AL-FUST AT Its Foundation & Early Urban Development AL-FUSTAT Its Foundation and Early Urban Development Wladyslaw B. Kubiak THE AMERICAN UNIVERSITY IN CAIRO PRESS Publisher’s Note In the transliterated Arabic, the hamza is indicated by an apostrophe (‘), the ‘ayn by a reversed apostrophe (‘). Following our current standard practice, long vowels and emphatic consonants are not marked. Copyright © 1987 and 2016 by The American University in Cairo Press Sharia Kasr el Aini, Cairo, Egypt 113 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10018 420 www.aucpress.com First published in 1987 by the American University in Cairo Press All rights reserved. No Part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher ISBN 978 1 61797 741 1 Contents Foreword 7 Introduction IO Abbreviations of Publications Referenced in the Text 14 Chapter I The Source Material 17 Documents 17 Narrative Sources 18 Archaeological Sources 29 Chapter II The Geography of the Site 32 'Amal As/al 34 'Amal Fauq 36 The Northern Area of al-Kharab 37 The Southern Area of al-Kharab 38 Al-Qarafa al-Kubra 40 East Bank Environs 42 The Nile 43 Al-Djazira 47 The Western Channel of the Nile 48 The Western Bank 49 Chapter III The Pre-Islamic Settlements 50 Chapter IV The Foundation and a Town in the Making 58 The Selection of the Site 58 The Settlers 61 Division of Land 65 Organisation of the Camp-Town 70 Chapter V Demographic Evolution 76 Chapter VI Territorial Evolution 85 Evolution of the Town Quarters 88 Chapter VII The Main City Districts 95 The District of Ahl ar-Raya 95 Dimensions and Other Characteristics of the Tribal Districts 97 The Quarters of al-La/if and az-Zahir 98 Al-Hamra 99 Al-Hamra ad-Dunia 99 Al Hamra al-Wusta 100 Al-Hamra al-Quswa 101 Birkat al-Habash 103 AI-Djiza 103 The Island of the Shipyard 104 Qasr ash-Sham'-Babylon 106 The Necropolis 108 Chapter VIII The Minor Topographical Elements 111 The Streets 112 The Harbour 117 Khalid) Amir al-Mu'minin 118 Chapter IX Architecture 121 Conclusion 131 Notes 132 Plans 171 I. The Site of al-Fustat 172 2. General Situation 174 3. Babylon at the Conquest 175 4. Ethnic Groups and Multi-Tribal Quarters 176 5. Street Network Excavated by 'Ali Bahgat 177 6. Street Network Recently Revealed 178 Index 179 Foreword Certain Islamic cities instantly lend themselves to visual memory, topographical recall, or the experience of an ambience within them, no matter their modern carapace. Isfahan and Cordova, Samarra and Seville, Damascus and Istanbul are possible of appreciation in any or all of the above terms. In a more discrete historical sense one can read of Tirourid Samarqand, Nasrid Granada, Mughal Delhi and suffer the shock of recognition. Something of comparable sensation has been accorded Cairo up until World War II when its Fatimid-cum-Mamluk structure and essence had not been sacrificed to political dicta, population explosion and the awesome catalyst of reinforced concrete. Other famed cities we must "resurrect" from libraries for they have been, in Yeats' instructive phrase, "changed, changed utterly". Baghdad springs to mind immediately. Professor Lassner has strained and pulled, sieved and sifted, posited and planned and yet we are no closer to the "feel" of this fabled center of a pulsing civilization than we were when Professor Creswell put before us the pure module of the Round City of al-Mansur. (The plain pity here is that though Baghdad is given as the main locus of A Thousand and One Nights, it is well-known that it is thirteenth century Cairo which is being topographically evoked.) However, not a few of the aforementioned cities were such before the dispensation of Islam subsumed them in a different destiny. What of the purely Islamic City, or rather of those camp-capitals from which major urban entities evolved? We all know the names: Kufa, Basra, Fustat, Wasit, Qayrawan; all founded within the first century of the Hijra. Can we imagine them in their original contours and subsequent growth; can we conjure the tenor of life within them, the tone of the spiritual expression guiding them, or the thrust of their context within the burgeoning dar al-Islam? Texts help but they emphasize the pious and the political and deny us the choisisme of daily living. Archaeology should serve us better, but the civilization itself has precious little interest in such a pursuit, and, until quite recently, the non-Muslim excavator has chosen to emphasize other periods and other places. What has been yielded is either too minimal or too captious (in the "experts" reading of the evidence) to be taken as a microcosm of a more faceted whole. And really, with all those texts, necrologies, chronicles, coins, glass weights, commenda, scribal notes, legal documents, buildings yet in situ and others whose loci can be established, the other-than­ archaeologically-arrived-at evidence of sheer living through more than thirteen centuries of historical prominence-can archaeology tell us much more? 8 Foreword Generally, not really: the Islamic archaeologist dots the i's and crosses the t's, as it were, of those texts and histories, those sundry objects, that mass of epigraphical and numismatic data; but then, surprising and smashingly, yes, yes: the paintings at Kasr al-Hair, the floor mosaics at Khirbet al-Mafjir, the stucco at Madinat al­ Zahra, the breadth of vista at Samarra, that bourgeois aqueduct in Fustat and the incidence of Chinese ceramics there proving a millenium of trade, the mosque at Siraf extend our knowledge·along a hundred lines of interpenetrating cause and effect, interest and beauty ... things and ideas not quite posited before the spade hit the encumbering dust. Thus it is important to know that the author of the present volume initiated his interest in the subject of Fustat as a working archaeologis't, one at once hopeful and humble. Each season afforded a clearer picture of the great entrep6t in the double (but not necessarily continuous) jloruit of the Tulunid and Fatimid epochs. The architectural and artifactual evidence broadened our artistic, economic and even social understanding of the city and from the accumulated mounds above the ruins of these epochs we even deepened our already "pre-set" knowledge of the Mamluk era. But what of the early, the true Fustat, the key to the conquest of Egypt and North Africa? There was stratigraphic evidence in plenty, such that we could, for instance, date the revival of glazing in Egypt to about A.O. 700. There was ample evidence of a building mode - baked brick laid in mud mortar - though no single building of the period could be proven. There was the superb lustred goblet made for the Abbasid governor, Abd al-Samad b. Ali in A.O. 778 which prov.eel that the technique was Egyptian in origin, as Lane and Lamm had surmised. We even uncovered a strange double-roomed underground chamber (serdab), indisputably pre-Tulunid and an anomaly in the domestic architecture of Egypt. Yet, however elated these discoveries made the archaologist, they did not in sum give us a hint of a microcosm of the misr founded by 'Amr b. al-'As. Bahgat's pioneer work was methodologically unsound, in that he reported no stratigraphy or locus for any of his major finds. Casanova's Reconstfrution was naturally a scholarly gift but it proved an albatross when used to pin-point particular sites if for no other reason than that no revealed street was as straight as he posited them all to be. Neither the sources nor the finds allowed for extrapolation. At this point Professor Kubiak decided to re-examine the sources. The results of this painstaking re-marshalling of the evidence (as he admits there is really nothing positively new in the source material) is a much more clearly focussed Fustat in the first century of its existence than we have had heretofore or we are likely to get from any future archaeology. The descriptions and arguments need not be detailed or countered here; suffice it to point to three aspects of Professor Kubiak's research which merit the strictest attention, particularly by those historians interested in the problems of the amsar and the transformational mechanics of the pre-Islamic into the Islamic. We get here for the first time a concise and yet richer picture of the area (which was to become Fustat) in its Roman and Byzantine setting. This is very important for it placed both geographical and politically economic limitations on the Foreword 9 conquering army, limitations which were ignored, if ever, at peril to the nascent community. Secondly, we are given the "growth pattern" both topographically and toponymically, which together corrects and/ or adumbrates the recieved concepts to be gleaned from Casanova and the authors of the articles on Fustat in both editions of the Encyclopedia of Islam. Here, most particularly, the author shows his mastery of the sources and his manner of"reading;• them: e.g., Abd al-Hakam got his information from the oldest inhabitants and was himself a citizen of the quarter; lbn Quda'i at key moments was simply not there though his surmises became scripture to.the likes of lbn Duqmaq and al-Maqrizi. Along these lines, it is now our belief that Kubiak's Plans I and 4 supersede the analogous ones in Casanova. Finally, Kubiak provides a most convincing evolutionary pattern for the society of the first century.