The Ottoman Archives as a Source for the History of the Arab Lands

Abstract

One of the classical difficulties of the student of the history of the Islamic Middle East, as contrasted with his colleagues in the European field, is the lack of archive material. While the western medievalist, for example, has at his disposal a mass of records, central and local, public and private, political, administrative, judicial, and ecclesiastical, the orientalist has to rely for the most part on literary and archæological sources. In many fields of history his findings are in consequence often vague and general; they are in the main limited to the public and external life of the communities and individuals he studies. Only the events and personalities important enough to achieve literary mention are known to him, and then only through the reflecting medium of literary sources. Even the great figures, with few exceptions, remain dim and formalized outlines, while for the life of the people he has to rely mainly on occasional hints and scraps of evidence. Large numbers of individual documents survive in isolation—some in the form of inscriptions, others quoted in the texts of the chronicles; but only for one period after the rise of Islam is any important body of original documents available—and the light they have shed on the period from which they derive has deepened the surrounding darkness. The Egyptian papyri of the early Islamic period have imposed a rewriting of much of the history of the early Caliphate, as recorded by the chroniclers and jurists. Yet even the papyri are not archives in the true sense of the word.