In 1317, he himself arrived on pilgrimage and proceeded to demonstrate to his generals that their sacred duty was to embellish the Temple Mount and the streets around it. Assisted by his best friend and Syrian viceroy, Tankiz, the sultan refortified the Tower of David, adding a Friday mosque for the garrison, and raised monumental colonnades and madrassas on the Temple Mount, reroofing the Dome and al-Aqsa, adding the minaret at the Gate of the Chain, and the Gate of the Cotton-sellers and Cotton-Sellers Market – all of which can be seen today.
Nasir favoured the Sufi route to reach God and built five convents for his orders of mystics. In their gleaming new lodges, they restored some of the holy magic to Jerusalem with their dancing, singing, trances and sometimes even self-mutilation, all to achieve the soaring emotion necessary to reach up towards God.
The sultan’s men got the message: he and his successors exiled outof-favour amirs to Jerusalem where they were expected to spend their ill-gotten wealth on sumptuous complexes that contained palaces, madrassas and tombs. The closer to the Temple Mount, the sooner they would arise on Judgement Day. They constructed enormous arched substructures and then built on top of them. These buildings* were ingeniously squeezed onto the roofs of earlier ones around the gates of the Noble Sanctuary.†
Nasir found Jerusalem – or at least the Muslim Quarter – in dust and cobwebs and left her in marble, so when Ibn Battutah visited, he found a city that was ‘large and imposing’. Islamic pilgrims poured into al-Quds, exploring from the hell of Gehenna to the paradise of the Dome and reading the books of fadail that told them ‘a sin committed in Jerusalem is the equivalent of a thousand sins and a good work there equal to a thousand’. He who lived there ‘is like a warrior in the jihad’ while to die there ‘is like dying in heaven’. Jerusalem’s mysticism blossomed to such an extent that Muslims started to circumambulate, kiss and anoint the Rock as they had not done since the seventh century. The fundamentalist scholar Ibn Taymiyya railed against Nasir and these Sufi superstitions, warning that Jerusalem ranked only as a pious visit – a ziyara – not the equivalent of the haj to Mecca. The sultan imprisoned this puritanical dissident six times but to no avail and Ibn Taymiyya provided the inspiration for the harsh Wahabiism of Saudi Arabia and today’s Jihadists.
The Exquisite sultan no longer trusted the Turkish Mamluks who had become the elite so he started to buy Georgian or Circassian slaveboys from the Caucasus to provide his bodyguard and they influenced his decisions in Jerusalem: he granted the Church of the Holy Sepulchre to the Georgians. But the Latins had not forgotten her either: in 1333, he allowed King Robert of Naples (and Jerusalem) to repair parts of the Church and take possession of the Cenacle on Mount Zion where he started a Franciscan monastery.
The ailing tiger is the most dangerous. The sultan fell ill but he had made his friend Tankiz ‘so powerful he became afraid of him’. In 1340, Tankiz was arrested and poisoned. Nasir himself died a year later, succeeded by his many sons. But ultimately, the new Caucasian slaves overthrew the dynasty, founding a new line of sultans who favoured the Georgians in Jerusalem. On the other hand, the Catholic Latins – the heirs of the hated Crusaders – were there on sufferance under the repressive Mamluks whose paroxysms of violence terrorized Christians and Jews alike. When the Cypriot king attacked Alexandria in 1365, the Church was closed down and the Franciscans dragged off to be publicly executed in Damascus. The Franciscan order was allowed to return but the Mamluks built minarets overshadowing the Church and the Ramban Synagogue to emphasize the supremacy of Islam.
In 1399, the dread Central Asian conqueror Tamurlane captured Baghdad and smashed into Syria just as a Mamluk boy-sultan and his tutor set out on their pilgrimage to Jerusalem.4
DECLINE OF THE MAMLUKS
1399–1517
TAMURLANE AND THE TUTOR: PILGRIM CITY
The royal tutor was the most celebrated scholar in the Islamic world. Now aged around seventy, Ibn Khaldun had served the monarchs of Morocco, then (after a spell in prison) Granada, Tunisia and finally (after another spell in prison) the Mamluk sultan. In between spells in power and in prison, he wrote his masterpiece, the Muqaddimah, a world history that still sparkles today. The sultan therefore appointed him tutor to his son, Faraj, who succeeded to the throne as a child.
Now, as the peppery historian showed Jerusalem to the ten-year-old sultan, Tamurlane besieged Mamluk Damascus. Timur the Lame – known as Tamurlane – had risen to power in 1170 as a local warlord in Central Asia. In thirty-five years of incessant warfare, this harsh genius, of Turkic descent, had conquered much of the Near East, which he ruled from the saddle, promoting himself as the heir to Genghis Khan. In Delhi, he slaughtered 100,000; at Isfahan, he killed 70,000, building twenty-eight towers of 1,500 heads each, and he had never been defeated.
Yet Tamurlane was not just a warrior. His palaces and gardens in Samarkand displayed his sophisticated taste; he was an ace chessplayer and a history-buff who enjoyed debates with philosophers. Not surprisingly, he had always wanted to meet Ibn Khaldun.
Yet the Mamluks were in a state of panic: if Damascus fell, so would Palestine and perhaps Cairo too. The old pedagogue and the boy-sultan hurried back to Cairo but the Mamluks decided to send the pair into Syria to negotiate with Tamurlane – and save the empire. At the same time, the Jerusalemites were debating what to do: how to save the Holy City from the invincible predator known as the Scourge of God?
In January 1401, Tamurlane, encamped around Damascus, heard that Sultan Faraj and Ibn Khaldun awaited his pleasure. He had no interest in the boy but he was fascinated by Ibn Khaldun whom he immediately summoned. As a politician, Ibn Khaldun represented the sultan, but as a historian, he naturally longed to meet the supreme man of the era – even if he was not sure if he would emerge dead or alive. The two were almost the same age: the grizzled conqueror received the venerable historian in his palatial tent.
Ibn Khaldun was awed by this ‘greatest and mightiest of kings’ whom he found ‘highly intelligent and perspicacious, addicted to debate and argumentation about what he knows and also what he does not know’. Ibn Khaldun persuaded Tamurlane to release some Mamluk prisoners, but the Scourge of God would not negotiate: Damascus was stormed and sacked in what Ibn Khaldun called ‘an absolutely dastardly and abominable deed’. The road to Jerusalem was now open. The city’s ulema decided to surrender the city to Tamurlane and despatched a delegation with the keys of the Dome of the Rock. But when the Jerusalemites arrived in Damascus, the conqueror had instead ridden north to rout the rising power in Anatolia, the Ottoman Turks. Then, in February 1405, en route to conquer China, Tamurlane died and Jerusalem remained Mamluk. Ibn Khaldun, who had made it home to Cairo from his meeting with Tamurlane, died in his bed a year later. His pupil Sultan Faraj never forgot his eventful cultural tour: he frequently returned to Jerusalem, holding court on the Temple Mount, beneath the royal parasol, amid the yellow banners of the sultanate, handing out gold to the poor.