HIKR al-KHAZEN
or
al-KHAZEN’S DISTRICT
This is the sabil-kuttab of Ahmed Effendi Selim, built around 1700 during Ottoman rule. Ahmed Effendi Selim was the head of the Ashraf, or the Descendants of the Prophet Mohammed.
But we’re not here for him. Instead, we want to go back a good four centuries before that.
Stand with the Sabil-Kuttab on your right, with your back to Madrasa of Azbak al-Yusufi. Everything in front of you and to your left and right in the late 1200s was a garden, lining the banks of Birket el-Fil Lake.
In 1296, the Mamluk Sultan al-Adel Katbugha cleared the gardens and turned the area into a polo ground. 1296 was a particularly horrific year: Cairo was struck simultaneously by an outbreak of the plague that killed hundreds a day and by a wave of inflation that left the poor starving, unable to afford bread. Chroniclers of the time write of mass graves outside the gates of Cairo and people eating dogs and cats to survive, or even resorting to cannibalism _ roasting the body parts with a touch of lemon, salt and vinegar, as one recounts.
Sultan Katbugha didn’t want all this to get in the way of his polo, but he was worried about unrest. That was why he built his polo grounds here. It was closer to the Citadel than the old one, located in what is today Bab el-Louq, so he could reach it with less exposure to the public. Still, the people harassed him. As he passed on his way to play, he had to suffer the commoners chanting at him, “Too much, plague and high prices/ One of you to wreck us suffices!”
Mamluk glass flask depicting polo players, c 1300.
Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Museum für Islamische Kunst / Johannes Kramer
Katbugha was soon killed in the to-and-fro of Mamluk power struggles. The plague and the bout of inflation eventually passed.
For the next decade, this area was abandoned and left to deteriorate, until Sultan al-Nasir Mohammed zoned it for housing construction. The first to build his home here was Emir Sanjar al-Khazen, sometime in the 1310s. Other emirs followed, and soon these blocks in every direction were built up with manors, creating one of the most beautiful neighborhoods in Cairo.
And so it became known as Hikr al-Khazen, or al-Khazen’s District.
The approximate extent of Hikr al-Khazen in Mamluk times, using the 1809 map from Description de l’Egypte
The same area today
At the time, al-Khazen was the governor of Cairo, a post tasked with keeping order in the city and maintaining public works. By all accounts, he was well liked by the people. He was intelligent, good tempered and not cruel. He purged officials considered oppressive.
He was also clever. One day, a Mamluk soldier came to al-Khazen to complain that his wife was cheating on him and demanded the governor take action against his wife’s lover. Al-Khazen’s men went to the lover’s house to arrest him, only to discover that he was a prominent judge. This put the governor in a spot. You don’t go around arresting judges.
So al-Khazen takes a thief who was already sitting in prison and dresses him as a judge, complete with the turban and the robes with long, wide sleeves known as the farjiyya. He hauls the culprit out in front of the offended Mamluk. “Shame on you!” al-Khazen shouts at the pseudo-judge. “A man of your caliber? You’re supposed to rule over morals and virtue, yet here you are despoiling the women of the sultan’s mamluks.” The pseudo-judge pleads extravagantly for mercy, weeping, “I sinned, milord, please pardon me!”
Throughout this whole piece of theater, the Mamluk is peering at the man suspiciously. “Emir, this is not the right man,” he protests to al-Khazen, speaking in his native Turkish.
“Sure it is!” al-Khazen replies. “Don’t be embarrassed! This is him.” Al-Khazen then offers to take the “judge” up to the sultan for punishment, “though that will mean you and your wife will be scandalized in front of all your comrades, but anyway....”
Worried over his reputation, the Mamluk drops the matter, after giving the “lover” a sound thrashing. (The chroniclers don’t say, but I like to think the thief was released for his troubles.)
Clever as al-Khazen may be, this little episode, related by a historian of the time, Moussa al-Yusufi, may seem questionable on the whole “justice” front. Al-Khazen, after all, is covering up for a corrupt and hypocritical judge.
But the story has a different purpose: to mock Egypt’s Mamluk overlords.
After all, the Mamluks were “foreign” rulers, Kipjak Turks and Circassians dominating a largely Arab population. Many of the Arab historians are contemptuous of the Mamluks, depicting them as corrupt and cruel, ignorant, barely able to speak Arabic and bad Muslims to boot. In this anecdote, the historian al-Yusufi clearly delights in making a fool out of this brutish Mamluk cuckold who speaks only Turkish.
Sarcasm and satire were one way the common people made their voices heard in the autocratic system run by the Mamluk military elite. The vast majority of the population, from rural peasants to urban workers, craftsmen and merchants, were excluded from any say in power, so they had to influence it from the outside. They might do this through petitions to the sultan or through personal connections with senior emirs, palace bureaucrats or members of the religious elite.
Or they might stage protests or descend into the streets for outright riots.
Al-Khazen, our Cairo governor, fell from favor because of one such protest.
It was prompted by the state’s attempts to manage the currency. The value of the copper “fals,” the smallest unit of Mamluk coinage, had plummeted because counterfeiters forged the coins with a lower percentage of copper. Authorities tried to prop it up by requiring merchants to trade it at a higher value. Cairo’s merchants protested by refusing to accept the fals. Markets came to a standstill.
A copper fals from the era of Sultan al-Nasir Mohammed © The Trustees of the British Museum
The sultan, al-Nasir Mohammed, blamed al-Khazen for not forcing merchants to deal in the coin. Al-Nasir Mohammed “generally held the people in contempt,” the historian al-Maqrizi writes. “He felt al-Khazen was too soft and so pushed him to clamp down and make an example of some.”
When al-Khazen didn’t come through, the sultan removed him. His replacement, Emir Qadaydar, was ruthless. First, he summoned all the bakers and bread sellers. He had some of them beaten. Others he nailed onto the doors of their shops. He proclaimed throughout the markets that whoever refused to deal in the fils would face the same fate. Just to add to the terror, Qadaydar brought inmates out of prison, chopped them in half and hung their body parts from Bab Zuweila.
He then turned to enforcing some good old-fashioned morality. He forced porters to report anyone ordering shipments of grapes, a sign of secret winemaking. Everyone rushed to pour out their jugs of wine. He raided Bab el-Louq, a neighborhood notorious for its decadence, and confiscated a large amount of hashish, which he then burned at Bab Zuweila.
The people hated him. In the streets, they shouted at passing emirs, “Lift this oppression. Bring back al-Khazen.”
This only delighted the sultan. “The people don’t fear even God. They only fear an oppressor,” he said.
Given free rein by the sultan, Qadaydar only got worse. His men raided houses, hunting for wine or any sort of wrongdoing. He banned people from leaving their homes after nightfall. His thugs patrolled the streets, banging drums to mark the beginning of curfew and slipping threatening notes under the doors of potential troublemakers.
Cairo at night became a ghost town, and commerce stopped again. Since this was exactly what the crackdown had been intended to prevent, the sultan finally removed Qadaydar in 1329.
Outbreaks of public protest increased throughout the 1400s. The century was a time of considerable social flux in the sultanate. Multiple waves of the plague had decimated the population, agricultural lands became less productive, foreign powers limited the sultanate’s access to gold and silver. Successive sultans resorted to new measures to raise funds, taking control over the spice trade, imposing new impromptu taxes and levies and confiscating wealth.
Commoners became more assertive in raising their voices, whether through alliances with senior emirs and court officials or by protests.
For the chroniclers of the time, who all belonged to either the Mamluk military elite or to the educated religious classes, this public restiveness was a disaster, a sign of the sultanate’s decline, the corruption of values and the spread of instability.
But present-day scholar Amina Elbendary writes that these protests “were sophisticated acts of negotiation.”
Sometimes successfully, sometimes not, commoners worked to change their rulers’ policies, particularly to ease or reverse taxes or other economic burdens. The result was “a pre-modern, non-institutionalized form of power sharing and political participation,” Elbendary writes in her book “Crowds and Sultans in Late Medieval Egypt and Syria.”
The court officials in charge of finances often bore the brunt of public anger. Stone-throwing mobs repeatedly forced them to take refuge in their palaces or in the Citadel, or to run into hiding.
Their wrath could be brutal.
In August 1449, people turned out in a giant mob all the way from Bab Zuweila to the Citadel, crying out for relief from high prices and taxes and shouting insults at their leaders. One of the most hated financial officials, Abu’l-Khair al-Nahhas, happened to ride by on his way to the Citadel and the people descended on him, throwing stones and shouting obscenities.
Al-Nahhas fled into the alleys of Darb el-Ahmar, where someone managed to knock him off his horse. He took refuge in an emir’s mansion nearby, but the crowd swarmed in. They beat him and stripped off his clothes down to the boots. “Put him on a donkey and parade him naked!” some shouted. Some just wanted to kill him on the spot. It likely would have been the end for him, if a group of emirs hadn’t rescued him, pulling him to safety, naked, bruised and bleeding.
The religious establishment often served as mediators between rulers and a restive public. Top qadis might intercede with the sultan to soften taxes seen as too painful for the people, or a sultan might send a cleric to try to mollify unrest.
Closer to the streets, popular holy men and Sufi preachers could serve as vehicles to express the people’s anger.
For example, Ali ibn al-Faysi, the chief market inspector, one day found two Sufi acolytes waiting on the doorstep of his home. The two acolytes presented him with a heavy chain and a lock and informed him that their master, Sufi preacher Sheikh al-Saffari, had ordered them to hang it around his neck. Somewhat apologetically, they added that they didn’t dare disobey their sheikh.
Furious, ibn al-Faysi had the two thrown into prison. Market inspectors were tasked with enforcing regulations and collecting taxes in the souq. So when they were bad, it raised public anger; and ibn al-Faysi, we’re told, was among the worst, letting corruption run wild in the markets even as he strong-armed money from the merchants.
Soldiers went to arrest Sheikh al-Saffari, who preached in the Amr ibn al-As Mosque. They found him there, surrounded by a large crowd of devotees. When they moved to seize him, the sheikh started babbling in a fit of divine madness and proclaimed: “In 19 days, we will be relieved of this sultan!” The troops — perhaps spooked by his divinely inspired ranting, by the boldness of his prediction or by his mob of supporters — decided he was insane and left him alone.
For the next 19 days, everyone waited to see if the sultan would die as the sheikh had foretold.
And his vision was indeed fulfilled. On the 19th day, al-Saffari dropped dead, gaining eternal relief from the sultan’s oppression.
The causes of protest were many and varied. Particularly infuriating to craftsmen and merchants were the so-called “tarh,” when the sultan forced them to buy their raw materials from the state at inflated prices.
Elbendary points to a protest by shoemakers on Saliba Street when authorities forced them to buy leather from the state at twice the market rate. The protesters massed on a hill overlooking the Citadel, where they were visible to the sultan as he held court, and they shouted their complaints and chants down to him. The sultan ordered the forced sale lifted.
Problems with the currency frequently caused unrest.
In 1457, Sultan Inal found that the dirhams issued under his rule were widely diluted; some were as low as 35% silver. He ordered the use of all these dirhams halted and announced he would mint new, 95% silver dirhams.
Silver dirham (front and back) minted by Sultan Inal. Source: American Numismatic Society
Merchants panicked at the prospect of their dirham holdings now becoming worthless. They shut down the markets in protest. In the streets, they mocked the sultan with little rhymes, “Inal took the coins from your pocket / so go take a sugar cane and suck it.”
Inal backed down. But a few weeks later, he tried again, announcing a fixed value for the old dirhams lower than that of the new dirhams he would produce. People were furious. Outside the Citadel, they stoned the Supervisor of the Sultan’s Purse. Unknown to the public, this supervisor was in fact responsible for the whole crisis, because he had secretly had the dirhams diluted with base metals to preserve the sultan’s dwindling stocks of silver, according to one chronicler of the era, the religious scholar Ibrahim al-Biqai.
The crowds were unstoppable. They rampaged up and down Saliba Street. The sultan’s son happened to be descending from the Citadel in a procession to his palace not far from here (formerly the Palace of Baktamur al-Saqi). Protesters swarmed around him, shouting slogans and insults.
Al-Biqai, who was contemptuous of the protesters, writes that at this point the sultan should have stuck by his decree and implemented it by force. Instead, Inal relented. Heralds went out into markets proclaiming all dirhams would be priced the same.
The protesters, flush with victory, led the heralds around the city, dictating to them what to announce.
For al-Biqai, it was like the world had turned upside down.
“It was a day the people had never seen before,” he writes. “The rabble overcame their rulers.”