Let me say something as to who Ibn Khallikan was. His father, Muhammad
Ibn Ibrahim, was professor in the college at Arbela founded by Kukuburi,
or the Blue Wolf, the governor of that city and the region of which it
was the capital, the brother-in-law of Salah Ad-Din, the sultan, whom we
in England know as Saladin, the enemy of the Cross, and the son of Ali
Ibn Bektikin, known as "Little Ali, the Ornament of Religion." Kukuburi,
who, although standing for the Crescent and all that was most abhorrent
to our Crusaders, was famous as a founder of asylums, schools, hospitals
for the blind, homes for widows, orphanages, and so forth, made special
favourites of the family of which Ibn Khallikan was a scion. Ibn himself
was born on September 22, 1211, and before he was two had begun
instruction by his father and was the recipient of a certificate from
Zainab, a very learned lady, stating that he was an industrious pupil.
In 1229, after having already read and studied much, particularly
theology and law, Ibn Khallikan left Arbela with his brother and
entered the college at Aleppo, then an educational centre, remaining
until 1234. After this he moved from one place to another, always
seeking more knowledge, until 1247-8, when he is found at Cairo
occupying a seat in the imperial tribunal and acting as deputy for the
kadi Sinjar, chief judge and magistrate of all Egypt. Later he himself
became the kadi of Al-Mahalla, and by 1256, when he was forty-five, he
had married, become a father, and had completed the first copy of his
_Biographical Dictionary_, which was, of course, as we must always
remember in connexion with the books mentioned in these Lives, a
manuscript.
In 1261 he was appointed chief kadi over all the provinces of Syria,
with his tribunal at Damascus, in which post he remained for ten years.
He was not, however, sole kadi for long, as three others were appointed
to assist him: a development that was meat and drink to the local
satirists, one of whom wrote: _The men of Damascus are bewildered with
the multitude of legal decisions. Their kadis are all suns, and yet they
are in the dark._ Another said: _The people of Damascus have witnessed
a perfect miracle: the greater the number of suns the more the world is
in the dark._ Being found wanting, and replaced, Ibn Khallikan took a
professorship in Cairo, learned by heart further enormous quantities of
poetry, and engaged in literary discussions which, judging by a specimen
given in one of his Lives, were even more futile than discussions
usually are.
The vicissitudes of fortune, always noticeably extreme in the East,
brought him again to be kadi at Damascus in 1278, when his reappointment
was signalized by public ceremonies, including the composition by
numberless poets of congratulatory and adulatory verses, which must have
been very dear to his simple old heart, and not the less so because he
may have discovered from his astonishing repertory that not all were
strictly original: such discoveries and the tracing back of the loans to
their fount being the greatest of his pleasures.
Thereafter, until the year 1281, the Kadi lived with much honour, famed
as the most learned and widely-read personage in Damascus, filling his
house with scholars and discursive amateurs of verse, and engaging in
conversations that are described by a friend as "most instructive,
being entirely devoted to learned investigations and the elucidation of
obscure points."
But Ibn Khallikan, who was now nearing three-score years and ten, was
destined still to misfortune, for suddenly, in 1281, he was deposed from
his kadi-ship and, more than that, thrown into prison on the charge of
having made a remark detrimental to the sultan, Kalavun. A pardon soon
after arriving, he was liberated and again reinstated; but after ten
more months as a kadi he was, in 1282, dismissed finally, and this time
he refused ever more to leave his house, and died there in the same
year.
Not a word (you will say) so far as to Baghdad. But although Ibn
Khallikan spent most of his life in Egypt or Syria, the greater number
of his heroes were, as I have said, citizens all of the city of the
romance which recently has fallen to Sir Stanley Maude's gallant forces.
Yet of the romance which we shall always associate with Baghdad he knew
nothing. To him it was delectable (and perhaps even romantic too--each
of us having his own conception of what romance is) because grave
bearded men there taught religion, explained the _Koran_, disputed as
to points of grammar, exchanged sarcasms and swapped verses. Not,
however, as I hope to show, unamusingly.
What indeed I particularly like about the book is the picture that it
gives of sardonic pleasantry and intellectual and sophisticated
virtuosity going quietly on side by side with all the splendours and
barbarities of absolute autocracy and summary jurisdiction. It throws a
new or unaccustomed light on those days. Not even yet--not even in
Bloomsbury, where the poets meet--have we in England anything quite like
it; whereas when Baghdad and Damascus were the theatres of these
poetical and hair-splitting competitions our ancestors had but just got
the woad off.