The Versified Turkic Translation of al-Wāqidī’s Futūḥ al-Shām by Ibn Ajā

This contribution presents the versified Turkic translation of the Futūḥ al-Shām or Conquest of Syria of al-Wāqidī composed by Shams al-Dīn Muḥammad ibn Maḥmūd ibn Khalīl al-Ḥalabī al-Ḥanafī, commonly known as Ibn Ajā (820–81/1417 or 1418–76). I begin by sketching the positionality of his mastery of Turkic in relation to his education within Arabic-Islamic scholarly traditions. I also suggest that the two volumes in which this text has been preserved are written in Ibn Ajā’s own hand. Subsequently, I engage with Ibn Ajā’s reworking of this text by discussing paratextual elements, the additions he introduced to the body of the narrative, and the mode of transposition followed in his versified Turkic rendering of the Arabic prose of the original. In this context, I also briefly discuss the problem of comparing a translation of so notoriously an unstable and “open” text as the Futūḥ al-Shām of al-Wāqidī with Arabic renderings of the same topic. In conclusion, I argue that the literary Turkic idiom chosen by Ibn Ajā should not be classified as “Ottoman” notwithstanding its close accordance with the literary Turkic subsequently centered in the Ottoman realms. Instead, I suggest that the attestation of this idiom in a work compiled in the Mamluk realms of the 1470s indicates that this literary language must be described as a form of courtly “pre-sixteenth-century supra-regional southwest literary Turkic” notwithstanding its straightforward intelligibility to modern scholars familiar with its (later) development as “Ottoman” Turkish.