What's in a Mamluk Picture? the Hall of Portraiture at the Cairo Citadel

chapter 20 What’s in a Mamluk Picture? The Hall of Portraiture at the Cairo Citadel Remembered Li Guo The Mamluk sulṭān al-Malik al-Ashraf Khalīl b. Qalāwūn (r. 689–693/1290– 1293) is perhaps best remembered for his triumph at Acre, the last Crusader outpost in the Near East. He was also one of the few rulers of Egypt and Syria in the pre-Ottoman era to have commissioned portraits for public display. Given the scarcity of references to figural representations in medieval Islam, the account of Khalīl’s Hall of Portraiture (īwān) at the Cairo Citadel deserves closer scrutiny. However, as the structure is no longer extant, historians must rely on textual evidence to re-imagine its illustrious past, even though it is very thin. Surviving accounts culled from chronicles amount to no more than a few sentences that differ from one another. In this article I introduce a new piece of textual evidence, a poem by the sulṭān’s panegyrist-cum-court-jester Ibn Dāniyāl (d. 710/1310), that describes the Hall in detail. After summariz- ing the poem, I discuss related issues pertaining to the use of adab material for historical inquiry. This article is dedicated to Professor Wadad Kadi whose scholarship, teaching, and friendship remain a source of admiration and inspi- ration for many of us. 1 The Poem The poem consists of nineteen lines (for a full translation, see the Appendix below).1 Lines 1–2, the preamble, draw parallels between Khalīl’s Hall and the famous Great Hall of Chosroes (īwān Kisrā) in ancient Ctesiphon, and make further references to the fantastic city of “Iram of the pillars,” built by the legendary Arabian king Shaddād of ʿĀd.2 Architectural specificity and divine 1 Ibn Dāniyāl, al-Mukhtār min shiʿr Ibn Dāniyāl, ikhtiyār Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn Khalīl ibn Aybak al-Ṣafadī, ed. M.N. al-Dulaymī (Mosul: Maktabat Bassām, 1979), 144–146. 2 “Hast thou not seen how thy Lord did with Ad, Iram of the pillars (dhāt al-ʿimād), the like of which was never created in the land …” (q 89:7). The reference became a common epithet © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2016 | doi: 10.1163/9789004307469_021 484 guo revelation intermingle in pairing the two īwāns with the ʿumud (sing. ʿimād), “lofty columns,” a metaphorical reference in the Qurʾān.3 Lines 3–15, the core of the poem, describe the Hall, especially the paintings adorning its walls: the portraits of the sulṭān and his troops, the sense of awe and solemnity they evoke, and the postures of the amīrs and soldiers on horseback (lines 3–8). The poem then shifts focus to illustrate the effects of the portraiture through depictions of visitors, chief among them foreign emissaries (rusul al-mulūk), who are awe-struck by the larger-than-life images of the Mamluks (line 9). The portraits are so vivid that it appears as if the figures are about to leap off the wall (lines 11–12). This segment concludes with a description of the adjacent domed hall, the qubba, replete with the clichés usually reserved for lofty monuments, a juxtaposition of stock astro- logical references: the spheres, the sky, the sun, and shooting stars (lines 13– 15). The sun and shooting-star motif paves the way to the madḥ-panegyric sec- tion, which praises the sulṭān as a shining sun, and then puns on the superlative adjective ashraf, “the most noble,” in his title al-Ashraf (line 16). This is fol- lowed by a poetic and spatial “exit” which describes the “splendorous hallway (dihlīz),” covered with colorful brocades (line 17), that then leads the viewer out to the public square where the real-life extravaganza of the Mamluk riding exercises takes place (line 18). The qabaq scenes evoke the “tender and gentle” side of the military regalia, while the theme of war and peace strikes a visual balance between the heroic paintings in the Hall and the celebratory peaceful reality shown in the public square.4 A verbal balance is achieved in the poem as well, as it progresses from an awe-filled, bombastic beginning to a joyous, cheerful end. The last line strikes the “bottom-line” trope, evincing the ritualis- tic function and the practical incentive of a panegyric. Having displayed their for remarkable landscapes. For its symbolic significance in Persian “heroic narratives,” see John Renard, Islam and the Heroic Image: Themes in Literature and the Visual arts (Macon, ga: Mercer University Press, 1999), 166–171, 179–180, 225. In Arabic sources, the city of Damascus, for example, was frequently referred to as “Iram of the pillars;” see Zayde Antrim, “Place and Belonging in Medieval Syria, 6th/12th to 8th/14th Centuries” (PhD dissertation, Harvard University, 2004), 88, 146, 305–306. 3 The Īwān Kisrā was a favorite topic for the poets, writing in Arabic and Persian; see Stefan Sperl and Christopher Shackle, eds., Qasida Poetry in Islamic Asia and Africa (Leiden: Brill, 1996), 2: 389–411; Samer Ali, “Reinterpreting al-Buḥturī’s Īwān Kisrā Ode: Tears of Affection for the Cycles of History,” Journal of Arabic Literature 37.1 (2006): 46–67. 4 Qabaq (Turkish) is the wooden target used for a royal archery game of the same name, which was a favorite pastime among the Mamluks..

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