The Mahmal Legend and the Pilgrimage of the Ladies of the Mamluk Court (MSR I, 1997)

During the Ottoman period in Egypt a legend was created which attributed the origin of the mah ̋mal tradition to Shajarat al-Durr. As women's topics are receiving increasing attention in scholarly research these days, the persona of Shajarat al-Durr ought to be revisited. More particularly, the circumstances that led to the association of the Egyptian pilgrimage with a female royal person deserve our interest. For this purpose, references to the earlier pilgrimage of the Abbasid queen Zubaydah and to the pilgrimage performed by the elite women of the Mamluk court will be examined and compared in the following pages in order to decode the legend about Shajarat al-Durr. Mamluk history begins with an extraordinary episode—the rule of a female sultan, Shajarat al-Durr, a Turk, who began her career as a slave. She carried the title of sulţa≠ nah and was elected by men to fulfill this function. In her name the khuţbah was delivered and coins were minted. One tends sometimes to disregard this fact because of its exceptional character. In her status as sulţa≠ nah in the medieval Muslim world, Shajarat al-Durr was of course an almost unique case. Her accession to the throne of Egypt was largely related to the complex and unstable political situation of that time, the end of the Ayyubid dynasty during Louis IX's Crusade against Damietta and the absence of an adequate successor to Sultan al-S̨a≠ lih̋ Najm al-D|n Ayyu≠b. Although her reign as sulţa≠ nah lasted only three months, or more precisely eighty days, Shajarat al-Durr's involvement in politics covered a much longer period, namely, the seventeen years during which, as the favorite concubine, then as the wife of two consecutive sultans, she was far from being a passive spectator of political events, using all available means to play an active role in decision-making at the sultan's court. This role began during al-S̨a≠ lih̋'s fight for the throne of Egypt, when she accompanied him to prison along with his closest followers. It ended with her decision to murder her second husband Aybak. Al-Maqr|z|, who seems to have been familiar with Shajarat al-Durr's waqf documents, attributes to her important buildings in Cairo. These included her husband's mausoleum as well as a garden, a h ̋amma≠m, and a palace near the cemetery of Sayyidah Naf|sah where she also founded a madrasah with her own mausoleum. Shajarat al-