Mamluk Cairo

This is the sixth of a series aimed at providing the existing details of the Madrasa al-Ashrafiyya built by Sultan Qaytbay in 887/1482 and referred to as the Third Jewel of al-Haram, the other jewels being the Qubbat as-Sakhra (Dome of the Rock) and the Al-Aqsa Mosque.  The madrasa although badly damaged by an earthquake in 1545  still contains many interesting details that directly relate it to Sultan Qaytbay’s Cairo foundations.

My intention is to illustrate the architectural evidence with minimal text partly because I have previously described and detailed many of the features , but, and perhaps more importantly, I believe that it should be the norm to make one’s research notes available to enable others to see the details and make their own comparisons and conclusions .

يعد ألبوم "ذاكرة القاهرة الفوتوغرافية" وسيلة شيقة تعرض لنا ماشهدته مدينة القاهرة من الازدهار المعماري خلال القرنين التاسع عشر والعشرين، هذا الألبوم الذي كانت تحتفظ به مكتبة الملك فاروق، والذي يضم مجموعة من الصور الشمسية تمكن المطلع عليها من التعرف على ما كانت عليه كثير من مظاهر الحياة الاجتماعية في مدينة القاهرة منذ عام 1849م وحتى أوائل القرن العشرين.
تحوي هذه المجمموعة صورًا شمسية لمناظر شوارع وميادين وأحياء القاهرة القديمة، كميدان محمد علي وميدان الأوبرا وميدان العتبة الخضراء، وحي الأزبكية وحي شبرا، وشارع عماد الدين وشارع الهرم وشارع الموسكي، بالإضافة إلى صور لعديد من السرايا والقصور التي اتخذتها أسرة محمد علي مقرًا للحكم؛ كسراي عابدين وسراي القبة، كذلك يمكن المطلع على ألبوم "ذاكرة القاهرة الفوتوغرافية" أن يتابع التحول العمراني الذي أحدثه الزمن بعروس الشرق من خلال مجموعة صور لأعرق الفنادق بالقاهرة كفندقي شبرد والكونتننتال، بالإضافة إلى مجموعة صور نادرة للكباري والقناطر والبرك والحدائق والدور والمتاحف والتي لم تنشر من قبل.
هذه الصور التي يضمها ألبوم "ذاكرة القاهرة الفوتوغرافية" والتي أخذت قبل القرن التاسع عشر قريبة الشبه من الأصل بدرجة تمتاز بالدقة في إيضاح ماكانت عليه القاهرة في ذلك العهد ـ كما لا يخفى ـ أن هذه العملية تحتاج إلى شخصيات لها إلمام تام وخبرة بفن التصوير الشمسي كالفنان بيشار وماكسيم دى كامب والفنان ليكيجيان، هؤلاء الفنانين الذين قاموا بتسجيل مشاهداتهم لمدينة القاهرة من خلال عدساتهم ليخرجوا لنا هذه المجموعة النادرة من الصور التي تفيد الدارسين وتثري مخيلة الهواة والتي أصبحت جديرة بهذا العرض الكريم.
The Photographic Memory of Cairo
Within the Memory of Modern Egypt series, the BA has published a catalog entitled The Photographic Memory of Cairo. Edited by Dr. Khaled Azab and researcher Shaimaa El Sayeh, the catalog presents some of Cairo`s rarest photographs and depicts Cairean life throughout nearly a century of time until 1952. The Catalog lies in 161 large-sized pages, and is divided into 11 sections; Districts, Squares, Streets, Palaces, Bridges, Arch Bridges, Lakes and Canals, Gardens, Hotels, Entertainment Houses and Museums and Panorama.

The Mamluks, at various ocaasions, organized entertainments, festivals and ceremonies accompanied by the singers and musicians. The female slaves who were bought at early age and skillfuly practised with their male or female master musicians named ustat/reis and reise participated into the various entertainments and ceremonies or high officials’ weddings and circumcision feasts or religious and local holidays. In that era, there were salaried court singers and musical groups performing their duties at the palaces together with the public singers as well as musicians. The most famous concubine is Ittifaq who talented in playing common instruments such as the ud, tanbur, çenk, def, mizmar, santur and kanun. This concubine  with a dark skin mentioned in the sources played the ud realy well and enjoyed a life like fairy tale while marrying three different sultans. Except for anonymous ones, Zuhra and Hubi with their wonderful voices together with their beauties also became the most attractive singers in that era; and these two are also regarded as the well-known singers in the history of Mamluks. In this article, the information about the female singers and musicians in the palace and society of Mamluks will be given and the acquisition as well as training of the above-mentened concubines will be analyzed.

This book offers a thorough investigation of a forgotten dynasty: the Cairene descendants of the Abbasid family. It uncovers the public and private lives of the men invested as caliphs during the period of ‘Mamluk’ rule in Egypt and Syria (1250–1517) and reveals a nuanced understanding of the Abbasid Caliphate according to elite members of Syro-Egyptian society. In doing so, it addresses the function of the caliph and his office amidst the breakdown and recreation of each new socio-political order of the sultanate. The uniquely Cairene context of the idea and institution of the caliphate is examined, including the ways in which it was socially and textually performed in the late medieval Cairo Sultanate.

The aim of the present contribution is to edit and translate the treatise Kitāb al-Sulūk fī ṭarīq al-qawm (Book on the voyage along the pathway of the spiritual kindred), a short Ṣūfī text extant in one known manuscript, MS Istanbul, Süleymaniye, Hekimoğlu 506, fols. 11v–16r. The manuscript ascribes the text to Yaḥyā b. ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq b. Sabʿīn, a son of the Andalusi philosopher and Ṣūfī Ibn Sabʿīn (d. 669 H/1270 CE), whose name was otherwise unknown. To provide some context, I will summarize the extant information about Ibn Sabʿīn’s life and present the available data about his son. Then, I will summarize the contents of this short treatise and examine its link to the school of Ibn Sabʿīn. And last, I will describe the manuscript on which the edition is based, and provide the edition and translation of this work. The Kitāb al-Sulūk fī ṭarīq al-qawm represents a witness during the early Mamlūk period of the spread of Andalusi intellectual Ṣūfism, particularly in the school of Ibn Sabʿīn, to the Mashriq.

People identified as Persians constituted one of the most prominent groups of nonlocal inhabitants in Mamluk Egypt, and earlier scholarship has paid considerable attention to Egyptian-Persian relations. Nevertheless, the determining factors that made someone Persian in Mamluk Egyptian contexts remain poorly understood. Accounts of the majālis, or learned salons, convened by the penultimate Mamluk Sultan Qāniṣawh al-Ghawrī (r. 906-922/1501-1516) offer a unique opportunity to examine which factors, agents, and motivations were decisive in the construction of what it meant to be Persian during the late Mamluk period. An examination of these sources demonstrates that language, cultural capital, and region of origin were the most important elements in the process of Persian identity construction at al-Ghawrī's court. The key actors in this process were persons who identified themselves as Persians and sought to make strategic use of the benefits their identity could entail within the patronage context of al-Ghawrī's court. In contrast to what is known about other ethnic identities within the Mamluk Sultanate, neither persons who identified as Persians nor their local interlocutors considered ancestry a defining factor of being Persian.

The Mamluk inscription on the Facade of the Main Entrance to the St. James Monastery of Jerusalem is one of the most significant ones given by the Sultan the nicknamed Chaqmaq in 1450 C.E. The inscription is one of the rare inscriptions given to the Armenians that the monastery and the Armenian monks are tax exempted and cursed be the one who renews or inflicts injustice upon the same.

The wealth of Cairo’s markets throughout the Mamlūk period is well attested in the sources. From roving peddlers to stationary markets, the city’s food supply was a testament to Egypt’s agricultural bounty. This study attempts to understand the food economy that provisioned these food markets. In doing so, Egypt’s agricultural production, its transportation network, distribution system, and Cairo’s markets are discussed with a focus towards understanding both the nature of the many aspects of the Mamūk food economy as well as the changes occurring within it. In providing an overall description of the mechanisms by which the Mamlūk food economy functioned, this thesis argues that the structure of the system was an ongoing dialectic between the labor and efforts of the peasants, the activities of the food merchants and sellers, and the contrivances of those with power, especially the Mamlūk regime itself. The complexities of this system were not only influenced by the activities of these three groups but were also driven by environmental and geographic factors as well. When all of these factors worked in concert, an intricate, multi-layered system produced the abundance and wealth of Cairo’s markets that were evident for all to see. However, the effects of the plague, starting in the fourteenth century CE, combined with the labor-intensive nature of the Egyptian agricultural and transportation systems disrupted this multiplex system. The agricultural sector being key to the overall Mamlūk economy, this breakdown created the conditions from which the agricultural system and, correspondingly, the economy failed to recover.

In 2018, the Egyptian Heritage Rescue Foundation (EHRF) launched a two-year project to document the minbars (stepped pulpits) made during Mamluk sultanate (1250-1517), and still present in many religious monuments in Egypt and international collections. In this paper I present explain why the project was conceived and how it was delivered. I describe the efforts made by the EHRF team to restore, conserve and protect these masterpieces of Mamluk art. The project was funded by the British Council's Cultural Protection Fund. It was implemented in partnership with the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities.

Traduction intégrale annotée d’Ibn Taymiyya, « Fetwa sur les Fāṭimides » (« Majmū‘ al-fatāwā », t. XXXV, p. 120-144), avec plusieurs corrections du texte arabe et, dans les notes, la traduction d’extraits d’al-Ghazālī, « Faḍā'iḥ al-bāṭiniyya ».

In Ottoman War and Peace:  Studies in Honor of Virginia H. Aksan, eds. Frank Castiglione, Ethan L. Menchinger, and Veysel Şimşek (Leiden:  Brill, 2019), pp. 315-26.
[The article has been published, but Brill's policies prohibit posting the offprints online.  Therefore, I have indicated page numbers in brackets in the manuscript.]

The revival of the arts during the reign of the Mamluk Sultan Qaytbay was concomitant with an architectural revival. Spurred by the need to furnish and decorate buildings in Cairo and cities in Greater Syria, many crafts resurfaced during this period and continued even after his fall. Decorative tiles are an example of such a revival. Those made in the region had an eastern  avour and their production continued to  ourish until the end of the Mamluk period in 1517.

How did Jews set the boundaries between orthodoxy and heresy?

This article argues that they did so in constant contact and negotiation with the ambient majority religious groups. It compares three cases of Karaite-Rabbanite tension—in Fatimid Jerusalem, Christian Iberia and Mamluk Egypt, and republican Amsterdam, based on published and unpublished sources.

In the end, this article is a polemic against the kind of internalist Jewish history-writing done so magisterially by the likes of Gershom Scholem. Scholem's interpretation of Jewish heresy, and especially of Sabbatianism, presumed an airtight seal around the Jewish community. But not only did Jews accused of heresy absorb ideas from Islam and/or Christianity; the rabbis who accused them of heresy couldn't help but articulate their accusations in terms they shared with the ambient religions.

Hadis Şerh Literatürü I, hadis ilminde önemli bir yer tutan şerh literatürünü karakteristiklerinden şeklî özelliklerine, telif süreçlerinden neşirlerine, karşılıklı etkileşimlerinden örnek şerh uygulamalarına kadar uzanan genişlikte ele alan kapsamlı bir rehber olmak üzere hazırlanmıştır. Eserin amacı bir yandan başlıca şerhlerin içeriğine dair derli toplu bilgi vermek, bir yandan da şerhleri pratik biçimde kullanmak isteyenlerin işini kolaylaştıracak ipuçlarını göstermektir.
Hadis şerhleri üzerine gerçekleştirilmiş geniş kapsamlı bir çalışmanın birinci cildini oluşturan bu eserde Muvatta ve Sahîhayn şerhleri ele alınmıştır. Yaklaşık 300 cilt kitabı ayrıntılı olarak inceleyen, bunun en az iki katı kadar kitap hakkında da genel değerlendirmeler içeren eserde, şerhleri ön kabullerden uzak ve içeriklerini gerçeğe en yakın biçimde yansıtacak tarzda ele almaya azami gayret gösterilmiştir. Burada hadis şerhleri hakkında sunulan bilgiler, İslam entelektüel tarihinin yapı taşlarından biri olan şerh külliyatının anlaşılmasına da ışık tutacaktır.

Osmanlı ve Memlûk Devletleri’nin Anadolu’da vekâlet savaşlarını bırakarak yüz yüze karşılaştıkları, Adana ve Ağaçayırı gibi büyük meydan muharebelerinin yanında irili ufaklı pek çok çatışmanın yaşandığı, 1485-1490 yılları arasında Çukurova bölgesinde gerçekleşen fiili savaşlardan dolayı Beş Yıl Savaşları olarak adlandırdığımız bu süreç; 1490 yılı Ekim ayında başlayan müzakerelerin, İstanbul-Kahire arasındaki uzun mesafe ve diplomasi trafiği sonucu Kahire’den onay alan Osmanlı heyetinin 1491 yılı Ekim ayında İstanbul’a dönüşüyle barış antlaşmasının tasdik edilerek imzalanması ile son bulmuştur. Günümüzden bakıldığında Osmanlı Devleti’nin -1516 Mercidâbık ve 1517 Ridaniye savaşlarıyla- Memlûk Devleti’ne son vermesi sebebiyle sonun belli olduğu ancak devrin şartlarıyla bakıldığında daha farklı bir tablo çizen bu savaş serisinin görünür kazananı Memlûk Devleti olmuştur.

For most of the fourteenth century much of the Muslim world was controlled by four dynasties, the Marinids in the west (1217–1465), the Mamluks in Egypt and Syria (1250–1517), the Ilkhanids in Iran (1256–1335), and the Tughluqs in India (1320–1401). By the end of the century the Timurids (1370–1507) had emerged as dominant in most of the area formerly ruled by the Ilkhanids. This chapter focuses on these dynasties, and in particular on the wealthiest and most active patrons, the Mamluks and Mongols, including their rivalry for prestige.

The Antiochene occultist, littérateur, and professional court intellectual ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Bisṭāmī (d. 858/1454) is best known as someone whose writings influenced Ottoman thought and ideologies of rule during and beyond his lifetime. It is argued here that al-Bisṭāmī’s writings shed important light on Mamlūk intellectual history as well, particularly regarding the rising interest in occultism in the Mamlūk cities of the late-fourteenth and fifteenth centuries—including at the court of the sultan al-Malik al-Ẓāhir Barqūq. Attention is paid to al-Bisṭāmī’s major work on the occult “science of letters and names” (ʿilm al-ḥurūf wa-al-asmāʾ), Shams al-afaq fī ʿilm al-ḥurūf wa-al-awfāq, which is approached as an “encyclopedic” work structurally reflective of major trends in Mamlūk thought and literature despite its seemingly obscure topic. The focus is on al-Bisṭāmī’s account of his initiation into the science of letters and names among various teachers in Cairo, Damascus, and Alexandria, and what this account reveals not only of the bustling occult scene in these cities, but also of broader changes that were afoot in Mamlūk learned society, especially with regard to issues of manuscript culture.

This study presents and intellectual- and literary-historically contextualizes a remarkable but as yet unpublished treatise by Ibn Turka (d. 1432), foremost occult philosopher of Timurid Iran:  the Munāẓara-yi Bazm u Razm.  As its title indicates, this ornate Persian work, written in 1426 in Herat for the Timurid prince-calligrapher Bāysunghur (d. 1433), takes the form of a literary debate, a venerable Arabo-Persian genre that exploded in popularity in the post-Mongol period.  Yet it triply transgresses the bounds of its genre, and doubly marries Arabic-Mamluk literary and imperial culture to Persian-Timurid.  For here Ibn Turka recasts the munāẓara as philosophical romance and the philosophical romance as mirror for princes, imperializing the razm u bazm and sword vs. pen tropes within an expressly lettrist framework, making explicit the logic of the coincidentia oppositorum (majmaʿ al-aḍdād) long implicit in the genre in order to ideologically weaponize it.  For the first time in the centuries-old Arabo-Persian munāẓara tradition, that is, wherein such debates were often rhetorically but never theoretically resolved, Ibn Turka marries multiple opposites in a manner clearly meant to be instructive to his Timurid royal patron:  he is to perform the role of Emperor Love (sulṭān ʿishq), transcendent of all political-legal dualities, avatar of the divine names the Manifest (al-ẓāhir) and the Occult (al-bāṭin).  This lettrist mirror for Timurid princes is thus not simply unprecedented in Persian or indeed Arabic literature, a typical expression of the ornate literary panache and genre-hybridizing proclivities of Mamluk-Timurid-Ottoman scientists of letters, and index of the burgeoning of Ibn ʿArabian-Būnian lettrism in late Mamluk Cairo; it also serves as key to Timurid universalist imperial ideology itself in its formative phase—and consciously epitomizes the principle of contradiction driving Islamicate civilization as a whole. 
        To show the striking extent to which this munāẓara departs from precedent, I provide a brief overview of the sword vs. pen subset of that genre; I then examine our text’s specific political-philosophical and sociocultural contexts, with attention to Naṣīr al-Dīn Ṭūsī’s (d. 1274) Akhlāq-i Nāṣirī and Jalāl al-Dīn Davānī’s (d. 1502) Akhlāq-i Jalālī on the one hand—which seminal Persian mirrors for princes assert, crucially, the ontological-political primacy of love over justice—and the Ẓafarnāma of Sharaf al-Dīn Yazdī (d. 1454), Ibn Turka’s student and friend, on the other.  In the latter, much-imitated history Amir Temür (r. 1370-1405) was definitively transformed, on the basis of astrological and lettrist proofs, into the supreme Lord of Conjunction (ṣāḥib-qirān); most notably, there Yazdī theorizes the Muslim world conqueror as historical manifestation of the coincidentia oppositorum—precisely the project of Ibn Turka in his Debate of Feast and Fight.  But these two ideologues of Timurid universal imperialism and leading members of the New Brethren of Purity network only became such in Mamluk Cairo, where lettrism (ʿilm al-ḥurūf) was first sanctified, de-esotericized and adabized; I accordingly invoke the overtly occultist-neopythagoreanizing ethos specific to the Mamluk capital by the late 14th century, especially that propagated at the court of Barqūq (r. 1382-99).  For it is this Cairene ethos, I argue, that is epitomized by our persophone lettrist’s munāẓara, which it effectively timuridizes.  To demonstrate the robustness of this Mamluk-Timurid ideological-literary continuity, I situate the Munāẓara-yi Bazm u Razm within Ibn Turka’s own oeuvre and imperial ideological program, successively developed for the Timurid rulers Iskandar Sulṭān (r. 1409-14), Shāhrukh (r. 1409-47) and Ulugh Beg (r. 1409-49); marshal three contemporary instances of the sword vs. pen munāẓara, one Timurid and two Mamluk, by the theologian Sayyid Sharīf Jurjānī (d. 1413), the secretary-encyclopedist Aḥmad al-Qalqashandī (d. 1418) and the historian Ibn Khaldūn (d. 1408) respectively; and provide an abridged translation of Ibn Turka’s offering as basis for comparative analysis.

The conference proceedings collect the articles of scholars who during the symposium held in Gorizia on 10 and 11 December 2014, contributed to share the results of the researches and studies dedicated to the architect Antonio Lasciac ( 1856-1946), who for many years worked in Egypt between the  XIXth and XXth century. He was appointed as the chief architect of the Khedivè and refined his knowledge in the stimulating cultural framework of Central Europe architecture. Like his colleague Raimondo D’Aronco who was born in the same northeastern region of Italy, Lasciac worked in the territories which at the time were ruled by the Ottoman Empire: D'Aronco in Istanbul while Lasciac in Cairo and Alexandria.
The presence of medieval Egyptian and Arab architecture in Lasciac’s works is a crucial topic, therefore, the villa he built as its private home on the Rafut’s hills in the native town, represents through the minaret tower a tribute to the priceless Cairene and North African architectural heritage where the great Arab culture flourished.
Nowadays the critical fortunes of Lasciac are ascribable to a renewed approach to the topic of the relationship between Italian and European architecture within the Mediterranean, where the millennial cultural and artistic dialogue between the Western and Arab worlds during the 20th century increased the exchanges through artworks, buildings, and urban settlements. The geographical issue also played a crucial role for Lasciac, as well as for his villa on the Rafut’s hills, which today is located in the nearness of the cross-border territory  between Gorizia Italy and Nova Gorica Slovenia, a region that at the time of its construction belonged to the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
Lasciac’s Villa became the icon of the conference and the astonishing destination of a guided tour held during the sunny afternoon of December 11th amidst the enthusiast scholars who were participating in the conference.  Some of them visited for the first time the building which could be considered the building self-portrait of Lasciac at the same time a cosmopolitan architect, but even a localist one, as his poems in Friulano -  the language spoken in the native village of San Rocco in Gorizia -
confirms.

The building has been studied from the structural point of view in the face of a future anti-seismic renovation by Marjana Lutman and thoroughly investigated by Bernard O'Kane who has analyzed its rich decoration, setting up an accurate series of comparisons with ornaments of Egyptian medieval Arab architecture. Alberto Sdegno focused his contribution to the graphic representation through the transcendent and evanescent models of today's digital tools.
The context of XIXth century  Central European architecture was the theme of Andrea Nerozzi's article, which focused on some Hungarian buildings influenced by eastern and Ottoman art, while Diana Barillari dedicated a broad range overview to many different themes triggered by the evocative concept of "Babel-Bibel".
Alessandra Marin dealt with Gorizia’s urban evolution at the time of Lasciac, while Breda Mihelich illustrated Ljubljana’s planning projects in comparison with other Central European cities. Edino Valcovich reported the evolution of theories and related applications of reinforced concrete between the XIX and XXth century, focusing upon its applications in Egypt and the Rafut’s Villa. In his essay, Ezio Godoli confirmed, on the base of documents and unpublished sources, the authorship of Lasciac concerning the summer residence of Khedivé's mother in Bebek on the Bosphorus, one of the Art Nouveau landmark buildings in Istanbul. Milva Giacomelli traced a refined and well-documented analysis of the modernist elements in the Eclectic buildings designed in the early XXth century by Lasciac in Egypt, with special attention to floral decoration. The connections between the architects who worked in the Habsburg Litorale and a general sight was offered by Bogo Zupancic, who confirmed, too, that Lasciac and Plecnick had a mutual knowledge of their activity in Ljubljana.
Thanks to thorough and systematic research at the State Archive of Gorizia Diego Kuzmin could re-read and illustrate a large series of Lasciac’s early projects, until then completely unpublished, which were realized between 1876 and 1882, the year he left Gorizia to Egypt.
The rediscovery of Anton Lasciac’s work and its consequently international knowledge is primarily due to the French scholar Mercedes Volait, who at the conference held her Lectio magistralis to students of the degree course in Architecture in Gorizia, in the prestigious Assembly Hall of the Faculty, designed in 1908 in the neo-Gothic style by the architect and Benedictine friar Anselmo Werner. Her contribution to the proceedings contains a selection of Lasciac’s drawings kept in her private collection, many unknown and published for the first time in this volume. The proceedings collect only the articles that have been delivered to the editors.

This presentation suggests that this design carried a series of religious meanings when employed within an Islamic context. That the "zigzag" design was "read" in the literal sense, in the combination of the written Arabic numbers 7 and 8 joined together. These, when added together total 15, with these two numbers summed, thereby a repeat design read as representing the repetition of the number 6. The number 6 representing the letter wav meaning "and", as in "and Allah"; and, as also representing the sum of the total number of Sura in the Holy Quran, 1+1+4=6. The repeat of the number 6 being read as both representing and repeating the numerical equivalent of the Name Allah, 66, visually read as zikr, wav=6 +Allah (66), as also reminding of the traditional total number of letters forming the Holy Quran, 6,666. Further, there is the association of this design with light, as it has been employed to represent the reflection of sunlight from the surface of water, as also employed to represent the reflection of light from a polished mirror, as also a design on candlesticks, thereby reminding of the relationship between sun and sunlight and The Light of the Almighty, employed by the designers-nakkaş as a sign, to remind in this temporal world of the nur illahi, of the Light of the Almighty. Hence the use of this design on the Kaba kiswah, on minarets, as on flags and tombs as on tomb coverings etc.

ÖZET Bu bildiri "zikzak" motifinin İslami bağlamda kullanıldığında bir seri dini anlam taşıdığını önermektedir. Motif "metin" olarak okunduğunda Arap rakamları olan 7 ve 8'in birleşiminden oluşur. Bu sayılar toplandığında 15=6 sayısını verir ki Arapça 6 sayısını gösteren şekil aynı zamanda "ve" anlamına gelen "wav" harfinin de şeklidir. "Wav" "ve Allah" olarak okunabileceği gibi, aynı zamanda Kur' an' daki surelerin sayısının da toplamına da işaret eder (1+1+4=6). Allah'ın adının rakamsal ve görsel tekrarı olarak kabul edildiğinde zikzak motifi (wav Allah=66) zikir olarak okunabileceği gibi sayısal olarak tekrarı da Kur' an'ı oluşturan harflerin toplamını (6666) betimliyor olabilir. Öte yandan, zikzak motifinin su yüzeyinden ya da aynadan yansıyan ışığa benzerliğinden yola çıkarak ışıkla bağlantısı da kurulabilir, ki motif şamdanlarda sıklıkla kullanılmıştır. Güneş ile Allah'ın ışığı bağlantısından yola çıkarak, motifin nakkaşlar tarafından geçici dünyada Nur'u İllahi'yi sembolize etmek üzere tercih edildiği önerilebilir. Bu okuma ile desenin Kabe Örtüsünde, minarelerde, sancaklarda ve mezar örtüleri gibi dini bağlamlarda kullanılması açıklanabilir.

The exhibition includes some three hundred objects,
most of them displayed to the public for the first
time, opening up the world of Ibn Battuta, following
the route of his travels (1325-1354) and presenting different
aspects of life with which he came into contact. It
provides a superb opportunity to bring together artistic
objects from very different lands, from Spain
to China, from the Volga to Central Africa, emphasising
not only their individual features but their
common links in the late medieval period.
Items from the Hermitage include ceramics, textiles,
metalwork and glass, architectural details and
coins. Many of them bear inscriptions with the names
of renowned figures, whom Ibn Battuta said he had
met on his travels.
The second participating institution, the Russian
National Library, has loaned more than thirty unique
Muslim (Arabic and Persian), Christian and Hebrew
manuscripts. Through these masterpieces, many of
them exhibited for the first time, we are able to present
the intellectual context, the reading material
and art of the age of Ibn Battuta.
The Mardjani Foundation (Moscow) is the third
participant in the exhibition, lending metal and ceramics
but also unique costumes dating from the
late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. Superbly
preserved, they illustrate the everyday world
of the ruling elite.

This chapter questions the commonly assumed link between political practices of integration and integrity on the one hand – which appear as empirical realities from many sources and studies – and the Syro-Egyptian Sultanate of Cairo (13th-16th centuries) as a dominant, autonomous and imperial historical actor on the other. It problematizes in particular the holistic nature of these assumptions and it identifies their merely descriptive value for understanding the region’s history, and the potentially misleading consequences of their normative character. At the same time, this chapter proposes to reflect further on the powerful idea of the Sultanate as an empire. It actually considers this notion of “empire” as a useful way out of this predicament, because it invites to engage with insights from other fields of historical research and to define valuable analytical tools, including from social network theory, to further and refine current assumptions about and understandings of late medieval Syro-Egyptian political action. Confronting such tools with various cases from the center and the peripheries of that Syro-Egyptian political action, this chapter argues that the imperial appearances of the Syro-Egyptian Sultanate were always constructed in the micro-history of people and their negotiation of particular cultural, socio-economic and political relationships, which were extremely fluid and multivalent, permeable, and continuously organized around the court in Cairo.