Travel to the Land of the Fatimids

June 16, 2007

Today I talked on the phone with a friend who will be going to Tunisia in a couple of weeks. He asked me if I plan on getting back to the Middle East any time soon.. and I explained that there are a couple of possibilities coming up. But what I wanted to say is that I am right now doing stuff in the Middle East! I have begun to read al-Maqrizi's section on the Fatimid dynasty in Egypt (969-1171 AD) and so I find myself looking over maps and trying to imagine the placement of different squares and buildings.

If I were actually in Egypt right now I would in fact find my mental traveling quite impeded. There are certainly remnants of Fatimid Cairo (Al-Azhar to name the best known), but for all intents and purposes Fatimid Cairo is gone. We know where certain buildings were once located. We can re-create on a map the layout of the city. We can even imagine through the descriptions of travel writers something of the life of the city. But that is all gone and contemporary Egypt is a rather poor tour guide for the re-creation of the Fatimid world.

One reason I enjoy the Egyptian historian al-Maqrizi so much is the immense intellectual effort he puts into getting the details of this lost time down in writing. It is as if he can somehow pin it down and preserve it if he can only describe it. But still, al-Maqrizi knows the past is gone. Here is a paragraph he includes in his introduction to the Fatimid section:

So Cairo became a city of residence, after it had been a fortress and the abode of the Caliph. It became of no importance after it had been exalted and wasted away after it had been honored. This is the nature of kings, who continue to obliterate the remains of those previous to them and destroy the memory of their enemies. For this reason they have wasted most cities and fortresses. The Persians did this and likewise the Arabs in the days of ignorance. They are engaged in the same practice in the days of Islam...

Al-Maqrizi goes on to give three specific examples of this process of destroying the memory of those who came before. It is a rather glum picture, all told. Dynasties rise but then their great works are inevitably torn down.

A deep understanding of this process leads not so much to renewed vigor in travel as intense effort in the quiet of one's home. After all: there is nothing to see anymore. That is the message of al-Maqrizi. So one must imagine and set down as best one can the world that once was.

I am becoming more and more convinced that the world of the imagination is practically the only way to understand these worlds that are gone. It is hard to overestimate the magnitude of the changes that are piling up around the world. The past is not hidden.. it is simply gone. Perhaps someday only tourists will travel while scholars stay home and imagine.