For two hundred years Egypt was ruled as a governorate of the Muslim caliphate. As this religious empire evolved, Egypt's affairs were controlled successively from Medina in Arabia, Damascus in Syria, and Baghdad in Iraq. As part of this early Islamic empire Egypt experienced the same metaphysical winds as Iraq, Persia and Spain.
One bitter eastern wind was a sense of disillusion not dissimilar to that which had played an important role in 'opening' (the Arabic metaphor for conquest) Egypt for Islam. The seventh-century Copts had resented an alien Byzantine government whose acts belied the Christian principles which it professed. By the ninth century a similar mood had built up toward a caliphate which had now become not the unknown rebel but the known authority.
In Islam political power proved as agonizing a trap as in Christendom. In a sense Christians were disillusioned less easily, not having been prepared for a kingdom of justice upon earth. In the first three centuries the Church had ben an underground movement in the Roman empire. This buried time had served to impose on the Christian mind a bifocal vision which it was seldom to lose, a vision made easy for Christians by their master's differentiation between what belonged to Caesar and what belonged to God. Even when Caesar became a Christian emperor, an always articulate and often rebellious hierarchy maintained the dual vision. This distinction between secular and sacred (detined to sharpen in a Latin Europe split between Holy Roman Emperor and Pope) was something Christianity gained from its birth in a despised province of the Roman empire.
Islam had experienced an apparently easier birth in its wild Arabian cradle. Though persecuted by the upper-class polytheists of Mecca, Muhammad had managed to establish a state obedient to himself in the northern city of Medina. It was as though Christ, by some miraculous coup d'etat, had seized and exerecised the powers of the Sanhedrin and Pontius Pilate. Muhammad in the last ten years of his life was no mere visionary seer but the day-to-day ruler of a state having powers of life and death over all its members. This Islamic government made no distinction between the sacred and the secular. For instance, the paying of zakat, the alms commanded by the Koran, was a civic duty. It could be enforced by law. A failure to fast in Ramadan could be punished by a governmental flogging. When Muhammad died in 632 his role of Prophet died with him; he bequeathed his other roles to his elderly friend and father-in-law, the pious Abu Bakr.
As caliph (that is, successor) Abu Bakr carried on the work of Muhammad. This was not simply to preach and practice a religion; it was to offer membership in a dynamic new community, a church lacking priests and sacraments but possessing an army and a collective missionary aim. Abu Bakr's greatest achievement in a two-year reign was his reimposition of Islam on a tribal Arabia which at first apostasized (thinking the bond between the tribes and Muhammad merely temporary) on the Prophet's death. The second caliph, Omar, propelled the missionary soldiers of this re-Islamized Arabia into Iraq, Syria, and Egypt.
Thus very early in its apostolic period Islam was forced to confront, and to try to solve, the problems of power. (These had remained theoretical for Christians until Constantine's conversion.) Within a very short time the apostolic charisma was stained with blood. Abu Bakr died in his bed; not so his three succesors. The determined and scrupulous Omar was stabbed while at prayer in the Medina mosque; the dying caliph expressed himself happy that since the assassin was a Persian non-Muslim, he would go, as a martyr, straight to heaven. But the third caliph, the aristocratic Uthman, was murdered by fellow Muslims; they spilled his octogenarian blood over the Koran whose text he had codified. Egypt was involved with the motives of his murderers. The rather weak Uthman was accused of having replaced Amr with a time-serving relative who had adopted Islam only for the opportunities it offered for personal gain.
The fourth caliph, ali, had the most tragic fate of all. No one had been closer to the Prophet. Ali's father, Abu Taleb, had brought up Muhammad in his own house, since Abdulla, Muhammad's father, had died before his birth and Amina, his mother, when he was a child. Ali was one of the first three male Muslims (the first Muslim of all had been Khadija, Muhammad's wife) and was married to Fatima, Muhammad's daughter by Khadija. Fatima bore him two sons, Hassan and Hussein.
Ali embodied to an outstanding degree the arabian ideals of what a man should be: eloquent, open-handed, and brave. Yet his claim to the caliphate had been overlooked by the rough consensus of the Muslim community which elected the first three caliphs. Perhaps the Muslims sensed Ali's unfitness for the role of politician. When in 656 ali was at last elected, those who had hoped that an intimate relative of the Prophet could reknit the fabric of Islam were to be disappointed.
Tragically, Ali owed his election to the murder of Uthman and Uthman belonged to the most powerful single family in Mecca, the Omayyads. this family, though kin to Muhammad, had persecuted Islam when it was struggling to birth and joined it when its cause was triumphant and profitable. Uthman had promoted Omayyads during his caliphate, tilting the balance from the revolutionary toward the conservative. His most brilliant relative was Muawiya, a politician in every fiber, whom he created governor of Damascus. On Uthman's death, Muawiya displayed his uncle's bloodstained robe in the mosque at Damascus and demanded vengeance. He would not recognize Ali as caliph until Ali had punished the murderers of Uthman; if Ali failed, then, Muawiya implied, he must be their accomplice.
Against the shrewd political skills of Muawiya and his ability to call on the support of men like Amr, Ali could at first count on the pious, the poor, and the non-arabian converts, in particular the Persians. He was to lose much of this support when after the battle between his army and the Syrian army of his rival he submitted his claims to arbitration. Muawiya's army had been led by Amr who, facing apparent defeat, thought of a brilliant ruse: his soldiers hoisted copies of the Koran on their lances and called for the arbitrament of God.
Some of Ali's most fervent supporters - those who saw Islam as a community of the saved, not a political organism - attacked him for submitting something as sacred as the imamate (the headship of Islam) to human election. One group of such people planned to solve the problems of divided Islam by arranging three assassinations on one day: of Amr in Egypt, of Muawiya in Damascus, and of Ali in Kufa, his barrack city in Iraq. Only the assassination of Ali succeeded. Power was not firmly in the hands of Muawiya who moved the capital of Islam to Damascus. He founded a hereditary dynasty which in a century was to conquer a vast empire stretching from Spain in the west to Central Asia in the est. During this century Egypt was ruled from Damascus.
But behind the facade of Islamic trimph there was a fundamental split in the minds of Muslims. Many saw in the Omayyads worldly opportunists who simply used Islam to cement a kingdom hardly better than other kingdoms. The fate of Ali's descendants increased resentment. While Hassan renounced his claims to the caliphate in return for a princely stipend and a life of debauchery, Hussein waiated for the death of Muawiya to lead an insurrection against Muawiya's son Yezid. Hussein and most of his family, lured to iraq by misleading promises to support, were massacred after a long ordeal outside the town of Kerbela.
The tragic fate of the Prophet's nearest descendant stirred the imagination of Muslims. Ali had been killrd on his way to ptayer and the grandchild whom Muhammed had dandled on his knee had been decapitated by brother Muslims. As the bright hopes of early Islam were disappointed, as the dream of a new society became simply a new oppression, many Muslims saw in the treatment of Ali's family a basic sin which would continue to smear Islam until a new imam, or infallible guide, was accepted from his descendants. This Shia, or party of Ali particularly attracted Persian Muslims who found that, despite their conversion, they were not treated as the equals of Arabians. The Shia formed a political movement embodying nostalgia for a lost charisma and the dream of a messianic age. its basic tenet was that God would not leave his people without a guide. In every age a descendant of Ali would constitute a divinely inspired imam; when the visible descendants of Ali's line ran out, pious fancy produced the attractive notion of a 'hidden imam,' a Messiah biding his time.
The Shia were to play an important role in molding the climate of opinion in which the Omayyad dynasty was destroyed in AD 750. Emissaries of another Meccan branch of the Prophet's wide-ranging clan, the descendants of his uncle Abbas, used the sympathies of the Shia as well as Persian nationalist resentment at Arabian supremacy to undermine Omayyad control.
The result of widespread disillusion with the Omayyad oligarchy was a military revolt in khorasan led by Abu Muslim, a Persian soldier of genius. The last Omayyad caliph, Marwan, escaped to Egypt. After setting fire to Fustat and the wooden bridge which linked it to Rode Island, he took refuge on the west bank. But the Persian soldiers under an Abbasid general discovered his hiding place and paraded his lopped-off head round the ruined town before sending it back to army headquarters in iraq. Marwan's fate was shared by nearly all his family. Ninety of his relatives, promised an amnesty by an uncle of the new Abbasid caliph, were invited to a banquet and treacherously slaughtered. The corpses were covered with leather mats and the planned banquet enjoyed on top of them. One Omayyad managed to reach Muslim Spain and there start an independent dynasty.
Though Islam was no longer coterminous with the caliphate, Egypt was now ruled by a caliph living in Iraq.
The first Abbasid caliph, al-Saffah ('the Slaughterer'), sent a governor to Egypt with instructions to rebuild the capital, but not on the site of Fustat, which was associated with the Omayyads. Known as Medinat al-Askar, or City of Cantonments, this new capital lay to the north of Amr's town. Its chief building was a large congregational mosque designed to rival Amr's. Each great Islamic city required one large mosque where all the male faithful could gather at noon on Friday to pray together and to hear a sermon from a leading member of the Muslim community. This kind of mosque, known in Arabic as jami, differed from a masjid, from which through Spanish the English word 'mosque' derives, whose basic meaning was 'a place for prostration'; a masjid could be large or small, a humble room in a hospital or barracks, or an impressive shrine. Later mosques were to be associated with education, healing, and death. Universities and schools, hospitals and tombs would enlarge the functions of a building originally intended for prayer.
In their Iraqi capital of Baghdad the Abbasids fused the religious tradition of Arabia with the cultures of ancient Greece and Persia to produce the richest compost of the medieval world. Al-Saffah's brother, al-Mansur, fathered a line of more than thirty caliphs, most of them to be begotton on non-Arabian, usually Persian, wives. Their effectiveness was steadily to diminish after the death of Harun al-Rashid (AD 809), the contemporary of Charlemagne and his superior in resources and culture. The Abbasids were not be banish the sense of disillusion which had brought them to power.
One reason for the gradual Abbasid decline was the way they teated their original supporters. Abu Muslim, who had put the Slaughterer on his throne, was murdered during an interview with his successor, al-Mansur. The Shia were persecuted even more thoroughly than under the Omayyads. Provinces of the empire were neglected.
In Cairo the canal that in Amr's time had ferried the cereals of Egypt to Arabia had fallen into disrepair, but it was still usable in late Omayyad times. Al-Mansur, the founder of Baghdad, closed it in AD 765 in order to spite some temporary enemies in Arabia. Thereafter the canal was merely to serve as an artery for the capital.
Abbasid treatment of their subjects - dictatorial and conspiratorial at once - undermined the bonds of trust between rulers and ruled. Arabian armies had already been discarded in favor of Persian; but since many Persians supported the Shia, they too wree found unsuitable props for the Abbasid throne. Once again the problem of power, and once again an unsatisfactory solution.
This time the solution was a time bomb in the Arabic-speaking empire. To protect their interests the Abbasids relied on a new element in the Middle East: Turkish-speaking nomads who arrived in steady waves from central Asia. The Turks brought little but their ponies and ornamented saddles; their religion was an animism lightly overlaid by borrowing from the China on whose western borders they had roamed. They were robustly built, devoted to fighting, and comparatively loyal. They were ready to sell their talents to whoever would pay. Absorbed into the culture of the caliphate, they became stalward champions of orthodox - that is, non-Shiite - Islam. They were loyal to the Abbasid caliphs until, scenting their power, they preferred that the caliphs should be loyal to them. The slave became the master, the buyer the bought. The first large-scale buyer of Turks was the caliph Motassim, Harun al-Rashid's grandson. His burly praetorians began to quarrel with the citizens of Baghdad. The caliph decided on a bold move: he would transfer his capital sixty miles upriver from Baghdad. At Samarra he founded the largest metroppolis since imperial Rome. Once again Egypt ahd a new foreign capital.
The gigantic Friday mosque, the chief monument to have survived from Samarra, symbolized the new situation in the caliphate - a situation to be mirrored in the provinces. The mosque was constructed so that sixty thousand soldiers could pray at once. Samarra depended entirely on these Turkish guards. To pay them (their upkeep cost two hundred million dirhams a year, or twice the yield of the land tax) and to sate the ambitions of their officers, the caliph and his weaker successors turned Islam into a feudal emipre of farmed-out fiefs.
Egypt was one of these fiefs. It was offered, in 868, to a Turk named Bayikbey whom the caliph feared and wished to remove. (He soon had him murdered, in a gallant but ineffectual effort to stem the Turkish flood.) To farm the fief Bayikbey sent his son-in-law, Ahmed, to govern Egypt. Ahmed was the son of Tulun, a Turkish slave who had been sold to Baghdad and had risen to a leading position in the military establishment; he had displayed an unusual passion for Islamic learning which he bequeathed to his son. ahmed (known to history as Ibn Tulun, the son of Tulun) was thirty-three when he arrived in Egypt.
The country had changed in structure and spirit since Amr's days. Physically, there was the new provincial capital of Medinat al-Askar. In building this second Islamic capital the Abbasids had hit upon the rule of all who have built on the east bank of the Nile: new cities must always be constructed to the north of the old. Practical reasons prompted this instinctive policy. Since the dominant wind was from the north, whoever built on the northern side of inhabited areas avoided their smells and dust. Fustat in any case had disadvantages. The nearby hills shut it off from eastern breezes; high floods submerged its low-lying land; giant mosquitoes haunted its marshes and pools.
More important than the physical changes were the spiritual.
The bright dawn of cooperation between the Muslims and their Coptic neighbors had soured in the tax collector's harsh noon light. the needs of the empire (in particular those of the Turkish praetorians) had made taxes onerous. Monks, for example, were no longer exempt from the poll tax; a man sworn to poverty found money hard to raise. The documents of state were now kept in Arabic; the administration of justice and the collection of taxes were largely in Muslim hands. Constant revolts by the still Coptic majority ahd inspired the Omayyads to encourage Arabian settlers to move into Egypt to strengthen the Muslim element. The Abbasids, more ruthless than the Omayyads, had resorted to periodic massacres.
Ibn tulun, sensing the mood of disillusion, aware of the caliph's weakness, decided to turn this fief into an independent state. (He was to wrest syria from Abbasid control as well.) To show that his regime marked a decisive change he decided in his turn to build a new capital. he followed Abbasid precedent and chose a site a little to the north of Medinat al-Askar, extending from the hillock of Jebel Yashkur (where he planned his mosque) to the rocky spur of the Mokattam, on which he built his 'Dome of the Air,' a place in which to escape the stuffy atmosphere of the summer city. He built an aqueduct (the first of which we have record) to bring water to his palace from the fresh springs south of the city. His city was known as al-Katai, or 'the Wards,' since it was divided into separate areas for various military contingents.
Ibn Tulun's roots in central Asia contributed little except his physical stamina and appearance. his cultural formation had been in the grandiose metropolis of Samarra. Something of this vanished capital was transplanted from the banks of the Tigris to the proximity of the Nile; its aroma survives in the written reports of Ibn Tulun's capital:
The Meydan, where Ahmed and his captains played mall or polo, became the favorite resort of the town, and if one asked somebody where he was going the answer was sure to be "To the Meydan." It was entered by a number of gates, restricted to special classes, such as the Gate of the Nobles, the Gate of the Harim, or named after some peculiarity, as the Gate of Lions, which was surmounted by two lions in plaster, the Sag Gate, made of teak, the Gate of al-Darmun, so called because a huge black chamberlain of that name mounted guard there. Only Ahmed himself could ride through the central arch of the great triple gate: his 30,000 troops passed through the side arches.
With Ibn Tulun's passion for physical exercise went the administratie genius of the early Turks. (The Ottomans, more Balkan than Turkish, were to distort the reputation of the Turks, who in Egypt and Anatolia left magnificent public buildings as traces of considerable states.) He ruled justly and reduced taxation. At the same time he had the ruthlessness of a despot. "In sickness the fierce emir was a terror to his doctors. He refused to follow their orders, flouted their prescribed diet, and when he found himself still sinking, he had their heads chopped off, or flogged them till they died."
His son Khomaruya had tastes of the kind which such eighteenth-century writers as Voltaire and Beckford were to evoke in their 'Oriental' tales.
He enlarged the palace and turned the Meydan into a garden, which he planted with rare trees and exquisite roses. The stems of the trees were thought unsightly and he coated them with sheets of copper gilt, between which the trunk leaden pipes supplied water, not only to the trees, but to the canals and fountains that irrigated the garden by means of water wheels. There were beds of basil carefully cut out to formal patterns, red, blue, and yellow water lilies and gilliflowers, exotic plants from all countries, apricots grafted upon almond trees, and various horticultural experiments. A pigeon tower in the midst was stocked with turtledoves, wood pigeons, and all sorts of birds of rich plumage or sweet song, who made a cheerful concert as they perched on the ladders set against the walls or skimmed over the ponds and rivulets. In the palace he adorned the walls of his 'Golden House' with gold and ultramarine, and there set up his statue and those of his wives in heroic size, admirably carved in wood, and painted and dressed to the life with gold crowns and jeweled ears and turbans. In front of the palace he laid out a lake of quicksilver, by the advice of his physician who recommended it as a cure for his lord's insomnia. It was fifty cubits each way and cost immense sums. Here the prince lay on an air bed, linked by silk cords to silver columns at the margin, and as he rocked and courted sleep his blue-eyed lion Zureyk faithfully guarded his master.
Khomaruya was able to support these expenses on an empire (conceded to him as a viceroyalty by the caliph) which stretched from Cyrenaica in the west to the Euphrates in the east. He married the caliph's daughter with as much expense as pomp.
But Tulunid Egypt did not survive the third generation. Khomaruya died in 896 and was succeeded by his fourteen-year-old son, whose name meant 'Father of the Soldiers of the Army.' The soldiers did for their adolescent father after an incompetent reign of six months. His brother Harun lasted six years before he too was murdered. By 905 an Abbasid army had regained control of Egypt.
The extravagant palaces of ibn Tulun and his family, flimsily built and unrespected, perished in the vengeful reconquest. What has survived to commemorate a man whose practical skill went with a love of learning and art is the largest mosque in the Egyptian capital. This building, being dedicated to God, survived the hammers of vandals.
Ibn Tulun's congregational mosque was the third to be built in Islamic Egypt. Of the first, the mosque of Amr, much survives, but it is not what Amr built. Of the second, the Abbasid mosque, nothing survives. Though the minaret has been remodeled and the great ablution fountain in the courtyard added, Ibn Tulun's mosque is substantially the same as when he completed it.
Ibn Tulun was determined to endow his city with a mosque worthy of an independent capital. For this purpose he employed a Christian architect (probably from Samarra) and expended 120,000 gold dinars. He obtained the money by no longer sending tribute to the caliph; he accounted for it to his people by claiming that he had discovered buried treasure - an escuse to be copied by later builders of costly buildings. The work was started in 877, according to one account, and was opened for prayers, as is shown by a commemorative inscription, in May 879.
The result is an architectural masterpiece which combines grandeur with tranquillity, majesty of conception with delicacy of detail. The influence of Iraq is pervasive. Ahmed and his father had worshiped in the Friday Mosque of Samarra, the grandiosity of whose containing walls looked back to the temples of the Babylonians. The first pre-Islamic feature of Ibn Tulun's mosque is the ziyada, or extension, which encloses external space on three sides of the mosque itself. (The fourth side, facing Mecca, was occupied by an administrative palace with a door giving onto the mosque.) This empty space removes the mosque from too close inimacy with the surrounding houses and corresponds to the sacred precincts of ancient Semitic sanctuaries. Ibn Tulun's cavalry may have used these vast enclosures to tether their steeds; the ziyadas were later used as bazaars; they are now cleared and provide an impressive approach to the mosque. "One mounts a slope to reach its doors, a few steps to enter the ziyada, and from the ziyada by another flight of steps to the mosque proper. This successive rise in levels recalls the Palace of Bulkuwara at Samarra." But the most vivid recollection of Iraq is the minaret. In Ibn Tulun's time the minaret was still a rudimentary form. The earliest minarets had probably been wooden platforms from which the muezzin summoned the faithful to their prayers; the pharos of Alexandria (which lasted until its destruction by an earthquake in the thirtenth century) may have suggested the tower form, since the Arabic word minara (the origin of minaret) means a place of flames, or lighthouse. The architects of the Samarra mosque had not imitated the pharos. They had instead created a giant spiral minaret which echoed, in a more elegant form, the tiered ziggurats (such as Aga Guf) which still puncture the Iraqi skyline and which in the ninth century were less eroded than they are today. A probably mythical tale accounts for the spiral shape of Ibn Tulun's minaret. The ruler, an impatient man who hated idle actions, was caught out in conference twisting a piece of paper into a spiral form. "Build me a minaret like that," he is supposed to have said, covering up his idle act. More likely he ordered his architect to build a helicoidal structure in the Samarra style. Later repairs have obscured the original design.
Echoes of Iraq haunt but do not distort a work of art which shows that Islamic architecture has come of age. The mosque proper consists of a courtyard, almost perfectly square, 302 feet long on each side, surrounded on all four sides by porticoes (or riwaqs), two aisles deep on three sides, five aisles deep on the side where the prayer niche points toward Mecca. The aisles which provide the worshipers with shade (and places of study or rest for the students and ascetics who in mosques have always found a home) are not formed from purloined Pharaonic or Coptic pillars. The whole mosque is build of red brick and this brickwork is covered with stucco that is, on the piers of the aisles, molded into pillar shapes, each surmounted with late Corinthian capitals (still in stucco) where vine leaves of Samarran decoration have replaced the classical acanthus. The soffits, or undersides of the arches, are decorated with exquisite friezes of formalized plant design.
That this great mosque has survived at all is one of the miracles of Cairo; that it has ben so frequently restored but not reshaped has made it perhaps the greatest possession of a city that possesses so much. It is significant that this aesthetic achievement was the product of the first independent dynasty in Egypt since the death of Cleopatra.