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Abstract

Al-Suyūṭī (d. 1505) was a prolific author and an influential scholar of the late Mamluk period. Around a decade after his death, the Ottomans established control over the Mamluk territories. This presentation questions whether al-Suyūṭī’s legacy continued to shape scholarly traditions in Ottoman Syria. To this end, it examines al-Kawākib al-sāʾira fī aʿyān al-miʾa al-ʿāshira (The Wandering Stars among the Notables of the Tenth Century), a biographical dictionary compiled by the Damascene scholar Najm al-Dīn al-Ghazzī (d. 1651). Al-Kawākib covers the lives of individuals who died in the tenth Islamic century (AH 900–1000 / AD 1494–1592), organizing them alphabetically into three sub-periods of thirty-three years, each roughly corresponding to a generation. Of the 1,554 biographical entries in the work, the majority belongs to the scholars from Syria and Egypt, including both al-Suyūṭī and his students. Analyzing the biographical data of al-Kawākib through the software and methods of social network analysis, this presentation investigates four key issues: (1) the extent to which al-Suyūṭī’s teacher–student network persisted in Syria; (2) the popularity and circulation of his works among later generations of Syrian scholars; (3) the types of references to al-Suyūṭī across the biographies in al-Kawākib; and (4) the presence of other Mamluk-era scholars who left their mark on Syrian scholarly communities in the sixteenth century. 

Bio

Gürzat Kami is a historian of the Mamluk and Ottoman empires, with a particular focus on scholarly networks, intellectual production, and law. He earned his PhD from Marmara University in 2023, with a dissertation entitled “Damascene Scholars in the Mamluk–Ottoman Transition: The History of Three Generations of the Ghazzī Family (1450–1650).” He served as a doctoral and postdoctoral researcher in the ERC-funded OTTOLEGAL (The Making of Ottoman Law) project and the Ulama Database Project hosted by the Centre for Islamic Studies (İSAM). He has been affiliated with the Institute of Islamic Studies at Istanbul University as an assistant professor since 2023. He is currently leading the project Scholars and Books in Egypt and Syria from the Mamluks to the Ottomans (1420–1620), funded by TÜBİTAK (The Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey). 

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