Kinship, authority, and narrative construction: the Banū al-Fāsī and the shaping of Meccan scholarly elites in the late medieval Hijaz

Abstract

This article examines the rise of the Banū al-Fāsī within the scholarly and judicial elites of late medieval Mecca and the ways in which Taqī al-Dīn al-Fāsī’s (d. AH 832/1429 CE) biographical dictionary, al-ʿIqd al-thamīn fī taʾrīkh al-balad al-amīn , shaped their place in the city’s history. It argues that this work gave particular prominence to the Banū al-Fāsī and to a wider network of households connected to them through kinship and marriage. By the early ninth/fifteenth century, these families occupied many of the principal religious, judicial, and scholarly offices of Mecca, forming an entangled elite whose authority was closely tied to institutional position, matrimonial alliances, and inherited scholarly capital. As such, the article shows how al-Fāsī’s historiographical choices were deeply rooted in his own social environment, and how his biographical dictionary offers a selective representation of the social world from which it emerged. Through this case study, the article explores the relationship between family, authority, and narrative construction in late medieval Arabic historiography.