The Khanqah of Aydakin & The Zawiyah of Sheikh al-Abbar
The great Ottoman travel writer Evliya Celebi loved Sufi holy men. So when he came to Cairo in the late 1600s, he made sure to tour a number of Sufi lodges and zawiyahs, the little local mosques where popular sheikhs preached and taught their devotees.
Among them was this site, the Zawiyah of Sheikh Ahmed Zein al-Abideen al-Abbar.
Sheikh al-Abbar, he writes, was one of the great “saliheen,” or holy men. He was turned inward away from the world and almost never stepped outside his zawiyah, where he lived a life devoted to fasting, prayer and asceticism.
But within his internal world, he clearly gained insights into the external one.
As they sat together, Sheikh al-Abbar asked Celebi, “What is the pasha up to?” referring to the Ottoman governor of Egypt at the moment, Deftardar Ahmed Pasha.
Celebi answered him, but the sheikh seemed uninterested. Instead, he mused, “I wonder, will he say hello to us when he passes by in three days?”
At this, the sheikh’s disciples protested. The pasha isn’t welcome here, they cried. They shouted insults against the governor and said he hates Sufis and dervishes.
Sheikh al-Abbar quieted them.
“One of God’s mercies to Egypt,” he told them, “is that the harmful locust never stays long but dies. And so the harmful man doesn’t stay long either. Those who cause turmoil day and night don’t last.”
Ahmed Pasha had arrived from Istanbul only a few months earlier to take up his post in the Citadel. He was tasked with carrying out reforms to diminish the power of Egypt’s local elites and centralize authority back in Istanbul’s hands. Over the years, the province had gotten too independent: Mamluk beys had grown in power, and Ottoman military regiments based in Egypt, like the Janissaries, had cozied up to local merchant families, creating their own centers of economic power. Ahmed Pasha set about culling the ranks of the regiments, imposed new taxes and took steps to prevent the beys from siphoning off taxes meant for Istanbul (1).
Al-Abbar’s disciples may have been echoing the discontent at Ahmed Pasha’s reforms felt by Cairo’s merchants and artisans, who were important patrons of Sufis.
In any case, exactly three days later, on February 5, 1676, the Janissaries and other soldiers rioted against the governor.
They massed in the square outside the Citadel “like a sea of pounding waves,” Celebi writes. They got hold of one of the governor’s top financial aides and beheaded him on the spot. Then they pulled Ahmed Pasha out of the Citadel, forced him to sign his own ouster and marched him down Saliba Street toward prison.
As he was dragged by, Ahmed Pasha saw the followers of Sheikh al-Abbar in the crowds watching.
“Give my greetings to Sheikh al-Abbar!” he called out to them. “How is he?”
And thus the sheikh’s prophesy was fulfilled.
As was often the case in the Ottoman Era, Sheikh al-Abbar had set up his zawiyah inside the remains of a much older monument. This one was nearly four centuries old by the time the sheikh moved in: the Khanqah of Emir Aydakin al-Bunduqdar (2).
A khanqah is a lodge where Sufis live and practice. Aydakin built his not long before his death in 1285, and he included in it his domed mausoleum, so he could be buried among Sufis praying to God constantly for his soul’s sake. At the time, this area south of el-Qahira’s city walls was little developed, and Aydakin’s khanqah sat among gardens and pavilions surrounding Birket el-Fil Lake. Behind it rose a green slope where the cattle that powered the Citadel’s waterwheels grazed. Here, the ascetics lived in a peaceful, semi-rural outpost, until the early 1300s when the craze of building caught up to this area.
Today, it’s the oldest monument on this stretch of street and is the oldest surviving khanqah in Cairo.
But it’s a puzzling monument. Hunched on the street corner, its structure is elusive; the more you look at it, the less sense it makes. Where is the monument? What of this is monument?
The dome containing Aydakin’s tomb, visible from the street, is clear enough. But what is it connected to? Around it, one wall sags. Its old stones tumble out, exposing the rubble filling inside like an embarrassing glimpse of underwear. Electrical boxes totter at its feet. The top story is a jumble of broken walls, veins of rich old brick, random parapets and wooden bridges to nowhere. Nothing connects to a function. Nothing defines a space inside. It’s not clear how to go in, or even what one would go into. A stumpy palm tree hides a sunken door that struggles to keep its head above the rising pavement. Is that the main door? Or would that be the other door, standing smug and unhelpful next to it?
Let’s break down what we’re looking at here:
The dome and part of the front wall (the part behind the palm tree) were probably all that was left of Aydakin’s khanqah by the time Sheikh al-Abbar came around. The sheikh then built his zawiyah in a space squeezed between the dome and the gigantic neighboring Palace of Emir Taz. On the street corner on the other side of the dome, a residential house was built sometime in the late 1800s. Over time, its stones like roots and tendrils intertwined with the rest.
Photo montage showing the components of the site. The remains of Aydakin’s khanqah are in yellow; the 19th century building is in white; the green is the entrance to Sheikh al-Abbar’s zawiya, and the pink part is connected to the Palace of Emir Taz.
The residential house was relatively new when, in 1901, a team from the Comité (the agency set up by Egypt’s khedive to document and restore the country’s Islamic and Christian monuments) came to inspect the Zawiyah of Sheikh al-Abbar. At the time, the house’s second floor had completely enveloped Aydakin’s dome, hiding it from view, and the team was overjoyed to discover what it called an “unknown tomb.” The Comité drew up plans to do preservation work and clear away parts of the “dilapidated modern edifice.”
But it couldn’t do anything because of a legal dispute. It seems the zawiyah had stayed in the hands of Sheikh al-Abbar’s family for the past two centuries, and one of his descendants, Abdel-Khaleq al-Abbar, had sued the Waqf Department to confirm his management of the site. The court battle took more than a decade until finally Abdel-Khaleq won, and the Comité signed a deal with him on renovations.
By this time, the Comité had scaled back its plans and reduced the work’s budget (from 135 Egyptian pounds to 45). In 1912, it removed the wall obscuring Aydakin’s dome from the street and carried out some preservation work. But it did little else.
As a result, unlike many other monuments where the Comité did extensive repairs and cleared away encroachments, this was left a hodgepodge. It’s an accumulation. Different eras pile onto and within each other. Cohesion is lost as multiple hands over the centuries shape the space. But in the process, it has taken on a different, ramshackle beauty. The layers of time themselves are the monument.
Part of what makes Cairo’s old city so distinctive, what gives it its rich texture, is that it feels lived in. Its monuments are not pristine and detached. They have context. And further context grows up around them over time. Too often that is seen as ugly and messy, and the instinct in renovations is to clean it up. But cleaning up goes to far into sterilizing. Strip away the layers and you’re left with a lifeless, bland museum piece.
The accumulation of layers around the Khanqah of Aydakin has created a sort of warp where the exterior and interior are disconnected; the dimensions and shape of one have nothing to do with the other. Like an Escher drawing, you step through the entrance of one building but enter an entirely different building somehow hidden inside.
The door to the right of the dome leads to a narrow stone passage that leaves the street behind. Aydakin’s dome, so prominent outside, is nowhere to be found. (In fact, it’s behind the wooden door on the left side of the passage and has recently undergone a very nice renovation.)
At the end of the passage, the space opens up unexpectedly into al-Abbar’s zawiyah, dim and secret. Dust shimmers in the shafts of light from the wooden skylight. Here among the stone arches is where Celebi sat with Sheikh al-Abbar, surrounded by his followers.
There’s another door off to the left, and if you wander out it, you find yourself at the mosque washrooms.
Here you would probably turn back because there’s no indication of the surprise at the far end of the passage.
Tucked around the corner, invisible to the outside world, stands a second dome. This is the dome of Aydakin’s daughter. At some point, she had it built onto her father’s khanqah to house her own tomb. (3).
The dome’s isolation meant the beautiful detail of its plaster work was largely preserved. Geometric and floral patterns run around the dome’s windows under an intricate calligraphy band. This is the Quran’s Verse of the Throne, with its reassuring message of an omnipotent God who keeps the universe in working order: “Allah! There is no god but Him, the Ever-living, the All-Sustaining. Neither drowsiness nor sleep overtakes him ... His throne encompasses the heavens and the earth, and He never tires of preserving them.”
This is what is wondrous and unique about Cairo’s historic fabric, where generations have been adding history on top of history: Follow a secret passage and you can find a 700-year-old masterwork of Islamic design, hidden behind the bathrooms.
The domed tomb of Emir Aydakin’s daughter
The calligraphic band of Ayat al-Kursi and plasterwork windows on the tomb of Emir Aydakin’s daughter
Photo of the tomb from the 1915-1919 report of the Comite on the site
A view from above. The dome of Emir Aydakin overlooking the street is in the background. The dome of Aydakin’s daughter is in the foreground. The square building between them, with the square skylight, is the Zawiyah of Sheikh al-Abbar
(1) “The Deposition of Deftardar Ahmed Pasha and the Rule of Law in Seventeenth Century Egypt,” by James E. Baldwin.
(2) Emir Aydakin al-Bunduqdar belonged to the first generation of slave soldiers who founded the Mamluk Sultanate as the Ayyubid Dynasty spluttered to a halt in the mid-1200s.
The Ayyubids were the descendants of the famed Salaheddin, or Saladin, who took power in Egypt in 1171. They weren’t so much a cohesive dynasty as a tangle of family branches, each ruling parts of Egypt and Syria and often feuding with each other. To strengthen their forces, they would sometimes buy and train slave soldiers, Mamluks, imported mostly from the Kipchak Turkish lands north of the Black Sea.
The last major Ayyubid ruler in Egypt, al-Salih Ayyub, really came to rely on his Mamluk soldiers, buying more than 1,000 of them. They were known as the Salihiyah, a personal army he could be sure was loyal to him as he battled the Crusaders and rivals within his own family.
Aydakin was one of the Salihiyah and was appointed Ayyub’s “bunduqdar,” a post in charge of the ammunition used in catapults and siege engines.
But Aydakin’s main significance was for something else entirely.
During al-Salih Ayyub’s reign, Aydakin bought several Mamluks of his own. One of them was a 15-year-old who had been captured in fighting between Turks and Mongols around the Crimea and was brought by a slave dealer to the Syrian city of Hama, where Aydakin acquired him. The boy’s name was Baybars, and he took his new master’s nickname, al-Bunduqdari.
And so Aydakin was the first owner of the man who would later become perhaps the greatest of all the Mamluk sultans, al-Zahir Baybars al-Bunduqdari.
Aydakin raised and trained Baybars. Then in 1245, al-Salih Ayyub fell out with Aydakin and confiscated all of his Mamluks. Now in Ayyub’s service, Baybars rose to become one of his most powerful lieutenants, far surpassing his former master Aydakin.
When al-Salih Ayyub died in 1249, his Salihiya became the new dominant elite in Egypt. Initially, they supported the rule of Ayyub’s famed wife, Shajar al-Durr. But to cut a complicated story short, it wasn’t long until the Salihiya installed one of their own as sultan, and the Mamluk era began.
Baybars was not the first Mamluk sultan, but he was essentially the founding father of the Mamluk Sultanate. He was the first to rule for a significant length of time, 17 years. It was he who carved out Mamluk rule over much of the Levant in wars against the Crusaders. He also established many of the traditions and institutions that would govern the sultanate for the next nearly 270 years.
Throughout his rule, Aydakin was a faithful lieutenant, military commander and adviser to his former slave.
As Baybars rolled back the Crusaders in Syria, he built mosques and Islamic shrines across the newly regained lands. This policy cultivated his own image as a holy warrior, but it also aimed to entrench the territory as firmly Muslim by spreading a popular form of Islam. As part of the campaign, Baybars encouraged Sufi groups and the construction of khanqahs and other Sufi lodges.
That fashion for khanqah building may explain why Aydakin, years after Baybars’ death, decided to build one here. It’s possible he chose this spot because it was already known for a Sufi presence. Al-Maqrizi says this location was previously known as Duweirat Massoud. Al-Maqrizi doesn’t elaborate on what that was, but “duweira” — Arabic for “a small house” — was a term used for houses where Sufis informally met.
(3) In its Report #292 of 1901, the Comité said it found an inscription here recording that “this blessed tomb was constructed by the daughter of Alaa’ al-Dunya wa al-Din.” (Alaa’ al-Din was Aydakin’s laqab.) Unfortunately, the inscription didn’t preserve the daughter’s name. The Comité also reports that the tomb under this dome was empty.