The Culture of Letter-Writing in Pre-Modern Islamic Society * By ADRIAN GULLY

Abstract

The secretary of the chancery and his craft, epistolary writing, are the topics of Adrian Gully's The Culture of Letter-Writing in Pre-Modern Islamic Society. His focus is on the fifth/eleventh to the ninth/fifteenth centuries. Despite the secretary's prominent position in society and the dominance of his craft as literary art form, few studies have been conducted on either the secretary or the art of letter-writing. For that reason alone Adrian Gully's study is very welcome. But there is much more. In a well-structured analysis Gully demonstrates how letter-writing became the dominant literary art form and how it remained the most popular genre for many centuries. Crucial to the success of epistolary prose were, according to Gully, the skills and professional acumen of its main supporters, the secretarial class. Who was this influential state servant and how did he fit into the intellectual stratum of Islamic society? The chancery scribe of pre-modern Islamic societies needed a long list of qualities to fulfil the requirements of his profession. He had to be well-versed in literary devices and excel in calligraphy and bayān (clarity of expression). Further he had to be trained in the epistolary protocol. He was supposed to know each and every salutation form for each and every rank of addressee in each and every type of correspondence. The Egyptian scribe al-Qalqashandī (d. 821/1418), for example, who was the author of a massive manual for secretaries entitled Ṣubḥ al-aʿshā fī ṣināʿat al-inshā (‘The Morning of the Night-Blind on the Craft of Composition’), devoted no less than 1400 pages (in modern print) to the protocol of letters of communication (The fourth maqāla of his Ṣubḥ al-aʿshā, ed. Muḥammad Ḥusayn Shams al-Dīn [Beirut, 1987], vi. 263–ix. 250).