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The Edge of Glory: The ʿAbbāsid Turkic Guard in Third/Ninth-Century Praise Writing https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.127321 Russo, Gabrielle 0009000849043833 Montgomery, James E This thesis assesses praise writing on the ʿAbbāsid Turkic guard across the third/ninth century, from the foundation of the guard to the semi-independent Ṭūlūnid dynasty. Chronicles and geographic writing from the third/ninth and fourth/tenth centuries are quick to cast the Turks as the ‘Other’, characterising them as military strongmen and impious usurpers. This study examines praise writing as an alternative corpus of prose and poetry on the Turks in this period—specifically, it looks at al-Jāḥiẓ’s epistle Manāqib al-Turk (‘The Merits of the Turks’) and al-Buḥturī’s panegyrics for the Turkic generals Ṣāliḥ ibn Waṣīf and Khumārawayh ibn Aḥmad ibn Ṭūlūn. In contrast to the dominant image of the Turks in the ʿAbbāsid period, praise writing associates the Turks and individuals labelled as Turkic with the idealised values of the elite third/ninth-century ʿAbbāsid milieu, and it frames their actions as being in the interests of the caliphate and community. Furthermore, the objects of praise are lauded in direct relation to their positions of power. As individual Turks accrue influence, praise writing affiliates them with an ʿAbbāsid model of virtue and distances them from the designation of Turkic. As a result of this research, this thesis bridges historical and literary scholarship to incorporate panegyric into the study of the Turkic guard and to consider boundary construction and group formation under the ʿAbbāsids. University of Cambridge 2025-08-31 Thesis Doctoral Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) eng Cambridge Trust, Newnham College, and the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/398475 embargo 2027-02-17 https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/16325d7d-219a-46ea-b2ef-9cf448548924/download 52f8b3922fab089bb73478473bbc5bbd https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/afb46df2-6926-42e9-b218-1f5b8f1184dc/download 87eda9de84448d1f82354d60eee3eb5f http://purl.org/NET/rdflicense/allrightsreserved Arabic literature Islamic history ʿAbbāsid Caliphate Turkic guard