Download PDF | Robert Hillenbrand and Sylvia Auld, eds., Ayyubid Jerusalem: The Holy City in Context, 1187-1250, Altajir Trust, 2009.
568 Pages
Jerusalem is a city with a unique status in the consciousness of the great monotheistic faiths. Its significance is enshrined in the beliefs of the three Abrahamic religions of the Book: Judaism, Christianity and Islam, which together are sacred to almost half of humanity. Jerusalem remains today a focus for the hopes and prayers of millions of people around the world.
With its overwhelming historic and spiritual importance, Jerusalem is, and has always been, among the most sensitive issues of human controversy. As with other holy places, the question of Jerusalem has never been a purely religious one, yet the convergence of values between the adherents of the different monotheistic faiths proposes the way forward. Jerusalem may be a turbulent city, but it is also one of sublime beauty, whose holy sites highlight our shared consciousness and speak of man’s common quest for contact with the infinite and the desire to find both God and self. This deep awareness of our common heritage points to the need for a recognition of the moral and philosophical authority of holy sites and cities. Religious authority should be raised above the mundane. The civilisational ties which we all have with these unique structures make it imperative that they do not become pawns in either political, or ideological, struggles.
Today the Old City of Jerusalem remains a precious heritage for the world, a unique collection of buildings and monuments, from the humblest shops and houses to the great mosques and mausolea. This fabric has evolved over more than two millennia, providing a setting for the lives of Jew, Christian and Muslim as they go about their daily business.
What we see today in the Old City, what can be studied, photographed and measured, is largely a creation of successive Muslim periods. As such it deserves preservation in its own right as a rare and valuable example of a process of urban evolution over the centuries. The spiritual element lifts the Old City to a higher plane and makes its conservation an urgent priority for us all. Its history as a living entity deserves to be better understood.
This study is the third in a distinguished series which seeks to make a contribution to that understanding. It concentrates on Ayyubid Jerusalem, the short, but significant, period of Saladin and his successors which saw the reassertion of the Muslim presence while Christians and Jews remained and continued to settle in the Old City. It was an era of cultural, socio-economic, and architectural change, in which Ayyubid Jerusalem can be perceived as a cultural entity enriched by the wide variety of groups shaping public life.
With its two companion volumes (Mamluk Jerusalem,1987, and Ottoman Jerusalem, 2000) this book draws on nearly 30 years of dedicated scholarship. It is hoped that the completed trilogy will add substantively to current knowledge about Jerusalem's unique urban environment and so increase the rationale for its preservation for future generations.
HRH Prince El Hassan bin Talal
PREFACE
Ayyubid rule marks a new beginning for Islamic Jerusalem, not only after almost a century of Crusader domination but also after a lean four centuries and more after the departure of the Umayyads. At the same time it served as a curtain-raiser for the thorough transformation which the city experienced under the Mamluks, who systematically beautified it with dozens of new public buildings, many of them on the Haram al-Sharif. Obviously this renewed interest in Jerusalem was triggered by the Crusader presence and by the supreme effort that it took to dislodge them from the city. Nevertheless, it proved problematic to sustain the momentum generated by Saladin’s victory at Hattin in July 1187 and his capture of Jerusalem a few months later. Jerusalem was plagued throughout the later medieval period by the small size of its population, and this factor in itself was enough to interdict the possibility that the city could challenge Damascus, let alone Aleppo or Cairo, for political dominance. The volatile political and military situation that obtained throughout the Ayyubid period made Jerusalem a risky proposition as a place to settle, and while there was a certain amount of repopulation in the generation after Saladin’s death, including the high-profile immigration of members of the Syrian intellectual élite, it was never enough to make the city fully viable in this period. This, then, was a time of transition, when—after the shock administered by the Crusaders—Jerusalem reclaimed its Islamic identity once more.
The project that has been realized by the publication of Ayyubid Jerusalem was one very close to the heart of Alistair Duncan, the Director and driving force behind first the World of Islam Festival Trust and then of its successor, the Altajir Trust. This book is the last major work associated with him. Over some four decades Alistair had developed a deep love for Jerusalem, coupled with an open-hearted acceptance of the key role it played for each of the three Abrahamic faiths. He revisited the city constantly, and formed some of the most enduring friendships of his life there and
under its metaphorical shadow. He loved to tell the tale of how, on an early visit, ‘Arif al-‘Arif himself had taken him by the hand and led him into the Haram enclosure. Alistair’s affection for Jerusalem, and his intuitive understanding of its many-layered history, inform two books he wrote celebrating respectively its Christian and its Muslim heritage—books which he illustrated with his own high-quality photographs. These document much that has since disappeared. He it was who photographed the minbar of the Aqsa mosque in colour just before it was destroyed by arson in 1969—an image reproduced in this book. Alistair saw the publication of books about Islamic civilization as one of the key activities of the Trusts which he headed, a policy which yielded rich fruit from 1976 onwards. Its highlights included the constellation of books published under the imprint of the World of Islam Festival Trust in that same year, and the Trust’s first essay in the genre of books devoted to a single city —namely San‘a’, An Arabian Islamic City, published in 1983.
Books on Jerusalem formed a major part of his longterm programme, and he was determined that the important monographs among them should become monuments themselves. The first major book in this series was Michael Burgoyne’s Mamiluk Jerusalem, a magisterial record—carried out to the highest possible standards of accuracy—of the physical fabric of Jerusalem in the two and a half centuries of Mamluk rule, supplemented by a detailed account of its historical context which owed much to the work of Donald Richards. This magnificent achievement was followed some 13 years later by Ottoman Jerusalem, which had grown into two volumes and 1168 pages, with the balance fairly equally divided between architectural material and historical, religious and art-historical chapters by 33 authors. Alistair envisaged Ayyubid Jerusalem as a shorter but still substantial volume with the same dual focus as Ottoman Jerusalem, and entrusted the project to the same editorial team of Dr Sylvia Auld and myself. We have sought to realize his vision and have interpreted our brief as presenting he historical and art-historical context of Ayyubid Jerusalem in rather more detail than the buildings themselves, since they cannot compete with those of the Ottomans, let alone the Mamluks. The much more limited time frame—63 years of Ayyubid rule in Jerusalem as against 267 for the Mamluks and 400 for the Ottomans—has also dictated a somewhat different emphasis from that followed in either of the previous books. The key difference is that, alongside the continuing emphasis on Jerusalem, we have attempted to provide a conspectus of certain aspects of the entire Ayyubid period.
It is a pleasant duty to acknowledge the help that the project has received over the years. | thank the individual contributors whose chapters have illuminated so many facets of Ayyubid life. In Jerusalem the support of ‘Adnan Hussaini, Yusuf Natsheh, ‘Issam ‘Awad and Khadr Salameh has been indispensable, and the warmest thanks are due to the Administration of Augaf and Islamic Affairs and to the Department of Islamic Archaeology. The Council for British Research in the Levant has helped to fund some of the survey work carried out by Dr Mahmud Hawari and his team. Our team was comfortably accommodated at The Kenyon Institute (previously the British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem) for the periods of research in the city.
The Altajir Trust has funded the entire project with the utmost generosity, thanks to the munificent patronage of H.E. Mohamed Mahdi Altajir and his family. They have been the means of presenting the Holy City, and all who love it, with a detailed record of its physical fabric in Ayyubid times, so far as it has survived, and of a historical and art-historical conspectus of the achievements of the Ayyubid dynasty. Thus the story of Islamic Jerusalem, as told by its buildings, can now, after forty years of work, be traced in detail in a trilogy of volumes from Saladin’s reconquest of the city in 1187 to Allenby’s entry into it in 1917. As with its companion volumes, the hope is that the mass of data thus assembled will not only document in exhaustive detail the unwavering Islamic commitment to Jerusalem, and its embellishment in these years of Muslim rule, but will also act as a stimulus to further research.
The Board of Trustees of the Altajir Trust has provided solid support throughout the long gestation of this book and throughout the many academic and administrative challenges that it has posed. To them, and particularly to Alistair Duncan and his successors, the late Dr Duncan Haldane and Richard Muir, as well as to Professor Alan Jones, the most grateful thanks are due. I would like to pay a special tribute to Richard Muir for his vision, his energy and his patient support. Euan Cockburn produced a corpus of drawings of consistently high quality, while Professor Yasir Suleiman, a Qudsi himself, put in place arrangements to administer the budget through the University of Edinburgh.
As with Oftoman Jerusalem, and indeed other projects in which I have collaborated with him, Leonard Harrow proved to be the kind of general editor of whom most authors can only dream. Himself an accomplished scholar of the Islamic world, he has constantly kept all the threads of this complex book in his hands and has dealt unobtrusively and efficiently with the many problems that it has generated. He has made everything easier by his good nature, his unfailing courtesy and his imperturbability.
Finally, I should like to record my deep appreciation of the sustained efforts of four people who have worked very hard to bring this book to completion. Dr Joe Rock took a great many of the photographs, sometimes in difficult circumstances, and contributed many insights into the discussion of the buildings themselves. Dr Michael Burgoyne enriched this book at every turn by generously putting at the team’s disposal his encyclopaedic knowledge of Jerusalem and its buildings. My wife Carole cheerfully dealt with all manner of linguistic and historical problems, especially as the book neared completion. And my co-editor Dr Sylvia Auld imposed order on the entire project from the outset and then sustained it through thick and thin. | have indeed been fortunate to work with such a team.
Robert Hillenbrand Edinburgh March 2009
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