Consorts of the Caliphs. Ibn al-Sa'i

25 §§2–7, 9–11, 13–19, 31; see also 34, 36. 26 §3.2. 27 Jawād, “Introduction,” 25, no. 15; see also 30, no. 47: Manāqib al-khulafāʾ al-ʿAbbāsiyyīn (The Virtues of the Abbasid Caliphs). 28 Jawād, “Introduction,” 27, no. 27. 29 Jawād, “Introduction,” 31, no. 52. Ibn al-Sāʿī refers to this work in the year 596/1199–1200 in al-Jāmiʿ al-mukhtaṣar, 9:43. 30 Jawād, “Introduction,” 25, no. 12, and 29, no. 38. 31 Jawād, “Introduction,” 28, no. 29, and 31, no. 50. 32 Jawād, “Introduction,” 17, quoting al-Qifṭī (568–646/1172–1248), Tārīḫ al-ḥukamāʾ, 177. This seems to have been in addition to the library installed in Saljūqī Khātūn’s mausoleum: see §29.2.1; and §29.2.2 for the Sufi lodge which according to Ibn al-Sāʿī was built not by Saljūqī Khātūn, but by al-Nāṣir in her memory. 33 See a later source that quotes Ibn al-Sāʿī as a witness to such donations, cited by Jawād, “Introduction,” 21. 34 Jawād, “Introduction,” 18, 20. 35 Jawād, “Introduction,” 30, no. 48, and 28, no. 34. 36 §12.3. 37 On the Zanj rebellion, see Kennedy, The Prophet and the Age of the Caliphates, 180–81. 38 See Jawād, “Introduction,” 29, no. 42. Zumurrud was a slave: see n. 100 in the main text below. She died in Jumada al-Thani, 599 [February, 1203], according to the sources quoted by Kaḥḥālah in his dictionary of notable women, Aʿlām al-nisāʾ, 2:39. Ibn al-Sāʿī records her death a month earlier, in Rabiʿ al-Thani, and quotes part of a long elegy by a court poet “which I have given in its entirety in Elegies on the Blessed Consort Lady Zumurrud, Mother of the Caliph al-Nāṣir li-Dīn Allāh,” al-Jāmiʿ al-mukhtaṣar, 9:102, 279. 39 §15.6. 40 §21.1. 41 §22.1–2. 42 §23.3. 43 See the maps immediately following this introduction. 44 Zubaydah, the wife of Hārūn al-Rashīd, was famous for provisioning the pilgrim route with wells and resting places. 45 Under the caliph al-Muqtafī (530–55/1136–60), Abū l-Faraj ʿAbd al-Raḥmān ibn ʿAlī ibn al-Jawzī (ca. 511–97/1116–1201), head of two, then five, Baghdad madrasahs, enjoyed an “extraordinary career as a preacher . . . through his influence on the masses, he was politically important for those caliphs who, in their struggle with the military and the Saljūqs, followed a Ḥanbalī-Sunnī orientation. Diminishing influence under other caliphs was due to different policies adopted by them” (Seidensticker, “Ibn al-Jawzī,” 338). In his history, al-Muntaẓam fī tārīkh al-mulūk wa-l-umam, “Ibn al-Jawzī . . . several times uses the obituary sections of his regnal annals to highlight the virtues of the mothers or consorts of caliphs. It seems likely that this device serves to redeem the reigns of caliphs who are not themselves wholly satisfactory from Ibn al-Jawzī’s viewpoint, and that it is meant to suggest a continuity of virtue in the Abbasid caliphate as a political institution” (Bray, “A Caliph and His Public Relations,” 36). Ibn al-Jawzī records the funerals or burials of notables, especially women, in considerable detail; so too does Ibn al-Sāʿī in Consorts of the Caliphs: see §21.2, §22.3, §23.2, §24.1, §25.2, §27.4, §28.1, §29.2.1, §29.2.2, §29.3, §32.1 and §33.1. One of Ibn al-Sāʿī’s works was devoted to cemeteries and shrines: al-Maqābir al-mashhūrah wa-l-mashāhid al-mazūrah; it has recently been edited. The work is referred to by Diem and Schöller in The Living and the Dead in Islam, 2:312, but they do not cite Consorts of the Caliphs. 46 Jawād, “Introduction,” 12. 47 Ibn al-Sāʿī’s sources for the early- to mid-Abbasid consorts include Abū l-ʿAynāʾ, Abū Bakr al-Ṣūlī, Abū l-Faraj al-Iṣfahānī, ʿAlī ibn Yaḥyā the astromancer, Hilāl ibn al-Muḥassin the Sabian, Ibn al-Muʿtazz, Jaʿfar ibn Qudāmah, al-Jahshiyārī, Jaḥẓah, members of the al-Mawṣilī family, al-Ṭabarī, Thābit ibn Sinān, and Thaʿlab; for all of these, see the glossaries.