The Khanqah of Emir Sheikhou

Here we stand between the mosque and khanqah of Emir Sheikhou, towering on either side of Saliba Street to create a monumental passageway.

We told the story of Sheikhou himself in a previous entry (the Madrasa of Sarghatmish), so let’s talk about his Khanqah, which is on your right as you face the Citadel.

First thing, we know what a mosque is, we know what a madrasa is — a teaching institution. But what is a khanqah?

Broadly speaking, it’s a residence for Sufis, followers of Islam’s mystical teachings. In a khanqah, dozens or up to several hundred Sufis hailing from across the Islamic world would live in cells, sometimes for decades, studying and carrying out their rituals. The builder of a khanqah, in this case Sheikhou, would create an endowment lasting long after his death to pay stipends to the resident Sufis, as well as salaries for teachers and other staff.

Chief among the residents’ rituals was the Hadra. Every day at a set time, they gathered to communally recite Quranic verses and prayers, repeating them over and over. As the late great scholar of Sufism Th. Emil Homerin wrote, this was a required duty for the residents. The endowment contract would set times for the daily Hadra and even specific verses to be recited, usually ones praising God and begging forgiveness for sin, all to be read on behalf of the khanqah’s patron and his family, who were usually buried in the khanqah (as Sheikhou is).

So by creating and funding a khanqah, the patron was setting up an institution dedicated to protecting his eternal soul, Homerin writes. The daily Hadra, continuing in perpetuity, generated blessings (baraka) for the patron, helped win atonement for his misdeeds and eased his torments in the grave, “so the deceased would arise on Judgment Day ready to enter Paradise.”

Homerin compares the khanqah to the medieval Christian chanteries in England of around this same time, which nobles built so clergy could say Mass every day for their souls and rescue them from Purgatory.

The Sufis residing in khanqahs had a reputation as “salary Sufis,” pampered and coasting on the food, housing and stipends. They generally contrasted with the popular independent Sufi sheikhs, the riveting charismatics and majdhoubs who with their athletic feats of self-deprivation and ascetism, their shows of divine madness and their miracles mesmerized the public and drew followers to the private zawiyas around Cairo where they preached.

The facade of the Khanqah of Emir Sheikhou, or al-Sheikhouniya

But some did inspire reverence. Like Sheikh ibn Arab, “the Ascetic of his Age.”

Ibn Arab (not to be confused with ibn Arabi, the famed and far more important Sufi from Andalus who lived two centuries earlier) was born in the city of Bursa, in Anatolia, where his father, a Yemeni, had migrated. As a young man, ibn Arab came to Cairo as a faqir, an impoverished mendicant Sufi adept. He studied and sometimes copied books, accepting only enough charity to keep himself alive.

Eventually he was taken on as a resident Sufi at the Khanqah of Sheikhou, receiving a stipend of 30 dirhams a month. He ended up living at the khanqah for 30 years. He cut himself off from society, staying in his cell and devoting himself solely to worship, prayer and long bouts of fasting. He wore only the roughest clothes. He could go for years without speaking to anyone, his voice used only in prayer and recitation.

For everyone in the neighborhood, he was a mysterious figure, seen only fleetingly but famed for the extremes of his devotion.

From time to time, he was spotted on the khanqah’s roof, feeding birds from his hand. If anyone did happen to catch sight of him in the street, they stopped to stare in awe but never dared talk to him because of the gravity and dignity of his demeanor. People spent the night inside the khanqah, hoping to catch a glimpse of him and perhaps feel the blessings of his glamour. One man saw him crouched over with a bit of kanafa, a filo-dough sweet, and heard him mumbling to himself, “Kanafa is all we have? Fine, then eat.” He watched ibn Arab pour vinegar over it to cheat himself of its sweetness.

Every once in a while, ibn Arab emerged from the khanqah under cover of darkness to buy food from the market, still never saying a word. The market sellers always tried to give him things for free; a good deed toward a holy man like him would bring extra favor on one’s soul. But ibn Arab refused any charity. Once someone slipped a morsel of meat into his pocket, and when he returned to the khanqah and found it, he went back into the market, tracked the man down and silently gave it back.

If a shopowner forced something on him for free, he would never return to the shop again. So the merchants learned to stop giving him anything and, instead, if this severe sheikh in worn, old clothes showed up, wordlessly directing a finger at the bit of food he wanted to buy, they took his choice of their shop as blessing enough.

When ibn Arab died in 1426, he got the equivalent of a state funeral. The sultan himself attended the funeral prayers over his body at the Mu’mini Prayer Hall at the foot of the Citadel. When his body was carried down Saliba Street, so many people crowded in for the honor of carrying it that his coffin rode balanced on their fingertips. People competed to buy shreds of the clothing that had touched his body or the books he had left in his cell. He was buried in the Khanqah of Sheikhou, his home for most of his life.

When the money earned from the sale of his clothes and books was put in the coffers of the khanqah, it was found to exactly equal the amount of stipend paid him over his 30 years there. The sheikh who shunned all charity had made sure that, in the end, he cost the khanqah exactly nothing, as if, in his self-denial, he had never existed at all.

Mosque lamp attributed to Emir Sheikou © The Fitzwilliam Museum

What I love about these stories is how ibn Arab’s rejection of the world only demonstrates how deeply woven the khanqah was into the surrounding community.

Every week, the khanqah’s Sufis and its Grand Sheikh walked in a procession down the street before Friday prayers. They were seen and known by everyone. These monumental institutions along Saliba Street may have been built by elites, but they pumped life into the neighborhood. The khanqah, the mosques, the madrasas were populated by hundreds of people — young pupils and students, Sufis, clerics young and old, Yemenis, Syrians, Iraqis, North Africans, Turks and Persians, Egyptians from the countryside, all of them looking to get ahead in the world or to learn the texts of their faith, all of them mingling and interacting every day with local residents.

Still, the Khanqah of Sheikhou, or the Sheikhouniya as it was called, was indeed an elite institution. It was part of the network of educational establishments, along with madrasas and other khanqahs that produced the educated class of Islamic scholars, or ulema.

Volume by volume, these students pored over the vast, centuries-old library of texts and manuals in the Islamic sciences —interpretation of the Quran, Hadith, fundamentals of religion, Arabic language, rhetoric and jurisprudence. When you read a biography of a scholar of the time, you find a long resumé listing the specific texts he or she studied and from which sheikhs they learned them. Once a scholar thoroughly learned a text, they became accredited to teach it to others.

The importance of these texts is enshrined in the names of some of the Sheikhouniya’s grand sheikhs.

One, for example, was so famed for his study of a legal manual titled “Al-Hidaya,” or “The Guidance,” that he was known by the nickname Qari’ al-Hidaya, the “Reciter of al-Hidaya.” Another was the pre-eminent expert in “Kafiyat Dhawi al-Arab fi Maarafat Kalam al-Arab,” a text on Arabic grammar written 200 years before his time, and so he was known as al-Kafiyaji, “the Kafiya-ist.”

The first page of a manuscript of al-Hidaya Sharh Bidayat al-Mubtadi (الهداية شرح بداية المبتدي), a 12th century manual of Hanafi jurisprudence. From مكتبة الملك عبد الله بن عبد العزيز الجامعية

These scholars would become the educated elite, the “turbaned” class of ulema who filled the array of religious posts around the Mamluk domains, from lowly teachers of Mamluk soldiers in the barracks or Quran reciters at a noble’s tomb, to mosque imams and madrasa teachers and judges.

At the pinnacle were the four senior judges, one from each school of Sunni Islam: Shafii, Hanafi, Hanbali and Maliki. Members of the “turbaned” class were also appointed to secular bureaucratic posts — everything from auditors, financial overseers and secretaries in an emir’s household, up to the sultan’s chancellors and wazirs.

Like academia today, it was a field bristling with giant egos, intent on establishing their reputations and competing for lucrative posts.

Rivalries were bitter. Also like academia today, it was publish or perish. A scholar built status in part by writing books that interpreted, summarized or elaborated on earlier books in the ulema’s vast canon, or by branching out into other fields to compile sprawling histories, biographies or medical texts.

No one exemplifies those giant egos better than Jalaleddin al-Suyuti, one of the most prolific writers of the 1400s and, in his own mind at least, the greatest scholar of the age.

He resided for a time here at the Khanqah of Sheikhou. In his autobiography, he boasts that a pupil came all the way from Syria to spend a year in the khanqah copying 30 of al-Suyuti’s works. The pupil then took the copies home with him for his colleagues to study and promptly returned to Cairo to copy 20 more.

Al-Suyuti also vents over every perceived slight. He recounts how he once lent a judge visiting from the Anatolian city of Tarsus his notebook summarizing a legal text by an 11th century Persian scholar. The judge never returned the notebook, and al-Suyuti fumed that he would likely pass it off as his own work back home. Al-Suyuti sneers, “I researched matters of Shariah with him, and I found him totally lacking.” He also complains that a less qualified scholar attained a teaching post at the Sheikhouniya before him by buying the post from its current holder.

At the top of each institution was its grand sheikh, or dean. The grand sheikhs here at the Sheikhouniya, one of the most prestigious khanqahs, were often close associates of the sultan.

The khanqah’s first grand sheikh, Akmaleddin al-Babarti, was revered by Sultan Barqouq. Whenever Barqouq descended from the Citadel and rode down Saliba Street, he always stopped at the khanqah’s gates and called on Akmaleddin to come riding with him. The sultan elevated him in honors above even the four top judges: Barqouq would seat Akmaleddin on his right in court and even stood when Akmaleddin entered the room. Akmaleddin scolded him for this, telling him he must stop slighting the judges by standing for him.

“There is no way I could not stand when you come in,” Barqouq protested.

“So stand for the judges as well,” he replied. Grudgingly, the sultan did.

When Akmaleddin died in 1384 after heading the khanqah for 30 years, Barqouq didn’t just attend the prayers over his body. He made the startling gesture of walking in the procession back to the Sheikhouniya for the burial. He even tried to join the pallbearers carrying his coffin, but his senior emirs, mortified by this compromise of the sultan’s prestige, insisted on carrying it for him.

Frontispiece and first page of a manuscript of “Kafiyat Dhawi al-Arab fi Maarafat Kalam al-Arab” (كافية ذوي الارب في معرفة كلام العرب), by ibn al-Hajib, a 13th century text on Arabic grammar. It’s from his knowledge of this text that Mohieddin Mohammed bin Suleiman al-Rumi got his nickname, al-Kafiyaji. Source: https://www.alukah.net/

Mohiyeddin al-Kafiyaji, who headed the Sheikhouniya from 1454 to his death in 1475, was considered one of the most respected scholars of his time. He was a close companion of the son of Sultan Jaqmaq, Mohammed, and frequented his academic salons.

Al-Kafiyaji’s biographers sing his praises. The proud abased themselves before him and he was revered by sultans, they say. He disdained worldly matters and lived modestly. He was “perfect in his virtue,” refusing to teach pupils alone in his cell (a pretty clear suggestion of what must have regularly gone on in other cells). A fine companion, good-natured and generous with his friends, gentle even with his enemies, his face glowed with light and his grey hair shined.

Once the poet al-Shihab al-Mansouri dropped by al-Kafiyaji in his chambers, and the grand sheikh invited him to a piece of pumpkin pastry. On the spot, al-Mansouri improvised a verse for him: 

“Oh reviver of God’s law in Egypt, oh elite of your age’s elites/ No man ever knocked on your door without tasting pumpkin sweets.”

Which really just goes to show how everyone in the Mamluk era loved to instantly spout poetry over the littlest things, stuffing their verses with puns and word play. (In Arabic, the verses have a clever rhyme; “reviver” is a reference to al-Kafiyaji’s title Mohiyeddin, “reviver of the faith”; and “knocked” and “pumpkin” are spelled the same in Arabic.)

Most of all, al-Kafiyaji was recognized for his prodigious knowledge in all the Islamic sciences. Those were on display in a debate held under a later sultan, Qaytbay.

Al-Kafiyaji and a rival sheikh had issued opposing fatwas over who would supervise the finances of a particular madrasa’s endowment. This sort of question had a lot of money at stake, and al-Kafiyaji had ruled in favor of the descendants of the madrasa’s founder, while his rival had ruled against them. Al-Kafiyaji asked the sultan to convene a council of scholars to resolve the issue.

So Qaytbay summoned the council in a courtyard in the Citadel. Everyone was there — the four top judges, their aides, crowds of jurists, as well al-Kafiyaji’s rival and his scholarly supporters, and Qaytbay himself was overseeing the session.

Al-Kafiyaji made what can only be described as a boss move. With everyone gathered in the courtyard, he sent an aide to inform them that he was busy. He had a class to teach. So they waited. And waited. His rivals began to snicker that he’d given up and fled. Finally, the 88-year-old al-Kafiyaji arrived, surrounded by an entourage of his students. The sultan, who should wait for no man, rose and embraced him.

What ensues is a furious debate that goes on for three pages in the histories. Most of it goes way over my head. They’re arguing over fine details of Islamic law concerning not just endowments but methods of issuing fatwas — a field rich in specialized jargon and technical terms hammered out over centuries in those manuals and volumes.

Suffice it to say, al-Kafiyaji fends and parries and bats down his rivals. Things turn raucous and vicious. At one point, a scholar climbs up on the shoulders of his colleagues to shout insults at al-Kafiyaji over the crowd. At another point, the sultan barks “SHUT UP” at everyone, throws up his hands and leaves for part of the session. Then there’s the moment al-Kafiyaji drops a withering pronouncement on a rival: “This man does not know grammar, or language, or the fundamentals of religion, or jurisprudence. He knows only trickery. In fact, he’s barred from issuing fatwas because he takes bribes.”

In the end, the ruling went in favor of al-Kafiyaji, and the session closed with the annoyed sultan giving one sheikh a petulant smack on the head for his general insolence.

The first page of another manuscript of Kafiyat Dhawi al-Arab, which I’m adding just because I find these manuscripts so beautiful. Source: مكتبة الملك عبد الله بن عبد العزيز الجامعية

Which brings us, for the sake of contrast, to another of the Khanqah of Sheikhou’s grand sheikhs: Zeineddin Abdel-Rahman al-Tafahni, who rose from nothing to hold some of the highest religious postings in Egypt, but never got any respect.

He was born around 1360 in extreme poverty in the remote village of Tafahna in the Nile Delta. As a child, Abdel-Rahman worked with his father milling wheat, until his father died, leaving him an orphan. He had an older brother who was a minor scholar in Cairo teaching Mamluk soldiers in the barracks. So Abdel-Rahman made his way to Cairo as well.

He ended up on Saliba Street, a country boy hovering around the edges of its urbane, scholarly world. He was taken in at a sabil-kuttab, a charity children’s school, next to the ibn Tuloun mosque, where he learned Quran. He worked as a servant for a Quran reciter named Blind Youssef. As he got a little older, he listened in on lessons at the Sarghatmish Madrasa, though he wasn’t an official student there. One day, a teacher discovered him and humiliated him in front of the other students. Little Abdel-Rahman ran out of class sobbing and prayed to God, “Please don’t let me die before I become a teacher at Sarghatmish.”

He became that and more. He must have come off as eager and promising to the clerics, scholars and merchants who met him along Saliba Street. His chance to officially enroll at the Sarghatmish Madrasa came when a student there dropped out and offered him his spot for 700 dirhams. Abdel-Rahman didn’t have the money, but a group of people gathered donations and secured the spot for him.

This set him on his path. He was among the best students at Sarghatmish and his reputation grew. He became a favorite of the madrasa’s grand sheikh, Badreddin al-Kulustani, who seated al-Tafahni in a prized spot to his right during classes.

That was a crucial connection because al-Kulustani went on to become the private secretary to Sultan Barqouq, a quite powerful position. (He got the post because Barqouq needed someone to translate a letter from Timur, the fearsome Turko-Mongol ruler who was at the time sacking Baghdad and threatening to overrun Mamluk lands in Syria. Barqouq summoned al-Kulustani, who was originally from the Mongol lands in Central Asia. He translated the letter, composed an eloquent reply and thoroughly impressed the sultan, who took him into his employ.)

From his new post, al-Kulustani boosted his protégé. As his status rose, al-Tafahni started issuing fatwas and judicial rulings. He married the daughter of a prominent merchant, increasing his wealth. At last, al-Tafahni got his teaching post at Sarghatmish, as well as a post here at the Khanqah of Sheikhou.

When al-Kulustani died, he left part of his own extensive fortune to al-Tafahni. In 1419, al-Tafahni was appointed one of the four top judges of Egypt, and soon after he also gained the post of Grand Sheikh at the Khanqah of Sheikhou.

Courtyard of the Khanqah of Emir Sheikhou

Still, he had few students and, in the accounts about him by other scholars of the time, their disdain for him is palpable. They might concede he was knowledgeable but dismiss his rise as solely due to al-Kulustani’s patronage. They say he let his own interests sway his judicial rulings and, most of all, they mock his terrible temper, describing how he would easily blow up, turning yellow and trembling with fury.

This reputation seems to come from one particular case, the trial of Shamseddin al-Maymouni.

Al-Maymouni was a scholar who had abandoned the ulema track and became a mendicant Sufi, preaching and drawing a popular following. One day, he told his acolytes that he had seen al-Tafahni in a dream. What exactly he said was disputed. Rumors spread that he told his followers that in his dream, al-Tafahni gave him permission to smoke hash, drink alcohol, commit sodomy and break the fast during Ramadan. Al-Maymouni denied ever saying this, insisting he only said that al-Tafahni in his dream was “in a bad state.” But witnesses came forward, and someone raised a case against him accusing him of spreading atheism.

His trial was held before the four top judges, who included al-Tafahni himself. Al-Tafahni batters him with questioning, until al-Maymouni bursts out at him in frustration, “Fear God, Abdel-Rahman. Don’t you remember your cheap wooden clogs and little cotton turban?”

Which, ok, I don’t get the exact reference either, but it’s clearly in the vein of telling Joe Pesci, “Now go home and get your fucking shine box.” 

And it had the same effect on al-Tafahni.

Al-Tafahni flew into a rage, screaming, “I sentence you to execution!” He demanded his fellow judges order the immediate implementation of the sentence. The judges sort of looked at each other awkwardly. Finally, one of them, the illustrious scholar ibn Hajar, gently advised, “Let’s hold on and wait till you’re not so upset.”

Eventually, the other judges decided al-Maymouni was mentally ill and had him imprisoned for a time. After his release, he lived out the rest of his days peacefully.

The harshest word against al-Tafahni comes from Badreddin al-Ayni, a far more famous scholar who competed with him for the top judge post. “He made some money and rose by bribery and flattery,” al-Ayni writes. “I didn’t agree with his rulings. He was motivated by corrupt interests in his rulings, not by religion. He gained positions he was not qualified for by bribery ... everything he earned was ill-gotten.”

Al-Ayni caps it with a scathing dismissal for a scholar: “He never knew a text well enough to teach it in its entirely, and he never wrote a book of his own.”

You can’t help but feel that a lot of this criticism comes out of simple snobbery.

Few prominent clerics had a background as impoverished as al-Tafahni’s. Most senior scholars were sons of scholars, often born into wealth with a ready network of teachers among their fathers and uncles. Just look at al-Tafahni’s colleagues among the top judges: Muhibbeddin al-Baghdadi was the son of one of Iraq’s most renowned clerics; Jalaleddin al-Bulqini was the scion of the Bulqinis, a family that for generations held top judge positions, frequented the courts of sultans and mingled with top emirs; and ibn Hajar al-Asqalani was the son of an aristocratic scholar who was raised by one of the richest merchants in Egypt.

You can imagine what they thought of this son of a village miller who got his start in a charity school for orphans. Whatever al-Tafahni’s faults were, it’s easy to believe they were hammered into him by the cruelties he faced working his way up through this cliquish world of elites.

And they mocked him to the very end. When he died in 1431, some spread seamy rumors that he had promised a slave woman with whom he’d had a child that he would marry her, then instead threw her out and married someone else. So she poisoned him out of jealousy, they write, adding coyly, “That’s what is said, anyway. God only knows.”

The mihrab and dome in the Khanqah of Emir Sheikhou

Finally, back to Sheikhou’s Khanqah and Mosque. There is a sad last testament to how important they were for the broader community.

It comes in a poem by Abu’l-Fatah al-Siraji, a small-time local cleric who was a fixture of Saliba Street, working as a notary from a stand in front of ibn Tuloun Mosque. It was there that in 1517 he witnessed the Ottoman’s sack of Cairo, a bloody rampage in which Mamluk soldiers were butchered in the streets, the city looted and the last Mamluk sultan’s corpse hung from Bab Zuweila gate.

His poem is a lament to the humiliating end of the Mamluk Caliphate, the centuries-long era when Cairo blossomed into its fullest glory. It runs more than 60 lines, transmitted in full by the historian ibn Iyas. (It’s all in a single rhyme in Arabic but I won’t attempt to preserve that in my rough translation here.)

It starts:

“Weep for Egypt! For this thing that has happened, for the tragedy that swept over its people...”

Line after line bewails the lost splendor of the Mamluks — the parades, the fine clothing, the archery tournaments, the war stallions in bejeweled bridles.

The only actual monument he mentions is Sheikhou’s, on the street he knew so well:

“I grieve for Sheikhou and his mosque, which once gathered all the people in prayer / Its features have been wiped out by the flames, its decorations and their geometry reduced to dust / I grieve for the markets of Saliba, its stores all empty from what has happened / I grieve for the marble stripped off and carried away from every manor, once so resplendent / The beauties of Cairo, which once outshone every city, have been erased.”