A DISCOURSE OF PLACE

The concept of place has acted as an important category of analysis in the fields of anthropology, geography, and literary criticism in recent years.

⁴

In the simplest terms, place may be defined as “space to which meaning has been ascribed”⁵

; and one way of ascribing meaning to space is to represent it in writing. Thus, examining representations of spaces—limited here to towns and territories—in the written record of a society over a period of time reveals culturally and historically specific meanings and yields insight into peoples' relationships to political and social realities. The proliferation of representations of Syria and Syrian cities in Arabic literature over the course of the 12th to the 14th centuries, for instance, may be interpreted as a “discourse of place,” the historical significance of which is attested by the fact that it was engaged, and in so doing transformed, by many of the prominent intellectuals of the age.⁶

The changing terms of this discourse act as significant clues for the reconstruction of a “politics of belonging” among Muslim intellectuals, loyalties and identities being expressed and contested through the idiom of place. The introduction to Ibn

Asakir's Ta

rikh madinat Dimashq, one of the largest scale city-based biographical dictionaries ever undertaken in the Arabic language, constitutes an ideal source for this type of reconstruction because it communicates what it meant, for at least one well-known Damascene scholar, to belong in Syria or in Damascus during the extreme sectarian conflicts of the 12th century.

A discourse of place can be discerned in a broader context for the medieval Islamic world. Representations of cities and regions in the Arabic written record began to appear in the 8th and 9th centuries in the form of local chronicles, local biographical dictionaries, and geographies.

⁷

Many of these works, as Rosenthal observed, contained introductions or individual chapters dedicated to topographical descriptions of the built and natural environment and/or to enumerations of the “merits” (faḍā

il) of a particular town or territory, usually taken from the hadith and related exegetical, legendary, and historical material.

⁸

Such faḍā

il treatises and topographies, usually as part of larger works although occasionally on their own, formed the backbone of the discourse of place as it matured from the 9th through the 11th centuries. In the middle of the 11th century, this discourse reached a culmination in the Ta

rikh Baghdad, a multivolume biographical dictionary prefaced by a faḍā

il cum topography of the city of Baghdad penned by the hadith scholar and Baghdad resident al-Khatib al-Baghdadi (d. 1071).

As did al-Khatib al-Baghdadi, whose work served as the model for generations of biographers to come, Ibn

Asakir combined a faḍā

il treatise and a topography in the introduction to his 12th-century dictionary. The format of the introduction to the Ta

rikh madinat Dimashq therefore reflected established practice in the broad-based discourse of place up to its time. In contrast, the content of the introduction owed a debt to more local representatives of the discourse. Independent faḍā

il treatises on Jerusalem and Damascus survive from the 11th century, and the introduction to the Ta

rikh madinat Dimashq can be seen as both testimonial to and departure from this literature.

⁹

Thus, Ibn

Asakir engaged a discourse of place that was already established in Syria and in the Islamic world more broadly. Despite his use of the conventions and terms of this discourse, however, the historically contingent perspective from which Ibn

Asakir constructed representations of Syria and Damascus in the introduction to the Ta

rikh madinat Dimashq distinguished him from earlier participants in the discourse and heralded a period of close association between a discourse of place in and about Syria and a politics of belonging in the region.

SYRIA AS PLACE: IBN

ASAKIR'S FAḌĀ

IL AL-SHAM

Unlike earlier works engaging a discourse of place in the Islamic world, Ibn

Asakir's introduction did not claim Syrian exceptionalism on the basis of the sanctity conferred by a pre-Islamic pantheon or the city of Jerusalem. Instead, the Ta

rikh madinat Dimashq opened with the territory referred to as “al-Sham,” the ill-defined borders of which justified the inclusion of the biographies of more than 10,000 individuals with some association to the territory, and the narrowly defined Islamic pedigree of which signaled the exclusion of heterodox groups from belonging, not only in Ibn

Asakir's biographical dictionary, but also, by implication, in the territory itself. This representation of “al-Sham,” which took the form of a faḍā

il treatise, occupied the first half of the introduction to the Ta

rikh madinat Dimashq and stood out most obviously because of its great length.

¹⁰

Although in some ways this meant that Ibn

Asakir simply included more of everything than did his predecessors, an analysis of his “strategies of selection, of placement, and of repetition,” to borrow Fred Donner's methodology, reveals patterns in the compilation of material.

¹¹

Where Ibn

Asakir furnished multiple versions of a single tradition or repeated the same versions with different chains of transmission, he was both showing himself to be a thorough hadith scholar and highlighting that particular material. This strategy of repetition was combined with strategies of selection, which make clear Ibn

Asakir did not include all traditions relevant to Syria in circulation by his time, nor did he treat them all with equal meticulousness. Finally, strategies of placement prompted Ibn

Asakir to place those traditions he wished to emphasize in more prominent locations in the lengthy work. Paying attention to these strategies of compilation makes it possible to suggest some general tendencies in Ibn

Asakir's representation of “al-Sham” and to interpret these tendencies in light of the historical context.

In addition to its size, Ibn

Asakir's faḍā

il was distinguished most clearly by the scale at which it represented the locality. The first half of the introduction to the Ta

rikh madinat Dimashq was concerned much more with the entity referred to as “al-Sham” than it was with the eponymous city of “Dimashq,” the author's hometown.

¹²

Ibn

Asakir did not exert much effort establishing the exact proportions of “al-Sham,” but his use of the more specific toponym “Dimashq” in the title and throughout the work suggests that “al-Sham” should not be seen here as a synonym for Damascus, as is often the case in modern usage.

¹³

Ibn

Asakir may have deliberately played on a certain ambiguity, however, leaving the physical referent for “al-Sham” unclear in order to justify the inclusion of as many biographical entries as possible without explicitly diverting the focus from his hometown. Overall, however, clues in the text indicate that he intended “al-Sham” primarily to refer to a larger, regional entity. Most conspicuously, Ibn

Asakir cited Qur

anic exegesis that relates “al-Sham” to God's blessed or holy land lying between the town of al-

Arish on the border with Egypt in the southwest and the Euphrates River in the northeast, two of the borders given to the region of Syria in 9th- and 10th-century Arabic geographies.

¹⁴

Because of the generally larger scale at which Ibn

Asakir represented “al-Sham,” it will be translated in this article as “Syria,” shorthand for the region often called “Greater Syria” or the “Bilad al-Sham.”

¹⁵

Representing localities at the scale of the region was unusual in terms of the discourse of place already established across the Islamic world. The topographical introduction to al-Khatib al-Baghdadi's Ta

rikh Baghdad, for instance, virtually ignored Iraq as a region.

¹⁶

Moreover, while the 11th-century faḍā

il treatises on Jerusalem situated the Holy City in the context of its hinterland, their emphasis was clearly Jerusalem proper and, more specifically, the walled sanctuary within the city.

¹⁷

The 11th-century faḍā

il of Damascus by

Ali al-Raba

i (d. 1052), from which Ibn

Asakir borrowed extensively, devoted only about a fifth of the text to “al-Sham”; the rest explicitly referred to Damascus and its environs.

¹⁸

In fact, by the 12th century, individual cities had appeared much more frequently and vividly in Arabic writing, with the notable exceptions of world geographies and faḍā

il treatises on Egypt, than had regions.

¹⁹

What this suggests is that Ibn

Asakir saw a particular need to address Syria as a region and to uphold it as a coherent and cohesive territory, united in a single identity and destiny.

Ibn

Asakir's emphasis on the region can be interpreted as an aspiration, consistent with the aspirations of the leadership of his day, toward a politically unified, Muslim-controlled Syria. As mentioned earlier, however, Ibn

Asakir did not represent Syria in terms of clearly defined borders. In addition to facilitating the inclusion of as many individuals as possible in the biographical dictionary, this vague rendering of Syria reflected the lack of an established political entity coterminous with an identifiable regional territory during Ibn

Asakir's lifetime. Nonetheless, after Nur al-Din, the Zangid prince of Aleppo, assumed control of Damascus in 1154, successfully wooing the city's elites in the process, Ibn

Asakir and his peers may have looked toward him not only as a patron but also as a potential unifier of Syria. By his death in 1174, Nur al-Din had brought extensive territories, including Syria's two largest cities, under the aegis of a single regime headquartered in Damascus, a political configuration not seen since the 8th century. The Crusader states were still firmly entrenched along the Mediterranean coast, however, and Shi

i challenges to Nur al-Din's suzerainty from extremist Isma

ili cells in Syria and the Fatimid Caliphate in Egypt kept political and religious unity under the Zangids a fragile reality at best. Nevertheless, for Damascene Sunni intellectuals like Ibn

Asakir, the concept of Syria as a regional polity united under a staunchly Sunni leadership may have finally seemed tantalizingly realizable.

Ibn

Asakir favored material highlighting the region's Islamic past to communicate these political aspirations in the opening faḍā

il of the Ta

rikh madinat Dimashq. Prominently placed traditions attributed to the Prophet and his Companions emphasize Syria's importance in the expansion of Islam. After the conventional introductory sections on etymology, Ibn

Asakir furnished the longest litany of variants of a single hadith in the entire faḍā

il, a hadith that celebrates Syria as the premier destination for the warrior immigrants of early Islam.

²⁰

In this hadith, the Prophet Muhammad predicts the future: “Armies will be dispatched, one to Syria, one to Iraq, and one to Yemen.” This foreshadowing of the incipient conquest period draws an enthusiastic response from the Companion

Abd Allah ibn Hawala al-Azdi (d. 678 or 699), “Oh Messenger of God, choose one for me!” At this, the Prophet replies, “Go to Syria.” Then he adds, “May whoever refuses stay in his Yemen and draw water from its streams; verily, God has vouchsafed Syria and its people to me.” This well-attested tradition appeared frequently in earlier hadith collections and faḍā

il treatises,

²¹

and Wilferd Madelung has interpreted the extent of its circulation as evidence of Umayyad-era support for the continuing obligation among Muslims to perform the hijra, or pious migration, and thus to join the ranks of recruits in Syria for wars against the Byzantine Empire.²²

The meticulous repetition of this tradition and its placement so far toward the beginning of the work suggest that Ibn

Asakir considered its message particularly important, even urgent. Madelung argued that by the Abbasid period “the hijra as a practical institution…came to an end.”

²³

It appears, however, that Ibn

Asakir was seeking to revive it. Though the enemies had changed, Ibn

Asakir still saw Syria as a region threatened by outsiders—European and Byzantine Christians and Isma

ili Shi

is—against whom rightly guided Muslims should fight.

To reinforce this representation of Syria as the most important testing ground for early Islam, Ibn

Asakir called on the historical narratives of the 7th century and, in so doing, evoked parallels with the realities of the 12th century. Although a detailed examination of the more than 200 pages devoted to the history of the Islamic conquest of Syria is beyond the scope of this article, the sheer size of this freighted interlude begs for comment.

²⁴

Accounts of the conquest or foundation of a city or region by the armies of Islam had become standard components of faḍā

il compilations throughout the Islamic world by Ibn

Asakir's time. However, the length and comprehensiveness of his conquest section—-from the early raids conducted during the lifetime of the Prophet to the siege of Damascus, from the defeat of the Byzantines at the Battle of Yarmouk to arrangements for the administration and taxation of the region—rendered it unusual as a mere convention of the faḍā

il format. Situated as it was after the more thematic opening sections of the faḍā

il, Ibn

Asakir's conquest chronicle celebrated Syrian particularism by distilling from the universalist narratives of the foundation and expansion of the Islamic community the episodes that were played out on Syrian soil. Ibn

Asakir may have intended this chronicle to stir the collective memory of his contemporaries in the hopes that past victories in the name of Islam might inspire future ones against the threats to incipient Syrian unity under Zangid leadership.

Ibn

Asakir also played on another kind of collective memory: the history of the future.

²⁵

The collection of traditions predicting a sequence of events leading to the apocalypse had constituted a distinct, though relatively marginal, branch of hadith studies since the early Islamic period.²⁶

Like that of his predecessors, Ibn

Asakir's invocation of apocalyptic hadith suggests an investment in looking toward the future to an ultimate triumph against enemies whose exact identities—Shi

is and Crusaders, for instance—might be superimposed by his audience on the inexact language of prophecy. Immediately after the opening litany of variants of the conquest hadith discussed earlier, Ibn

Asakir moved to another long litany, this time of variants of a tradition in which the Prophet relates a dream vision on the authority of

Abd Allah ibn

Amr ibn al-

As (d. 684): “Verily, I saw my bookstand lifted from under my cushion. I followed it with my eyes, and lo! There was a light shining from it towards Syria. Indeed, when the time of the trials comes, true faith will be in Syria.”

²⁷

The fact that this hadith was transmitted by the son of the great conquest-era conqueror of Egypt,

Amr ibn al-

As, made its failure to name Egypt, under a Shi

i regime for most of Ibn

Asakir's life, as the bastion of true faith at the end of time a subtext for its bestowal of such a distinction on a Sunni Syria.

²⁸

Other apocalyptic traditions defend Syria against criticism from, it is implied, Shi

i sources, such as the following prophecy in the words of

Ali ibn Abi Talib, whose legitimacy as caliph was challenged by a Syrian faction at the Battle of Siffin in 657: “At the end of time there will be a civil war in which the people will be mined just as gold is mined out of ore. So do not insult Syrians [in general]! Insult only their traitors. For truly, among them are the Substitutes (abdāl).”

²⁹

Thus,

Ali, whose contested succession prompted a split in the Islamic community that led to the establishment of Shi

ism among his supporters, defends the region that rejected him as host to the divinely privileged Substitutes who would fight on the side of truth at the end of time. The implications of this prediction—not only exonerating Syria for Siffin but also installing the wronged

Ali as its champion—allowed Ibn

Asakir to co-opt

Ali for Syria and for Sunnism in the face of Syria's Shi

i enemies.

³⁰

Ibn

Asakir also quoted many apocalyptic traditions that, read in the context of 12th-century Syria, conjure up images of another enemy of the emerging Zangid state, the Crusaders. The following hadith, which appears in numerous variants throughout the faḍā

il, would likely have reminded Ibn

Asakir and his fellow Damascene elites of confrontations between Crusader and Muslim armies outside Jerusalem and, more recently, outside Damascus: “The Prophet said, ‘A band from my community will remain fighting at and around the gates of Damascus and at and around the gates of Jerusalem; desertion will not impair their efforts, and they will remain victorious in the name of the truth until the Day of Judgment.’”

³¹

Other apocalyptic traditions also suggest a Christian enemy on Syrian soil. Ibn

Asakir emphasized material featuring the second coming of the Prophet

Isa ibn Maryam, or the Islamic Jesus, and linking him not only directly to Syria, where he would descend upon a white minaret on the eastern side of Damascus, but also to Islam.

³²

The first half of the introduction to the Ta

rikh madinat Dimashq concludes with a section describing the “Dajjāl,” a monstrous apocalyptic figure who would arrive on Earth to spread temptation and turmoil before Jesus's second coming.

³³

Situated as it was immediately following the more than 200 page conquest chronicle, this section reinforced a continuity between past and future in the representation of Syria as host to the primal conflicts and final resolutions of the Islamic community. It also reinforced an image of Jesus as an Islamic prophet, leading the Muslim community against the infidels, who were identified specifically in these chapters as, among others, Christians and Jews.³⁴

The first half of the introduction to the Ta

rikh madinat Dimashq, therefore, represented Syria by portraying past and future threats to its territorial and spiritual integrity as the enemies of Islam in general. Ibn

Asakir wielded the full arsenal of early Islamic historiography—Prophetic and apocalyptic hadith, conquest-era narratives and reports, Qur

anic exegesis—to emphasize the role Syria played and would continue to play in safeguarding the righteous from corruption and infidelity. This representation of Syria showcased Ibn

Asakir's skills as an accomplished, and relatively conservative, member of the ulama.

³⁵

In line with this conservatism was Ibn

Asakir's departure from the emphasis on pre-Islamic history that had marked the discourse of place in and about Syria up to his time. One of the peculiarities of the faḍā

il literature on Syria preceding the Ta

rikh madinat Dimashq was the depth of its historical vision, drawing heavily from a reservoir of para-biblical lore circulating in the region to evoke the longue durée of the monotheistic tradition.

³⁶

The treatises on Jerusalem in particular moved almost seamlessly from the days of David and Solomon and the Temple Mount to the Islamic conquest of Jerusalem and the construction of the Dome of the Rock.³⁷

By contrast, the scarce material featuring pre-Islamic prophets and historical figures in the first half of the introduction to the Ta

rikh madinat Dimashq is completely overwhelmed by the mass of material privileging episodes from the early Islamic period and interlocutors from the ranks of the Prophet's Companions and Successors.

³⁸

The fact that Ibn

Asakir's volumes of biographies include entries for pre-Islamic prophets has been interpreted in recent scholarship as evidence of his particular interest in the pre-Islamic past and its relationship to Syria.

³⁹

However, recalling the importance of strategies of selection, repetition, and placement, Ibn

Asakir's choice to exclude much of this material from the opening faḍā

il of the Ta

rikh madinat Dimashq, especially in contrast to its privileged position in an earlier discourse of place, suggests a deliberate downplaying of pre-Islamic history and legend in representing Syria.

⁴⁰

In the context of the 12th-century conflicts with Christian Crusaders, Ibn

Asakir's reluctance to embrace “biblical Syria” as an integral part of his representation is understandable, although, as mentioned earlier, he did highlight eschatological traditions featuring Jesus.

⁴¹

Ibn

Asakir's inclusion of Jesus in the opening faḍā

il of the Ta

rikh madinat Dimashq in any capacity is striking in the context of his relative neglect therein of other pre-Islamic prophets, historical figures, and the tales of their exploits in Syria. However, the portrayal of Jesus in a strictly apocalyptic role was characteristic of the field of hadith studies as it had evolved by the 12th century and as exemplified by conservative ulama like Ibn

Asakir. As Tarif Khalidi explains, “When the Hadith texts came to be edited and standardized in authoritative and carefully arranged and divided collections…the Jesus of the eschaton survived, but not the Jesus of the ‘biblical’ materials.”

⁴²

Not only was the “Jesus of the eschaton” acceptable to a strict hadith scholar, but he could also be linked directly to Syria, allowing Ibn

Asakir to reconcile his rigorous training with his Syrian particularism.

⁴³

The repetition of some of these traditions later in the biographical entry for Jesus only served to underscore the importance of this material to Ibn

Asakir, as well as the relative unimportance—at least, in the context of representing Syria—of the material on other pre-Islamic prophets that appears solely in their biographical entries. The Syria represented in the introduction to the Ta

rikh madinat Dimashq was not, therefore, an “abode of the prophets,” as it had been described by geographers and faḍā

il authors up to Ibn

Asakir's time, a description that implicated Syria in the birth and development of Judaism and Christianity as well as Islam.

⁴⁴

Instead, Ibn

Asakir's Syria was an exclusively Islamic Syria, defined by its importance to the early community of believers under Muhammad, to the expansion of Islam, and to the ultimate showdown between faithful Muslims and infidels at the end of time.

Despite Ibn

Asakir's clear antipathy toward the Crusader presence in Syria and his favoring of traditions intended to inspire rightly guided Muslims to fight infidels in their midst, he did not make the Crusader occupation of Jerusalem a cause célèbre for his call to arms nor did he represent Jerusalem as the sine qua non of Syrian sanctity. Upholding Jerusalem's status as an Islamic holy site in the same category as Mecca or Medina had been the overriding concern of the 11th-century faḍā

il treatises on Jerusalem, and the city's divinely privileged status dominated representations of the region of Syria in medieval geographical literature.

⁴⁵

By contrast, although Jerusalem, like Jesus, appears throughout Ibn

Asakir's faḍā

il al-Sham in apocalyptic traditions, and thus possessed clear eschatological significance, the city remained but a symbol of promise for the end of time rather than a dominant and current source of Syria's Islamic prestige. The few spots in which Ibn

Asakir mentioned Jerusalem in a nonapocalyptic context occur primarily in a chapter placed a third of the way through the faḍā

il citing commentary on Qur

anic references to God's blessed or holy land (Q. 21:71, 5:21, 7:137).

⁴⁶

However, taking into account Ibn

Asakir's strategies of repetition, the traditions pinpointing the source of Syria's holiness in Jerusalem or in Palestine should be seen as variants,

⁴⁷

included by virtue of the scholarly thoroughness that marks the work as a whole, on the far more numerous interpretations of the scriptural holy land as “al-Sham.”⁴⁸

Overall the toponym that dominates the faḍā

il is “al-Sham,” with “Dimashq” a distant second. Mecca and Medina, the regions of Egypt and Iraq, and the Syrian city of Homs received mention at least as often as did Jerusalem or Palestine. Furthermore, unlike earlier faḍā

il authors, Ibn

Asakir did not cite the Qur

anic verse describing the Prophet Muhammad's “Night Journey” (Q. 17:1) to the Masjid al-Aqsa, interpreted as Jerusalem by many authoritative exegetes up to Ibn

Asakir's time,

⁴⁹

nor did he include the well-known “hadith of the three mosques,” intended to legitimize the pious visitation of Jerusalem's sanctuary alongside those of Mecca and Medina.⁵⁰

This neglect of the two most frequently cited pieces of evidence for Jerusalem's sanctity in an earlier discourse of place suggests a deliberate downplaying of the sanctity its presence conferred on Ibn

Asakir's Syria.

To characterize Ibn

Asakir on the basis of the introduction to the Ta

rikh madinat Dimashq as a “propagandiste de la sainteté de Jérusalem et de la Terre Sainte”

⁵¹

is, therefore, to misread or overlook strategies of selection, repetition, and placement. In fact, Ibn

Asakir's downplaying of Jerusalem was consistent with his downplaying of pre-Islamic history in the representation of Syria. The material in circulation at the time praising Jerusalem as a holy city derived mainly from the shared historical and legendary heritage of monotheism. Much of this material would not necessarily have appealed to a strict hadith scholar, nor would it have facilitated the rejection of non-Muslim claims, particularly those of European Christians, to Syrian territory based on its biblical past. Furthermore, given Crusader control of Jerusalem for the duration of his lifetime, Ibn

Asakir must have seen little use in making Jerusalem the focus of his immediate political and religious aspirations for Syria or in encouraging Muslim pilgrimage to the holy city. Although Ibn

Asakir was reported to have authored an independent faḍā

il treatise on Jerusalem

⁵²

and certainly was committed to the reestablishment of Muslim rule in the territories under Crusader occupation, it was Damascus to which Ibn

Asakir turned in the second half of the introduction to the Ta

rikh madinat Dimashq as the center of his representation of Syria.

DAMASCUS AS PLACE: IBN

ASAKIR'S URBAN TOPOGRAPHY

Apart from scattered references to “Dimashq” in the opening faḍā

il, Ibn

Asakir's representation of his hometown occurs primarily in the urban topography occupying the second half of the introduction to the Ta

rikh madinat Dimashq. The topography marked Ibn

Asakir's transition from material celebrating the more abstract virtues of Syria, its Islamic pedigree and apocalyptic destiny, to material celebrating the very concrete virtues of Damascus, virtues stemming from a foundational period as an Islamic capital city under the Umayyad caliphs; from a “ritual topography” replete with destinations for pious visitation; and from a complex and richly urban present to which Ibn

Asakir's systematic observations testified. When it came to his hometown, Ibn

Asakir displayed less of the conservatism of a strict hadith scholar. Although he avoided material derived from Syria's pluralistic heritage in his faḍā

il al-Sham, in his topography of Damascus he drew from much more varied, late, and local sources and represented the city through the blessings (baraka) conferred by shrines and cemeteries, relics and rituals. Furthermore, while Ibn

Asakir's faḍā

il claimed a monopoly on divine prestige for the region of Syria, his topography claimed both sacred and secular distinctions for Damascus. Thus, Damascus emerges from these pages as a living, breathing city that could boast a powerful political past, monumental architecture, holy sites, and a thriving economy.

Ibn

Asakir devoted the first quarter of the topography to a description of the Umayyad Mosque of Damascus and the history of its construction.

⁵³

While this section conforms more to a faḍā

il format than to that of topography, it signaled a departure from Ibn

Asakir's representation of Syria in the preceding pages, a representation that consisted primarily of traditions traced back to the lifetime of the Prophet or to that of his Successors. By contrast, his description of the Umayyad Mosque drew from later and more local and partisan sources, as in the opening clarification of the exegesis of God's oath in Qur

an 95:1, “by the fig and the olive.” The exegesis of this verse offered by Ibn

Asakir earlier in his faḍā

il al-Sham interpreted the “fig” as a reference to Damascus and the “olive” as a reference to Jerusalem on the authority of prominent figures within the early Islamic community.

⁵⁴

To begin his urban topography, however, Ibn

Asakir called on Damascene scholars from the 8th and 9th centuries to provide four traditions interpreting “the fig” specifically as the site of the Umayyad Mosque.

⁵⁵

In one of these traditions, Muhammad b. Shu

ayb (d. ca. 815), whose grandfather Shabur had been a client of the Umayyad Caliph al-Walid I (r. 705–15), invokes the vague authority of “more than one of our elders” to explain this interpretation by claiming that fig trees were seen on the site before al-Walid built the mosque.

⁵⁶

This late and patently partisan exegesis set the tone for the subsequent pages, which take an emphasis, already established in the Syrian branch of the discourse of place, on the Umayyad Mosque as the focal point of Damascene topography and expand it into a celebration of the city's political power and Islamic prestige under the Umayyad caliphs.⁵⁷

Central to Ibn

Asakir's narrative of this chapter of Damascene history were al-Walid's negotiations with the city's Christian community in which he vouchsafed a group of churches in exchange for the ceding of the Byzantine Church of St. John, future site of the Umayyad Mosque.

⁵⁸

When the caliph personally struck the first blow to this church in 706 and ordered the construction of a congregational mosque in its place, he brought to an end nearly seventy years of Muslims and Christians sharing the site for worship.⁵⁹

The subsequent high cost of the Umayyad Mosque's construction and al-Walid's aspirations for the notoriety it would bring Damascus round out Ibn

Asakir's narrative.

⁶⁰

Highlighting this particular episode in the history of the city's most important Islamic monument established interfaith negotiations as integral to the historical ordering of its loci of devotion, but the conclusion of the episode left little ambiguity about religious and political hierarchies under the Umayyads.

A chapter devoted to the famously pious Umayyad Caliph

Umar II (r. 717–20) and his ascetic objections to the lavish decorations gracing the mosque reinforced the portrayal of Damascene monumental architecture under the Umayyads as reflective of Islamic political power.

⁶¹

In an anecdote at the end of the chapter, even the scrupulous

Umar manages to justify such an ostentatious display. When a group of Byzantines visits the mosque, emissaries from the caliph overhear their awestruck reaction, “Why do you underestimate [the Muslims'] power? Only a great monarch could have built this edifice.” On hearing of this reaction to the mosque,

Umar lays his concerns to rest and says, “Well, if it angers [our] enemies, so be it.”

⁶²

In emphasizing these justifications, Ibn

Asakir acted as an apologist for Umayyad building projects, especially inasmuch as they impressed on Christian communities both inside and outside of Muslim jurisdiction the power, righteousness, and assured longevity of the Islamic polity. Ibn

Asakir's use of 8th-century historical material featuring the Byzantine Empire as a Christian rival for Syrian territory echoed the message delivered in the preceding faḍā

il that the unity of Muslim-controlled Syria, with the emphasis here on Umayyad Damascus as its capital city, was an essential and urgent prerequisite to the defeat of Syria's, and Islam's, enemies.

As had earlier participants in the discourse of place in and about Syria, Ibn

Asakir took the Umayyad Mosque as but the starting point for a ritual topography. His enumeration of the many other loci of devotion in the city and its environs distinguished the second half of the introduction to the Ta

rikh madinat Dimashq from the preceding portrait of Syria by representing Damascus through its manifold attractions for pilgrims and, in so doing, by embracing material of heterodox and popular origins.

⁶³

Ibn

Asakir introduced a chapter on destinations for pious visitation (ziyāra), a lesser form of pilgrimage, by quoting a tradition on the authority of

Abd Allah ibn

Amr ibn al-

As, “There is no Muslim to whom, when he undertakes ziyāra on the land or comes to a mosque built of stone and prays in it, the land will not say: Make a request of God Almighty on his land, and I will bear witness for you on the day that you meet Him.”

⁶⁴

Thus, the land itself, when approached as sacred, becomes an intercessor for humans on the Day of Judgment.

In representing Damascus, Ibn

Asakir duly approached the land as sacred, reporting on popular practices of ziyāra and attributing baraka to various sites by virtue of their contact with prophets and other sacred figures of both pre-Islamic and Islamic fame. In the chapters on the Umayyad Mosque, he cited traditions attributing the initial erection of the south wall of the mosque to the pre-Islamic Arab Prophet Hud

⁶⁵

; recounting the discovery of the head of John the Baptist in a crypt under the foundations of the mosque⁶⁶

; and identifying a phantasmic night visitor to the mosque as the legendary immortal Prophet al-Khidr.⁶⁷

In the chapter devoted to destinations for ziyāra, he recounted the full legend of the High Place (rabwa) where Jesus and Mary sought refuge in Qur

an 23:50, said to be located in the Ghuta, the fertile oasis extending south and east from the slopes of Mount Qasiyun on the northern outskirts of the city

⁶⁸

; he made repeated reference to Abraham's relationship with a village called Barza in the Ghuta, allegedly his birthplace as well as site of the Mosque or Station (maqām) of Abraham⁶⁹

; and he established the mystical significance of Mount Qasiyun and its various shrines, including the Grotto of Blood (maghārat al-dam), where Cain was said to have killed Abel.⁷⁰

Finally, he concluded the second half of the introduction to the Ta

rikh madinat Dimashq with a chapter on the cemeteries of Damascus, listing traditions identifying tombs of illustrious early Islamic personages in the Bab al-Saghir cemetery outside the southern wall of the city.

⁷¹

Visitation of tombs had long been a stalwart of popular piety in Islam, and Ibn

Asakir's Damascus was full of baraka of this sort.

⁷²

Although the material he furnished on these and other destinations for visitation in and around Damascus reflected less the strict hadith scholar of the opening faḍā

il al-Sham and more a long-time Damascene resident well versed in popular practice and legend, Ibn

Asakir did not lend all of this material the same credence. Describing a Damascene mosque founded by a weaver from Cairo in the early 11th century that allegedly bore the handprint of

Ali ibn Abi Talib, Ibn

Asakir cast doubt on the relic's authenticity. “I heard that when [the founder of the mosque] was asked which hand [

Ali] placed on the rock, he said that it was the right one. However, the impression [in the rock] was from the left hand. It is said that [the founder of the mosque] carved this handprint in the rock [himself].”

⁷³

The fact that this mosque was founded by an Egyptian at the height of the Fatimid Caliphate and that he claimed it bore the mark of

Ali makes it highly likely that it was a site of Shi

i visitation in Damascus.

⁷⁴

Since Ibn

Asakir did not question controversial legendary material locating, for example, Abraham's birthplace in the Ghuta,

⁷⁵

his skepticism in this instance should probably be attributed to his antipathy toward Shi

ism. Despite this skepticism and his silence on the subject of other Shi

i holy sites, as well as his limited observations of the ritual practices of Damascene Christians and Jews,

⁷⁶

Ibn

Asakir's ritual topography sprang from the pre-Islamic antiquity and monotheistic heritage of his hometown. Unlike Ibn

Asakir's Syria, the Damascus that emerged from this topography was truly an “abode of the prophets,” a city in which the traces of saints, patriarchs, and caliphs had been etched into its very stones.

In the final three-quarters of the topography, Ibn

Asakir sketched the impressive dimensions that qualified Damascus as the first city of 12th-century Syria and, in so doing, vividly distinguished the introduction to the Ta

rikh madinat Dimashq from that of the Ta

rikh Baghdad and other representatives of an earlier discourse of place. The cataloguing of the Damascene built environment that Ibn

Asakir presented in these chapters also contradicts conclusions drawn in some secondary literature about the work. According to Rosenthal, “Ibn

Asakir's introduction was mainly concerned with the relations between Damascus and Muhammad and the early Muslims. Items borrowed from annalistic historiography, such as the story of the introduction of the Muslim era, seemed more important to the author than a factual topographical description such as we find it in the History of Baghdad.”

⁷⁷

This comparison between the topographical introductions of the Ta

rikh madinat Dimashq and the Ta

rikh Baghdad was echoed by David Morray, “Al-Khatib's introduction consists of a long section containing topographical, cultural and historical information concerning Baghdad and its suburbs, as well as the story of its foundation. Ibn

Asakir, however, finds factual topographical information less interesting than items taken from earlier chronicles, such as the account of the beginning of the Muslim era.”

⁷⁸

As the discussion later will bear out, these statements misinterpret the topographical material presented in the Ta

rikh Baghdad and ignore a large portion of the topographical material Ibn

Asakir furnished on Damascus. In fact, the great innovation of the introduction to the Ta

rikh madinat Dimashq was its factual and up to date depiction of the Damascene cityscape.

Ibn

Asakir's chapter inventorying the mosques of Damascus was the first of its kind

⁷⁹

; in it, he led the reader on a guided tour of the mosques located inside and outside of the walls of the city. All of the material was recorded based on firsthand observation, and the mosques were listed in the order that they occurred along a circuit of Damascus, starting at the westernmost gate of the walled city, Bab al-Jabiya, and continuing eastward along the old Roman Via Recta, taking detours through the southern half of the city to the easternmost gate, Bab Sharqi, then north to Bab Tuma, and then back west along the northern half of the city to conclude at the Umayyad Mosque and the Citadel. For each mosque along the way, Ibn

Asakir noted its location, the circumstances of its foundation, and a few defining physical characteristics. A representative series of entries gives an idea of the detail that this chapter conveys:

This final remark, that the restorations on the Mosque of the Pearl Market had finally been finished, was evidently added later either by Ibn

Asakir himself or by a subsequent author or copyist and suggests that the information supplied here was considered relevant and practical enough to warrant ongoing revisions. The most striking aspect of this chapter, however, is not simply the up to the minute depiction of the numerous mosques of Damascus (some 240 within the walled city alone), but the continuity reflected in that depiction between the sacred and the profane in the city. Residences, markets, and mosques flow one into the other, and street names alone tell a story of a thriving commercial town, the quotidian vocabulary of foodstuffs and commodities demarcating Ibn

Asakir's Damascus.

⁸¹

While his mosque inventory was the richest in detail, he also supplied original information on several important features of the Damascene infrastructure. After a series of historical reports addressing the development of a state-controlled water distribution system in late 7th- and early 8th-century Damascus under the Umayyad caliphs, the following rare editorial remark revealed Ibn

Asakir's concern with the prosaic essentials of urban life:

Clearly, in the Middle Eastern cities of the 12th century that Ibn

Asakir had visited the existence of an efficient public water system available to all inhabitants, both rich and poor, could not go without saying. Its existence in Damascus testified to the sophistication and prioritization of municipal planning in Ibn

Asakir's time and prompted the direct declaration of civic pride quoted earlier. An enumeration of the one hundred-plus water mains and public baths within the walled city of Damascus, plotted along roughly the same itinerary as the mosques, follows this statement.

⁸³

Ibn

Asakir indicated whether the upkeep of each branch of the network was funded by an endowment and noted directions to each site. He also inventoried the gates of Damascus, exhibiting similar concern with the efficiency of the urban infrastructure, this time in terms of the architectural features and recent renovations that enabled the gates to meet the competing needs of commercial intercourse and defense.

⁸⁴

In these annotated lists, Ibn

Asakir emphasized the secular attributes of Damascus that served and strengthened the religious significance of its wealth of mosques and other loci of devotion.

Ibn

Asakir's topography of Damascus in the second half of the introduction to the Ta

rikh madinat Dimashq stood out, therefore, not for its lack of factual information, as suggested by the authors quoted earlier, but for its concern with establishing an up-to-date and logically ordered guide to the city. By contrast, the majority of the material with which al-Khatib al-Baghdadi represented Baghdad in the introduction to the Ta

rikh Baghdad dates from the late 9th century, depicting the city as it had looked a century and a half before his death.

⁸⁵

However, Ibn

Asakir not only provided inventories of buildings and features of the municipal infrastructure based on firsthand observation, rather than received historical or traditional material,

⁸⁶

but he also organized these inventories according to each entry's position along a circuit of the city.⁸⁷

Ibn

Asakir portrayed his hometown as 12th-century Damascenes encountered it, and his catalogues of its mosques and canals resemble “walking tours” intended to provide a practical guide to the principal landmarks of the city. In his urban topography, therefore, Ibn

Asakir associated belonging in Damascus with the intimate familiarity of the resident, with a reverence for its Umayyad past, and with a sense of the baraka embedded in its stones. These pages acted as a pledge of allegiance to Damascus from one of its most prominent native sons and as a celebration of a city that was, if not untroubled, certainly poised in the second half of the 12th century for better things to come.

CONCLUSION

According to Ibn

Asakir, the lengthy compilation of the Ta

rikh madinat Dimashq, a project that he started earlier in life and subsequently despaired of ever finishing, was encouraged and finally completed at the urging of Nur al-Din, “avenger of the vile, infidel enemies of Muslims.”

⁸⁸

Ever since his triumphant entry into Damascus in 1154, Nur al-Din had sought to engage the notables of the city, such as the Banu

Asakir, in his bid for the consolidation of Syria and the expulsion or marginalization of its non-Muslim and non-Sunni elements.

⁸⁹

One of the institutional centerpieces of Nur al-Din's policies was the construction of the Dar al-Hadith in Damascus, a bastion of conservative Sunni hadith studies under the direction of none other than Ibn

Asakir. Moreover, the Zangid prince asserted his authority and strengthened his position in the architecture and infrastructure of his new capital city; Ibn

Asakir's topography of Damascus lists nine mosques inside and five outside the city walls, two canals, two baths, two gates, and three separate Madrasa al-Nuriyya's, all endowed, renovated, or expanded at the behest of Nur al-Din.

⁹⁰

By the time of Nur al-Din's death in 1174, Damascus had become the political capital of the united Muslim-controlled areas of Syria. The last year of Ibn

Asakir's life was marked by the entry of Salah al-Din ibn Ayyub into Damascus, where he maintained his predecessor's policies, even in his patronage of the city's Sunni elites, as his presence at Ibn

Asakir's funeral attested.

⁹¹

Within a decade, Salah al-Din would wrest Jerusalem from the Crusaders and administer the expanding territories of Muslim Syria from his capital at Damascus. During the last two decades of his life, therefore, Ibn

Asakir had every reason to feel optimistic about the future of his region and the rising political fortunes of his native town.

Thus, the Ta

rikh madinat Dimashq emerged from a particular environment of politics and patronage that came together in Damascus during the second half of the 12th century. Given his family's prominence and his professional relationship with Nur al-Din, Ibn

Asakir's magnum opus should be seen as the product of a Damascene intellectual fully invested in that environment. While its numerous volumes of biographies certainly shed light on the intellectual orientation of their author and the historical context in which they were composed, as has been demonstrated ably in secondary scholarship to date,

⁹²

this article argues that the introduction to the Ta

rikh madinat Dimashq, a heretofore interpretively neglected aspect of the work, is particularly revealing of Ibn

Asakir's politics of belonging. In this introduction, Ibn

Asakir claimed for Syria virtues derived from Islamic historiography and the authoritative methods of a reputable hadith scholar to restrict belonging in the region to those conforming to an increasingly exclusive and militant Sunnism espoused by political rulers, such as Nur al-Din, and religious notables, such as Ibn

Asakir, and propagated through their combined, often collaborative, efforts.

⁹³

In this same text, he claimed for Damascus a heritage of Islamic power as well as the baraka associated with ancient history, holy sites, and popular piety, linking belonging in the city to a range of beliefs and ritual practices, if not necessarily to a range of official religious and political affiliations. These representations of Syria and Damascus established Ibn

Asakir both as an advocate of Nur al-Din's militant and exclusionary plans for Syria and as a Damascene particularist, a proud witness to its distant past, thriving present, and hopeful future.

Ibn

Asakir presented two series of readings from the introduction to the Ta

rikh madinat Dimashq at the Umayyad Mosque in 1164, installing it as a public text, the import of which rested not only in its composition but also in its reception. A set of surviving audience certificates (samā

āt) attests to an attendance of between seventy and eighty-five people for the second series of readings, which occurred on Thursdays and Fridays over a period of a month at the end of the year.

⁹⁴

Since a biographical analysis of the individuals listed on the certificates is beyond the scope of this study, it is impossible here to determine exactly how “public” or “popular” these sessions were, beyond the cursory observation that the lists include various relatives of Ibn

Asakir as well as titles suggesting membership in the religious elite.

⁹⁵

However, readings with more than fifty auditors appear comparably rarely in the preserved body of Damascene samā

āt from the mid-12th through the mid-14th centuries, so Ibn

Asakir's sessions seem to have attracted an above-average attendance.

⁹⁶

Furthermore, the Umayyad Mosque was well known at the time as a site of public instruction in the religious sciences, and the fact that many of Ibn

Asakir's sessions occurred on Fridays, when the mosque attracted a larger and more diverse assortment of visitors than on any other day of the week, makes it likely that these were comparatively conspicuous readings.

⁹⁷

Comprising members of the Banu

Asakir and the ulama for certain, as well as, with likelihood, members of a wider cross section of the population, this group of seventy to eighty-five individuals formed the most immediate audience for the introduction to the Ta

rikh madinat Dimashq. It was to this group of contemporaries that Ibn

Asakir may have intended the vote of confidence conveyed by his faḍā

il al-Sham for Nur al-Din's policies.

In a less immediate, but no less significant, way, the audience for the introduction to Ibn

Asakir's great biographical dictionary would include future participants in the Syrian branch of the discourse of place, which expanded considerably in the two centuries following the composition of the Ta

rikh madinat Dimashq. As argued earlier, Ibn

Asakir's representations of Syria and Damascus were part of an ongoing discourse among past and future authors of such representations, authors who reproduced material from or responded in common terms to each other's work. The representation of Syria in the first half of the introduction to the Ta

rikh madinat Dimashq engaged this discourse in the conventional format of a faḍā

il treatise. In a departure from the discourse, however, Ibn

Asakir's representation did not celebrate Jerusalem's centrality to Islamic history or ritual, as representations of Syria would once again and with added intensity during the half-century following the conquest of the city from the Crusaders in 1183.

⁹⁸

However, its clear refrain of “Syria for Sunnis,” and its implicit rejection of the para-biblical material that had dominated an earlier discourse of place would be echoed in representations of Syria and Syrian localities over the next century and a half, as Crusaders would continue to threaten and Mongols would soon invade Syrian territory and divide Syrian residents.⁹⁹

As for the second half of the introduction to the Ta

rikh madinat Dimashq, the attention to topographical detail and the insistence on quotidian familiarity in the representation of Damascus also announced a new emphasis in the discourse of place, as up to date written descriptions of the built and natural environments, including loci of devotion, in and around the cities of Syria would proliferate, heralding a closer identification between city and city dweller under the decentralized politics of the Ayyubid period.

¹⁰⁰

Thus, the Ta

rikh madinat Dimashq marked a turning point in the discourse of place in and about Syria, a harbinger of an ideologically exclusive and city-based politics of belonging in the late 12th and 13th centuries.