The Madrasa of Qaraqoja al-Hasani

What jumps out about the Madrasa of Qaraqoja al-Hasani, built in 1442, is of course its minaret. Rather than towering from the madrasa’s roof, it stands on the other side of the alley, connected to the madrasa by a wooden bridge. This is one of only two Mamluk monuments in Cairo with a detached minaret (1).

I’ve passed by here many times over the years and, if I thought about it at all, I just assumed this separated minaret was a quirky decision of the builder.

But that’s not the reason. It turns out that originally Qaraqoja built a whole other mosque on the northern side of al-Sadat Alley. According to the foundation documents, it occupied most of the block of houses that stands here today, from Darb el-Gamamiz to the dead-end alley Atfet al-Neidi. The building consisted of a mosque and an upper floor with several riwaq halls used as a school for orphans, as well as a sabil for distributing water, which stood at the corner of the dead-end alley (2). It was to this mosque that the minaret belonged, but it was also used by the madrasa.

The mosque had completely vanished by the mid-1800s. At that time, the great urban planner Ali Pasha Mubarak documented the madrasa in his survey of Cairo, al-Khitat al-Tawfiqiya, but he seems unaware the mosque across the street had ever existed. He does mention the sabil, which hung on a little longer before it too disappeared by the early 20th century.

It might seem startling that an entire mosque could disappear like that. We’re deceived by the amazing richness of Cairo’s monuments. But what we see today usually survived because of a wealthy Ottoman benefactor who stepped in at some point and renovated a particular Mamluk monument as an act of charity, or because of the preservation campaign of the Comite in the late 1800s and early 1900s, which rescued many ruins. Otherwise, neglect and decay have worked their power for centuries, erasing houses, palaces and even mosques and madrasas:  If a Mamluk building wasn’t in regular use, it could be left to crumble, scavenged for parts and eventually something else would be built in its place.

And that is presumably what happened to Qaraqoja’s mosque. But the minaret survived, probably because the madrasa remained more actively used.

This changes completely how we read this monument. It isn’t an architectural anomaly at all. It’s all the forces that shaped Cairo into what it is today – decay, destruction, rebuilding -- frozen at an instant and turned into stone before our eyes. This monument is time halted in the middle of an act of rescue: the madrasa holding tight onto the minaret, keeping it from sliding into oblivion along with the rest of the mosque.

The madrasa’s interior, with a painted “kurdi” or “kuraydi,” a sort of wooden decorative corbel.

The founder of the madrasa, Emir Qaraqoja, was a senior emir under Sultan Jaqmaq. A successful military commander, he garners unusual praise from the chroniclers of the time, who call him a modest man, virtuous and religious, cheerful and dignified, a highly skilled horseman and lancer. He was widely considered a strong candidate to eventually become sultan.

But it was not to be. He died along with one of his sons in a 1449 outbreak of the plague that wreaked particular havoc among the elites, killing a number of senior emirs, top clerics and one of Jaqmaq’s wives.

Perhaps more interesting is the man Qaraqoja appointed as his madrasa’s first preacher and prayer leader, a scholar named Salaheddin Mohammed al-Assiouti.

Born in the Upper Egyptian town of Assiout in 1381, al-Assiouti was a 20x great-grandson of Imam Ali. He entered religious studies as a child and became well known as a Quran reciter with a powerful voice. As a young man, he had an encounter in the street with a drunken Mamluk soldier that turned into an argument, then a fight, ending with al-Assiouti killing the Mamluk. So he had to flee to Cairo.

He was one of the innumerable young country boys who came to the big city to get onto the religious studies career track. Cairo was the world’s center of Islamic scholarship at the time, and al-Assiouti had some very prominent teachers. He had an automatic leg up with his direct lineage to the family of the Prophet. No doubt he could have made a name for himself writing volumes on jurisprudence or hadith or could have found a scribal position in the household of an emir or in the Citadel.  

But al-Assiouti's real love was literature, or “adab.” He dedicated himself to it completely and lived in poverty, refusing all official positions.

“I’m grateful to my writing, so much return to me redounds,” he wrote in one of his verses. “Its wages are my capital, and my profit ever compounds.”

He was part of a vibrant literary scene during the Mamluk Era. Now, it must be said that Mamluk literature has always been scorned in the Arabic canon, particularly the poetry. It’s considered a massive decline from the Abbasid Era; many will you tell you Mamluk poetry is just plain bad, overly mannered, and obsessed with gimmicks and word play to the expense of great themes or emotion.

But there was SO much of it. In the Abbasid Era, poetry was centered around the ruler’s court, but the Turkish-speaking Mamluk sultans weren’t interested in Arabic poetry and patronized it far less. So literature dispersed. Everyone composed poetry, from religious scholars to merchants to craftsmen, and their audience was not the ruler but each other. Poetry and literature didn’t decline, it was popularized. It was a means of daily communication; people traded poems and epigrams in letters and dropped verses about the minutiae of their lives.

Everything was fodder for verses. When the poet al-Shihab al-Hijazi got an inflamed boil that tormented him, he wrote to al-Assiouti asking for his help — in a letter entirely made up of poetry and rhymed prose:

“Afflicted by a boil, I didn’t sleep a wink. Unbearable! How the night dragged on! / Like an obsessed astronomer, I observed the stars all night, watching and waiting for the dawn.” And when al-Assiouti responded, he too wrote back in rhymed prose.  

It was the “poetization of everyday life,” writes Thomas Bauer of the University of Munster, who has worked to rehabilitate the reputation of Mamluk Era literature.

Mamluk poetry, Bauer writes, is lively and communicative, it seeks participation and response from the listener. It’s interactive and playful, reveling in puns and double entendres and using colloquial language. Unlike Abbasid poems that evoke idealized beauties and want to awe you with the resonance of their metaphors, Mamluk literature descended into the streets and alleys, and “let you smell the odors of the market and the quarters of the craftsmen,” Bauer writes.

One game poets played, for example, was to write a love poem to a member of a particular profession, and the trick was to make the cleverest pun possible using jargon from that profession. 

Al-Assiouti wrote one on a paper-maker:

“I give myself to you, paper-maker, but my heart has nearly withered since you refuse to meet / It needs fulfillment – nothing strange, just a lover asking the paper-maker for a receipt!” The pun lies in the poem’s last word in Arabic, wasl, meaning both a paper receipt and a physical or emotional connection.

This could typify everthing critics hate about Mamluk poetry: It’s clever rather than ambitious and so punny it’s practically a Dad Joke. But the impact came when when poets wrote whole collections of verses on different professions — carpenters, bakers, water-carriers, lamp-lighters, anyone – skipping from shop to shop in the marketplace and riffing on the language of love. The effect, as Bauer puts it, eroticizes the whole of society.

Al-Assiouti was in the thick of the literary scene, producing two anthologies of poetry, رايض الالباب و محاسن الاداب  (“Cultivating Minds and the Beauties of Literature”) and المرج النضر و الارب العطر (“The Flourishing Meadow and Its Sweet Fragrance.”)

Such anthologies were very popular, and dozens of them were written. With such a huge amount of poetry circulating around, an anthology collected the best of it in one place, old and contemporary, and organized it by subject. That way a gentleman or lady could show their sophistication by quoting an appropriate verse at the appropriate time in conversation or correspondence.

“The art of literature is dear … Whoever memorizes it can pop open expressions that the listener’s ear will imbibe like wine,” al-Assiouti writes in the introduction to The Flourishing Meadow. Literature “is the language of all gatherings, the friend of every drinking companion.”

Front page of al-Marj al-Nadir

Source: gallica.bnf.fr. Bibliotheque nationale de France. Arabe 3385

Each chapter collected poems on a particular subject — “Passion and the Suffering it Causes,” “Tears of Love, Sleeplessness, and the Night that is Too Long (or Too Short),” “Flirtation,” “Alcohol and Intimate Gatherings,” “Verses for those who Serve Rulers,” “Verses on Modesty and Good Temper” and “The Benefits of Asceticism.”

Al-Assiouti resided for a period in the Madrasa al-Mahmoudiya, located in what’s now the Tentmakers’ Street outside Bab Zuweila. It was famed for having the best library in Egypt, and it is perhaps here that al-Assiouti met ibn Hajar al-Asqalani, who for a time was the library’s caretaker.

Ibn Hajar was the greatest hadith scholar of the Mamluk Era, and al-Assiouti was basically a nobody. But the two were friends, bonded by the literary life.  

Ibn Hajar consulted with al-Assiouti on his writings and ran poems by him for his opinion. They were conversation companions. Al-Assiouti related to ibn Hajar news of the street, from fights in the market to the affair of a merchant’s wife with a slave. They entertained themselves by composing riddles in verse for each other to solve, and al-Assiouti wrote a long poem celebrating the marriage of ibn Hajar’s daughter to another scholar. Other prominent scholars and poets of the age frequented al-Assiouti’s company.

Still, al-Assiouti was a minor figure. He wasn't a big name. His anthologies were not widely cited. He ended up in a not particularly significant post — prayer leader — in a not particularly significant madrasa, the Qaraqoja. 

But this is what I like about him. The Mamluk literary scene was so deep and wide that even in an out-of-the-way spot like this we run across someone absorbed by  a love of letters.

Al-Assiouti lived the last 10 years of his life at the Qaraqoja Madrasa and died in it in 1452.