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Getting al-Maqrizi’s
Khitat
on the Web
presented at MESA 2010, San Diego, California by Martyn SmithLawrence University
[To begin I’d like to situate my project in the comments last night by Roger Allen in his presidentialaddress on translation. He talked mostly about the translation of modern texts, but he could equally well have been talking about older texts. He also distinguished between mechanical translationand more interpretive or creative approaches to translation. I’d expand that to include the visualpresentation or apparatus in the act of translation. My project makes the argument that translationis not just about words, but also about making a world available to readers. Allen urged us to “takerisks” in translation, and this online project is my attempt to do that.] No translation of al-Maqrizi’s
Khitat
is available in English or any other European language. Themore you know about the history of Cairo the more remarkable that will appear. Pick up a standard work on Cairo, such as that by André Raymond, and the influence of al-Maqrizi in reconstructing points of medieval history is evident in many places. The sort of building by building tour of IslamicCairo in the work of Doris Behrens-Abouseif is enabled, to a large degree, by the informationpreserved by al-Maqrizi. In the
Khitat
al-Maqrizi presented a synthetic view of the history of Cairo, augmented through theconcept of cyclical history that he learned from Ibn Khaldun.
1
Equal in importance to his original views on Cairo are the passages drawn from works otherwise lost. Because of this material al-Maqrizi is an essential source for the study of the Fatimids, and he receives close attention in Paul Walker’s
Exploring an Islamic Empire: Fatimid History and Its Sources.
The
Khitat
is a large work, 2 volumes (over 1000 pages) of densely printed Arabic in the standardBulaq edition of 1853. The structure of the book can be visualized as a series of historical waves,beginning with some fascinating material on pre-Islamic Egypt, but soon settling into a periodby period examination of the expansion of Fustat into the palace cities of ‘Askar and Qata’i..
1
Briefly explored by Nasser Rabbat in his essay “The Medieval Link: Maqrizi’s
Khitat
and Modern Narratives of Cairo” in
Making Cairo Medieval
(Oxford, 2005), 32.
then comes a lengthy section devoted to the Cairo of the Fatimids. The Fatimids give way to the Ayyubids under the leadership of Salah al-Din. At this point the historical waves are replaced by thesystematic treatment of different topographical features found within Cairo. So we get surveys of the markets, neighborhoods, residences, mosques, madrasas, shrines, synagogues, and churches (andthat’s not a complete list). No works with close to this degree of comprehensiveness survive fromthe medieval period. My goal in this talk is to examine how al-Maqrizi’s
Khitat
can benefit from presentation on theInternet. Or to put it another way, why al-Maqrizi’s great historical work is particularly well fitted forour digital era, and points the way forward to new ways of conceptualizing academic work. To get to that larger point we might ask, why hasn’t the
Khitat
been translated and published intraditional book form? It clearly deserves a wider audience. To answer this question we can beginby looking at it’s most recent
Arabic
edition, edited by Ayman Fu’ad Sayyid, published from 2002-04in six large volumes by the Al-Furqan Islamic Heritage Foundation in London. The primary goal of this edition was to present a new critical Arabic text, based on a comparison of several manuscripts.Frederic Bauden in his review of the text has pointed out that it falls short of this central goal. Theclearer Arabic font is definitely welcome, but it’s not a critical text that can serve as the basis of adefinitive translation. Strangely, one problem with translating and publishing the
Khitat
is exactly it’s amazing medieval success. The number of extant copies is so great that there’s been no realpossibility of collating them all. (Chase Robinson puts the number of manuscripts of the
Khitat
at170.) So the very popularity of the text--which should be a central argument for publishing it--hasled to its neglect. This lack of a critical text is one problem, but let’s also look closer at this Arabic edition. Onereason these books are so thick is the amount of space devoted to reproducing pictures and maps.Especially in the last sections covering the major mosques and other structures from the time of al-Maqrizi, many of which survive to our own time, we find a schematic layout plus historic photosof the site. These could well be great helps to the reader, who otherwise might not have a clearconception of these mosques, madrasas, and shrines. In addition the set comes with several foldout maps, including the official map of Islamic Monuments, a detailed map of the Citadel, a latercopy of the 16th century Venetian map of the city, and the map of the city published with the
Description de l’Egypte
from about 1800. Implicit in all this visual information is the notion that tounderstand and follow the text of al-Maqrizi, one should have at hand rich visual material, such ashistoric photos, maps, and plans. If this is the kind of total visual attention demanded for a reader tounderstand al-Maqrizi, then we may be waiting a long time for a translation.. as the images and maps will be a challenge for a print edition. It’s hard not to admire the effort put into these volumes by Al Furqan Islamic Heritage Foundation,but the ambition outstrips the media to some extent. The images don’t have the resolution onedesires; the maps lack the crispness necessary to read the labels. It’s as if the editors fully realizedthat the
Khitat
demanded a multi-media presentation, but were left trying to mimic that on theprinted page. The volumes thus end up pointing to the one place where Maqrizi’s
Khitat
could comealive: the Internet.. where images can be reproduced in full detail for almost nothing, and maps canbe used to pinpoint sites. If a visual commentary is necessary for this work, then the Internet hascapabilities that can’t be matched by print works at any cost. We might also reconsider the other concern about presenting a translation of the
Khitat
at this time:the lack of a definitive critical text. Given the multiplicity of texts and the incredible survival of actual rough drafts for the work, we are likely to lack this critical edition for some time. That mightbe a great reason to resist putting a book into print, but it hardly counts as a reason not to publisha web edition, which can be easily revised to incorporate new readings. In addition, the presenceof multiple manuscripts can be seen as more of a feature than a bug, since multiple versions couldbe presented on the Internet. Arabic manuscripts could be made more available for active work (perhaps even work by students?). The Internet is a fantastic place to think creatively about how topresent a scattered complex text. At this point let me stop and introduce you to the website I’ve set up for al-Maqrizi’s
Khitat
. Thisis a work in progress, so I don’t consider that it has arrived at a final stage. What in traditionalterms might have been a decade long project has been broken up into smaller stages. The website went live a year ago in October of 2009, completing a summer of work funded by the NationalEndowment for the Humanities, in addition to a sabbatical for the fall term from my institution. The initial goal has been to get up the translated sections from the
Khitat
for the medieval mosquesand madrasas that survive in Cairo. These included al-Azhar, the mosque of ibn Tulun, the mosque