Download PDF | (Handbook of Oriental Studies. Section 1 the Near and Middle East, 176) Doris Behrens-Abouseif - Dress and Dress Code in Medieval Cairo_ A Mamluk Obsession-Brill Academic Pub (2023).
258 Pages
Introduction: Subject, Sources, and Terminology
The significance of dress and dress code in Mamluk history-writing is a remarkable phenomenon that goes even beyond the traditional ‘obsession’ with textiles in the Muslim world.1 If, as Lisa Golombek stated, ‘textiles in Islamic society fulfilled far more than the functions normally expected in other societies,’ the Mamluk approach to textiles, especially to dress, could be described as an obsession. This phenomenon is evident in the wealth of information provided by all chroniclers of the time on ceremonial outfit, dress code, and dress. As the textile historian Louise Mackie put it, ‘Mamluk society was saturated with textiles.’2
However, this book is not about Mamluk textiles. It is about political selfrepresentation and social identities under Mamluk rule as they were manifested in the clothing culture of that time. Without the material evidence of surviving garments, we are left almost completely at the mercy of the chroniclers, with all the limits and biases their views may imply, to inform us about Mamluk dress culture. This book is a response to what I perceive as a crucial message which Mamluk chroniclers were keen to convey to the world and to posterity. The meanings they associated with clothing reveal a wide scope of Mamluk urban culture spanning ceremonial as well as everyday life. As elsewhere in medieval societies, dress was meant to define various layers of identity such as gender, religion, rank, ethno-geographic origin, profession, and affiliations at the same time as individual character, thus reflecting and documenting its social environment as it evolved. ‘The wearing of an item of clothing is fundamentally an act of meaning that goes beyond modesty, ornamentation, and protection. It is an act of signification and therefore a profoundly social act right at the very heart of the dialectic of society’, wrote Roland Barthes.3
This book is based on a diachronic perspective, which aims at linking the evolution of dress culture with its historical context. This perspective will confirm the differences that cannot be overemphasized between the Bahri sultanate (1250–1390) which, since 1279, was ruled by the Qalāwūnid dynasty and the later Circassian period ushered in by the interrupted reign of Sultan Barqūq (1382–89, 1390–99). The book begins with a look at the role of religion and other traditions in shaping the basic features of dress culture in Mamluk Cairo.
The chapter that follows links the peculiar Mamluk type of ruling aristocracy with the sultanate’s emerging vision of self-representation. This vision is complemented by the chroniclers’ own vision of regal representation and its vestiary aspects. A chronological review of Mamluk sultans that is focused on their attitude to clothing culture is presented in the next two chapters, dealing respectively with the earlier ‘designer’ sultans who established the Mamluk dress code and with the Circassian sultans who modified and adapted these rules to the realities of their time. The bestowal of a robe of honor, khilʿa, a symbol of the bond between the ruler and his subjects, is a subject that accompanies and punctuates all political events in the Mamluk chronicles; its narrative unfolds a panorama of Mamluk society in Cairo. It is discussed in two chapters, 6 and 7, dealing respectively with its institutional and material aspects, following the changes it underwent over the entire period.
The next chapter on the Dār al-Ṭirāz in Alexandria, the only court workshop of the sultanate, which was concerned with the production of honorific textiles, connects its history to the city of Alexandria and demonstrates for the first time its significance in the history of Mamluk art. Chapters 9 and 10 document respectively the ceremonial dress code of the military and civilian elites formulated in Ibn Faḍl Allāh al-ʿUmarī’s Masālik and its practical implementation as described in the chronicles. The next chapter on the dress of urban commoners is followed by a chapter on women’s dress and the controversies the creation of fashions caused in the city. Chapter 12 shows the discrepancies and consistencies between the representations of Mamluk dress in the visual sources, artefacts, manuscripts, and Renaissance art and the historians’ accounts. Social mobility, a highly controversial subject in the chronicles, was manifested in dress behavior.
The Mamluk regime, however, was creative and pragmatic in dealing with new developments as Chapter 13 demonstrates. The economic situation following the reign of al-Nāṣir Muḥammad and the Black Death is usually described as obscured by a series of crises, industrial and agricultural decline, and currency devaluation. Chapter 14 argues that these are not directly reflected in the modes of consumption and lifestyle, especially regarding the court and the upper classes. Rather, it seems that economic crises increase the significance of clothes and textiles as assets to be treasured and hoarded. Owing to accidental material loss, the art of clothing has been invisible in the history of Mamluk art and material culture as it is conveyed in modern studies and through the showcases of museums and exhibitions. This book calls on the testimony of the Mamluk historians to fill this gap, emphasizing the significance of clothing as a collective as well as individual symbol of identity and as a major artistic and esthetic expression of its time.
1 Studies Numerous studies have been dedicated in recent years to pre-modern dress culture in general social and ceremonial contexts, including in the Muslim world and with reference to the Mamluk period. Nevertheless, only a few studies have focused on the Mamluk period. Leo A. Mayer’s seminal book, Mamluk Costume, published seven decades ago is so far the only monograph dedicated specifically to Mamluk dress and has been of great use to my research. However, its synchronic perspective leaves questions open to a new diachronic approach. Aḥmad ʿAbd ar-Rāziq’s book on Mamluk women includes a chapter on dress and a glossary of related terms, and Albrecht Fuess’s dedicates an article to late Mamluk turban fashion.4 Albert Arazi’s lexicographic study based on al-Suyūṭī’s treatise on the ṭaylasān is a significant documentation of the clerics’ vestiary code in Mamluk academic circles.5
Stewart Gordon’s edited book6 on robes of honor in the Middle Ages points to the universal significance of this institution and thus contributes to putting the Mamluk case in perspective. Monika Springberg-Hinsen’s monograph deals with the khilʿa across regions and periods of the Muslim world7 and Werner Diem’s monograph8 concentrates on the khilʿa as a component of the investiture procedure in the pre-Mamluk and Mamluk periods. Both studies explore the political and institutional context of investiture and its ceremonial aspect. Eiren Shea’s enlightening book on Mongol Court Dress9 adopts a panoramic perspective covering global-commercial, artistic, ceremonial, and cultural aspects of clothing in the Yuan Empire. This perspective has indirectly provided me with interesting comparative material to emphasize the peculiarities of the Mamluk sultanate in this matter. Studies on textiles have greatly expanded in recent years to reveal the technological and artistic interactions activated by the global commercial network.
Mamluk trade history, amply documented in Italian archives, is a significant source for the study of Mamluk material culture, as the classic studies of Wilhelm Heyd and Eliahu Ashtor and, more recently, publications on Mediterranean trade history and its interaction with the Muslim world, including Jacobi and Marco Spallanzani on textiles, and Benjamin Arbel and Georg Christ on the Venetian connection with the sultanate, have reiterated. Nonetheless, these archives have not yet been exploited in research focused on Mamluk textiles. Recent studies based on textile fragments in museum collections and secondary sources have been mainly concerned with stylistic and technical categorization and comparisons.10 Louise Mackie’s article on Mamluk silk and Esin Atıl’s catalogue on Mamluk art, both published more than four decades ago, continue to be useful references. What Esin Atıl wrote then that, ‘the history and development of Mamluk textiles have not yet been properly studied’, is still valid.11
2 Material Evidence It is an unfortunate fact that not a single complete outfit or garment survives from the period to convey a tangible enough image of Mamluk ceremonial or even ordinary dress to match the chroniclers’ accounts.12 The fact that textiles were not merely for clothing but fulfilled many other functions in furnishing, horse-trappings, and ceremonial paraphernalia, makes it difficult to identify the surviving textile fragments with the rich variety of garments and clothing items mentioned in the chronicles. Most importantly, owing to the importation of fabrics from India and Europe that took place on a large scale for both common and upmarket use, the testimony of fabrics alone, whether made in Egypt or Syria, remains limited. For the same reason, textiles in European collections and European sacerdotal vestments made of Mamluk fabrics cannot reveal much about dress culture in medieval Cairo. The evidence of fragmentary fabrics alone has limited relevance to the scope of this book, which is focused on dress code and the wider meaning of clothing in a specific period in the Egyptian capital. However, the images of Mamluk silk fragments that I have included in this book should convey a sense of the textile esthetics of the period.
3 Archival Sources No archival sources of the kind available to scholars of Ottoman history and culture are available to Mamluk historians. However, Italian archives have provided a wealth of material on commercial interactions between the Mamluks and Italian cities. The exceptional Ḥaram documents in Jerusalem that contain estate inventories provide some unique information about the clothing of ordinary people and about the socio-economic significance of clothing and textiles in that region in the late 14th century, as Huda Lutfi’s studies on Jerusalem have revealed.13 However useful it is, this source cannot fully mirror the situation in the capital. Waqf deeds do not provide information relevant to our subject. The Geniza documents are an important source about clothes in the Fatimid and Ayyubid periods but less so for the Mamluk period.14
4 Narrative Sources All major Mamluk narrative sources report extensively about dress and dress code in courtly and official circles. It is a phenomenon in Mamluk historiography in general and not specific to individual historians. ʿUmarī’s Masālik, partly repeated in Qalqashandī’s Ṣubḥ, both compiled in the context of chancery, is our major source on the Mamluk dress code in its early and formative phase. Among the historians, only Maqrīzī in his description of Cairo’s markets gives a glimpse of customers’ attitudes in matters of dress and fashion. Ḥisba literature or manuals for market inspectors and related literature dealing with market regulations are already well known and frequently cited for the information they provide about religious and ethical precepts involving clothes and textiles and about commercial practices. An interesting source on the meaning of textiles and clothes in Mamluk society is the text compiled by the Mamluk emir and scholar Khalīl al-Ẓāhirī on the interpretation of dreams. Although the subject is based on religious traditions, Ẓāhirī’s book stands out for the extensive and detailed information it provides about the symbolism of textiles and clothes. The 14th-century Mamluk text of the 1001 Nights reveals information on the clothes of urban commoners that cannot be found elsewhere.
5 Visual Sources Unlike other Islamic rulers, the Mamluk sultans did not patronize the art of the illustrated book, with the result that pictorial material on clothing from this period is limited. Figural representations on artefacts of metal and enameled glass fill some gaps in the Bahri period but they are no longer available for the 15th century. Observations made by European travelers of late medieval Cairo and ‘Orientalism’ in Italian Renaissance paintings of the late 15th and early 16th centuries add impressionistic touches to the chroniclers’ accounts.
6 Terminology Names of textiles are often of diverse origin, reflecting the wide commercial network of the medieval Muslim world; however, they are rarely self-explanatory. Arabic dictionaries are not very helpful when it comes to specifying time and space, though Dozy’s Dictionnaire des Vêtements, even after 180 years, is still valuable because of its extensive use of primary sources, many of which are Mamluk, and his Supplément aux Dictionnaires Arabes fills many gaps. Arazi’s more specialized study ‘Noms de vêtements’ points to mistakes in some of Dozy’s interpretations. Despite its age and focus on the earlier period, Serjeant’s book on Islamic textiles is useful for referring to textual sources and for his interpretation of some technical terms.15 Terms describing clothes should not be interpreted universally; rather their meanings vary largely between regions and periods. Old inherited terms can refer to contemporary types of clothes that look very different from their predecessors. Already the long lexicographic discourse in al-Suyūṭī’s treatise on the ṭaylasān, studied by Arazi, attests to the problem Mamluk scholars faced when they tried to define the features of a garment mentioned in the Prophet’s tradition, a term may continue to refer to an item that has substantially changed over time, and conversely, various terms across time and space may have been used to describe the same type of item. Within a period of more than two and a half centuries of Mamluk history, terms evolved as well as the objects they designated, not always equally or simultaneously. Most terms used for garments and their fabrics in the 14th century, such as the ‘qabāʾ tatarī’ and the ‘bughluṭāq’, were no longer in use in the 15th century. The ‘malūṭa’ in the 14th century designated a plain garment worn by commoners; however, in the later period, it was worn by emirs and the sultan himself, changing a commoner’s garment to a common style of garment. Conversely, some textiles, like the block-printed cotton imported from India, amply represented in museum collections,16 are not documented in the chronicles, which merely refer to ‘Indian cotton’, so that their use remains unknown. The historian Ibn Aybak al-Dawādārī in the 14th century describes costumes in different terms than those used a century later by Maqrīzī or Ibn Taghrībirdī in their account of the same event, and his contemporary Nuwayrī also uses a different vocabulary. The term ‘kūfiyya’ describes two different types of head cover, a bonnet worn by Mamlūks and a kind of scarf. While the Egyptian chroniclers of the 15th century use the term ‘kāmiliyya’ for a certain type of robe of honor lined with sable, this term is not used by the contemporary Syrian chronicler Ibn Ṭūlūn when he refers to the same thing. When Ṣayrafī uses the unusual term ‘janda’ (pl. jandāt) once to describe a robe of honor with sable or squirrel we may assume that he is referring to a kāmiliyya.17 Sometimes the name of a garment was abbreviated to describe only its fabric, like the ‘aṭlasayn’ instead of ‘qabāʾ aṭlasayn’, ‘fawqānī’, ‘khanjī’, and ‘shāsh.’ The nuanced meaning and evolution of the term ‘qumāsh’ for textile reveals the increasing significance of textiles as assets. Only an analysis of a term’s context in time and space, like Mayer and Dozy did, and as I have also attempted to do in this book, can help identify the item behind the word. Although the headdress of the Mamluk class resembled a turban, both being composed of a cap wrapped with fabric, the chroniclers never refer to it by the term ‘ʿimāma’, which is the term reserved for the turban of the religious establishment and other civilians described as ‘muʿammamūn’. Nevertheless, modern historians describe it indiscriminately as a turban. This is perhaps the best example for demonstrating the complexity of terminology.
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