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Al-Ahram Weekly 9 - 15 March 2000 Issue No. 472 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 9 - 15 March 2000 Issue No. 472
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Tumanbay: Al-Sultan Al-Shahid (Tumanbay: The Martyred Sultan), Emad Abu Ghazi, Cairo: Mirette, 1999. pp96
Monthly supplement
Alexandria re-inscribed
No One Sleeps in Alexandria, Ibrahim Abdel-Meguid, tr. Farouk Abdel-Wahab, The American University in Cairo Press, 1999. pp409
Southern PartThe Crusades through Muslim eyes
The Crusades -- Islamic Perspectives, Carole Hillenbrand, Edinburgh University Press, 1999. pp648Economic schizophrenia, global style
Misr wa Riyah Al-'awlama (Egypt and the Winds of Globalisation), Mahmoud Abdel-Fadil, Cairo: Dar Al-Hilal, 1999. pp264Canine ruminations
Darourat Al-Kalb fil Masrahiya (The Need for the Dog in the Play), Girgis Shukri, Cairo: General Egyptian Book Organisation, 2000. pp101History and parallel history
Tumanbay: Al-Sultan Al-Shahid (Tumanbay: The Martyred Sultan), Emad Abu Ghazi, Cairo: Mirette, 1999. pp96Sun Dancer speaks his sorrow
Prison Writings: My Life is my Sun Dance, Leonard Peltier, St. Martin's Press, New York, 1999. pp243Novel of novels
Al-Bashmouri II, Salwa Bakr, Cairo: Supreme Council of Culture. 2000, pp151Chagall's Arabian Nights: Four Tales from The Thousand and One Nights with lithographs by Marc Chagall, Prestel Verlag, 1999. pp163 Read caption
To the editor
At a glance
A shorthand guide to the month compiled by Mahmoud El-WardaniMagazines & Periodicals
* Al-Kotob: Wughat Nazar (Books: Viewpoints), a Monthly Review of Books, issue No. 14, March, 2000, Cairo: The Egyptian Company for Arab and International Publishing
* Aafaq Ifriqiya (African Horizons), quaretrly, Cairo: State Information Service, issue no. 1
* Al-Thaqafa Al-Alamiya (World Culture), bimonthly cultural magazine, Kuwait, no.99
Books
* Al-Riwaya fi Nihayat Al-Qarn (The Novel at the End of the Century), Ali El-Ra'i, Cairo: Dar Al-Mustaqbal, 2000, pp371
* Al-Himaya wal-Iqab: Al-Gharb wal-Mas'ala Al-Diniya fil-Sharq Al-Awsat (Protection and Punishment: The West and the Religious Question in the Middle East), Samir Morqos, Cairo: Miret, 2000, pp210
* Al-Wataniya Al-Misriya fil-Asr Al-Hadith (Egyptian Nationalism in Modern Times), Amina Higazi, Cairo: General Egyptian Book Organisation, 2000, pp555
* Khamriya, Amin El-Ayyouti, Cairo: Al-Hilal, 2000, pp121
* Awlamat Al-Faqr (The Globalisation of Poverty), Michael Chossudovsky trans. Mohamed Mostagir, Cairo: Sotour, 2000, pp328
* Hal Intahat Ostourat Ibn-Khaldoun? (Is the Myth of Ibn-Khaldoun over?), Mahmoud Ismail, Cairo: Dar Qibaa, 2000, pp333
Books is a monthly supplement of Al-Ahram Weekly appearing every second Thursday of the month. We welcome contributions and letters on subjects raised in this supplement. Material may be edited for length and clarity; and should be addressed to Mona Anis, Books Editor, Al-Ahram Weekly, Galaa St., Cairo, Arab Republic of Egypt; Faz: +202 578 6089; E-mail: m.anis@ahram.org.eg
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Illustrations courtesy of International Commitee of the Red Cross
"Folk drawings and tales", Cairo, 1996
History and parallel history
Reviewed by Amina Elbendary
Historians rarely write biographies of people they hate. The main exceptions are usually notorious historical subjects, such as Adolf Hitler for example (and even he has found more than one admirer among his biographers). Otherwise, scholars who spend years of their lives working on a particular person tend to choose someone they admire. Emad Abu Ghazi's chosen title for his book on Tumanbay (d.1517) -- who was sultan for the last three months of the history of the Mameluke empire of Egypt and Syria before it fell to the Ottoman sultan, Selim I-- is itself indicative of his attitude towards his subject. He refers to him not as the "last sultan" but as the "martyred sultan". In a sense, the author's choice is different from that of more traditional historians if only because he has chosen to profile the loser. But it is perhaps worth questioning that choice. Why write a biography of a defeated ruler, one who went down in history as the last of the independent Mameluke sultans, one who frankly failed to defend his realm against invaders? What is there to chronicle? Not much, as even Abu Ghazi would have to admit. But to understand the relevance of his choice the reader has to read between the lines. It is almost as if there were a parallel story hidden there.
Tumanbay's brutally tragic death lends itself to romantic reconstruction. This sultan, who tried to defend his realm till the last moment but failed, was eventually hanged at Bab Zuwayla, one of Cairo's gates, and left there for three days to rot. Abu Ghazi takes popular consciousness as his starting point for the story. In an interesting prelude, he recounts a scene from a popular programme on Egyptian TV where the presenter quizzes people about famous historical locations in Cairo, in this case the area of Bab Zuwayla. An old woman claimed that the mosque of Al-Mar'a on Taht Al-Rab' street, was built by "the widow of the famous sultan, the martyr, who was hanged at the nearby Bab Zuwayla". The widow, the legend goes, used to go out every night to offer water to thirsty troops returning from battle. Of course, the mosque in question, that of Al-Mar'a' Fatma Al-Shaqra, was not built by Tumanbay's widow. But the legend passed down to this old woman from older women in the neighbourhood serves to prove the author's point: that Tumanbay was a hero, and is still considered one by Egyptian collective consciousness. And "the people" know best, of course. This approach is slightly different from that commonly used by more traditional historiography, which is more concerned to take a more official approach.
Illustration from the Mameluke military arts treatise of Al-Aqsara'i, dated 1366
Abu Ghazi spends the larger part of this relatively short book recounting Tumanbay's achievements and accomplishments prior to his assumption of the sultanate. Afterwards, he warns us not to idolise the sultan. He was, after all, a ruler of his times. In fact, deeds that could be counted as among Tumanbay's accomplishments could as well be taken as faults by modern analysts. A case in point is the Sultan's quelling of Bedouin revolts. As a successful Mameluke officer, Tumanbay was required to put down several Bedouin revolts in the course of his military career. These were challenges the Egyptian state periodically had to face, and they were often destructive, especially when they affected the rural population and Egypt's agricultural resources. But putting down such revolts inevitably involved the brutal use of force, and it is hard to give one's unqualified assent to these. Tumanbay's career also led him to go on tax-collecting missions. And nobody likes the tax-collector, the population inevitably trying to evade paying taxes, all the more so when these are unjustly high. When the state is run by a military administration facing external threats, it will invariably resort to using force in collecting taxes, and in general the relationship between the Mamelukes as rulers, officers, provincial administrators, and tax collectors was a very complex one.
Bab Zuwayla where Tumanbay was hanged
Abu Ghazi relies heavily on the works of the historians Ibn Iyas and Ibn Zunbul Al-Rammal, both of whom witnessed the Mameluke defeat and Ottoman take-over. He has also used the writings of European travellers. Abu Ghazi's own specialisation is diplomatic history, and he has, therefore, also made use of official archives and documents dating back to the Tumanbay period. These include the sultan's waqf (religious endowments) documents, as well as some of the decrees and correspondence that survives at the St. Catherine monastery. Such chronicles give us an impression of how Tumanbay was perceived by his contemporaries, the impressions Abu Ghazi detects in them being overwhelmingly in the sultan's favour. Since Ibn Iyas and Ibn Zunbul wrote under Ottoman rather than Mameluke influence, there is no need to doubt their sincerity in praising him.
All historians reinvent the past to say something about the present and, when they're particularly prescient, something about the future as well. In this regard, however, Emad Abu Ghazi deserts his readers almost in mid-sentence, leaving us to fill in the blanks. One wonders whether he deliberately left this short history without a conclusion and without a clear explanation as to why he chose this particular juncture in Egyptian history and this particular sultan to write about. Abu Ghazi consciously belongs to the Egyptian nationalist school of historiography, and, as such, he views the coming of the Ottomans to Egypt as a "conquest" by foreign invaders. This moment in Egyptian history is therefore given political as well as symbolic importance. It is the point at which Egypt ceased to be an independent power-base, turning instead into a province ruled from a far-away centre by foreign rulers. Never mind the fact that the Mamelukes Emad Abu Ghazi implicitly mourns were themselves foreign; they were Turks from Central Asia, neighbours of the Ottomans in fact, who were brought to Egypt as young slaves, and then educated, and Islamised. However because the centre of their empire was Egypt, their fates were linked to those of its people, and they were interested in re-investing whatever profits they made from ruling Egypt in the country itself. The Ottomans, by contrast, shipped off any profit --or surplus--to Istanbul. Or so the Egyptianist historians would argue.
Emad Abu Ghazi thus reconstructs Tumanbay as "an Egyptian national hero", and even cites Ibn Zunbul's quotation of a 100-verse poem Tumanbay is reported to have composed and recited by the pyramids -- the symbol of Egyptian nationalism par excellence! Tumanbay is described as "the martyred sultan," which implies that he died for some honourable holy cause, in this case Egyptian nationalism. He is presented as the ruler who tried to save Egypt's national interests to the last. Yet he did not try hard enough, and Tumanbay's obstinacy in resisting the Ottomans can seem more romantic and legendary than calculated and organised. He failed, for example, to control the Mameluke army which had allowed Ottoman infiltration and eventual Ottoman victory. In retrospect his defeat seems inevitable, and if this is the case, what is it that makes of him a hero, much less a martyr?
This history would also have benefited from a considered conclusion in which the author could have carried his implicit presumptions to their logical end points. As things stand, the only thing that comes close to such a conclusion is the blurb on the back cover of the book. In the absence of a concluding chapter one inevitably has to fill in the blanks, and a good place to end the book could be at the beginning that Abu Ghazi has chosen, namely those popular perceptions of Tumanbay. For years, Egyptians passing by Bab Zuwayla have had a habit of reading the fatha, the opening verse of the Qur'an that is often read for the dead. Perhaps they have been reciting it in memory of this last Mameluke sultan hanged at that gate. Perhaps he died a martyr's death, after all.
