IFAO

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.

The third reign of sultan al-Nāṣir Muḥammad is usually seen as a turning point in the political history of the Mamluk sultanate. Coming back to power in 1310, al-Nāṣir Muḥammad found the opportunity to implement economic and institutional reforms enabling him to consolidate and expand his house and his private domain. While during his two previous reigns al-Nāṣir’s authority has been reduced and his power controlled by the leading emirs, from the beginning of his third reign, the sultan managed to establish new practices in the exercise of power, which layed the foundations of a real court society in which the favor of the prince was the main way to promote individual, militaries and civilians. Al-Nāṣir Muḥammad encouraged the lightning rise and the enrichment of powerful civil administrators of the Mamluk state. One of them, Karīm al-Dīn al-Kabīr, intendant of the mamluk domain of the sultan, appears to be a crucial cog of the wheel of al-Nāṣir Muḥammad’s new power. Studying his career, his prerogatives and his relations with the sultan and the Mamluk emirs, the aim of this paper is to enlight the reality of al-Nāṣir’s power, which is usually depicted as absolutist.

The article identifies and interprets significant changes in the designs, script and other visual elements on gold and occasionally silver Islamic coins stuck in Egypt and when appropriate Syria beginning with those minted from the Fatimid era to the end of Ottoman suzerainty in 1914 C.E. For each chronological period interpretations that, in most cases, are not dependent on the ability of the user of the coin to read the engraved text in Arabic script. In all these cases the market or monetary role of the currency was far more important, initially, then their specific political messages, which, while inscribed on the coins were not signaled by visual clues. Over time a new style of coinage in terms of its visual appearance was created by the ruling sultans and it became the new standard.

Après le temps des califats, marqué par des pouvoirs où le leader politique et le chef religieux sont confondus dans la personne du Prince, et avant celui des réformes (les Tanzimat) et de la naissance des États modernes, l’ensemble du monde musulman a connu, entre le Xe et le XVe siècle, l’apparition d’un type de pouvoir particulier, qui, dans certaines contrées, a perduré jusqu’à nos jours : le sultanat. Cette appellation est encore en usage à l’époque moderne, voire contemporaine, ce qui est le signe qu’on ne s’attendra pas à ce que ce terme recouvre une réalité unique.