Gleanings from Maqrizi VI:
Flashes of Humor?

September 28, 2009

Humor in medieval Arabic literature is not hard to find.. you just have to look in the right place. Every year in my Islam class I assign some pages from The Book of Misers by Jahiz. Students tend to be a bit mystified, and then in class I try to convince them that it's hilarious. Jahiz is a humorist, but where else could one look? Popular literature such as the 1,001 Nights is always there. But even Maqrizi in his Khitat gives us flashes of humor.. although one has to know what to look for.

My first example of humor comes from Maqrizi's recounting of the opening of the Mosque of Emir Sarghitmish in 1356 A.D. It's an amazing mosque which somehow I never gave much attention since it sits right next to the famous and older Mosque of Ibn Tulun.

Maqrizi lists some important officials who attended the opening of this mosque and the great repast in which the water of the fountain was flavored with sugar. Then he writes:

He rewarded on this day Qawam with a splendid robe and had him ride upon a royal mule. He also bestowed upon him 10,000 dirhams for the following verses in praise of him, which are the height of unseemliness:

This Qawam was clearly a favorite, and he had gotten himself appointed teacher of Islamic law at this mosque (an indication of the interconnection between Cairo's religious leadership and the leading mamluks). Maqrizi notes his large reward for a poem in praise of Sarghitmish and then mentioning its unseemliness he goes on to cite about twenty lines from this poem. The reader will right away understand why it could be deemed "unseemly":

Have you seen the one who has strength
     and arrives near to God and expels suspicion?
He appears as a banner and grows like a grape vine.
     He progresses forward having taken the victory!
Being impassioned for piety, true guidance, and             liberality,
     he takes his repast and stretches forth the meal             with affection.
He exemplifies custom; he makes vivid the sunna.
     He sweetens our time with his excellent judgment.
This one Sarghitmish, the days of his princehood
     have sent forth nourishing rain clouds...

We would all be slightly embarrassed to have that poem read out about us.. but it could get you a great position in medieval Cairo!

Now, my question is what is Maqrizi's attitude toward these lines? There's no doubt some moral censure in that declaration of the lines as "unseemly." And that would match what we know of Maqrizi from his biographies; he has a distaste for this kind of political favor-currying. That moral judgment does not explain the twenty lines of citation. It's a lengthy passage and the only real explanation is that Maqrizi finds the whole thing funny.. hilarious. It's as if Maqrizi is writing: "Here's a specimen of over-the-top praise that you just have to read!" The shear length of the quotation shows that Maqrizi intends more than moral censure, but also active enjoyment of the absurdity of the poetry.

A second example of humor comes in the section about the Mosque of al-Hakim. This mosque was completed in 1013 A.D. by the Fatimid caliph al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah, but its story doesn't end there. Like all mosques that survive, it is continually renovated and reclaimed. That this renewal continues to be the rule is evident even today in the total makeover given to this mosque by the Agha Khan:

Sultan Hasan in the mid-14th century devoted extensive property to the maintenance of the mosque. Unfortunately he made a mistake. The close advisor al-Hirmas was expelled and had his property seized by the Sultan. Shortly thereafter the Sultan was establishing a waqf (or pious foundation) and to avoid the long drawn out reading, he simply had recited the introductory matter for the waqf and then it was signed and ratified by the proper witnesses. Everyone had forgotten that within the body of this waqf was a large grant to the formerly favorite advisor who the Sultan had just expelled. That was awkward! So now the Sultan wanted badly to invalidate the waqf document. The problem was that this was not easily done since waqfs are supposed to be inviolable and untouchable.. that's their point: they are a way to lock down wealth so that it can't be grabbed by the next Sultan.

Maqrizi lays out the basic story succinctly and then provides several paragraphs of legal wrangling about what to do. I found this section difficult to translate since it turns on quite obscure points of legal theory. Here is an example:

So Sultan Hasan asked the muftis for a legal opinion on this situation... These muftis agreed on the invalidity of a judgment settled with such invalid testimony and invalid execution. But the Hanafi judge was the one to make the decision and the others to implement it. The Hanafi judge said: “The waqf, if it originated in the correct manner, upon the principles of the Shari’a, then it cannot be invalidated by anything a witness says, and that’s the final answer to this incident.” The Shafi’i judge wrote an opinion supporting that: “If his legal school demands the invalidity of what he had first deemed correct, then it makes valid its invalidity.” The upshot was that the judges answered that the waqf was valid; the muftis that it was invalid.

You get that? It does make sense. The Hanafi judge, backed by the Shafi'i one, asserts that a waqf correctly implemented cannot be invalidated even if it turns out that the testimony of a witness is invalid. And if that is the case, then the large grant must go to the guy the Sultan just expelled.

The next move of the Sultan was to convene a group of scholars at his summer retreat at Siryaqus. You can almost see the Sultan's eyes glaze over as the legal scholars go at it contradicting each other as to whether and how this waqf can be overturned. Maqrizi describes the Sultan as yielding "after being worn out by the learned ones in the gathering and by his sharp discomfort in clarifying the paths they explained in looking for the truth." The final solution was to impeach the witnesses and render their testimony invalid. This involved some injustice to the poor men who were at the time following the orders of the Sultan..

The only possible reason for relating this legal argument at such length is humor. The scene is meant to tickle us. There's no importance to the debate in a historical sense. It is might be important to learn how seriously waqf stipulations could be taken with a conscientious judge, but that limited goal could have been communicated with a much shorter recounting of the controversy. Maqrizi loves telling this story, in all its legal obtuseness and hair-splitting. It's a funny!