Consorts of the Caliphs. Ibn al-Sa'i
that wins over the lover. The workings of attraction and esteem can be imagined and explored in the case of slaves as they rarely are in that of free women; and this, in addition to their talents and exquisite sensibility or dashing manners, is what makes the early-Abbasid jāriyahs culture heroines, whose hold on the Arabic imagination persists through the ages.
Ibn al-Sāʿī’s Contribution
Unlike Abū l-Faraj al-Iṣfahānī, the authority most cited in Consorts of the Caliphs,54 Ibn al-Sāʿī seems far less interested in music than in poetry. He was a poet himself, as indeed was almost any contemporary Arabic speaker with any claim to literacy and social competence. He and all his readers knew the wide range of available poetic genres, both ceremonial and intimate. As children, they would have been taught the ancient and modern Arabic poetic classics, and as adults, they might have written verse on public occasions and would certainly have composed poems to entertain their friends, lampoon unpleasant colleagues, or give vent to their feelings about life. The poetry of the jāriyahs has its own place in this spectrum. It is occasional poetry: even when they write accession panegyrics or congratulations on a successful military campaign, the jāriyahs keep them short and light.55 What is poignant about their poetry is its ephemerality: it captures and belongs to the moment. And what is especially moving about it is that (in the eyes of Ibn al-Sāʿī, who simplifes but does not traduce the complex vision of Abū l-Faraj al-Iṣfahānī) it is identical with the woman who composes it and her precarious situation. As Ibn al-Sāʿī tells it, the poetry of the slave consorts is an act of personal daring and moral agency, which finds its reward in the love of the caliph and sometimes even in marriage.56 This is something considerable, contained in the small compass of the anecdote format.
There have not been many attempts, in modern scholarship, to make distinctions between the jāriyahs as poets and cultural agents, on the one hand, and as romantic heroines and objects of erotic and ethical fantasy, on the other. There are basic surveys of the sources;57 there is a pioneering study of the world of Abū l-Faraj al-Iṣfahānī’s Book of Songs;58 and, most recently, there is an exploration of the values underlying the competition between jāriyahs and free male poets and musicians.59 Medieval contemporaries were alive to the social paradox of the woman slave performer as a leader of fashion but also a commodity, an extravagance but also an investment for her owners, able to some extent to turn her status as a chattel to her own profit by manipulating her clients—and they satirized it unsympathetically.60 By comparison, modern reflection on female slavery and its place in medieval Islamic societies is unsophisticated.61 The time span of Consorts of the Caliphs is wider than that of the mid-Abbasid classics which have been the focus of modern scholarship until now, and the life stories it presents of female slaves bring together a greater range of backgrounds and situations and open up more complex perspectives.
Ibn al-Sāʿī’s special contribution to the subject is his seriousness and sympathy, the multiplicity of roles within the dynasty that he identifies for consorts, and his systematic, and challenging, idealization of the woman over the slave.
Julia Bray
Maps
| 1 | The Abbasid Caliphate |
| 2 | Early Baghdad |
| 3 | Later Baghdad |
| 4 | Later East Baghdad |
Note: The maps of Baghdad are based principally on Le Strange, Baghdad (1900), Jawād and Sūsah, Dalīl (1958), Makdisi, “Topography” (1959), Lassner, Topography (1970), and Ahola and Osti, “Baghdad.” In cases where precise locations are not known, the aim has been to give readers of Consorts an idea of the relationships between different places topographically. Outright conjectures are followed by a question mark.
The Abbasid Caliphate
Early Baghdad
Later Baghdad
Later East Baghdad
Note on the Edition
The Manuscript
There appears to be only one extant manuscript of Ibn al-Sāʿī’s Jihāt al-aʾimmah al-khulafāʾ min al-ḥarāʾir wa-l-imāʾ, which is in the Veliyyuddin Library in Istanbul, bearing MS no. Veliyyuddin 2634. Muhammet Günaydın of Istanbul University kindly obtained a copy for us on CD from the Beyazıt Devlet Kütüphanesi (Beyazıt State Library) in 2012.
The manuscript has 58 folios, the first 48 of which consist of Jihāt al-aʾimmah. Folios 49–58 comprise a miscellany of stories, some humorous, some moralistic, culled from the adab literary tradition.62 The colophon to Jihāt al-aʾimmah appears on the verso of folio 48. It states that the copying of the manuscript was completed on 4 Rajab, 900 [March 30, 1495] by one Muḥammad ibn Sālim al-Ḥāniʾ.63 It also mentions the fact that the book has been supplemented with “the consorts of princes and important viziers” (maʿa mā uḍīfa ilayh min mashhūrī [sic] jihāt al-sādat al-umarāʾ wa-l-jullah min al-wuzarāʾ). This refers to the fact that in the latter part of the book, Ibn al-Sāʿī includes entries about the consorts of a vizier and of several Saljūq sultans.
There are nine lines to each page in a legible Naskh hand. The text is in black ink. Red ink is used to indicate headings, thus the names and affiliations of the consorts; quotations, e.g. a horizontal line above the lām of (قالـــ) and other such verbs; the ends of paragraphs or subsections; and the beginnings and endings of verses. In only one place (the “Saljūqī Khātūn” heading) is the manuscript illegible, but the missing words can be divined from the entry itself. There is the occasional—and by no means untypical—omitted word that is then written in the margin. That the scribe was also hasty, or even sloppy, is evident from the fact that the tail end of one anecdote and the beginning of another pertaining to one consort is entirely misplaced in the entry about another consort, and from features such as the listing of ordinal numbers out of order, or the misnaming of famous authors. The scribe also appears not to have been very knowledgeable about the subject.64
Previous Edition
There is one previous edition of the work, published as Nisāʾ al-khulafāʾ, al-musammā Jihāt al-aʾimmah wa-l-khulafāʾ min al-ḥarāʾir wa-l-imāʾ (lit. Women of the Caliphs, known as Freeborn and Slave Consorts of the Imams and Caliphs), first published by Dār al-Maʿārif in Cairo in 1962 as volume 28 in the “Dhakhāʾir al-ʿArab” series and reprinted in 1968 and 1993.65 Manshَūrāt al-Jamal issued a handsome reprint in 2011.66 The editor, Muṣṭafā Jawād (1905–69), like Ibn al-Sāʿī a son of Baghdad, had learned of the existence of the work from the French scholar Louis Massignon (1883–1962). He obtained a photograph of the manuscript from Ahmed Ateş of Istanbul University in 1952, then produced a photostat copy on which he based his edition. Jawād’s edition includes the manuscript pagination.
Jawād had a broad and deep knowledge of Ibn al-Sāʿī and of Baghdad;67 this is reflected not only in the edition, but also in his introduction about Ibn al-Sāʿī and his times, as well as his detailed footnotes identifying places, events, individuals, and references in other works. Jawād’s occasional faulty readings can be attributed to the quality of the manuscript reproduction. He is also more at ease with the political history of the 5th–6th/11th–12th centuries than with