Hammam al-Fariqani
Here once stood a madrasa and a bathhouse built sometime in the late 1200s or early 1300s by a low-level Mamluk emir, Rukneddin Baybars al-Fariqani. It's completely vanished now, remembered only in the name of the modern mosque in its place (1).
Though the madrasa was never of much significance, the bathhouse was a well-known local landmark. Even more than a century and a half after its builder’s death, if you’re al-Maqrizi or ibn Taghribirdi or any other of the great Mamluk-era chroniclers, “near the Hammam al-Fariqani” is the way you give directions in this neighborhood.
So one day, an itinerant street sheikh entered the hammam. Filthy, he wandered among the patrons asking for alms so he can bathe himself. It’s a blessing to help such holy beggars, so one man gives him a few coins. Another donates the mix of crushed jujube leaves and salt that are used for soap. A merchant offers to scrub his back.
But a few minutes into the scrub, the sheikh jumps up, grabs the merchant by the loincloth and screams, “My money! You took my money!”
Through weeks of begging, he’d managed to collect 300 dirhams, he shouted to everyone in the hammam. He needed it to buy his son’s release from prison. He was just coming in to wash the stink of the streets off himself before going for his son, he wailed. Three hundred dirhams, he’d had it in a blue sack tied with a cord. Now it was gone.
The hammam patrons were stunned. There was no way this merchant was a thief, thought one of the bath attendants, Umar bin Ali. But it was also true that the sheikh had not left the hammam since he entered. Everyone started searching the bathhouse for the sack. Umar looked in one of the private bathing rooms and noticed a bit of paper sticking out of one of the water pipes. He pulled it out and unrolled it. With a cry of joy, he found wrapped inside it a blue sack tied with a cord.
When he brought it out to everyone, the merchant fainted in shock. The merchant then produced a blue sack tied with a cord that he too had just found. Each, they discovered, contained exactly 300 dirhams.
“We were all astounded,” Umar recounted. It was some sort of miracle wrought by this impoverished sheikh _ sacks of silver just appeared around him. The sheikh and the merchant both left satisfied.
Still, Umar wanted to know who the real thief was. His suspicion fell on a young man who worked in the kitchen staff in the Citadel and who frequented the hammam. The next time this kitchen servant showed up, Umar followed him. The man went straight to the private bathing chamber, stuck his hand in the pipe and started rooting around.
Umar burst in. In his surprise, the man’s hand got caught in the pipe. As a crowd gathered, the kitchen servant at first claimed he had hidden a chunk of hashish in the pipe. When they tried to break the pipe to free his hand, a flying bit of its pottery cut him. Bleeding and flustered, he confessed that he had stolen the sheikh’s bag and hid it here to retrieve later.
They let the man go. After all, in the end, nothing had been stolen. Still, Umar said the man’s colleagues in the Citadel kitchens told him he was a master thief. “He was so skillful he could swipe a chunk of meat from a boiling pot and hide it without anyone noticing.”
Umar bin Ali rose to become the manager of the Fariqani bathhouse, and then a number of other bathhouses as well. Now known as Umar al-Hammami, he became a wealthy man. He was also a pious Sufi and was loved for his rich, emotive voice singing poems and praises to God during “hadra” gatherings. He was generous and gave from his wealth to support impoverished ascetics, an example of how tradesmen and merchants made up an important base of the Sufi movement in Egypt.
And sometime before his death in 1418, he told this story from the Hammam al-Fariqani to his friend and neighbor, the historian al-Maqrizi, who in turn included it in his collection of biographies of notable men and women, “Durar al-Uqoud.”
It’s an odd little story, but it gives a charming glimpse into the day-to-day goings-on in a bathhouse, where everyone from merchants to servants to beggars came together, with a whiff of Cairo’s hashish underworld and a glimmer of the magic that surrounded a Sufi ascetic no matter where he went.
(1) Baybars al-Fariqani is rarely mentioned in the histories, but there was one notable thing about him: He wrote poetry.
The Arab literati looked down on the Mamluks who ruled over them as uncultured boors, slave soldiers of foreign, Turkish and Circassian origin who were unversed in the centuries-old Arabic literary heritage. The stereotype is a little unfair, as some emirs became well educated in religious writings and held cultural salons. Still, the intellectual elite could barely imagine the common Mamluk appreciating poetry, much less writing it.
So the chronicler ibn Iyas notes with surprise that Baybars al-Fariqani, while totally illiterate, had a natural poetic talent and could compose meter and rhyme by ear. Ibn Iyas quotes one of Baybars’ poems, written in praise of Sultan al-Nasir Mohammed for his victory over the invading Mongols in Syria in 1303:
“He is the lion who plunges headlong toward death into the furnace of war / He came with Egypt’s army like a storm cloud, their drums like thunder’s roar / The drumbeats rattled the Earth and made tremble the horizons of the world / and, flashing like lightning, their swords sliced through both flesh and bone...”
Ibn Iyas dryly adds that he cites the poem “so the listener can know that some among the Turks were not totally without virtues.”