Gowaart Van Den Bossche – författare

This book is one of two volumes presenting the results of the KITAB (Knowledge, Information Technology, and the Arabic Book) project and their application of text reuse detection to a digital corpus of thousands of Arabic texts spanning eight centuries. The authors begin by examining the function of text reuse in ensuring the survival of books, highlighting the perspectives of individual authors as well as the effect of regional chronological conditions on memories of the past. The second half then goes on to show how memorialisation and recycling of communal texts (such as annals, legal compendia and biographical collections) served to create a shared idea of the past and to sustain a social group’s memories and identity.Using the KITAB project's expansive digital corpus, this book analyses case studies that span North Africa and the Middle East and the Indian Ocean: from the Ismaʿili communities of India, Yemen and northwestern Syria, to Egyptian courts, to Mālikī scholars in North Africa. Altogether, this volume aims to demonstrate the huge potential for digital study of written traditions alongside traditional methods of close reading and manuscript studies, and provide templates for similar studies within Arabic literature and beyond.

The so-called Mamluk sultans who ruled Egypt and Syria between the late thirteenth and early sixteenth centuries AD have often been portrayed as lacking in legitimacy due to their background as slave soldiers. Sultanic biographies written by chancery officials in the early period of the sultanate have been read as part of an effort of these sultans to legitimise their position on the throne. This book reconsiders the main corpus of six such biographies written by the historians Ibn ʿAbd al-Ẓāhir (d. 1293) and his nephew Shāfiʿ ibn ʿAlī (d. 1330) and argues that these were in fact far more complex texts. An understanding of their discourses of legitimisation needs to be embedded within a broader understanding of the multi-directional discourses operating across the texts. The study proposes to interpret these texts as "spectacles", in which authors emplotted the reign of a sultan in thoroughly literary and rhetorical fashion, making especially extensive use of textual forms prevalent in the chancery. In doing so the authors reimagined the format of the biography as a performative vehicle for displaying their literary credentials and helping them negotiate positions in the chancery and the wider courtly orbit.