The Rab’ of Emir Tughuj

Standing before this unattractive modern apartment building, you may find yourself searching in vain. Is there not even a corbel remaining? A piece of architrave? Not a cut stone, conspicuously old, embedded in the street?

And you may ask yourself: Is there no trace left of Tughuj?

And you may tell yourself: But then how many traces of the past can a city hold? Where could a city possibly store all those many men and women over the centuries who seemed so very important in their moment but then vanished into insignificance?

Emir Tughuj — or Tughji, Tuqji, or even Tufji, the spelling varies — was one of the Almost Sultans of the Mamluk era. There were quite a few of them, emirs who made a play for the sultanate, had it in their grasp an instant or two and then lost it. Tughuj is not even the most significant of them.

But he was here. His mausoleum-madrasa, built in the final years of the 1200s, stood on the site of this residential block before you.

Tughuj was a member of the personal guard of Sultan al-Ashraf Khalil bin Qalawoun and was the sultan’s favorite. He was so dashing that the men of the sultan’s court studied the cut of his fashion and imitated it, naming the style the “Tughji.” In 1293, the sultan, after conquering Acre and toppling the last Crusader fortresses in Palestine, threw a three-day archery tournament outside Cairo’s gates. Tughuj was one of the “fine young men, each more beautiful than the Hoor al-Ein of Paradise” who competed, splendid in their colorful silks and embroidered headgear and gold necklaces, and who, as the sultan, his court and the crowds of commoners watched and the singers sang and the musicians played, thundered down the tournament field on their warhorses, and who, once underneath the tiny “qabaq” target dangling 30 feet overhead, lounged back on their saddles and, there, as relaxed and elegant at full gallop as if they were reclining into luxurious cushions, stretched their bows and released.

Illustration of a qabaq archery contest in the 15th century Mamluk military textbook al-Makhzoun Jami’ al-Funoun (المخزون جامع الفنون)

Bibliothèque nationale de France. Département des manuscrits, Arabe 2824

Unfortunately, the tournament was spoiled by an abrupt sandstorm that uprooted the pavilions and sent the crowds running. Undaunted, the sultan threw a lavish feast the next day inside the Citadel to celebrate the circumcisions of his brother and nephew.

More than 3,000 sheep, 600 head of cattle and 500 horses were slaughtered for the meal. Thousands of kilograms of sugar went into the drinks and sweets. All the emirs and the entire court attended. At the sultan’s command, Tughuj and the other members of his personal guard came out one by one and danced before him as servants showered them with flakes of gold. In a fit of exuberant generosity, the sultan wrote out an order in his own hand granting Tughuj 100,000 gold dinars from the treasury.

The wazir had a near breakdown when Tughuj came to him the next day to collect. They could barely afford the 300,000 dinars spent on the feast, he cried. When the wazir begged the sultan to retract the order, the sultan was furious. “Should I give to my mamluk one day, then retract it the next?” The wazir appealed to Tughuj that he take 100,000 silver dirhams instead. “Are you out of your mind?” was Tughuj’s reply. It took the deputy sultan, Baydara, to convince him to accept.

The next month, this same Baydara and his allies assassinated the sultan in his tent during a hunting trip in the Nile Delta. Tughuj and the other mamluks of the murdered al-Ashraf Khalil, known as the Ashrafiya, rallied, defeated Baydara’s forces and killed him. They then installed al-Ashraf Khalil’s 7-year-old half-brother, al-Nasir Mohammed bin Qalawoun, as sultan.

Tughuj now stood among the ranks of the most senior emirs of the realm. Still, he was an outsider among them and a generation younger; most of them belonged to the Mansouriya faction, the former mamluks of the great sultan al-Mansour Qalawoun, the father of al-Ashraf Khalil and al-Nasir Mohammed.

Eventually, the Mansouriya removed the child sultan al-Nasir Mohammed and sent him into exile. then installed one of their own, Lajin, as sultan. They imposed one condition on him: that he never elevate one of his own mamluks over them.

Sultan Lajin promptly did just that. He appointed his favorite mamluk, Mankutamur, as his deputy and gave him near-complete authority. Over the next year, Mankutamur alienated all the top emirs. Some he sidelined to obscure posts in the provinces, some he imprisoned, others he drove into exile. He tried to push Tughuj out of the palace by having him appointed to a minor governorship in Syria. “I don’t know how to govern, I’ve never governed anything in my life,” Tughuj pleaded to the sultan, who overruled his favorite and cancelled the appointment.

Tughuj and the remaining emirs realized they had to rid themselves of Mankutamur before he got rid of them. The only way to do that, they decided, was to eliminate his patron, the sultan himself.

Tughuj’s partner in the conspiracy was Emir Kurji, one of Sultan Lajin’s most trusted mamluks, so trusted he had free rein to enter the sultan’s presence. Like the others, Kurji had had his own run-ins with Mankutamur, who resented his closeness to the sultan and conspired to eliminate him.

On the evening of Jan. 16, 1299, Sultan Lajin was playing chess with a cleric in his private chambers in the Citadel. When Kurji entered, the sultan asked him, “Did you close up the barracks for the night?” Kurji said he had. Lajin turned to the cleric and praised Kurji’s loyalty. “If not for Emir Kurji,” he said. “I would never have been sultan.” Kurji then asked his master if he wanted to do his evening prayers. Lajin said he did and stood up from the chess board.

Kurji pulled out his sword and ran him though. Kurji’s comrades burst in and hacked Lajin to death. They then stormed Mankutamur’s house and dragged him off to prison, where within hours they beheaded him.

The gathered emirs decided to restore the now adolescent al-Nasir Mohammed to the throne, with Tughuj as deputy sultan. But Kurji protested: “I’m the one who took the risk here and killed Lajin and Mankutamur. I should get something out of this. We shall make Tughuj sultan, and I’ll be his deputy.”

The emirs all looked around, each hoping someone would speak up to oppose this. But none dared. So reluctantly, they agreed.

There was one problem. Even as Tughuj and Kurji prepared for their ascension to power, the commander of the army was at that moment returning from a months-long campaign in Cilicia. This was Emir Baktash al-Fakhri, a veteran of the past decades’ wars against the Crusaders, and here he was arriving back in Cairo at the head of a full army, his feelings about the new arrangement unknown.

Kurji argued that Baktash should be made to come up to the Citadel to present himself in submission to the new sultan. But the other emirs told Tughuj this would be a violation of custom and an insult. A sultan should welcome a victorious returning army at the gates of Cairo. Tughuj wavered, then felt ashamed and decided to go out to greet Baktash.

He tried to make an intimidating show of grandeur and authority, marching through Cairo in a procession with 400 of his mamluks, as crowds turned out to watch him go by, until he met Baktash and his army outside Cairo’s walls. The facade promptly collapsed when Baktash asked where the sultan was, and Tughuj informed him Lajin had been killed.

“Who did this?” Baktash asked.

“He did,” piped up one of the Mansouriya emirs, pointing at Tughuj.

Tughuj spluttered out a denial. An uproar arose among Baktash’s troops. Tughuj panicked and turned to run, but one of Baktash’s fighters drew his sword and sliced Tughuj’s face in two, killing him immediately.

Back at the Citadel, Kurji jumped on his horse and made a run for it, fleeing through the Qarafa cemetery with Baktash’s men in hot pursuit. He was a strong horseman and, firing his bow as he rode, was able to fend them off, until one of his pursuers caught up with him and knocked him to the ground. Baktash’s men cut him to pieces and brought his head back to the Citadel.

Tughuj’s body, meanwhile, was thrown onto the garbage dump of a bathhouse. There it was left for all to see until it was allowed to be buried here, in his madrasa.

Al-Nasir Mohammed was restored to the throne, eventually to become one of the greatest of Mamluk sultans.

Tughuj’s moment was short, irrelevant and quickly forgotten. He was never even properly enthroned as sultan.

Even his madrasa vanished. Presumably he built it during his time of prominence between 1293 and his death in 1299. It is mentioned here and there by Mamluk writers, but never described. At some point it must have fallen into ruin. By the time of Napoleon’s invasion in 1798 it was gone, unmentioned by Napoleon’s corps of savants who mapped and documented Cairo.

There was one trace of Tughuj that did survive nearly to our day, his Rab’.

A rab’ was a multistory residential apartment building. Usually, they were built as part of an endowment, so the money earned in rent would go to the upkeep of a mosque or madrasa or other institution. The Rab’ of Tughuj adjoined his madrasa and helped fund it. If you stand right in front of the little alley named Ismail Bey, the one with a lawyer’s office on the left and an electrical equipment shop on the right, you’re looking right at where it once was.

Photo of what remained of the Rab’ of Emir Tughuj, in the 1911-1912 report of the Comité.

The Comité, the body founded in the 1880s to preserve Islamic and Coptic monuments, documented the Rab’ in its 1911-1912 report. The building was in two parts, one on either side of the alley running through it. Each part was five stories tall, with a shop on the ground floor, mashrabiyya windows above and facades built in cut stone “of impeccable form.”

“Even an amateur would easily recognize a product of the Middle Ages, given the taste and finesse of execution,” Comité member Max Herz wrote. He heartily recommended it be preserved as a rare example of Mamluk civil architecture.

Unfortunately, it seems nothing was done. In 1952, the Comité looked again at the remains and decided it had deteriorated too much and was no longer of interest.

It’s not clear how long it lasted after that. It continued to appear on later maps marking Islamic monuments, even some today, and seems to have lingered on the official list of protected monuments until 2010. But by that point, the Rab’ of Tughuj had already been gone for decades, at least since these apartment buildings were put up — I’m guessing in the 1980s.

So nothing remains of our Tughuj.

And yet....

You might walk right past the non-descript, more modern mosque on this block. There’s little reason to notice it. It’s the one with the worn, white façade, nearly bare of decoration, with two benches framing its entrance.

This is the Mosque of Sheikh Abdullah and Lady Malaka. It’s been here since sometime in the Ottoman Era (Napoleon’s savants mark it in their 1809 map of Cairo). Abdullah and Malaka were presumably Sufis running a zawiyah, or small mosque here. She could have been his wife, his patron or a holy figure in her own right. In any case, by the 19th Century, their zawiyah had decayed.

It was rebuilt in the late 1800s by the great urban planner and polymath Ali Pasha Mubarak, who had built his mansion next door. He noted that the mosque was on the former site of the Madrasa of Tughuj and that inside it were the tombs of Sheikh Abdullah and al-Sitt Malaka. (1)

In fact, the two tombs may have been those of Emir Tughuj himself and his wife, according to two leading historians of the 1930s, Hassan Qassem and Mahmoud Rabia. (2)

Portrait of Ali Pasha Mubarak

Facade of the Mosque of al-Sheikh Abdullah and al-Sitt Malika

Perhaps the tombs of Tughuj and his wife survived long after the madrasa itself had collapsed into ruins, their names forgotten. Then Sheikh Abdullah and Lady Malaka built their zawiyah around the graves, and over the years it’s their names that stuck. Popular preachers of Ottoman times often set up their mosques in the monuments left behind by the Mamluks.

Sadly, even the tombs seem to have vanished. There’s no sign of them inside. One day when I found the mosque’s custodian sitting on a bench at the entrance, I asked him if there are tombs. “There have never been any tombs here” he said, very quickly and very definitively, as if it were an accusation — and one he’s had to address often — as if he knew he was sitting above them at that very moment but they’re a secret he longs to keep only for himself.

Still, this mosque is the last trace of the dashing, doomed Tughuj — transformed and unrecognizable, perhaps, but infused within it.

And once you realize this, you may find new lenses have slipped into place over your eyes and that suddenly the city of the past is visible within the city around you.

That state hospital across the street, an empty hulk gutted by a never-ending renovation: Now you see it fills the hole in the urban fabric left when the Madrasa of Emir Hazman al-Abu Bakri, built in the 1450s, crumbled into ruins. You might catch a vision of the mansion of one of Mohammed Ali Pasha’s wives, rising briefly to fill the space in the 1800s before it too vanishes.

Or take that little dome on the corner, the tomb of Emir Sanjar al-Muzaffari. In a rude violation, an apartment building was put up practically on top of it, so intimately close that the neighbor on his balcony feeding his pigeons in their coops practically knocks his elbows on the dome.

But now you see: It’s the fault of our beloved polymath Ali Pasha Mubarak. He built his mansion flush with the tomb 150 years ago. His mansion has since disappeared, leaving only its property lines that later builders followed. (3)

Around another corner, families seeking treatment bustle in and out of an Islamic charity medical clinic deep in a dead-end alley; a few centuries before, that same spot was a sheikh’s zawiyah, where the faithful sought blessings.

And you may find yourself wandering across Cairo, startled to find that everywhere you look the past overlaps the present. Even the most mundane and ugly of today holds some vanished beauty within it. You may marvel at how the past determined the shapes of the present, like genes forgotten but still at work. And you may find yourself overcome, simultaneously, by wonder and by sorrow.

View of the tomb of Emir Sanjar al-Muzaffari today

View of the tomb in a photo from 1915-1919 report of the Comite. Surrounding it is the mansion of Ali Pasha Mubarak.