The Persian Documents from al-Ḥaram al-Sharīf in Jerusalem, 1300-1353

2021 – 2024

This project investigates 76 medieval Islamic legal and administrative documents on paper produced in fourteenth-century Northwest Iran. Written mainly in Persian, these documents became entangled at some stage with a much larger corpus of over 900 Arabic documents drawn up in fourteenth-century Mamluk Jerusalem. The larger corpus was ‘discovered’ in separate batches since the 1970s in locked drawers of the Islamic Museum in Jerusalem, and numerous documents remain uncatalogued. Precisely when and how this major medieval Islamic documentary corpus, including the Persian documents, entered the collections of the Islamic Museum in Jerusalem (founded in 1927) is unclear. The Islamic Museum itself is located in the southwest corner of the Temple Mount or al-Ḥaram al-Sharīf in Arabic, next to the Al-Aqṣā Mosque. It occupies the halls of two historic buildings, the al-Maghāriba congregational mosque and a second building which probably dates back to the Crusader or the Ayyubid period or both.

The Persian documents of the Islamic Museum in al-Ḥaram al-Sharīf, Jerusalem, are of outstanding historical significance to our understanding of the textual and archival practices of the eastern regions of the medieval Islamic world. We will seek to understand how these original documents were created by examining the relationship between written artefact and the parties involved in the production of these documents. In this case, the Northwest Iranian region close to Transcaucasia, where the documents were produced during the Mongol Il-khanid period, have resulted in striking written artefacts in multiple languages and scripts (Persian, Arabic, Armenian and Uighur). We will examine how power is inscribed onto the documents through the selective use of language and script, for example Arabic by judges and Uighur by Mongol Il-khanid officials. Signs of power are embedded through the formatting of content, both in the way text is arranged spatially but also by the use of specific formulae in Arabic and in Persian. In this regard, the documents shed light on an important rupture in the medieval Islamic east: how legal and administrative formulae in Arabic adapted to and became transformed through the introduction of new Persian formulae, in this case under Mongol Il-khanid rule in North West Iran in the fourteenth century.

In addition, this project aims at making an important contribution to the recent ‘archival’ turn in the field of Islamic studies. Scholars, rather than lamenting the lack of surviving state archives of medieval Islamic polities, have turned their attention to documenting the ‘archival practices’ of institutional and non-institutional actors based on the study of the materiality of surviving documentary corpora. The archival logic of the Persian documents and their subsequent integration into the larger Ḥaram documentary corpus will be examined from the perspective of documents which were once part of the private family archive of a local military commander and his descendants in North West Iran.