Introduction
Abū Shāma was born in 1203 in Damascus to a family of religious scholars. He is best known today as the author of The Book of the Two Gardens on the History of the Two Reigns (Kitāb al-Rawḍatayn fī akhbār al-dawlatayn), a chronologically arranged history of the reigns of Nūr al-Dīn Zangī (d. 1174) and Saladin (d. 1193), regarded as one of the most important Arabic sources for the period of the Crusades.[1] Abū Shāma's autobiography is found listed under the year of his birth in his continuation of the original work, the Sequel to the Book of the Two Gardens (Dhayl kitāb al-rawḍatayn), which covers the years from Saladin's death to Abū Shāma's. The Sequel is also arranged chronologically and includes biographical notices of prominent figures listed under the years of their deaths. The final scene of the Sequel, in fact, describes how the author was beaten up by thugs, an incident that apparently led to his death soon afterward.
Although Abū Shāma is today remembered primarily as a historian, his self-portrayal in his autobiography, translated here in full, shows that he considered himself first and foremost a scholar of Islamic religious sciences, particularly of Islamic law. His account of his life begins with a list of his forebears—all men distinguished by their religious learning—and then sketches the broad outlines of his education. The turning point in Abū Shāma's life is depicted as the year 624 (1227), when he traveled to Jerusalem with his most important teacher and his hair suddenly turned gray though he was only twenty-five years old. He interprets this event, in conjunction with the trip to Jerusalem and some dreams from that same year, to mean that he had “arrived” as a mature religious scholar. As he puts it in the short poem that appears in his autobiography—a poem he conventionally attributes to “some good person or other” but which he himself wrote—God marked him with the outward signs of intellectual maturity to reflect his inner intellectual growth.
Abū Shāma's autobiography poses some intriguing problems concerning the nature and function of the self-tarjama in the Arabic tradition. Throughout the larger historical text, the Sequel, Abū Shāma refers to himself exclusively in the first person, which communicates to the reader a clear sense of the author as a person beyond the text. In addition, in the larger text, he provides information of a rather personal nature (at least, in the modern sense), noting, for example, his reactions to the tragic deaths of several of his children (e.g., Dhayl, 176), expressing his love and affection for his wife in a lengthy poem (Dhayl, 196–98), and giving other intimate details of his life. He intermingles many of these with the major historical occurrences of the realm, thus placing the events of his own life on par with those of the kingdoms and reigns he chronicled:
Because of the many references to Abū Shāma's own life that are woven into the larger historical flow, some scholars have suggested that the overall work should be considered a memoir.[2] In any case, in his work of history, Abū Shāma inserts the kind of information a modern reader might expect to find in an autobiography.In this year Ibn Abī Firās led the people from Iraq on the pilgrimage, and Sharaf al-Dīn, the ruler of Sarkas, those from Syria.
Also in this year, my mother passed away—May God have mercy on her! I buried her in the foothills on the road near al-Imāj and al-Maghar, next to the wadi. I hope to be buried next to her. Her death occurred on Saturday, the sixth of the month of Rajab. She was pious and virtuous—May God be pleased with her!
Also in this year, the Amīr Mubāriz al-Dīn Sunqur of Aleppo died, one of Saladin's contingent. (Dhayl, 134)
In the autobiography itself, however, Abū Shāma curiously shifts to the third person and changes the tone of his self-representation drastically. Here, little of Abū Shāma's “personal” life (again, in modern terms) is portrayed, while materials such as dreams and visions occupy a prominent place alongside details of Abū Shāma's education and career. Although the critical historical facts of Abū Shāma's life are presented here, the sense of “person” that is communicated interstitially in his historical writing is replaced with an entirely different self-representation.
By Abū Shāma's time there were a substantial number of first-person autobiographical texts in wide circulation, several of them written by famous figures of the period of Saladin's reign and therefore almost certainly known to him. Yet Abū Shāma chose to present information about his life in the standard third-person format of scholarly biography; he probably composed it specifically as a “camera-ready” text to be quoted by later historians and biographers. Arabic autobiographers clearly had a choice between first-person and third-person portrayal; Abū Shāma, however, is the only Arabic autobiographer to have couched a third-person autobiography in a larger framing text in the first person (cf. the texts by ‘Imād al-Dīn al-Kātib al-Iṣfahānī, ‘Abd al-Laṭīf al-Baghdādī, and Ibn al-‘Adīm, all translated in this volume, as well as the famous autobiographies of ‘Umāra al-Ḥakamī al-Yamanī and Usāma ibn Munqidh, available in French and English translations respectively). In some sense, a complete reading of Abū Shāma's text can only be accomplished alongside the numerous passages of the Sequel to the Two Gardens that provide other autobiographical glimpses of the author.
Abū Shāma does not fully subordinate his account to the scholarly tarjama genre, however; he includes dimensions not commonly found in those texts, such as a large number of dream narratives (cf. al-Tirmidhī, translated in this volume), and his account of his hair turning gray (cf. Ibn al-‘Adīm, translated in this volume), marking this event even further with the inclusion of a poem (the only one in the text). His text is also lacking many of the standard components of the scholarly tarjama, such as a detailed list of his teachers and writings and extracts from his poetry. Abū Shāma's text shares much with other Arabic autobiographies and differs significantly from standard scholarly biographies. In fact, a later hand, probably that of one of his students, has attempted to rectify this situation by adding a list of teachers, some information about his writings, and a collection of extracts from his poetry.
If Abū Shāma wrote this text to be cited by later writers, his strategy failed. None of his main biographers quote it, although Ibn Kathīr (d. 1373) at least mentions its existence. On the other hand, al-Sakhāwī (d. 1497) notes Abū Shāma's sharp tongue and makes reference to his high opinion of himself,[3] despite the approbative tone of other biographies of Abū Shāma; this may in fact be a veiled reference to Abū Shāma's autobiography, for Abū Shāma's text was cited as a respectable precedent for writing an autobiography by al-Sakhāwī's chief rival, Jalāl al-Dīn al-Suyūṭī (d. 1505).