The Mamluks - The horsemen of Islam: Study on the art of war among the Mamluks (13th - 14th centuries), by Mehdi Berriah, Héritage Éditions

Originally mostly from the Eurasian steppes of Kipchak, a region famous for its people of horsemen, and bought to be trained for war, those known as Mamluks were propelled to the fore in the wake of the Seventh Crusade. Who would have thought that it is on the shoulders of these foreign slave-soldiers and newly converted to Islam that the fate of territories of Islam would rest for several decades? And yet, it was the Mamluks who, barely ten years after their seizure of power in Egypt, carried for a time the standard of Islam which threatened to fall in the face of various external dangers. In just over half a century, the Mamluks succeeded where many other Muslim dynasties failed: they managed to put an end to the existence of the Latin States of the East, to the kingdom of Armenia-Cilicia, to submit the kingdom of Nubia and, above all, to stop the Mongol invasions. This last feat is, in large part, the origin of the prestige and military reputation of the Mamluks. During the 12th and 14th centuries, the Mamluk sultans and emirs set up one of the most powerful armies in the Near East. More than a profession, war was the raison d'être of the Mamluks. From the analysis and confrontation of Arabic, Latin, Armenian and Persian sources, Mehdi Berriah has carried out several studies on the art of war of these outstanding horsemen, some of which are collected in this book.

Presentation of the author

Historian, Islamologist and Arabist, Mehdi Berriah is Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Religion and Theology and member of the Center for Islamic Theology (CIT) at the Vrije Univeristeit Amsterdam (VU). He also teaches Arabic language at Sciences Po Paris. He is also Editor for the SHARIAsource research program within the framework of the Program of Islamic Law at Harvard University (School Law Harvard). His research and publications focus on military history, furūsiyya, the work and thought of Ibn Taymiyya, the ideology of jihad as well as the jurisprudence (fiqh) of war. He is currently leading a research project on the Taymiyyan corpus of jihad which was the winner of the 2020 call for projects of the Central Bureau of Cults "Islam, religion and society". He edited the book published in 2021 by Brill, Professional Mobility in Islamic Societies (700-1750): New Concepts and Approaches.