Gelehrte Krieger is based on an MA thesis completed at the University of Göttingen in 2011. Its very specific goal is to revisit the traditional image of the Mamluks as uneducated and uncultured military men, whose slave background prevented them from properly learning Arabic and participating in any meaningful way in the scholarly life of the day. Moving away from the contemporary chronicles that perpetuated these stereotypes, Mauder focuses his study on a handful of mainly biographical dictionaries, in which the obituaries of Mamluk officers suggest they were in some way or another “learned”. The issue of Mamluk education is an important one, first raised in Barbara Flemming's pivotal article of 1977 (“Literary activities in Mamluk halls and barracks”) and addressed in several subsequent studies by Ulrich Haarmann and Jonathan Berkey (summarized in Berkey's The Formation of Islam: Religion and Society in the Near East, 600–1800, Cambridge, 2003). Mauder's innovative work also keeps pace with current trends in Mamluk scholarship on the popularization of education, such as Jonathan Berkey, The Transmission of Knowledge in Medieval Cairo (Princeton, 1992) and on image-making, noting Koby Yosef's recent essay “Mamluks and their relatives in the period of the Mamluk Sultanate” (Mamluk Studies Review 16, 2012, 55–69), which emphasizes pride in ethnicity over slave background in the construction of Mamluk self-image.

What Mauder contributes to the body of scholarship is a systematic study of biographical entries of Mamluks, culling from them the kinds of religious knowledge – in Arabic language – in which these military men distinguished themselves in the eyes of contemporary scholars. He differentiates between two kinds of knowledge – ʿilm (religious knowledge on the theoretical level) and ʿamal (practical knowledge) – adopting the perspectives of contemporary religious scholars (ʿulama). In identifying appropriate entries, the author cautiously and systematically selects those of who can without a doubt be identified as Mamluks and who died during the reign of the Mamluk sultans. In order to identify “educated Mamluks” in his sources, he proceeds with two carefully defined concepts, that of the “Mamluk” and that of “learned”. An “educated Mamluk” is, in this study, a military slave who uses Arabic as the medium for knowledge exchange, doing so with such an intensity that it distinguishes him in the eyes of his scholarly contemporaries (p. 69). To assure control over his data, the author largely limits his study to four fourteenth- and fifteenth-century sources: three biographical dictionaries (al-Ṣafadī's Aʿyān al-ʿaṣr w-aʿwān al-naṣr and al-Maqrīzī's Kitāb al-muqaffā al-kabīr and his Durar al-ʿuqūd al-farīda fī tarājim al-aʿyān al-mufīda) and one topographical–historical text (al-Maqrīzī's Kitāb al-mawāʿiẓ wa-l-iʿtibār fī dhikr al-khiṭaṭ wa-l-āthār).

After discussing his sources, methods and guiding concepts, Mauder proceeds to a discussion of the Mamluks' religious training and what in this training made an educated man. Eight areas of religious study in which the Mamluks attained a degree of ʿilm are discussed in chapter 5, reflecting the classification of knowledge by the religious elite: the Prophetic traditions, Islamic law, belles lêttres, Quran, linguistics, the natural sciences (namely astronomy) and metaphysics, Sufism, and history. Chapter 6 explores the various factors which reinforced Mamluks' access to education of this form (training needed to fulfil the functions of administrative offices) and those that hindered it (language and social barriers, troubled relations with the local population, the conflicting demands of their jobs).

Of a total 7,000 biographical entries in the sources under study, Mauder identified 1,200 as Mamluk by laqab, ism, nasab and nisba. Of these, 481, by conservative estimates, were true Mamluks who died within the period of Mamluk rule, and 58 (12.1%) of these were “learned” by the standards of contemporary scholars (pp. 74–7). Mauder concludes that at the very least, one in eight Mamluks would have been considered educated men (p. 174).

The study is deliberately limited in scope and source material. The author allows the ʿulama to define for us “learnedness”, privileging the religious sciences in the process. Mauder's work does not address education in the applied, and explicitly non-religious sciences, such as veterinary medicine, geography and the natural sciences (agronomy, for example) – areas of training that were inherently practical and necessary for Mamluk officers. This is, of course, a broader definition of what made a man “educated” in this period – it is ʿamal – and could position Mamluks in local society in a very different manner. Expanding the study in this way to include the broadest definition of education would require analysis of a wider range of sources – such as furusiyyah and agronomic manuals – and their place in Mamluk training and in their libraries.

The biographical dictionaries that lie at the heart of this study, as rich as they are for information on the predominantly religious elite, are evocative but not documentary. The author readily recognizes this limitation (p. 78). Other kinds of sources could complement these biographical entries, illustrating the varied ways in which the Mamluks contributed to the scholarly life of their time. Biographies of sultans who studied under Sufi mentors, for instance, and waqfiyyāt for educational and religious institutions, which, in congregate, document patronage patterns beyond what is available in al-Maqrīzī's Khiṭaṭ and, individually, specify the donor's special conditions (reflecting in an indirect way the educational background and preferences of the Mamluk patron) might prove illuminating. These lines of research, however, perhaps go beyond the scope of a Master's thesis, but they would certainly provide impulses for future work on this topic.

These observations aside, Mauder's thesis is very valuable for its conceptually clear, focused and systematic study of a phenomenon that has attracted relatively limited attention. One applauds these efforts and looks forward to continued research on the larger problems of Mamluk education, enculturation and self-representation.