In the Sultan’s Salon: Learning, Religion, and Rulership at the Mamluk Court of Qāniṣawh al-Ghawrī (r. 1501–1516) By Christian Mauder

Abstract

In Shaʿbān 922/September 1516, sultan Qāniṣawh al-Ghawrī (r. 906–22/1501–16) infamously died of a stroke on the battlefield of Marj Ḍābiq, North of Aleppo, where his Syrian and Egyptian armies succumbed to the military force and charisma of the Ottoman sultan Selīm (r. 918–26/1512–20). In subsequent months, Selīm conquered first Syria and then Egypt, he integrated them into the rapidly expanding space of the Ottoman empire, and he ended the longstanding Sultanate of Cairo, also known as the ‘Mamluk’ Sultanate (648–923/1250–1517). Since the nineteenth-century beginnings of the modern historical study of this sultanate, these ignominious endings have coloured understandings of the reign of its penultimate sultan Qāniṣawh al-Ghawrī. Considered politically and militarily incompetent, socio-economically irresponsible, and culturally conservative, the elites of al-Ghawrī’s reign were thought of as incapable of responding to the many challenges of the early tenth/sixteenth century and therefore destined to disappear in the new world of early modernity. In the early 1990s, in his biographical study of both al-Ghawrī’s and his predecessor’s reigns—ominously titled Twilight of Majesty—Carl Petry still concluded that ‘[t]he reigns of these sultans may, in their distinctive ways, be symptomatic of incurable inertia pervading the central Arab lands at the end of the Middle Ages’.1 Around the same time, another doyen of ‘Mamluk studies’, Ulrich Haarmann, summarized how dominant scholarship considered this perception of ‘incurable inertia’ to be related to the general dominance of a traditionalist worldview. ‘Egypt established itself,’ according to Haarmann, ‘[…] as the bulwark of orthodox cultural and religious conservatism’, which meant that ‘[t]he challenges and creative impulses which Mongol and post-Mongol turmoil brought to the artistic, literary and scholarly worlds of Eastern (Iranian, Central Asian, Anatolian) Islam never affected […] the land of Egypt’.2