In the Sultan's Salon

Christian Mauder's In the Sultan's Salon builds on his award-winning research and constitutes the first detailed study of the Egyptian court culture of the Mamluk Sultanate (1250-1517), one of the most important polities in Islamic history. Based mainly on understudied Arabic manuscript sources describing the learned salons convened by the penultimate Mamluk Sultan al-Ghawrī, In the Sultan's Salon presents the first theoretical conceptualization of the term "court" which can be fruitfully applied to premodern Islamic societies, thereby facilitating comparative and interdisciplinary research. It uses this conceptualization to demonstrate that al-Ghawrī's court functioned as a transregionally interconnected center of dynamic intellectual exchange, theological debate, and performance of rule that triggered novel developments in Islamic scholarly, religious and political culture.