Fatimid Fascination

February 25, 2008

Going over André Raymond's book Cairo, I am reminded once again of the attraction of the Fatimids, the Shia dynasty that ruled Egypt from 969-1171 AD. It may have something to do with their library:

It contained eighteen thousand manuscripts on the sciences of antiquity alone. The books were arranged on shelves all around the rooms. The shelving was partitioned and enclosed behind shutters equipped with locks and bolts. In all there were more than one hundred thousand bound volumes. These included works on the laws of every religion, treatises on grammar and lexicography, collections of traditional lore, history books, royal biographies, essays on astronomy, works relating to the supernatural, alchemical research, all in various forms of writing. [Gaston Wiet by way of Raymond 47]

This is all made even more alluring by the Fatimid faith—an ancestor of today's Ismailis—which in its esotericism and insistence on an interior meaning allowed for a highly creative interpretive lens. So it is not simply the presence of so many books, but the unloosed interpretive imagination that was at work in these stacks.

At the heart of the Fatimid city was a palace complex:

image from electronic edition of Writing Signs by Irene Bierman

That palace was of course stupendous. The Persian traveler Nasir-i Khusraw describes it as like a mountain when seen from afar. Since none of this palace exists today we have to make due with imagining something like Alhambra in Spain.. not in details, but in effect.

I think that is part of the allure: those central palaces are gone and so Fatimid Cairo has now become a city that lives in the imagination. But at the same time since some of these mosques and monumental gates remain (as seen in the picture above), something of the scale and economy of the Fatimid city can still be felt as one walks around. It becomes something like a mirage.. something dimly glimpsed. This makes it a different experience than studying, say, Alexandria in the Hellenistic period. That city is just gone.

I feel a certain challenge when looking at images of the Fatimid city: how to better preserve this city for the imagination. The current Egyptian state efforts to turn this zone into a tourist friendly "Fatimid Land" are absurd. Why not find a way to preserve this city through the resources of the internet? Travelers' tales, architectural notes, and contemporary images can all coexist and give substance to this place. This attempt at digital preservation is finally the academic goal I am coming to for the next few years.

The thick mixture of religious values and human landscape give this project an unusual theoretical edge. Here (as in so many areas) I take a cue from Clifford Geertz:

Chartres is made of stone and glass. But it is not just stone and glass; it is a cathedral, and not only a cathedral, but a particular cathedral built at a particular time by certain members of a particular society. To understand what it means, to perceive it for what it is, you need to know rather more than the generic properties of stone and glass and rather more than what is common to all cathedrals. You need to understand also—and, in my opinion, most critically—the specific concepts of the relations among God, man, and architecture that, since they have governed its creation, it consequently embodies. [51, The Interpretation of Cultures]

A place is always more than just what is there on the ground. It is also a system of thinking and perceiving. This is an unusually good rationale for a historic city to exist in virtual space.. since it is only there that some of this conceptual world can be recaptured and reapplied to this space.