Читать книгу Islamic Monuments in Cairo - Caroline Williams - Страница 8
ОглавлениеHistorical Summary and Chronology
Cairo is an unequaled treasure house of Islamic architecture. Built over a span of a thousand years, Cairo’s historic center contains the most concentrated, the most numerous, the most varied collection of monuments in the Islamic world. But Cairo is not only a sum of its monuments; its historic center remains also a dynamic urban organism. Medieval Cairo was the city where the tales of the Thousand and One Nights were collected, and it was in the narrow streets of Bayn al-Qasrayn and the Darb al-Ahmar that many of the characters of those tales were supposed to have lived. Over the centuries, Cairo has continued to be a literary setting. Cairo, unlike Baghdad and Damascus, was spared the devastation of the Mongol invasions. Therefore, since her medieval structures and their urban context are the products of an accumulated history, a brief description of the city’s development is offered below.
By Near Eastern standards, Cairo is young. At the time of the Arab conquest in 641, there was a provincial fortress town called Babylon, the nucleus of which is now occupied by the Coptic Museum, the Hanging Church, and related buildings in the Coptic quarter of Old Cairo (Misral-Qadima). The Fortress of Babylon guarded the northernmost crossing of the Nile; just upstream, the Nile divided and one had to cross two or more channels to pass over it. To the invading desert Arabs, Babylon, at the juncture of Upper and Lower Egypt and with its back to the desert, was a safer and more strategic site than the Greco-Roman capital of Alexandria, a city that lay on the unfamiliar sea and was surrounded by a hinterland crossed by numerous canals and other impediments to the rapid movement of mounted Bedouins. The leader of the Arab troops, ‘Amr ibn al-‘As, therefore established a garrison town called al-Fustat, ‘the camp,’ to the north and east of Babylon, as the first Islamic settlement in Egypt. On the western edge of al-Fustat, on the Nile, he built a simple mud-brick mosque, the first in Egypt.
Subsequent expansion was to the northeast as new dynasties (the Abbasids, Tulunids, and Fatimids) created new royal cities. Under the Ayyubids and Mamluks, the city finally centered in the area between the Citadel and Bab al-Futuh (figure 2), while outlying fringes reached the present northern limits of the Northern Cemetery, or the City of the Dead. The suburb of al-Fustat was burned and abandoned in 1168 to deny it to the Crusaders, and that portion of the city was never resettled. The southern boundary of the medieval city was thus roughly the Mamluk aqueduct (Fumm al-Khalig), which still runs east from the Nile and then north toward the Citadel (figure 3). From near Fumm al-Khalig also, a canal once wound northward along the route of present-day Sharia Port Said to Azbakiya and eventually out to the Red Sea. Most of the Islamic monuments of interest lie in the area that is immediately east of central Cairo, that is, east of Sharia Port Said. The sketch map (figure 1) provides an idea of the location of major areas covered by this book in relation to Maydan al-Tahrir and the Nile Hilton hotel.
In the nineteenth century the city of Cairo moved westward to the Nile, first as a series of palaces and gardens along its banks (whose memory survives in such names as Qasr al-‘Ayni and Qasr al-Dubara), then radiating out from the new planned city that Khedive Isma‘il created as part of the impressive extravaganza organized around the opening of the Suez Canal. Maydan Isma‘il, renamed Maydan al-Tahrir (‘liberation square’) after the Egyptian revolution in 1952, is still the hub of Cairo’s central business district.
To the person who is not a student of Arab or Islamic history, the procession of exotic names and dates following ‘Amr ibn al-‘As, the first Arab conqueror, is hard to keep straight. To appreciate the monuments, however, it helps to have some idea of the sequence of dynasties, both to know when the monuments were built as well as to recognize what distinguished one architectural style from another. The summary that follows should help.
The Rashidun (632–61). The four orthodox caliphs, or Sunni successors of Muhammad, are Abu Bakr, ‘Umar, ‘Uthman, and ‘Ali. There was general acquiescence to, if not agreement on, the claims to leadership by the first three, but a struggle over succession began with the assassination of ‘Uthman. When he died, his relatives, the Umayyads, contested ‘Ali, the Prophet’s son-in-law, when he made a bid for the caliphate. In 661 ‘Ali was murdered, and the Umayyads, who had already established themselves at Damascus, succeeded to the caliphate.
‘Amr ibn al-‘As conquered Egypt for the caliph ‘Umar in 641, built his mosque, and established al-Fustat. From the period of the orthodox caliphs nothing identifiable remains in Cairo.
The Umayyad Caliphate (661–750). Al-Fustat was relatively unimportant during this period. The monuments of the Umayyads were built in Syria, Transjordan, and Palestine, and there are none from this period in Egypt.
Abbasids and Tulunids (750–935). In 750 the Abbasid branch of Muhammad’s tribe put a bloody end to the Umayyads in Syria and succeeded to the caliphate. Under such figures as Mansur and Harun al-Rashid, the family ruled the Arab world from an almost legendary Baghdad during one of the most splendid periods of Islamic civilization. Egypt was ruled by governors appointed by Baghdad, and one of them, Ahmad ibn Tulun, made himself independent and founded a short-lived dynasty (870–905). Three monuments date from this period: the Nilometer, the Mosque of Ibn Tulun, and the Aqueduct of Ibn Tulun outside al-Fustat.
Ikhshidids (935–69). For the thirty years following Ahmad ibn Tulun’s death, control of Egypt returned to the Abbasid government in Baghdad, but soon enough, another Turkish dynasty, like the Tulunids, seized power through the governorship. It left no monuments except the Mausoleum of the Sharif Tabataba, now much altered, on the eastern edge of al-Fustat.
Fatimids (969–1171). The Fatimids were Shiites (partisans of ‘Ali) and believed that the Prophet’s successor should be from his family (as opposed to the Sunnis, who favored successors chosen by the community). They founded the only major Shiite caliphate. Starting in Tunisia and claiming descent from the Prophet through his daughter Fatima (hence their name), they held Alexandria briefly in 914 and took control of Egypt in 969. Immediately after capturing al-Fustat they set to work laying out a new quarter, a city three to five kilometers to the north that served as palace, administrative offices, and residence for the caliph, his attendants, and his bodyguards. The new city was called al-Qahira because Mars (al-Qahir, ‘the victor’) was in the ascendant at the time the foundations were begun. This is the present-day Arabic name of the city, which has become ‘Cairo’ in English. It became the Fatimid capital in 973, and remained the nucleus of the medieval and modem city until Cairo expanded westward in the nineteenth century and eastward and northward in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This medieval city was what the nineteenth-century French scholars of Napoleon’s expedition referred to as le grand Caire. Under the Fatimids Cairo became the capital of a new Mediterranean empire.
The Fatimid Empire reached its peak under its fifth caliph, Abu Mansur al-‘Aziz (975–96), who built mosques, bridges, and palaces. Al-‘Aziz’s successor, al-Hakim bi-‘Amr Allah (literally ‘ruler by God’s command’), was perhaps psychotic. A number of bizarre actions are charged to his record, including the destruction of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem. The Fatimid dynasty lasted for another 139 years after al-Hakim but was in a steady decline for most of that period. This decline coincided with the establishment of the Crusader kingdom in Jerusalem, the expansion of Crusader power and influence, and the resurgence of Sunni Islam under the Seljuk Turks and their successors in Iran, Iraq, and Syria.
Numerous monuments from this period survive, the most important being the mosques of al-Azhar, al-Hakim, al-Aqmar, Salih Tala’i‘, and al-Guyushi; the north walls and city gates (Bab al-Futuh, Bab al-Nasr, and Bab Zuwayla); and the mausoleums in the Qarafa, or Southern Cemetery.
Ayyubids (1171–1250). This was the dynasty of Salah al-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyub, the Saladin of the Western chronicles. A Kurd from Syria, Salah al-Din became wazir, or prime minister, of Fatimid Egypt in 1169. His immediate ambition was to convert Egypt from Shiite back to Sunni Islam. He subsequently extended his control over Syria, Yemen, and the Hijaz. The last of the Fatimid caliphs expired in 1171, and in 1175 Salah al-Din had himself invested by the Abbasid caliph of Baghdad as ruler of Egypt, North Africa, Nubia, Western Arabia, and Syria. He subsequently defeated the Crusaders at the Horns of Hattin in Galilee in July 1187 and captured Jerusalem on October 2 of the same year. He died in 1193 and was buried in Damascus.
The empire that Salah al-Din put together was split up among his sons and heirs after his death. Egypt saw a succession of seven Ayyubid sultans. The sixth was al-Salih Ayyub, who introduced the practice of importing slave troops, or mamluks, the forerunners of the Mamluk regime. When he died in 1249, for a brief time his death was concealed. His Armenian concubine, Queen Shagarat al-Durr, assumed power, but the anomaly of a female ruling over men was so shocking that she was forced to marry Aybak, the commander of al-Salih’s Mamluk guard, and power passed to a new dynasty.
The most important monuments of the Ayyubid period are parts of the Citadel and city walls, the Tomb of Imam al-Shafi‘i, the Tomb of the Abbasid Caliphs, the Madrasa-Mausoleum of al-Salih Nagm al-Din, and the Tomb of Shagarat al-Durr.
Bahri Mamluks (1250–1382). Mamluk means ‘one who is owned.’ In this system of army-raising, which eventually took over the leadership of Egypt, non-Muslim children and adolescents, purchased or captured, were brought to Egypt as slaves. After a long and careful training in military arts and Islam, they were formally freed. The lowest rank of Mamluk officer, an amir, commanded ten household troops, next forty, then one hundred. An amir kabir, the great lord or grand marshal, commanded one hundred high-ranking amirs, or an army of one thousand. Through ruthlessness, intelligence, or merit, the young amir might hope to advance to the highest offices, even to the sultanate itself. As sultan he maintained himself by severity, prodigality, and the guard of highly trained soldiers with whom he surrounded himself. At the sultan’s death, rival amirs fought over the succession, often through the streets of Cairo, until the strongest, ablest, or most cutthroat prevailed.
Mamluk rule is divided into two periods, the Bahri and the Burgi. The Bahris ruled from 1250 to 1383. Bahr means ‘river,’ and the Bahris were so called because their original barracks were on the island of Roda in the Nile. The majority of the Bahri Mamluks were Kipchak Turks from the steppes of the Volga River near the Caspian Sea. Most of the Bahri sultans were descended from Sultan Qalawun, who established a dynasty that lasted a hundred years. The period of Bahri rule was relatively prosperous. Egypt, the wealthy crossroads of trade and commerce, provided the rulers with sums sufficient to support a crack army and subsidize learning and the arts. A succession of strong rulers maintained Egyptian control over Syria and eventually drove the Crusaders from the mainland. More importantly, they successfully repelled four major Mongol invasions, thus sparing Egypt the crushing devastation that befell Iraq and Syria, and from which Iraq never quite recovered.
Sultan al-Nasir Muhammad (1293–1341) was Cairo’s greatest medieval architectural and urban patron. He not only built monuments himself; he encouraged his amirs to build also. His urban development included a canal west of the Khalig al-Misri and the main roads, the Darb al-Ahmar and Sharia Saliba, that led toward the Citadel from old centers, thus doubling Cairo’s built area. Sultan al-Nasir ruled over medieval Cairo at its apogee, at a time when Cairo’s population of two hundred thousand was second only to that of Constantinople, and two and a half times that of Paris and more than three times that of London. Ibn Battuta, the great medieval traveler, wrote in 1345: “I arrived at length at the city of Cairo, mother of cities, mistress of broad provinces and fruitful lands, boundless in the multitude of buildings, peerless in beauty and splendor . . .” Of the 433 monuments built in the Bahri period, the Index to Mohammedan Monuments in Cairo lists one hundred that survive. Of these, the best known are the complex of Sultan Qalawun, the monuments of al-Nasir Muhammad, the Mosque of Sultan Baybars I, the Mosque of Altinbugha al-Maridani, and the Madrasa of Sultan Hasan. Others of historical importance and great beauty dot the medieval city.
Burgi Mamluks (1382–1517). The Burgi (or Burji) Mamluks succeeded the Bahris. They were mostly Circassians from the Caucasus mountains. They took their name from the fact that they were quartered in the towers (burg) of the Citadel.
Bahri rule was violent, but Burgi was more so, and this was not a happy era in Egyptian history. The corrupt and arbitrary rule of the Circassians led to the ruin of an economy that suffered further from natural catastrophes such as plague (sixteen outbreaks between 1348 and 1513) and drought, a breakdown in security in outlying areas, and the European discovery of a sea route to India. These misfortunes were compounded by the invasion of Timur (Tamerlane), who got as far as Damascus, destroyed most of what he found, and routed an Egyptian army sent to stop him. Again, however, the Nile Valley itself was spared an invasion. Contributing also to the instability of the period were fissures in the military structure and civil societies. Mamluk losses due to plague were replenished by the purchase of new mamluks on a massive scale, made possible by Barsbay’s monopoly of the spice trade, but their training period had to be drastically reduced. They were not the crack troops they had once been. The Ottoman Turks under Selim I took Cairo in 1517, hanged the last Mamluk sultan, Tumanbay, and brought the Mamluk period to an end.
The money extorted by the Burgis was spent in part on architecture, and some fine monuments date from this period. Of the 270 originally built, the Index lists 133 survivors. The early Burgi monuments continued Bahri precedents, but in the middle of the fifteenth century there was a change of style. The period ended with another great and influential patron, Sultan Qaytbay (1468–69). Among the monuments that stand out are the tombs of Barquq, Barsbay, and Qaytbay in the Northern Cemetery, the buildings of al-Ghuri around al-Azhar, and the Mosque of Qijmas al-Ishaqi near Bab Zuwayla.
The Ottoman Turks (1517–1798). Under Ottoman control Egypt reverted to the status of a province to be exploited by a distant power. Egypt’s history from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century is one long, and rather confusing, struggle for power. This period, however, once regarded as decadent and inglorious, is currently the subject of animated revision. Ottoman rule in Egypt featured both innovation and compromise. The ‘new’ included the Ottoman governor and Ottoman militia. The office of viceroy, or pasha, initially had considerable authority, but after the sixteenth century, became limited by local instability, checks and balances from Istanbul, and an average tenure of less than three years. The Janissary militia known as mustahfizan (guardians) was assisted by six other militias, such as the ‘Azaban. The ‘compromise’ was that where there was no conflict with their own authority, the Ottomans retained a certain number of Mamluk institutions. Mamluk beys provided administrative continuity in the countryside; they retained some of the highest local offices, such as the amir al-hajj, and they were in charge of three militia units. Thus local grandees were able to preserve their bases of material power and to organize themselves into a political order that soon competed with that of the pashas.
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as disorder and mutinies increased, power alternated between imperial viceroys and militia on the one hand and local grandees on the other. Between 1610 and 1660 as the power of the viceroys began to wane, power in Egypt seesawed between two local factions (the Faqariya and the Qasimiya), while from 1660 to 1730 Ottoman Janissary elements predominated, until they were weakened by a power struggle within the militia.
By the eighteenth century, the entourages (slaves, servants, bodyguards, henchmen) of individual local grandees, along with those of their clients and allies, created large residence-based conglomerates, extended households called buyut (sing. bayt). Preeminent among these was the Qazdughliya, an offshoot of the Faqariya, who began their rise c. 1700, and who after 1748 dominated the beylicate until the early nineteenth century. Toward the end of the eighteenth century, ‘Ali Bey al-Kabir, seeking to build a state that would recreate the Mamluk Empire, challenged Ottoman rule unsuccessfully. His reign marked a transition to a more independent rule in Egypt, so he is now viewed as a precursor to Muhammad ‘Ali. The last quarter of the eighteenth century was dominated by the rivalry between Ibrahim and Murad, beys of Muhammad Abu Dhahab. This uneasy and unstable period ended with the Napoleonic Expedition of 1798.
Yet Cairo did not diminish. The city grew south along the Khalig al-Masri, north in Azbakiya and Bulaq, and west along the Darb al-Ahmar. Trade flourished. Cairo was central to the trade within the Ottoman Empire, and remained the primary trade link with the east. Coffee, flax, and sugar were the main commodities. The number of wikalas built serves as a comparison: 58 in the Mamluk period; 360 in the Ottoman period. This socio-economic growth is reflected in the population figures. By 1798, the population of Egypt had increased to about six million (with 263,000 in Cairo)—compared with eight million in Roman times, five million at the end of al-Nasir Muhammad’s reign (200,000 in Cairo) and seventy-eight million (twenty million in Cairo) in 2008.
The Index lists 216 monuments from the Turkish period. Although the most numerous, they are not the most grand. Of the mosques, some are built in the Ottoman style (Sulayman Pasha, Malika Safiya, and Sinan Pasha); others follow the styles of the preceding, Mamluk period; and some show interesting combinations of both. Numerous sabil-kuttabs dot the city. These double-storied combinations of public drinking fountain and Qur’anic school were a favorite civic charity and a type of monument unique to Cairo. Of the secular buildings, the large numbers of surviving wikalas reflect Cairo’s economic centrality. There is considerable charm, however, in the domestic architecture (Bayt al-Sihaymi, for instance) that survives. ‘Abd al-Rahman Katkhuda was the main patron of this period. His original and restored monuments survive in such quantity that the historian al-Jabarti dubbed him “the Great Benefactor and the Prince of Renovators.”
The Dynasty of Muhammad ‘Ali (1805–1952) and After (1952–2007). Napoleon invaded Egypt in 1798, and although he defeated the Mamluk-led army at Imbaba in the so-called Battle of the Pyramids, he was not able to hold the country. Allied with English marine power, the Ottomans drove him out and appointed Muhammad ‘Ali, an Albanian mercenary officer, as their viceroy in Egypt in 1805. In 1811 Muhammad ‘Ali massacred the leading Mamluks, ending forever an institution that had survived for more than 550 years. He founded his own dynasty, which lasted until 1952.
His reign was notable for its break with the medieval past and the introduction of new Otttoman architectural styles and features. The Birkat al-Fil and the Azbakiya lakes, the focus for Mamluk and Ottoman residential quarters, were drained and filled, to become gardens, and later, new districts. Muhammad ‘Ali’s mosque in the Citadel is a unique example of a Turkish imperial mosque and, by virtue of its dominating position, one of the most impressive structures in Cairo. Muhammad ‘Ali’s successors in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries continued the ‘modernization’ and ‘Westernization’ that he had begun. By confining their main architectural projects to new areas of the city, such as the eastern and western banks of the Nile, they did not obliterate the city’s medieval heritage. But new avenues, such as Sharia al-Muski and Sharia Muhammad ‘Ali, connectors between the new (Ataba), and the old (the historic center), did destroy both monuments and parts of the historic fabric of the city.
It was by way of response to this destruction that the Comité de Conservation des Monuments de I’Art Arabe came into being. During its seventy years in existence, 1881–1952, the Comité did much to record and maintain Cairo’s architectural legacy, but its focus lay on the restoration of the single monument, not on neighborhood conservation. The Index to Mohammedan Monuments in Cairo lists 492 monuments. Since 1952, due to pressures from an ever-expanding population, commercial interests, and general indifference to the problem by the population at large, buildings have either disappeared or have been compromised, while their contexts have also been threatened. The earthquake of October 1992 seriously damaged over 125 monuments. Today, interest in these monuments, for a long time particular to art historians and specialists, is expanding to a wider audience. The Egyptian government, as the Historic Cairo Restoration Program, in response to both threats and increasing public interest, began in 1998 a vast campaign of restoration.
This was and remains a huge undertaking and a burdensome responsibility for a country estimated to contain 60 percent of the world’s monuments, and the HCRP and SCA branches of the Ministry of Culture are still feeling their way with respect to Cairo’s Islamic architectural and urban heritage. There have been some notable successes as far as individual restorations are concerned. Refurbishing and cleaning have made visible once more beautiful and delightful ornament. Water distribution systems have been discovered. Old residences have been rescued from oblivion. But the government is still focused on the restoration and display of the single monument, and not on the preservation and conservation of its urban context. Some monuments thus risk being isolated and/or turned into commodities. Contemporary practice in other world regions integrates monuments and people and sees them as interrelated and interdependent. The Ministry of Culture has not yet published a plan that safeguards both aspects—architectural and urban—of this remarkable historic legacy.
Arcade and minaret, Mosque of Ahmad ibn Tulun
View of Sultan Hasan from al-Azhar Park
Bayn al-Qasrayn: Qalawun and Barquq
Sabil of Muhammad ‘Ali Tusun, near Bab Zawayla
Sharia Surugiya with the dome and Minarel of the Mosque of Ganim al-Bahlawan
The Tomb of the Abbasid Caliphs and Mosque of Sayyida Nafisa
The tombs of Sudan and al-Sawabi
Khan al-Khalili, Bab al-Badistan
The façades of al-Azhar and Abu Dhahab
