Download PDF | Ghazwan Yaghi - Imperial Ideology and Architecture_ Damascus Under the Mamlūk Sultans (1260-1516 Ce) (Leiden Studies in Islam and Society, 19)-Brill (2024).
139 Pages
Introduction
Architecture is one of the ways in which the grandeur and authority of the state finds expression. Ibn Khaldūn drew a connection between a state’s might and the greatness of its architectural outputs and said that the splendor of a state’s building projects varied according to its strength and policies.1 The interplay between the material and intellectual elements of buildings reveals a great deal of information about a state’s artistic output and the factors that influenced the formation of its particular artistic style. When speaking of “Islamic architecture,” this refers at once to an external structure—constituting the outward physical appearance of the architectural product with all of its structural, architectural, and decorative elements—and, at the same time, a deep structure; representing the intellectual substance encapsulated within the architectural product that gives its outward physical appearance the form, features, and identity that render it distinct from other architectural styles.
The emergence of architectural styles has, throughout the history of Islam, been connected to the political changes that gave rise to various states, each of which had their own political doctrine, which was the primary reason for political, intellectual, and social changes in its domains, which were in turn reflected in the artistic and architectural styles that the state produced, as these are primarily associated with the state’s political doctrine and ideology.2 Researchers agree that the political doctrine of the ruling elite, in terms of its goals and methods, determines the form and quality of the state’s artistic and architectural output, and determines its orientation, themes, and general characteristics, as well as the final form of its architectural and decorative elements. Political ideology is reflected through architecture in a number of different forms, to the extent that building projects can serve as a record of the historical and political events associated with them and which left their imprint upon them. At the same time, these buildings embody the power of the state and its cultural orientation, as many of these structures carry multi-faceted implications for notions of politics and authority.
Indeed, the deep conceptual relationship between political ideology and architecture does not appear out of the blue. On the contrary, it takes time for this complex set of factors to gradually appear in the state’s architectural endeavors—a process that has several stages—until clear changes take place that merit these projects being recognized as belonging to a unique and independent style, with its own defining qualities. This fact is evident in the emergence of a distinctly Mamlūk artistic and architectural style when the mid-thirteenth century saw the rise of one of the most powerful “Turkic” regimes in the Middle East: The Mamlūk Sultanate. Ruling over an empire that stretched from southeastern Anatolia to Egypt and the Hijaz, the political-military elites of the Sultanate—the eponymous mamlūks—invested heavily in urban building projects.
The political ideology of the Mamlūk Sultanate was, to a large degree, concerned with how power was distributed among the ruling elites and the purposes for which it was to be used. Architecture was the most important arena in which the power of the Mamlūk state was reflected, and it is in their architectural record that we find the most important surviving examples of expressions of Mamlūk imperial ideology. Traditionally, analyses of the Mamlūk Sultanate are framed in terms of a conflict between oligarchy and autocracy.3 Writing in the 1970s, Holt had already presented this conflict in political ideology as“the concept of a hereditary monarchy [that]failed to establish itself against a rival view of the state as a crowned republic, an oligarchy of magnates in which the throne would pass by election or usurpation to one of the amīrs.”4 According to this school of thought, the amīrs—the political-military elites of the Mamlūk Sultanate—exclusively consisted of former military slaves (mamlūks) of mostly nomadic Central Asian extraction.5 Recently, however, this notion of a “one-generation nobility” consisting of former military slave elites has been convincingly challenged,6 as has the paradigm of tension between oligarchy and autocracy by the introduction of a new concept of the socio-political organization of the Sultanate; the so-called “military patronage state.”7
The military patronage state builds on a long standing regional Turco-Mongol tradition of political organization.8 And in Central Asia, the ideology of Turkic politics was very similar to that of the Mamlūks in Syria and Egypt.9 The Mamlūk elites made architecture a priority and invested heavily in urban building projects. In many of their details, the resulting structures reflect both the strength of the state and its general orientation.10 Even though these buildings were privately-funded and initiated by members of the elite on an individual basis, they played an important role in the provision of public services in the empire, such as drinking water, bathhouses, education, and medicine. As such, these architectural undertakings served to legitimize the rule of the Mamlūk political elite and conveyed a specific imperial ideology, insofar as these structures represented the goals and methods of the political ideology of the Mamlūk sultans and leaders.
The Islamic legal institution of the pious endowment (waqf ) was essential to this process, especially for conferring legitimacy upon these political elites and communicating this ideology through the buildings that were constructed as a result of it. The present study, which looks at one of the most important architectural complexes from the Mamlūk era that still stands in the Syrian capital of Damascus, intends to examine the relationship between imperial ideology and architecture under the rule of the Mamlūk sultans, and to shed further light on the role of pious endowments (sing. waqf, pl. awqāf ) in facilitating the legalization of the imperial Mamlūk ideology and guaranteeing its survival.
Link
Press Here
0 التعليقات :
إرسال تعليق