14219-ISME

WiSe 24/25: The World of the Premodern Arabic Secretary

Ingrid Austveg Evans

Hinweise für Studierende

for ISME students only

Kommentar

What can the lives and duties of the secretary or scribe (katib, pl. kuttab) reveal about cultural politics in the Abbasid period (ca. 750–1000 CE)? The early state secretaries, many of whom were of Persian descent, drew on a bureaucratic tradition rooted in the Sassanian and Byzantine empires. Because of their frequent connections to non-Arab intellectual traditions and their key role in both the transmission of knowledge and state administration, the secretaries were routinely criticized by leading cultural authorities, many of whom worked in the chancery themselves. In this course, we will discuss transcultural phenomena that featured a central role for the scribes, including state correspondence, quarrels over Persian and Greek influences, and the roles of non-Muslims in the chanceries. Challenging the notion of the chancery as an all-male domain, we will also discuss traces of women’s scribal activities. The bulk of the seminar sessions will focus on primary and secondary sources written in and about the Abbasid period, though the final sessions will also incorporate a longue durée perspective that considers the continuity of scribal practices throughout the Fatimid, Ayyubid, and Mamluk periods. Schließen