Consorts of the caliphs : women and the court of Baghdad / Ibn al-Sa'i ; edited by Shawkat M. Toorawa ; translated by the editors of the Library of Arabic literature ; introduction by Julia Bray ; foreword by Marina Warner ; volume editor Julia Bray.
Bilingual English and Arabic texts on facing pages.
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references (pages 196-200) and indexes.
Summary
Consorts of the Caliphs is a seventh/thirteenth-century compilation of anecdotes about thirty-eight women who were, as the title suggests, consorts to those in power, most of them concubines of the early Abbasid caliphs and wives of latter-day caliphs and sultans. This slim but illuminating volume is one of the few surviving texts by Ibn al-Saʿi (d. 674 H/1276 AD). Ibn al-Saʿi was a prolific Baghdadi scholar who chronicled the academic and political elites of his city, and whose career straddled the final years of the Abbasid dynasty and the period following the cataclysmic Mongol invasion of 656 H/1258 AD.
