Sole Survivor: The Mosque of
Ibn Tulun, pt. 2

June 3, 2006

Cairo appears to the visitor as a city with a crumbling, but preserved, past. Compared to the state of other great Islamic historic cities.. Baghdad comes to mind.. this is largely true. Cairo is a special place when it comes to the sheer number of monuments from the past that have survived. It is also a city with multiple pasts, as new regimes came and opened up new administrative cities outside the population center.. in the end Cairo simply swallowed all these smaller cities whole. The following passage from al-Maqrizi gives a sense of the original environment for the mosque of Ibn Tulun.. and allows himself to show some nostalgia:

When the ruins took over in the time of the ordeal, he ordered the building of a wall to hide the ruins from the sight of the Caliph, when he went from Cairo to Fustat, what was between [the cities of] 'Askar and Qata'i and the road. He ordered the construction of a wall, the end of which was at the mosque of Ibn Tulun...

In the caliphate of Amr bi-Ahkaam Allah, he ordered his vizier... to delay the coming of al-Ma'mun ibn al-Bataahi. Then over the course of three days it was announced publicly in Cairo and Fustat that whoever had a house or place among the ruins, that he should build it up. Whoever was unable to build it up, he should sell or rent it without transporting anything from the rubble. Whoever delayed after that had no right and no connected income, and abandoned the ability to build on all that with no recourse to any right. The reason for this public announcement was that when the prince of armies Badr al-Jamaali advanced in his utmost Majesty and established his residence in Fustat, the people began to transport what was at 'Askar and Qata'i from the debris of the structures so that ruin came to most of what was there, and what was between Cairo and Fustat in the way of structures became a forlorn ruin. Nothing remained there except some gardens. So when the vizier called for the people to build what remained [from this area] and the debris of 'Askar having been transferred, as has already been seen, this area became vacant (that is, the area running between the shrine of Sayyida Nafisa to the mosque of Ibn Tulun, and from the Qantara al-Sadd and the Majdam Gate in the walls of the Qarafa cemetery).

There does not remain now from 'Askar anything standing except Mount Yeshkur which has on it the mosque of Ibn Tulun and some of what was around it.. Whenever I have passed this vacant area between the mosque of Ibn Tulun and Kawm al-Jaarih where 'Askar was located, I have recalled what was there in the way of exalted residences and great homes.. and mosques and markets and baths and gardens and amazing ponds and the marvelous hospital.. and how it was all destroyed until not a single trace remained from it.

That last paragraph is the "money-quote" where al-Maqrizi's personal feeling for his city comes through.. his sense of loss for the what has passed away. The story as it unfolds in the first two paragraphs is somewhat complicated, but the general idea, I hope, stands out clearly (I cut some names and details in an attempt to bring out the gist): these once important satellite cities gradually became abandoned and eventually had to be more or less condemned because of their unsightly presence.

The sole survivor from that period in Egyptian history is the mosque of Ibn Tulun. So as we stood upon the minaret, looking out upon the rest of Cairo, we were in some ways standing upon an island. It is like a single odd piece the remains from an intricate puzzle that has been erased.. and the single piece that remains worked into a wholly different puzzle. There are many such fragments in Cairo.. pieces caught and suspended in a different environment than anyone at the time could have guessed.