Gleanings from Maqrizi IV:
A Medieval Jane Jacobs

September 3, 2009

Above is a photo I took in the Mosque of Sayyida Zaynab in Cairo. It's a popular mosque, and one mark of that is the large number of people literally lying around. In mosques oriented toward tourists, such as the Mosque of Sultan Hasan, there's little or none of this. Which model is most helpful for imagining a mosque in medieval Cairo? Maqrizi leaves no doubt that the lying-around model is the one we should keep in mind.

Maqrizi's section on the Mosque of al-Azhar gives some of the clearest indications of the rich social life rooted inside the walls of a mosque:

There continued in the Mosque of al-Azhar, since it was built, a number of poor Sufi brethren who took residence in it. Their number in these days reached 750 people, split between Persians and other foreigners and people from the Egyptian and North African countryside. Each contingent had a colonnade called after them.

The Mosque of al-Ahzar is a good sized mosque, but it had to serve as a spiritual hotel for 750 Sufis. That's a lot of Sufis. They were divided by place of origin and each group took over a colonnade as their own. Maqrizi goes on to mention the activities you would have found here in the 15th century AD:

The mosque continued to thrive with reading from the Qur’an and ongoing study and instruction. It was busy with varieties of learned sciences such as hadith, Qur’an commentary, and Arabic grammar. There were also sessions of exhortation and circles for zikhr. A person who entered this mosque found familiarity with God and satisfaction and refreshment for the soul such as he found in no other mosque.

Walking into a mosque is not like walking into some giant cathedral where your footsteps echo into the air. The mosque has always been a social place. The kind of spiritual practices that go on within it are social ones. The sound of the Qur'an being read would always be in the background, as would the hum of people talking. There was a mixture of serious study groups and Sufi circles performing zikhr, or "remembrance" of God. The common denominator here is group activity.

Maqrizi adds a laudatory note that anyone who entered the Mosque of al-Azhar found "familiarity with God" and "refreshment for the soul." Those are categories worth remembering for the experience of a medieval mosque. It points to the acquisition of two things: knowledge of God and personal spiritual benefit. Both stem from taking part in social activities.

The masters of wealth began to come to this mosque with varieties of charity, giving gold, silver and coins to support the sojourners within it, in service to God Most High. People of small means brought varieties of food, bread, and sweets to them, especially during festivals.

The spiritual density of the mosque attracted the wealthy and the common people. All give from whatever wealth they have and underwrite spiritual activities.

Urban planning theorist Jane Jacobs would have appreciated this state of affairs. Her book The Death and Life of Great American Cities is a lengthy argument for the value of social interaction within an urban landscape. She worried that plans for "urban renewal" would destroy the organic social mixing that took place in a great city. Jacobs would have loved the mosque as portrayed by Maqrizi here: it's everything the urban environment is supposed to be. The mosque functions as a stage for all kinds of social interactions.

Although urban renewal as an official philosophy was centuries away, Maqrizi documents a similar impulse in a certain emir who decided that he did not like the crowdedness of the Mosque of al-Azhar:

Then the emir... ordered... that the sojourners be expelled from the mosque and banned their residence inside the mosque. He also expelled from the mosque all their cabinets, storage places, seats, and Qur’an copies, claiming that this would be among the works that God would reward him for. But it was nothing but the greatest and gravest of sins for the harm it brought.

The actions of this emir are presented as motivated by a sense of piety. He kicks out the Sufis and believes that this will be one of the actions for which God will someday reward him! He is perhaps purifying the mosque from the noise and smells of all these hundreds of people. The emir could pat himself on the back. This impulse to purify the urban world by destroying the social fabric is what Jane Jacobs fought against. Maqrizi, while recognizing that the emir was acting out of a sense of piety, calls this act a grave sin.

It gets worse. The emir shows up one night after the last evening prayer and harasses all the people who were trying to pass a summer's night in the mosque. These people include businessmen, spiritual seekers, military men, and people just looking for refreshment on a hot evening. The mosque would have looked like a more crowded version of the photo at the top of this post. Maqrizi, as always, is a defender of traditional Cairo, and he is happy to report the bad end of this emir:

God struck swiftly the emir..., as the Sultan arrested him in the month of Ramadan and imprisoned him in Damascus.

If only the anti-urbanists of our own time could be dealt with in such summary fashion! Imagine: "God struck swiftly those who tried to make our cities like unto suburbs.." I guess the point, though, is that the impulse toward purifying an urban environment can exist in many different cultural environments.. as can the defense of these urban environments. In this case both sides are expressed in the idiom of medieval Islam.

Although most mosques in Cairo long ago lost their connection to higher education, the Mosque of al-Azhar is still a center of learning. I saw the following schedule of classes posted in the courtyard of the mosque this past summer:

The third column (from either the left or right) lists the subject matter of various courses being offered at the mosque. From top to bottom these are: Hanbali legal theory, principles of Shafi'i legal theory, logic, Maliki legal theory, Sufism, Arabic grammar, Sufism, and Shafi'i legal theory. Again, the Mosque of al-Azhar is pretty much unique now in offering all this, but in the medieval period lots of mosques/madrasas would have had offerings like this.