Places of Legitimacy

June 29, 2006

Allow me a brief thought-experiment. Imagine that the American government was overthrown at some point in the future. Perhaps a military coup ushers into power a dictator, or some mega-corporation gains so much leverage that essentially its board of directors is running the country.. the continuity of our democratic system is broken. What would happen then to the national spaces in Washington DC? It is likely that a new leader would try to distance himself/herself from the White House and direct symbols of the American presidency. At the same time the new leader would have a craving for legitimacy that could only be met by re-using certain symbolic spaces that are charged with meaning for the American public. One can easily imagine a ceremony to recognize the new leader which would parallel the events of inauguration and the oath of office, and be held on the same ground. Perhaps the Capitol building would be deemed too charged with specific political meaning, and so it would be torn down.. but a new building is erected in its location.. the heir of that symbolic space.

What I am getting at is that certain physical places are connected to political legitimacy.. and a change in government may overthrow the time-honored use of a building, but that place will nevertheless inherit the past symbolic freight.

Cairo happens to be an impressive laboratory for the construction of legitimacy, as it has been the home to a long series of political upheavals. Cairo itself, it will be remembered, was the product of the Fatimid dynasty. This administrative city was located north of the old city of Fustat, and it contained at first a handful of important structures:

Early Cairo consisted of two palaces and a congregational mosque, the Azhar, all enclosed by a brick wall. The city had an unmistakably Isma'ili character. By the early eleventh century, Cairo possessed another congregational mosque, the Mosque of al-Hakim, which quickly assumed an importance equal to that of the Azhar in ceremonial life. [The Cambridge History of Egypt, Vol. 1, "The Fatimid State, 969-1171" by Paula A. Sanders, pg 166]

The "two palaces" mentioned above sat on opposite sides of a street known, appropriately, as "Bayn al-Qasrayn".. that is, "Between the two Palaces." When Salah al-Din overthrew the Fatimids he retreated to the Citadel.. but this street did not lose its symbolic importance. The last of the Ayyubids, the Sultan al-Salih Najm al-Din, built a madrasa along this street, the minaret for which is visible below:

Doris Behrens-Abouseif writes concerning what is left of this Ayyubid madrasa:

The madrasa of al-Salih was built on part of the site once occupied by the Great Fatimid Palace, that is, within the heart of the Fatimid city. To the passerby today only a minaret standing above a passage with an exquisitely decorated entrance is visible; the rest of the facade beneath the minaret is behind a row of shops. [89]

A part of that "exquisitely decorated entrance" is below:

In this case the madrasa stands hollow. Only its shell remains. One proceeds through the entrance not to enter a mosque, but to continue along a market street. The madrasa has been reconstructed from various clues:

The plan of the madrasa was reconstructed by Creswell, who found that it duplicated the plan he identified of the earlier madrasa which is today in ruins, of Malik al-Kamil on the opposite side of the street. [90]

The details of the architectural plans are not at issue for us here, but we catch a glimpse of multiple building projects in the exact place where the Fatimid Palaces were once located. Those palaces were themselves allowed to decay.. perhaps torn down.. but their space remained important.

The Ayyubids go, and in come the Bahri Mamluks in 1250. The Mamluks have an odd regime, which I will not even attempt to describe in full, but their former status as slaves made legitimacy a particularly important concern. What is one way to construct legitimacy? To construct buildings in places of legitimacy!

The first of the Bahri Mamluks to build here was Qalawun, but since his madrasa/mausoleum/mosque is under heavy reconstruction, I will skip this and look at the smaller structure of his son Sultan al-Nasir Muhammad, the entrance to which is below:

That entrance may look familiar.. If it looks something like an entrance to a church, you should be patting yourself on the back.. that is exactly what this is!

The most remarkable feature of the facade is the portal, a trophy brought from a church in Akko during the Crusades by al-Malik al-Ashraf Khalil... It is a Gothic marble portal with pointed arch, at the apex of which was added the word, Allah. [100]

It is at once a beautiful portal and a reminder of the continuing Muslim ability to beat back the Crusaders.

The minaret is covered with an intricately patterned stucco design.. like lacework running up and down the stone. As should be quite evident from the variety of minarets that turn up in these blogs, there was no single minaret pattern. In fact, it appears that some effort went into not repeating the designs of previous minarets.. and that effort to avoid repetition may be a key reason for the employment of foreign craftsmen when possible.

The qiblah is another example of intricate stucco work:

Behrens-Abouseif confidently asserts the presence of foreign craftsmen: "The prayer niche, which has no parallel in Cairo, is by a foreign hand. It shows similarities to Persian stucco work..." (101).

As for the internal design of the madrasa itself, can be discerned despite much deterioration.. It looks like a smaller version of the mosque of Sultan Hasan, with four large halls located under a great arch on each side of a square (a cruciform patter). The design can be glimpsed in the photo below, taken from in front of the qiblah.. (note four arches on each side of a square):

Right next door to this structure is yet another very large madrasa/khanqah/mausoleum, that of Sultan Barquq, who was the first of the Circassian Mamluks after their overthrow of the Bahri Mamluks toward the end of the 14th century. What does Sultan Barquq do? He builds a large structure next door to his predecessors along the street once known as Bayn al-Qasrayn.

I am going to save my full description of Sultan Barquq's religious complex for tomorrow's blog, but I want to point out that now a fourth successive regime has inititiated a high-prestige building project in this area. One could be tempted to think that there is something important about this space. As if the traditional expectations of the people so center on this ground that successive dynasties needed to prove themselves here. These buildings are not creating symbolic space, they are making use of symbolic space.. and gaining for their builders the legitimacy that inheres to places.