Tradition and the Construction of Symbolic Legitimacy "Ibn Ḥajar al-ʿAsqalānī’s Sīniyya in Praise of the ʿAbbāsid Caliph al-Mustaʿīn bi-llāh"

Abstract

This study repositions the concept of tradition in Mamluk poetry beyond the binary of novelty and antiquity, treating it as a symbolic mechanism that produces meaning and regulates practices. It examines Ibn Ḥajar al-ʿAsqalānī’s panegyric of the Abbasid caliph al-Mustaʿīn bi-llāh III, composed in 815 AH after a violent crisis, as a text dense with inherited formulas and intertexts illuminating how tradition organizes meaning and symbolic fields. It argues that what appears as traditional repetition is a performative–ritual act reactivating models within cultural memory to contain violence and stabilize legitimacy at a fragile moment. Mediated through the poet’s symbolic capital in the field, this operation negotiates relations between the sultanic and scholarly fields while articulating symbolic legitimacy that reinscribes the Abbasid model within a Mamluk horizon. The study adopts a sociological, ritual, and performative approach drawing on the concepts of habitus, cultural memory, and rhetorical mediation of Bourdieu, Girard, Assmann, and others, while engaging analyses of Laclau and Austin on the production of meaning within discourse. It concludes that the poem, through strategic deployment of traditional forms, produces an interpretive narrative framing violence within a symbolic order and redistributing symbolic aura among figures of authority within the hierarchy.