Biography

Nasser Rabbat is the Aga Khan Professor at MIT.  An architect and a historian, his scholarly interests include Islamic architecture, urban history, heritage studies, urbicide, Orientalism, and postcolonial criticism. He has authored and edited numerous books, most recently Writing Egypt (winner of the 2025 British-Kuwaiti Award for Best Book in Middle Easter Studies), Taqiyy al-Din al-Maqrizi: Wijdan al-Tarikh al-Misr (Winner of the 2025 Arabic Book Award, History Section), and Reconstruction as Violence in Assad’s Syria (2025). Currently, he is editing a cultural history of Syria and completing a history of Mamluk Cairo and a historical novel set in 13^thcentury Damascus.  Rabbat has held numerous international academic and research appointments and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2025.
 

Project Summary

The book seeks to recover the life of the Damascene scholar and historian Abu Shama al-Maqdisi (1203-67) as it might actually have been lived: among parents, spouses, children, and grandchildren; among friends, rivals, colleagues, and students; in courts of law, scholarly circles, and madrasas; and through the ordinary details of daily existence that traditional biographical dictionaries rarely preserve. The narrative goes through the full arc of Abu Shama’s long and complex life: studying, teaching, marrying, raising a family, writing several historical chronicles covering the great events of his age, and confronting the limits of honesty, candor, caution, fear, and silence.  It explores the relationship between the historian and his city, between public events and private experience, and between the written archive and the silences it leaves behind. The research draws on the concept of critical fabulation, developed by Saidiya Hartman as a narrative practice for approaching the “impossible stories” left incomplete, fragmented, or silent within the archive.  It unearths what the sources are unable to articulate: feeling, hesitation, intimacy, and the seemingly minor choices through which a life gradually acquires its form. Its aim, however, is not to replace history with fiction, but to place them in productive tension. Historical evidence establishes the boundaries of the possible; literary imagination explores the human experiences that may have existed within those boundaries.