IFAO

The Rasūlid Sultanate of Yemen (626-858/1229-1454) offers a new but rather singular evidence in the debate on state archives in the Medieval Arabic Lands. The existence of several books of administrative documents voluntarily preserved, constituting an extremely rich set of “Rasulid archives” is here put into perspective with the works written by the rulers themselves. All these archives and royal books aim apparently to replace Yemen, its territory, its products and its people in the horizon of universal knowledge. This paper deals particularly with two distinct types of administrative knowledge: how to describe the Yemeni land and how to identify the men who served the Sultanate? In these two fields, a distinct sultanic language is gradually forged, by borrowing heavily to dominant forms of the astronomical science and the biographical writing.

This paper addresses the theme of Sufi public parading, focusing on a case study of the Wafā’iyya order. Correcting earlier academic characterizations of Sufism as a passive vehicle to be manipulated in the interests of religious or military elites, the agency of Sufi actors is recovered. The peculiar nature of Sufi parading is explored in light of its apparent mimicking of military parades, and an argument is made on aesthetic criteria that identifies it as an independent display of power.

Two magnificent monuments adorn al-Darb al-Aḥmar Street today, both built by al-Sulṭān al-Mu’ayyad Šayḫ. But their present monumentality is just a portion of their original physical entity, when they were founded. The article discusses the original borders of the two structures by information recruited from waqfiyya of al-Mu’ayyad Šayḫ and demonstrates how these two edifices were used by the architects of al Mu’ayyad to control over fifteenth century al-Qāhira’s beating heart, al-Darb al-Aḥmar Street.

Country management being a royal privilege, Mamluk sultans didn’t miss their kingly duty: they fit out their capital and its surroundings. In Cairo particularly, the challenge was quite demanding, as the capital was found on the edges of a lively river, providing each year its uncertain summer flood, but also shifting from one bank to the other at the current’s discretion. In Cairo as in the countryside, the feeder river had to be regulated and controlled to assure safety to its inhabitants as well as to supply them with fresh water all year long. Those two requirements, water supply and security, couldn’t be without a dynamic politics of water management. Regarding the Nile and Cairo, it consisted in digging channels, building and maintaining dykes, dams, levees and aqueducts; an everyday task demanding tremendous and continuous efforts.

As the river bed was shifting more and more westward during medieval times, eroding banks and transporting and depositing its loads along the edges, new banks were progressively created in Cairo. First undetermined swampy unwelcoming lands, they soon became suitable for a human utilization first, then for settlement and urbanization. This is how, at the beginning of the 8th/14th century, a significant piece of “new land” appears along the channel of Cairo (ḫalīǧ). Immediately considerate as a major opportunity for developing Cairo, this land, once dried, stabilized and secured, is leased in long lasting rents by the sultan al-Nāṣir Muḥammad. The story of the process of the sultan’s investment on that urban operation, retraced thanks to his waqf deed, is an excellent source of information about the Mamluk power’s involvement in urban promotion.

Many of the Mamluk turba-s of Cairo’s cemeteries survived because of a process of subversion of the original intention of their founders whereby new meanings and functions were endowed by the users of these funerary complexes, particularly the religious figures living and/or buried there and their followers. This study will investigate the reasons behind the construction of the turba-s of the cemeteries of Cairo, for the choice of the particular formula they followed, and also for the choice of site and location. It will then follow their post-inception history and discuss the reasons for the mutations and subversions they underwent. In doing so, it will argue for a re-assessment of this later history and for its validation as an integral part of the identity of the turba and in some cases, as a decisive factor in its survival.

This essay considers the question of the boundary between the cities in the early Ottoman period (16th-17th century), in the regions conquered from the Mamluk Empire. In this period of tremendous urban growth, the edge of the city was transformed through the creation of new suburbs. This essay considers the resources available to understand the movement of the urban edge, including the study of architectural remains, juridical literature that legislates the limits of the city, as well as narrative sources produced by urban dwellers. These sources each produce different kinds of knowledge about the city, making some aspects of urban transformation better understood than others. This essay addresses the specific kinds of information that can be gleaned from these sources, and it considers how scholars have used such sources in the past and to what effect. Moreover, based on a study of Aleppo, this essay suggests that an original contribution to urban history can be made through a careful utilization of the biographies of saints, a rich resource not often considered for the study of space.

During the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, the Gafsa region, South-West of the Ottoman Regency of Tunis, seemed to know a new era in the relations between the oasis communities and the central government. Various mechanisms were used by the Turkish military-political class to ensure the allegiance of local populations. The ratio of military force was maintained for the center through the permanent presence of a garrison of Turkish asker the Casbah of Gafsa, periodic stays of “Winter Mehalla” in Dār al-Bey, in the city center, and the makhzenisation of the neighboring tribes (Hamama). The establishment of a political and administrative system favored the recovery of some local notables. The collection of taxes by the central government was considered as the necessary price to guarantee public order, security and justice. The legitimization of power was reinforced by the instrumentalization of religion in its various forms. Perceptions of power by the local communities indicate changes in the degree of acceptance. Images, sometimes contradictory, of the power of “al-Turk” especially in the 17th century indicate that the population was torn between the fear of abuse and the expectation of a body that would guarantee security. In the 19th century, new concepts in the local discourse show a change in the perception of the state as a concrete component of the everyday life of the people. The exercise of power can be better understood when studied in terms of convergence of interests and interrelationships.

Far from the urban centers of military and political power, the Mamluk state maintained an unpredictable relationship with local peoples and attempted to exercise power over them in a way that could best be described as “managerial”. In many ways land was the key to the ever-changing power relations within the Mamluk elite and with local society. The complexities of these relationships are illustrated well in the case of the Transjordan, which comprised the eastern frontier.

This paper is concerned with two related phenomena. The first is the centrality of land in Mamluk policies in the Transjordan and the regime’s relations with local peoples. The second addresses the “decline” of the Mamluk state from the perspective of developments in the local agricultural regime, changing relations between producers and the state, and migrations of populations in Jordan, which were driven, in part, by regional political conflict and economic necessity. Adopting an Annaliste perspective on imbedded cycles of change, the rural sphere is interrogated as the locus of contestation and collaboration between ruler and ruled and provides a backdrop for assessing the transformations of the final century of Mamluk rule.

Archival evidence suggests that Muḥammad ʿAlī, shortly after acceding to power in Egypt in 1805, took steps to emancipate political authority from its financial dependence on local notables by creating a broad-based tax levied on different socio-economic groups. This tax was based on economic activity, classified according to estimated profitability and location. There was but a short step between the invention of such a tax obligation and one based solely on individual revenue. Being engaged in a productive activity came to justify paying a portion of one’s revenue to the State – no longer as a forced contribution, but precisely because income-generating employment (especially in the form of salaried government work) could be presented as a privilege granted by the government. A much closer approximation to a pure income tax was instituted around 1855; in the 1860s, massive recruitment into the state apparatus took off once more after a hiatus, and a new law granted government staff a set of social guarantees. The institution of the income tax and its precursors as an expression of state power will provide the focus of this paper.

This paper aims at bringing to light the modest causes that were the talk of Mamluk Cairo around 1450. The former chief Šāfiʿī qāḍī Muḥammad al-Safṭī met with legal troubles after having a brilliant career owing to Sultan Ǧaqmaq’s patronage and falling immediately after into disgrace. Charges were laid against him for debt, extortion or embezzlement of waqf assets. The lawsuits were put forward by the sultan as a pretext to seize the wealth of his former protégé. Such methods were usual in the Mamluk exercising of power. What is less regular is the fact that Sultan Ǧaqmaq strictly remained within the limits of lawfullness. Indeed the sultan secured his ends by laying back the charges, holding courts with the four chief qāḍī-s and playing with the fours maḏhab-s’ competition. Even though he could have exercised discretionary powers or have turned to the maẓālim court, he decided to follow the qāḍī-s’ judicial settlements in order to compromise his former protégé. During the Fifteenth century indeed, the Mamluk power’s acculturation to lawfullness was effective.