ABSTRACT
This is not so much intended to be a detailed analysis of an individual document from the Haram collection as it is a case study of a sample representing the Arabic pieces as a whole. Although I will certainly analyze this particular document from the standpoints both of form and content, my purpose will be to use it as an example of the practical, methodological problems that a scholar encounters, and must try to solve, in using such records as sources for social, institutional – including legal and judicial – political, and even cultural history of the Mamluks during the late fourteenth century. I hope I will be indulged if I take a personalized approach since my remarks inevitably reflect my own problems in learning to use these sources, and I freely admit that after some twenty-five years of hard work I am still having difficulty in reading and interpreting the documents and that solutions are still elusive. Moreover, I have recently become aware of what at least one scholar familiar with the Ottoman archives has labeled as
the dangers of “document fetishism.” By this exotic-sounding term we mean the tendency to reproduce more or less verbatim the statements of our primary sources and associated unwillingness to use logic and/or experience of the relevant milieu to interpret them …. 1
