Books by Christian Mauder
Christian Mauder’s In the Sultan’s Salon builds on his award-winning research and constitutes the... more Christian Mauder’s In the Sultan’s Salon builds on his award-winning research and constitutes the first detailed study of the Egyptian court culture of the Mamluk Sultanate (1250–1517). Based mainly on understudied Arabic manuscript sources describing the learned salons of the Mamluk Sultan al-Ghawrī, In the Sultan’s Salon presents the first theoretical conceptualization of the term “court” that can be fruitfully applied to premodern Islamic societies. It uses this conceptualization to demonstrate that al-Ghawrī’s court functioned as a transregionally interconnected center of dynamic intellectual exchange, theological debate, and performance of rule that triggered novel developments in Islamic scholarly, religious, and political culture.
After 1250 Egypt and Syria were ruled for over 250 years by former military slaves, the men known... more After 1250 Egypt and Syria were ruled for over 250 years by former military slaves, the men known as Mamluks, who were of non-Muslim origen and had mostly been brought to their new countries as young boys. Historians have long denied that these soldier-slaves had any deep interest in Arab culture, but new research is finally refuting this idea. The first systematic study of over 450 lives of members of the Mamluk military elite shows that many Mamluks engaged with the Arabic learning of their age and played a part in the transmission and development of Arab-Islamic scholarship. The study also analyses the factors that motivated or hindered the Mamluks in their study of Arabic science and culture. The results not only help to create a more precise picture of Mamluk life but also offer a key to deeper understanding of the scholarly culture and social history of the Mamluk period.
Islam offers a multidisciplinary study of Muslim thinking about paradise, death, apocalypse, and ... more Islam offers a multidisciplinary study of Muslim thinking about paradise, death, apocalypse, and the hereafter. It focuses on eschatological concepts in the Quran and its exegesis, Sunni and Shi'i traditions, Islamic theology, philosophy, mysticism, and other scholarly disciplines reflecting Islamicate pluralism and cosmopolitanism. Gathering material from all parts of the Muslim world, ranging from Islamic Spain to Indonesia, and the entirety of Islamic history, this publication in two volumes also integrates research from comparative religion, art history, sociology, anthropology and literary studies. Unparalleled and unprecedented in its scope and comprehensiveness, Roads to Paradise promises to become the definitive reference work on Islamic eschatology for the years to come.
Wie wird die Heilige Schrift des Islam außerhalb ihrer arabischsprachigen Ursprungsregion verstan... more Wie wird die Heilige Schrift des Islam außerhalb ihrer arabischsprachigen Ursprungsregion verstanden? Kann der Koran überhaupt übersetzt werden und seit wann gibt es Übersetzungen in wichtige Sprachen der islamischen Welt wie Türkisch oder Swahili? Welche Zugänge zum Koran haben arabische Literaten, christliche Theologen und westliche IslamwissenschafterInnen in den vergangenen Jahrzehnten und Jahrhunderten gefunden? Und was hat das alles mit der Region Franken zu tun? Die Beiträge des vorliegenden Bandes helfen diese Fragen zu beantworten, indem sie die Rezeption des Koran aus unterschiedlichen sprachlichen, geographischen, historischen, religiösen, literarischen und wissenschaftlichen Blickwinkeln untersuchen. Diese Rezeptionsbeispiele werfen damit Licht auf die vielfältigen globalen Zusammenhänge, in welchen die Heilige Schrift des Islam seit ihrer erstmaligen Verkündigung bis in die Gegenwart steht. Zudem wird deutlich, welch entscheidenden Anteil Wissenschaftler und Literaten aus Franken daran hatten, dass der Koran heute auch außerhalb seines arabischsprachigen und muslimischen Entstehungskontexts zu den wichtigsten Texten der Weltliteratur zählt.
In den 1770er und frühen 1780er Jahren hielten sich mehrere Angehörige der protestantischen Gemei... more In den 1770er und frühen 1780er Jahren hielten sich mehrere Angehörige der protestantischen Gemeinschaft der Herrnhuter Brüderunität in Ägypten auf. Ziel der Brüder, die sich in Kairo häuslich niederließen, war die religiöse Unterweisung koptischer Christen im Geiste der pietistischen Frömmigkeit der Herrnhuter. Zu diesem Zweck besuchten sie ländliche koptische Gemeinden - so insbesondere die mittelägyptische Stadt Behnesse (al-Bahnassa) und ihre Umgebung. Hier wurden Erbauungsstunden abgehalten und religiöse Herrnhuter Literatur in arabischer Übersetzung studiert. In der Zeit ihrer Abwesenheit von Behnesse pflegten die Brüder brieflichen Kontakt mit ihren dortigen Freunden und Sympathisanten. Auch wurden die Dienste des Herrnhuter Arztes Friedrich Wilhelm Hocker von Außenstehenden in Anspruch genommen. Die hier erstmals veröffentlichten arabischen Briefe mit deutschen Übersetzungen dokumentieren diesen religiösen und kulturellen Austausch zwischen Europäern und ägyptischen Einheimischen in der zweiten Hälfte des 18. Jahrhunderts. Sie zählen zum Eindrucksvollsten, was sich aus der ersten intensiveren Interaktion zwischen deutschen Missionaren und koptischen Christen erhalten hat.
Papers by Christian Mauder
Memlükler Dönemi İlim Geleneği – II, 2024
While research about ethnicity in the Mamluk Sultanate has made significant progress in recent ye... more While research about ethnicity in the Mamluk Sultanate has made significant progress in recent years, our knowledge about how Circassian identities very constructed, ascribed, and understood in the Mamluk lands is still quite limited. The present chapter addresses this situation by examining the construction of Circassian ethnicity within a particularly well-documented elite environment, namely the court of the pen-ultimate Mamluk ruler Qāniṣawh al-Ghawrī (r. 1501–1516) who, like many members of the late Mamluk military elite, had been brought to Egypt as a Circassian military slave. The chapter argues that in the highly competitive social space of the late Mamluk court, it was not only Circassian identity in itself, but also the status of one’s lineage group among the Circassian ethnos that could be used to define and legitimate a person’s position in the Mamluk political system. The findings of the chapter thus challenge the assumption expressed in earlier publications that Circassian identity alone was important in late Mamluk political culture and call for a more nuanced understanding of what it meant to be called a Circassian in the Mamluk Sultanate. The chapter thereby demonstrates that an exclusive focus on ethnic macro groups such as the Circassians is insufficient for grasping the full complexity of Mamluk concepts of ethnicity. Rather, researchers also need to pay attention to how internal divisions within these macro groups were imagined and evaluated.
Oxford Journal of Law and Religion , 2023
Oxford Journal of Law and Religion, 2023
The article investigates the history of the genre of Hanafi legal riddles (alghaz fiqhiyya) durin... more The article investigates the history of the genre of Hanafi legal riddles (alghaz fiqhiyya) during the Mamluk period (648/1250-923/1517). It argues that legal riddles did not constitute 'useless' knowledge as earlier scholarship on Islamicate learned riddles had assumed. In contrast, the article shows that the Hanafi texts under investigation fulfilled important functions in the transmission of canonized legal scholarship, the performance of madhhab identities, the establishment and maintenance of scholarly prestige and patronage relationships, and the legitimation of political rule. The article demonstrates that in order to fully understand processes of transmission and the canonization of legal knowledge, we must broaden our focus to encompass more than the bodies of knowledge used in qadi courts and taught in institutions of higher learning such as madrasas. Instead, we should be open to the possibility that Islamic legal learning and its textual tradition were also shaped by institutions and practices that catered at least as much to the curiosity and aesthetic expectations of the people involved in them as to their desire for practically useful knowledge.
Intellectual History of the Islamicate World, 2023
Intellectutal History of the Islamicate World, 2023
The article critically reexamines the notion of Mamluk rulers being uninterested in religious aff... more The article critically reexamines the notion of Mamluk rulers being uninterested in religious affairs and the authority a supreme religious status could bestow. It shows that, with the late Mamluk ruler Qāniṣawh al-Ġawrī (r. 906/1501-922/1516), at least one Mamluk sultan laid claim to religious authority through his participation in courtly processes of knowledge production and transmission in his learned maǧālis. These efforts culminated in the attempt to portray al-Ġawrī as "the sultan of scholars and verifiers (sulṭān al-ʿulamāʾ wa-l-muḥaqqiqīn)" and "the sultan of the truly insightful (sulṭān al-ʿārifīn)." Al-Ġawrī used the scholarly status conveyed through these titles to reaffirm a decidedly Sunni interpretation of prophetic traditions and the Quran, thus setting himself apart from many of the so-called "millennial sovereigns" of his time whose claims for spiritual leadership often marked a break with traditional Sunni concepts of political rule and religious authority.
The Mamluk-Ottoman Transition: Continuity and Change in Egypt and Bilad al-Sham in the Sixteenth Century, 2, 2022
Islamic Ethics as Educational Discourse, 2021
While there can be little doubt that Miskawayh’s interactions with his Christian Westsyrian teach... more While there can be little doubt that Miskawayh’s interactions with his Christian Westsyrian teacher Yaḥyā ibn ʿAdī (d. 974) were of pivotal importance for the development of the former’s ethical thought, the precise nature of the relationship between the ethical writings of the two philosophers has so far largely eluded scholarly analysis. This is in part due to the fact that students of Miskawayh’s ethical teachings have so far paid insufficient attention to an inherent tension within Ibn ʿAdī’s ethical oeuvre. By focusing on two of Ibn ʿAdī’s most prominent ethical works, namely his The Refinement of Character Traits and The Treatise on Continence, it is shown that the Christian philosopher contributed in his writings to two partly separate ethical discourses, one of which of which can be described as Baghdadian and religiously pluralistic in nature, while the other one was aimed at maintaining a Westsyrian confessional identity. Moreover, it is argued that the tension between these discourses had a profound impact on Miskawayh’s reception of his teacher’s thought and thus needs to be taken into account in any analysis that seeks to situate Miskawayh within the inter-religious intellectual context of his time.
New Readings in Arabic Historiography from Late Medieval Egypt and Syria, 2021
Al-Walīd b. Yazīd] once grabbed his brother and fornicated with him. Moreover, he wanted to drink... more Al-Walīd b. Yazīd] once grabbed his brother and fornicated with him. Moreover, he wanted to drink [wine] on top of the Kaʿba. The author of the work of history (ṣāḥib al-tārīkh) said: "No one from among the Muslims did (ʿamila) what al-Walīd did." Bon mot (durra): He whose victory may be glorious [i.e., Sultan al-Ghawrī] said: "Nay, neither a Christian nor a Mazdaist nor any other person who ever did anything (aḥad min al-ʿāmilīn) did something similar to what this ill-fated sinner (al-fājir almanḥūs) did."1 * This chapter is based on research results from my dissertation In the sultan's salon: Learning, religion and rulership at the Mamluk court of Qāniṣawh al-Ghawrī (r. 1501-1516), which I defended at the University of Göttingen in 2017 and am currently preparing for full publication; cf. esp. chapters 3.
History and Society during the Mamluk Period (1250–1517): Studies of the Annemarie Schimmel Institute for Advanced Study III, 2021
Studies on the History and Culture of the Mamluk Sultanate (1250–1517), 2021
al-Usur al-Wusta: The Journal of Middle East Medievalists, 2020
People identified as Persians constituted one of the most prominent groups of nonlocal inhabitant... more People identified as Persians constituted one of the most prominent groups of nonlocal inhabitants in Mamluk Egypt, and earlier scholarship has paid considerable attention to Egyptian-Persian relations. Nevertheless, the determining factors that made someone Persian in Mamluk Egyptian contexts remain poorly understood. Accounts of the majālis, or learned salons, convened by the penultimate Mamluk Sultan Qāniṣawh al-Ghawrī (r. 906-922/1501-1516) offer a unique opportunity to examine which factors, agents, and motivations were decisive in the construction of what it meant to be Persian during the late Mamluk period. An examination of these sources demonstrates that language, cultural capital, and region of origen were the most important elements in the process of Persian identity construction at al-Ghawrī's court. The key actors in this process were persons who identified themselves as Persians and sought to make strategic use of the benefits their identity could entail within the patronage context of al-Ghawrī's court. In contrast to what is known about other ethnic identities within the Mamluk Sultanate, neither persons who identified as Persians nor their local interlocutors considered ancestry a defining factor of being Persian.
Knowledge and Education in Classical Islam, 2020
Norm, Normabweichung und Praxis des Herrschaftsübergangs in transkultureller Perspektive, 2019
Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verz... more Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen Nationalbibliografie; detaillierte bibliografische Daten sind im Internet über https://dnb.d-nb.de abrufbar.
Die Geheimnisse der oberen und unteren Welt: Magie im Islam zwischen Glaube und Wissenschaft, ed. Sebastian Günther and Dorothee Pielow, 2019
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Books by Christian Mauder
Papers by Christian Mauder
and social history to analyze the role that salons played in
the integration of the Arabic-speaking lands into the Ottoman
Empire. Based primarily on Arabic and Ottoman Turkish
sources, Pfeifer uses the figure of the Damascus-based scholar
Badr al-Dīn al-Ghazzī (1499-1577) and the members of his family
and network to demonstrate that salons were of central importance
to both Arabs and Rumis as they navigated the new,
post-conquest realities of the 16th century.
While biographies of rulers have long been examined as essential sources on the history of the Islamicate world, individual texts of this type have been primarily studied in isolation from each other. Consequently, the field of Middle Eastern and Islamic studies lacks not only a proper understanding of the origen and shared characteristics of this type of texts but also foregoes much of the potential that these sources have for the transregional, diachronic, and comparative study of premodern Islamicate political cultures and concepts of good governance. By developing a comparative toolkit for the examination of premodern Islamicate biographies of rulers, this workshop will bring both the study of specific examples of such texts and our knowledge about the genre they belong to an entirely new level, thereby laying the ground for the publication of an edited volume on Biographies of Rulers in the Premodern Islamicate World and Beyond that promises to redefine the state of the field on this type of sources.