Annemarie Schimmel Kolleg Spring School 2016
14-18 March 2016
Topic: “Environmental Methods in Mamluk and Islamic Studies”
Mamluk Studies and the “environmental turn”
Defined in as many different ways as there are disciplines in the humanities, environmental history is
the study of relations between people and their natural environment through time. On one level, it
offers perspectives on the impact of climatic and other environmental changes on society, and on
another it is a window on the varied ways people make use of, understand, control, and maintain their
natural resources (İnal 2011). Rejecting the outdated models of environmental determinism,
environmental historians tend to either study the environment as a very powerful actor in socio-cultural
change or as the locus of social conflict (Appuhn 2013). Environmental history can be a potent tool for
contextualizing political change and explaining the complex combination of factors behind dynastic
decline in pre-modern societies. It is, in short, uniquely positioned for writing holistic histories (O’Connor
1997).
This is not a new field. What began as an American preoccupation with the climate change in the 1970s,
has spread to the study of modern, pre-modern, medieval, and ancient societies worldwide. It is well
established in Ancient Near Eastern Studies and Classics, and has come to occupy an important position
in the historiography of medieval Europe (for example, Pfister et al 1999). Middle Eastern Studies has
remained remarkably remote from these trends in scholarship. In the last few years, fortunately, there
has been a surge in publications among Ottomanists, who have turned to environmental history to
address problems ranging from peasant and tribal rebellions and political decline to the workings of the
Ottoman state on the local level and the agency of local communities (Michail 2011; Michaeil, ed., 2013;
White 2011; for earlier studies Griswold 1993).
It is rather surprising that, with a few exceptions, scholarship on Mamluk Studies has not been caught up
in the “environmental turn”. Mamluk-era historians were certainly aware of the impact of
environmental change, in its various forms, on their contemporary societies. Drought, for example, was
a constant preoccupation of medieval Arab historians. The chroniclers demonstrate a real understanding
of and concern for a wide range climatic and environmental conditions (rainfall, temperature, land use
and abuse), which they regularly cite as the direct cause of famines, revolts, and political decline. The
annals of Damascene historians, in particular, are full of detailed references to rainfall, road conditions,
prices of foodstuffs, and peasant and Bedouin riots, which they suggest were all interrelated. Many of
these historians gained their income from managing rural endowments, and others maintained close
contact with family in villages (note the colorful historian Ibn Ḥijji al-Ḥusbāni): they were sensitive to the
relationship between man and his physical landscape and the role that threat of the natural elements in
causing economic suffering. That there was a relationship among the political, social, and natural orders
was duly acknowledged by contemporaries. al-Maqrizi’s Ighathāt, an Egyptian treatise on famine, is a
veritable lament of the state’s misuse of natural resources and mis-action in times of drought. The
Mamluk state, as well, had a vested interest in the environment, natural resources, and particularly the
viability of agricultural land and maintenance of water systems. It had clear agricultural policies, in
certain sectors of that regime, and conflicts over natural resources were important flash points at times
with local communities. Contemporaries were, in modern parlance, environmentally aware.
The kind of environmental research emerging now in Ottoman studies is highly interdisciplinary, and it
must be so. To approach the study of interrelations among people, political and economic systems, and
the physical environment requires recourse to a bewildering variety of textual, natural science, and, yes,
archaeological sources that no single scholar can master. The key to environmental history is
collaboration and an open-mindedness to asking questions that transcends the single discipline. This
may have been one reason why Ottoman Studies came to this kind of research as late as it did, and it is
certainly the case with Mamluk Studies, which has long suffered from disciplinary isolation and a high
degree of specialization. (This is, of course, the main reason why the Annemarie Schimmel Kolleg was
established in 2011 – to foster dialogue and facilitate transdisciplinary research.)
That is not to say that there has been no interest in environmental issues among Mamlukists. The
trajectories followed in the small body of scholarship that has been published to date in many ways
parallel that of current “Ottoman environmental history”: the adaptation of local communities to
changing environmental conditions (this is at the center of a growing body of archaeological literature),
the environmental impact of state policies (Kareem 2000), the social impact of environmental disasters
(Ghawanmeh 1992 and 2005; Tucker 1999),the legal framework of urban water systems (Levanoni 2008;
Shoshan 2011), economic studies of imperial water systems (Borsch 2000 and 2004; Rapoport and
Shahar 2012 for the late Ayyubid Fayyum),and environmental perspectives on rural history (Walker
2011). However, investigations into the complex, dialectical relations among climate, land use, and
socio-political systems – which remain at the heart of environmental history (Rosen 2007; Lucke et al
2012) – have escaped the attention of most Mamluk specialists.
Environmental history also provides a useful tool for social, legal (laws and ethics related to the
management and equitable access to scarce resources, and disputes over them), and intellectual history
(perceptions of the natural environment – color, space, etc.); urban studies (the “Islamic garden”, urban
gardening and the development of urban “green spaces”); and, most importantly, the study of
knowledge transfer (the agrarian manuals). Social history can certainly benefit from such lines of inquiry.
The concept of “resilience” is a useful one, for example, for understanding why communities survive
political upheavals and what ultimately undermined the solidarity of others during different crises.
Resilience is the ability of a system to remain stable in the face of stress and to recover following a
disturbance. For environmental historians it refers to the ability of local societies to weather the storms
of environmental disasters (and particularly droughts). On a more abstract level, resilience theory
involves the study of the complex relationships between natural and man-made systems; that is
between landscape and climate and human societies (in all of their political, economic, and cognitive
complexities).
For this Spring School, we are interested in the physical environmental in all of its forms – climate,
landscape, agriculture and pasturelands, water systems, natural resources, urban green spaces, and
food and feeding the people – how people related to the environment, how they conceptualized space,
what they found beautiful and valuable, and how medieval Islamic societies developed institutions for
managing access to and equitable use of these resources.
Structure of the 2016 ASK Spring School
The purpose of this year’s Spring School is to introduce participants to the methods, sources, and lines
of inquiry in environmental history as it pertains to Mamluk Studies today. It takes the form of lectures,
interspersed with seminars and group reading on Arabic texts of the period and scientific reports, as
well as hands-on work with objects in a “lab-like” environment. While the focus of the Spring School is
the Mamluk period, some of texts studied date to the larger “Middle Islamic” period, and namely the
13th century.
The daily topics of this five-day Spring School will include: an introduction to methods of environmental
history (integrating textual analysis and environmental studies), scientific methods (introduction for
historians to palynology, pollen analysis, palaeobotany, and zooarchaeology; how to read scientific
reports and where to find them, how they are useful to Islamic Studies); working with maps; and textual
analysis (Mamluk-era chronicles, the 13th-century treatise by al-Nabulsi – Tārīkh Fayyūm, and Rasulid
agrarian manuals). The final day of the School will be devoted to small-group collaborative writing,
challenging those participating to go beyond their own areas of specialization and disciplines to write
together on topics related to those covered during the week.
The instructors have largely cross-disciplinary training and are actively engaged in research on Mamluk
environmental history and that of the larger “Middle Islamic” period (12th-16th centuries) era. They
include:
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Prof. Dr. Bethany Walker (Annemarie Schimmel Kolleg, University of Bonn) – environmental
history of Mamluk Bilād al-Shām
Prof. Dr. Yossi Rapoport (Queen Mary College, University of London) – agricultural and irrigation
in the 14th-century Fayyum; peasant society and tribalism
Prof. Dr. Daniel Varisco (Qatar University/Hofstra University) – medieval Yemeni agriculture and
Islamic science
Dr. Chiara Corbino (Marie Curie Intra-European Fellow, University of Sheffield,
zooarchaeologist), Ms. Sofia Laparidou (University of Texas, Austin, palynologist), and Ms.
Annette Hanson (University of Gronigen, palaeobotanist who also works with agrarian texts) –
environmental scientists associated with the ASK Hisban Field School
Mr. Anthony Quickel (University of Marburg) – Mamluk historian, agricultural history and
feeding the Mamluk city of Cairo
Prerequisites: Open to all doctoral students of Islamic Studies and related subjects, post-doctoral
scholars, and ASK Fellows, who have a graduate-level command of written Arabic, a desire to learn
cross-disciplinary methods, and an open mind to collaborative writing. The language of instruction and
seminars is English, though the collaborative writing on the final day can be done in German, English, or
Arabic.
Key texts
Appuhn, Karl. “The Nature of Ottoman History”, Eighteenth-Century Studies 46.2 (2013): 302-306.
Borsch, Stuart. “Nile Floods and the Irrigation System in Fifteenth Century Egypt”, Mamluk Studies
Review 4 (2000): 131-145.
_______. “Environment and Population: The Collapse of Large Irrigation Systems Reconsidered”,
Comparative Studies in Society & History 46.3 (2004): 451-468.
Ghawanmeh, Yusuf "Earthquake Effects on Bilad ash-Sham Settlements”, Studies in the History and
Archaeology of Jordan 5 (1992): 53-59.
_______. Dimashq fī ʿAṣr Dawlat al-Mamālīk al-Thāniyyah. (Amman, 2005).
Griswold, William. “Climatic Change: A Possible Factor in the Social Unrest of Seventeenth Century
Anatolia”, pp. 37-57 in Humanist and Scholar: Essays in Honor of Andreas Tietze, ed. Heath W. Lowry
and Donald Quartaert. (ISIS Press, 1993).
İnal, Onur. “Environmental History as an Emerging Field in Ottoman Studies: An Historiographical
Overview”, Journal of Ottoman Studies 38 (2011): 1-26.
Kareem, J.M.H.. The Settlement Patterns in the Jordan Valley in the Mid- to Late Islamic Period. (Oxford:
BAR Series, 2000).
Laparidou, Sofia and Arlene Rosen. “Intensification of Production in Medieval Islamic Jordan and its
Ecological Impact: Towns of the Anthropocene.” The Holocene 25 (2015): 1542-1552.
Levanoni, Amalia. “Water Supply in Medieval Middle Eastern Cities: The Case of Cairo”, al-Masaq 20.2
(2008): 179-205.
Lucke, Bernhard, Mohammed Shunnaq, Bethany Walker, Atef Shiyab, Zeidoun al-Muheisen, Hussein alSababha, Rupert Bäumler, and Michael Schmidt. “Questioning Transjordan’s Historic Desertification:
a Critical Review of the Paradigm of ‘Empty Lands’”, Levant. 44.1 (2012): 100-126.
Michail, Alan. Nature and Empire in Ottoman Egypt: An Environmental History. (Cambridge University
Press, 2011).
_______. The Animal in Ottoman Egypt. (Oxford University Press, 2013).
_______, ed. Water on Sand: Environmental Histories of the Middle East and North Africa. (Oxford
University Press, 2013).
O’Connor, James. “What is Environmental History? Why Environmental History?”, Capitalism, Nature,
Socialism 8.2 (1997): 1-27.
Pfister, Christian, Rudold Brázdil, and Rüdiger Glaser. Climatic Variablity in Sixteenth-Century Europe and
its Social Dimension. (Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1999).
Rapoport, Yossi and Ido Shahar. "Irrigation in medieval Islamic Fayyum: Local Control in a Large Scale
Hydraulic System”, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 55 (2012): 1-31.
Rosen, Arlene. Civilizing Climate: Social Responses to Climate Change in the Ancient Near East. (AltaMira
Press, 2007).
Shoshan, Boas. “Mini-Dramas by the Water: On Water Disputes in Fifteenth-Century Damascus”, pp.
233-244 in Histories of the Middle East, ed. Eleni Margariti (Brill, 2011).
Tucker, William F. "Environmental Hazards, Natural Disasters, Economic Loss, and Mortality in Mamluk
Syria”, Mamluk Studies Review 3 (1999): 109-128.
Varisco, Daniel. Medieval Folk Astronomy and Agriculture in Arabia and the Yemen. (Ashgate, 1997).
Walker, Bethany. Jordan in the Late Middle Ages: Transformation of the Mamluk Frontier. (Chicago
Middle East Documentation Center, University of Chicago, 2011).
White, Sam. The Climate of Rebellion in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire. (Cambridge University Press,
2011).