Literature and Documents Meet at Qayrawān

This article examines two approaches to early eleventh-century rhymed works (poems and a rhymed chronicle) used to describe a society: the positivist and the exceptional. The positivist approach treats literary sources as genuine evidence of actions and events from a specific time and place, treating them as reliable historical records. The second approach focuses on the exceptional aspects within a literary work, which are often favoured as sources for historical analysis. These two options are analysed using Genizah documents in a case study of descriptions of dignitaries, in which sufficient sources have been collected to compare historical information with its representation in literary works on the Negidate of Qayrawān. The comparison between documentary and literary sources aims to reveal the gap between a dignitary's image and his character, and its importance in extracting historical lessons from sources within a single discipline.