Qayt Sharīfī’s Turkic Class Notes and Tamurbāy’s First Arabic Scribbles: Language and Education at the Mamluk Barracks in Light of Ayasofya MS 1448

The manuscript Ayasofya 1448 is not the umpteenth graduation copy of a mamluk trainee that ended up as a khazāʾinī manuscript in the library of Sultan Qāytbāy, but something far more exciting: a manuscript copied by one such mamluk trainee, Qayt Sharīfī, and then presumably passed on to another trainee, Tamurbāy. Given its provenance and contents, Ayasofya 1448 sheds some unique light on the mamluks’ non-military curriculum inside the barracks: kitābah and legal-religious training, Turkic and Arabic. Included in the composite manuscript and undoubtedly written in Qayt’s advanced yet still unprofessional hand are (1) the rather common Turkic interlinear translation of al-Samarqandī’s Al-Muqaddimah fī al-Ṣalāh, (2) a unique bilingual commentary on that same Muqaddimah—one that allows us to finally identify an already known Turkic interlinear Quran translation as undeniably Mamluk—and (3) a unique Turkic story on the provenance of the Arabic yā mujīr supplication. Rather than leaving the Burhānīyah barracks following Qayt’s manumission, his notebook was then used by Tamurbāy—assumedly a younger trainee stationed at the same barracks—to put down his very first clumsy scribbles. Thus making sense of what must have been an emblematic rather than exceptional manuscript, this article presents an exercise that is imaginative yet informed by a wide array of Mamluk-Arabic and Mamluk-Turkic parallel sources. A full edition and translation of its two unique Turkic texts is appended.