New Sources on the Memory of Saladin in Islamic History: An Explorative Essay into the Arabic Chronicles of the Late Medieval and Early Modern Period

Abstract

I had the great pleasure of meeting Professor Amir Hassanpour for the first time at the University of Toronto during the Department of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations’ Christmas luncheon back in December of 2016. At that time, Professor Hassanpour was already a retired faculty member and was attending the event to reconnect with old colleagues and friends. Being seated right next to him and having been introduced, the conversation between Professor Hassanpour and myself naturally turned to our fields of specialization. After informing him that I conduct research in medieval Islamic history during the Age of the Crusades, he turned to me and asked if I was familiar with Taʾrīkh dawlat al-Akrād wa-al-Atrāk ( The History of the Kurdish and Turkish Empire), a late-medieval dynastic history of Saladin and his Kurdish Ayyūbid state (1174–1249). This was a pleasant surprise to me that there is yet another chronicle on the renowned Kurdish sultan and his dynasty, this time written in 1309, more than a century after his death. Ever excited by the manuscript, I was encouraged by Professor Hassanpour to delve further into its fate, and after a couple of meetings, several correspondences, and some research, we discovered that the chronicle’s manuscript was already edited and translated from Arabic into English as part of a doctoral dissertation.