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Ежедневные события Дамаска аш-Шам с 1154 по 1176 год (1741–1763)
The chronicle of Shihāb al-Dīn Aḥ mad Ibn Budayr (commonly known as Ahmad
al-Budayrī), a barber in eighteenth-century Damascus, is a valuable resource for
learning about the commonplace city life in the Levant. Set in the early modern period, the chronicle at times anticipates the ideology of the Arab Renaissance (al-Nahḍ a)
of the nineteenth century. The earliest known version of the manuscript has recently been discovered in the Chester Beatty Library (Dublin, Ireland). In the late nineteenth century, one of the f gures of al-Nahda, an imam, teacher and literary scholar
Muḥ ammad Sàīd al-Qāsimī prepared a recension of the chronicle, which f rst brought
this remarkable resource to the attention of scholars.
The present edition of the chronicle of Ibn Budayr has been translated from
Arabic into Russian, and accompanied by commentary which serves to explain the
historical setting of the chronicle and compares the two editions. The comparison
between the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century manuscripts made it possible to
come closer to reconstructing the original manuscript, which to this date has not
been found, and compare the worldview of the eighteenth-century tradesman with
the nineteenth-century scholar.
The introduction to this translation sets the place of the chronicle and locates
it in Arabic historiography, discusses the history of the text, and presents the biographies of both the author and its most famous editor. The introduction also comments
on the main divergences of the two editions of the manuscript and its contested interpretations. The appendix contains two articles by the translator I. M. Smilianskaia,
“Ottoman Local Government and Social Institutions in Eighteenth-Century Syria,”
and “Uprisings in the City (Syria and Egypt in the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth
Centuries),” both in Russian. These studies provide the necessary historical context
to understand the realities of the chronicle of Ibn Budayr.
