The Final Resting Place of Imam Shafi'a

June 19, 2006

This is a different kind of monument than I have yet featured in this blog. It is not primarily a mosque (although a mosque is connected), but a mausoleum where the legist Imam Shafi'a (767-820 AD) was buried, whose name became attached to one of the four major legal schools in Sunni Islam. He came to live in Fustat and taught at the mosque of 'Amr ibn al-'Aas. This mausoleum, however, was not built until 1211 AD.. and to understand that time gap one must remember the presence of the Shi'a Fatimids in Egypt from 969-1171 AD. In the years after the fall of the Fatimids, the official re-introduction of Sunni Islam was high on the agenda of the rulers. The first of whom was Salah al-Din (or Saladin).. the founder of a madrasah (school) here in honor of Imam Shafi'a. A few years later this domed mausoleum itself was built. Honoring this foundational figure became a way to reassert Sunni identity in Egypt.

The mausoleum is located in the Qarafah.. which is the large cemetery to the south of what is today Cairo. It was the cemetery for Fustat, and thus the place where the earliest Muslims would have been buried. Getting to the mausoleum today means driving past many modern Muslim burials.. some open, like this.. and others located inside covered structures. Even odder is the fact that these cemeteries are inhabited by large numbers of poor people.. and so they get the name "cities of the dead."

If you enter the mausoleum expecting a tomb.. well, you won't be disappointed. There is stands behind what seem like brass bars and illumined by the fluorescent green light that seems standard for these things.

Once inside, the mausoleum became one of my favorite structures in Cairo. The interior is endlessly complex. Although much of the painting in the high dome was restored at a later date, Doris Behrens-Abouseif indicates that the "wooden frieze running along the walls" is original (87). This wooden frieze can be seen at the bottom of the following picture:

Behrens-Abouseif also notes that the "marble column with Imam Shafi'a's name and date of death, topped with a turban-like structure, is original" (87). This is a striking thing to be located in the middle of the mausoleum:

While I was in the mausoleum I learned that many women come to here to pray for fertility. It is of course a great mystery why this place would be associated with anything like fertility.. Maybe this marble column somehow stirs up hope?

Through the grating below you can glimpse a couple of women who have come to the mausoleum.

One of my thrills in coming to see the mausoleum was my knowledge that Ibn Jubayr, the medieval pilgrim, had also been here. The domed structure was not built yet, but the school must have been newly instated by Salah al-Din. Here is Ibn Jubayr's description (in Broadhurst's translation):

The tomb of the Shafi'a imam—may God hold him in His favor—a shrine superb in beauty and size. Over against it was built a school the like of which has not been made in this country, there being nothing more spacious or more finely built. He who walks around it will conceive it to be itself a separate town. Beside it is a bath and other conveniences, and building continues to this day. [40]

That final statement informs us that Ibn Jubayr was here at the beginning of the history of this complex.. when the expenditures were still endless, patronage at the highest levels. He saw this complex when it was all new.. when much was still to come.