Scripting Mamlūk Cities: Insider's Look. Explorations into Landscape Narratives

Abstract

AbstractIn a memorial lecture for Charles Beckingham, David Morgan1 evoked one of this prolific travel literature scholar's astute observations: “[T]he study of travel narratives, especially travel narratives about a culture quite different from the traveller's own, can be very revealing, not only about the culture he observed, but about the culture to which he belonged”.2 This insight indeed undergirds my own approach to the descriptions of cities by both insiders and outsiders. Narratives of cities, indeed of any landscape, are but interpretative and hermeneutics texts which can be surely used to narrate the very landscape, but also as texts which may be used to understand the culture and perceptions of the narrator. Over the course of this paper, I examine two accounts (texts) of residents of Mamlūk provincial cities in al-Shām. These texts will be placed under the scrutiny of the data and the existing literature of those cities. In other words, the ‘conceptualised city’ as narrated by the sources will be compared with the ‘tangible city’. The latter we may unearth from various other sources (mostly texts) as well as the city's built environment. Thus, this chapter examines the ways in which Mamlūk cities of al-Shām were scripted and narrated by two local ‘storytellers’ and ‘image-makers’ of the city.3 In this context, ‘storyteller’ is an umbrella term for those who left us with a narrated legacy of their city. I decided to call them storytellers for the purpose of accentuating their inherent subjectivity. Informed and accurate as some of these narrators may have been, all of their experiences with and accounts of the urban landscape were guided by a personal understanding and their own cultural background. Since each of these texts is about spatial practices and spatial arrangement (landscape) of the city, the argument can be made that they all fall under the heading of travel writing.4 What is more, any narrative with a spatial dimension (Michel de Certeau would argue that there is no such thing as a narrative without one) is a story that organises space. Against this backdrop, the objective of this chapter, above and beyond presenting ‘spatial stories’ of cities of Syria, is to demonstrate the complexity of the reading landscape and particularly the ways landscape descriptions need always be taken as subjective, culture-based, culturally constructed, and a constant negotiation between the traveller/story-teller/source narration, the ‘actual’ built environment and the political context.