8 - 14 November 2001
Issue No.559
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 8 - 14 November 2001 Issue No.559 |
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Morbid metaphors
The Northern Cemetery of Cairo, Hani Hamza, California: Mazda Publishers, 2001. pp107
It has become so common to hear of Cairo's "cities of the dead" referred to as a city of the living that it is perversely refreshing to remember those for whom they were originally intended. Not, of course, that these were all departed; as Hani Hamza reminds us, the Northern Cemetery -- an area of a little over one square kilometre, bordered roughly by the Muqattam and Al-Gabal Al-Ahmar to the east and Salah Salem Street to the west -- also attracted mystics and their followers, who resided in the numerous Sufi foundations constructed there, as well as all sorts of visitors come to pray, request the intercession of sainted figures, or simply, one imagines, to gawp at the Mamluk architecture that could blossom here unconfined by any preexisting urban fabric. While the "pilgrimage guide books" produced starting at the end of the 11th century mentioned only the tombs in the two Qarafas, and did not encourage visitors to stop at shrines in the sahraa (the desert, as the chronicles refer to this burial site, sometimes specifying that it is the "desert outside Cairo"), one -- Al-Sakhawi's Tuhfat Al- Ahbab -- singled out the tomb and zawya of Ibn Gawshan and the tomb of Abdallah Al- Menoufi as holy enough to warrant a halt.
Bab Al-Nasr necropolis
Hamza contends that the site constitutes the closest thing to an attempt on the Mamluks' part to establish an urban settlement -- albeit one for the dead. Yet it is the living who conceived and shaped it, after all, according to considerations that were often very much of this world. In fact, this study argues that the development of the necropolis closely mirrored the changes that took place in Mamluk society. It served as grounds for parades and war games "in accordance with the military spirit of the formative years of the young state;" the urbanisation it witnessed during the following periods waxed and waned with domestic power struggles and external threats.
The northern tip of what was to become a necropolis began as a games field, Midan Al- Qabaq, named after the sport of the same name. In a challenging variation on basic archery practice, Sultan Baybars's soldiers would compete in aiming their arrows through a circle fixed to a pole in the middle of the midan -- presumably as they rode by at full tilt. The 15th-century historian Ibn Taghribirdi describes a more poetic version of this activity, in which a gold or silver gourd was attached to the pole; the mounted archers sought to strike it with their arrows, thus releasing a bird kept within. The winner, Hamza writes, received both "the precious pumpkin and a robe of honor."
Military training, games and ceremonial parades continued to occupy Midan Al-Qabaq until some time before 1311-12, when the amir Shamseddin Qarasunqur built a fountain, a mosque and a mausoleum there. Not until the reign of Al-Nasser Hassan, however, did this arid location begin the transformation that would make it "the focus of royal patronage" under the Burgi Mamluks (from 1382 onward). Al-Zahir Barquq set the trend, and many of his Burgi successors -- notably Al-Ashraf Barsbay and Al-Ashraf Qaytbay -- followed suit.
Although sultans sponsored the vast majority of the buildings dating from the Burgi era, the commissioning of mausolea was not exclusively the ruler's prerogative. Financial resources and space, it seems, were the principal factors restricting the construction of functionally sophisticated funerary complexes such as those of Inal and Qurqumas.
While Hamza's study of the Northern Cemetery is detailed (often painstakingly so), non- specialists should not be put off by the wealth of information -- nor, indeed, the academic questions with which he engages -- that will be of principal interest to more erudite readers. Encrusted within a somewhat technical architectural analysis is much general information on the political events of the Mamluk period, as well as a wealth of interesting tidbits about various individual rulers. This is essential reading for those who have perused the section devoted to this area in El Kadi's La Cité des morts (see review) and are hungry not only for more information on the area's establishment and early development (until 1517), but also for a sophisticated analysis of the complex relations between funerary architecture and political developments. The Northern Cemetery, as a detailed case study, often problematises questions the two authors can only mention in passing, without further scrutiny. The drawback of this concentrated approach is the concomitant paucity of context; non-specialists will find it a sometimes bumpy ride, especially in the initial section, where they may wish for a more gradual narrowing of the study's perspective.
Hamza, then, gets to the point, and gets there with occasionally bewildering rapidity; the study is clear, concise and well organised; yet he fails to address some questions that will not appear self-evident to a general reader. While explaining that the principal appeal of the sahraa lay in the "worldly attractions of space, proximity to the city and freedom of the religious constraints imposed on... construction in the holy areas," as well as its location "on the main route to the Raydaniyya and the north," he does not seem to wonder, for instance, why architectural patrons chose to build mausolea rather than edifices of more immediate practical benefit to the city's inhabitants: covered markets, khans, bathhouses or palaces. El Kadi, too, describes this burial site as "in fact simply an aborted urban extension," yet does not offer the reasons for the project's discontinuation.
Prosaic attempts at its secular urbanisation were made at a relatively early date, with Al- Nasser Farag's transfer of the camel and donkey markets from their place under the Citadel to a spot near his father's tomb. Whatever the motives for this somewhat eccentric decision, his orders were reversed only days after his death in 1412. And while he must have had more elaborate plans in mind, building a flour mill, a public bath and a bakery in the vicinity, these were all deserted just as soon after his demise.
The only purpose-built residential quarters known to have existed in the area, on the other hand, were part of religious foundations, as in the madrasa of Al-Ashraf Barsbay, the compound of Qurqumas or the mausoleum of Gamaleddin Al-Ustadar. Hamza's argument on this point is somewhat circular, attributing the area's sparse population to the absence of social and economic infrastructure: the "swift failure" of Al-Nasser Farag's attempt at economic development, he hypothesises, "must have discouraged future plans of large scale economic development. Henceforward all major development projects focused on religious rather than secular activities."
Nor is it entirely clear why the "economic, military and social decadence" of the later Burgi sultanate did not impede the continued efflorescence of the necropolis, where the commissioning of elaborate edifices continued apace. Architectural excellence peaked under Qaytbay; and one is left to wonder why this, "the last burst of energy of a dying dynasty," was quite so magnificent.
Reviewed by Pascale Ghazaleh
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