I completed my doctoral dissertation, entitled “Egypt’s Quiet Sixteenth Century: Transformation and the Production of Knowledge Across the Mamluk-Ottoman Transition” at the Philipps-Universität Marburg under the supervision of Prof. Albrecht Fuess.

Abstract

Egypt’s sixteenth century is one of the least-documented and most poorly understood in its otherwise rich and developed historical record throughout the Islamic period. This is all the more problematic given the importance of the century as Egypt’s transition between the Mamluk Sultanate and the Ottoman Empire, as well as between the late medieval to early modern periods. Yet while there was some continuity for Egyptian society following the Ottoman Conquest of 923 / 1517, many aspects of social, political, and economic life were disrupted or altered by the takeover. This dissertation seeks to explore the problem of sources and the lacuna in the historical record within the context of the social transformations following the Conquest. Drawing on chronicles and manuscript catalogs, it studies the ways in which the social context contributed to the production of knowledge, especially historical writing, during the late Mamluk period and across the sixteenth and into the seventeenth century. In doing this, it argues that the conditions which facilitated and encouraged the production of knowledge in the late Mamluk period—patronage and inheritances, a vibrant intellectual climate, educationa and religious institutions supported by rich endowments, and proximity to the political center—were transformed by the Ottoman Conquest. The dissertation examines what historical writing is available for the sixteenth century and how the social context of the writers of history changed from the Mamluk period into the Ottoman period. It will also look at the material production of books, as well as the ways in which Cairo’s book, copyist, and paper markets changed across the period in question will also be examined. Finally, it will look ahead to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and connect that more-examined, later period with the lesser understood sixteenth century. Doing this, the dissertation offers an examination into the quietude of that century—a topic about which has been much speculation but little study—and thus offers a clearer view into a critical but obscured moment in Egypt’s otherwise detailed historical past.