In The Presence of Power: Court and Performance in The Pre-Modern Middle East ed. by Maurice A. Pomerantz and Evelyn Birge Vitz (review)

Maurice Pomerantz and Evelyn Birge Vitz open their introduction to this sweeping exploration of courtly performance in the premodern Middle East with the 102nd Arabian Nights tale, one that suggests the many types of performance and performativity found at court. In the tale, a hunchback fills a risky and precarious role as court entertainer, and the king performs brutality and power, but also generosity and magnanimousness. This trope is present throughout In the Presence of Power: the relationship between performance at the court and performance of the court. The essays collected in this book speak to courtly life in the premodern Middle East (which has received far less scholarly attention than its European counterpart), treating a major gap in the scholarship: performance as a crucial aspect of courtly life. Pomerantz and Vitz point out that, while scholars from fields such as musicology and theater studies are attuned to thinking about performance, the bulk of this volume approaches performance through textual evidence, proving that "texts can provide a valuable guide to court performance" (243).

Pomerantz and Vitz set the parameters of the wide net this volume casts. They align the beginning of the "premodern" in the eighth century with the first dynasty of Islam, the Umayyads, and end with the Ottomans and Safavids of the sixteenth century. Their definition of the Middle East is informed by a desire not just to show commonalities across Islamicate cultures (Persian, Turkish, and Arabic) but also to demonstrate cross-pollinations that occurred between those cultures and Byzantine and Carolingian courts. As for the definition of "court," the editors are careful to point out that no one single shared courtly institution is presumed, seeking instead to understand the ways in which contemporaries experienced and spoke about spaces of power. Perhaps their broadest definition of all, "performance" is exploded into all manner of communicative and performative displays, and allows for the rich variety of chapters that follow.

The first section of the book offers three chapters that explore the performance of power at court. Vitz's chapter on competition of Kingship and Court in Le Voyage de Charlemagne à Jerusalem et à Constantinople examines how the kings in this twelfth-century epic perform their power, Charlemagne's ultimate victory presenting power not as a static identity but a performative creation. Stavroula Constantinou's chapter on performances of imperial punishment in Byzantine Hagiography looks at the performance of imperial punishments on male iconophile saints, and iconoclast emperors' courts as stages on which theaters of violence were enacted. By drawing on a number of hagiography texts and comparing their tropes to those of martyr legends that eroticized the female body, Constantinou provides ample evidence that these hagiographies function more as literary tradition than historical fact. In Chapter 3, Babak Rahimi reads the display of power in courtly buildings themselves: the Maydān-i Naqsh-i Jahān, constructed in Isfahan in the early seventeenth century, transmitted for the public a distinct ideology that fused royal sovereignty with Shi'i Islamic conceptions of cosmic authority. It was a stage for performing imperial drama, including ceremonial rituals and sporting practices. Rahimi argues that the Maydān built under Shāh 'Abbās performed imperial identity through militaristic gaming performances, linking the public urban space with Safavid state identity.

Part two dives into persuasion at court, with a chapter by Louise Marlow about performances of advice and admonition in the courts of Muslim rulers. Marlow's chapter analyzes "mirrors for princes," advisory literatures that enjoyed a wide audience and passed between oral and written media. These moral exhortations on proper princely virtues were as performative for the advice giver as for the recipient, and took place in strictly prescribed settings subject to controlled forms. Chapter 5 by Nadia Maria El Cheikh discusses a mode of persuasion as prescribed...