Abstract

At the turn from the 15th to the 16th century, the Mamluk Sultanate experienced a period of succession conflicts when a number of Sultans came to power in rapid sequence. With the ascension of Qānṣawh al-Ghawrī to the throne in 1501, the history of the Sultanate entered into a final phase of relative tranquility. Nevertheless, the previous crisis had proven that the person of the ruler was a highly contingent element in the late Mamluk political landscape. This article will examine how the panegyrist ʿAbd al-Bāsiṭ al-Malaṭī justified Qānṣawh al-Ghawrī’s reign in the light of the previous succession crisis in his unedited work ‚al-Majmūʿ al-bustān al-nawrī li-ḥaḍrat mawlānā al-Sulṭān al-Ghawrī‘. After preliminary theoretical remarks and a contextualization of the author and his work it will be shown that in the text under study, al-Malaṭī mainly described Sultan al-Ghawrī’s deeds and achievements. Accordingly, al-Malaṭī addressed the man-made experience of contingency during the succession crisis by focusing on the intra-mundane actions of the ruler he praised. He thus stepped out of the common tradition of Arabic panegyric works in the later Islamic middle period which usually emphasized the ruler’s immutable moral qualities and virtues and paid much less attention to his individual actions. Moreover, al-Malaṭī’s work is notably devoid of any attempts to legitimize al-Ghawrī’s rule on religious grounds.