Ibn ʿasākir's Children: Monumental Representations of Damascus Until the 12Th/18Th Century*

Ibn ʿAsākir’s Children: Monumental Representations of Damascus until the 12th/18th Century*

Dana Sajdi

The glory of Islamic Damascus is discursively inscribed. It is one of the few cities that has received an uninterrupted series of textual narrations—indeed, a tradition—in the form of literary (non-pictorial) topographies.1 While several authors had attempted to give Damascus textual shape, it is the description of al-Ḥāfiẓ ʿAlī b. al-Ḥasan Ibn ʿAsākir (d. 571/1176)2 that “made” the city and inaugurated an intertextual tradition of topographies of Damascus that lasted until modern times.3 In this article, I will examine three texts that constitute important junctures or turning points in the tradition, written by authors who lived in time periods as disparate as the 7th/13th, late 9th/15th, and 12th/18th centuries. But, the treatment will begin with Ibn ʿAsākir’s topography in order to understand its authoritative and canonical nature, attributes that give the

* I would like to thank Zayde Antrim and Nancy Khalek for their continuous conversations about Damascus with me; Steven Judd for his comments on an earlier version of this article; Jim Bowley for his editorial corrections; Heather Richardson for acting as the “intelligent Martian”; and Sahar Bazzaz and Emine Fetvacı for their small but crucial contributions to parts of this chapter. This work was originally inspired over a decade ago by R. Stephen Humphreys, Islamic History 228–54 (chapter ten “Urban Topography and Urban Society: Damascus under the Ayyubids and Mamluks”). 1 In addition to the four texts treated in the article and the six texts cited in notes below, other topographical works are Muḥammad b. Mukarram Ibn Manẓūr (d. 710/1311), Takmilat mukhtaṣar taʾrīkh‌ Dimashq li-bn ʿAsākir; al-Ḥasan b. Aḥmad al-Irbilī (d. 726/1326), in a compilation by Muḥammad Duhmān, Fī riḥāb Dimashq, 72–91; Shams al-Dīn Aḥmad b. Muḥammad al-Baṣrawī (d. 1003/1595), Tuḥfat al-anām fī faḍāʾil al-Shām: Taʾrīkh‌ wa-tarājim; Nuʿmān Qasāṭlī (d. 1338/1920), Kitāb al-rawḍa l-ghannāʾ fī Dimashq al-fayḥāʾ; ʿAbd al-Qādir Badrān (d. 1345/1927), Munādamat al-aṭlāl wa-musāmarat al-khayāl. 2 Ibn ʿAsākir, Ta‌ʾrīkh madīnat Dimashq: Wa-dhikr faḍlihā wa-tasmiyat man ḥallahā min al- amāthil aw ijtāza bi-nawāḥīhā min wāridīhā wa-ahlihā. The second volume has been re- printed with the same pagination under the title, Ta‌ʾrīkh madīnat Dimashq: Khiṭaṭ Dimashq. A French translation of the topographical part of the work has been undertaken by Elisséeff, La description de Damas d’Ibn Asakir. For the precursors of Ibn ʿAsākir, see the editor’s intro- duction in Ibn ʿAsākir, TMD 2, 6–9; Cobb, Virtual sacrality 35–55; Khalek, Damascus 142–4. 3 See, for example, Muḥammad Kurd ʿAlī, Khiṭaṭ al-Shām.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ��7 | doi ��.��63/9789004345201_005 Ibn ʿAsākir’s Children: Monumental Representations of Damascus 31 text a particular status, which I will term “monumental representation”. Before I explain this term, a brief history and description of Damascus is in order. There is no escaping the cliché that Damascus is one of the oldest continu- ously inhabited cities on earth. At a height of 1,000 meters above sea level, it is located in a semi-arid region in the southwest of modern Syria. The city’s ver- dant nature is due to the river Baradā and its tributaries, which run down from the Anti-Lebanon Mountains to feed the fertile gorge, al-Ghūṭa, without whose bounty Damascus could not have existed. Rising to importance as an Aramaic settlement in the 11th century BC, Damascus included a temple, which never lost its sacred character through the Assyrian, Chaldean, Persian, Hellenistic, Roman, Byzantine and Islamic periods. This sacred space’s last guise is the fa- mous Great Mosque or Umayyad Mosque, which was built in 96/715 and still defines the center of the city today. Damascus’ Greco-Roman past is detectible even in its modern topography by the outline of its walls, lending the city its rectangular shape, and the form of its two main intersecting roads.4 Within the walls, Damascus measures approximately 3.1 square kilometers; however, starting in the 5th/11th century, extramural neighborhoods began to emerge. Al-Ṣāliḥiyya suburb was built at the foothills of Mount Qāsyūn, to the northwest of the city, for the purpose of housing refugees escaping the Crusaders from the south.5 Several other quarters appeared to the north, northwest, west, and southwest of the city walls in the late medieval period. Finally, the neighborhood of al-Maydān,6 the long, diagonal extension to the southwest, was the most significant suburban growth during the early modern period and before the Ottoman Tanzimat reforms transformed parts of the city according to modern planning schemes.7 Damascus’ population has been estimated at a 100,000, 50,000, and 90,000 at different times in the medieval and early-modern periods.8 Thus, throughout its long history, Damascus sustained a relatively

4 There have been several surveys and histories of Damascus. The following is a list of selected works: Sauvaire, Description de Damas; Wulzinger and Watzinger, Damaskus, die islamische Stadt; Sauvaget, Les monuments historiques de Damas; Ziadeh, Damascus under the Mamlūks; ʿAbd al-Qādir Rīḥāwī, Damascus: Its history, development and artistic heritage; Schatkowski- Schilcher, Families in politics; Sack, Damaskus: Entwicklung und Struktur; Mouton, Damas et sa principauté. For a general history, see Burns, Damascus. 5 I am not aware of a study on al-Ṣāliḥiyya, but Ziadeh devotes a short chapter to the description of the suburb based on anecdotal evidence (see Ziadeh, Damascus 48–59). 6 Marino, Le Faubourg du Mīdān a Damas. 7 Weber, Damascus: Ottoman modernity. 8 For the medieval period, Ziadeh mentions 100,000 souls (see Ziadeh, Damascus 47). For the early-modern period, André Raymond agrees with other scholars that the count went from 52,000 in the 10th/16th century up to 90,000 at the end of the 12th/18th century (see