The Lessons in Ruins and Wonders

Tamim Al-Barghouti

One of the most important books of Arab social history, architecture and art was written in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth century by Taqiyyouddin Ahmad Ibn Ali Al Maqrizi. Maqrizi was one of Ibn Khaldoun’s best students; he believed in the circular movement of history where the rise and fall of empires was driven by what we would call today the mode of production and its super structure of ethics. All states were bound to fall after reaching certain levels of luxury.

Like Ibn Khaldoun, Maqrizi was actually living through such a period.  In the thirteenth, fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, the Mamlouk Empire in Egypt and the Levant was one of the most luxurious in the Middle East. Before the European geographical discoveries, the revenues of world trade had to pass by the lands of Arabs, and the Mamlouks collected the revenue. The Mamlouk state was also self sufficient in food, cloths, and all raw materials needed for medieval life. Nevertheless, the state was morally corrupt. The Mamlouks, whose name, literally, meant “the ones owned by others” were a clique of slave warriors brought into the Middle East from the Caucasus or Central Asia. They had overthrown the Ayyoubid dynasty in the second half of the thirteenth century. Being a class of uprooted soldiers, the Mamlouks did not develop any form of the moral associations that results from settling down and stability. There were no bonds of family, neighbourhood of even long lasting friendships. Their relations were strictly pragmatic. Making and breaking alliances, saving peoples’ lives or killing them in cold blood, all depended on the Mamlouks’ calculation of what would bring them to power. Many of the Mamlouk sultans did not speak Arabic, and none of them spoke Arabic as their mother language. In a time when art and literature flourished only in the courts of princes, this meant the great demise of Arabic literature, philosophy, jurisprudence and the fading out of intellectual life altogether. To strengthen their positions, each one of the Mamlouks, after having secured considerable fortunes from the spoils of war or from extracting the agricultural surplus of Egypt and Levant, would use the best part of his money to buy more warrior slaves from the Caucasus and Central Asia. Supposedly, those new comers would be loyal to him. He would teach them the arts of war and politics. In the first ten to fifteen years of their apprenticeship, those new Mamlouks would be totally economically dependent on the old Mamlouk who bought them. On the other hand, he would be greatly dependent on them as far as his military and political weight in society was concerned. In essence, Mamlouk politics revolved around such units of old Mamlouks and their apprentices. Those gangs of slave warriors fought frequently, and the Mamlouk Sultan had little power over the rest of the ruling elite. Accordingly, very few Sultans died in their beds.

All this created an atmosphere of insecurity, every thing was temporary; the joys of the Mamlouks were susceptible to random attacks by new comers or old rivals. The powers of the Sultan himself were held hostage to the delicate balances of power between the factions that supported him and those who didn’t. Moreover, the safety and well being of the normal peasant, who had nothing to do with the ruling class, was subject to the random attacks of the Mamlouks plundering his land to feed their mini armies. The world was too random that it seemed to defy reason. A sense of fatalism developed and trickled down into people’s understanding of religion. Islam, which had been a revolutionary force throughout its first three centuries, and a social doctrine of justice morality and fairness, became filled with beliefs in demons, possession, evil eyes, and millions and millions of rituals.  The religion was totally isolated from the sphere of politics and morality; it was also quarantined outside the realms of interpretation and philosophical debate. Everything was heading towards a disaster. Yet, the state was still extremely luxurious.

This made more people like Maqrizi believe in Ibn Khaldoun’s analysis about the corrupting effects of luxury. Once people start buying others to defend them, their fortunes, whether political or intellectual, start to decline.  Obsessed with destruction, Maqrizi decided to write a history of Cairo by describing the buildings of the city. His famous Book, “The Lessons in Ruins and Wonders”, is a great record of how Cairo looked in the fourteenth century. Despite the fact that the book has been usually dealt with as a non-political description of the buildings, I think there is much more to it. In telling the story behind each building, how it was built, who owned it, how it changed owners and what conspiracies took place in or around it, Maqrizi was delivering a subtle Khaldounian message that every building held the seeds of its own destruction. A concept his professor applied to whole societies. In a sense Maqrizi was taking his Professor’s ideas one step further by stating that they were not only theoretical but rather were applicable to each and every palace in the city. In one of the very few incidents where he betrays his neutral mask, Maqrizi notes that a certain house built by the Fatimids was annexed by the Auyyoubids, and then by three different Mamlouk warlords. He then writes about the consecutive owners of the house: “If you look carefully, you’ll see that they were but thieves robbing thieves, May God forgive us all!”

Tamim Al-Barghouti