0021-1818_islam_98-1-2-i-259

130 Nasser Rabbat
tory may have provided al-Maqr\z\ with the theoretical framework he needed to
rationalize and organize his feelings of attachment to Cairo and of loathing toward
those who caused its decline and turn them into a general discourse on
its history and topography. Ibn Khaldun seems to have influenced al-Maqr\z\’s
thinking in two ways: analytical, that is, to look for causes and effects behind
events and appearances, and interpretive, that is, to see in the urban and architectural
history of the city a reflection of the underlying cycle of the ups and
downs of civilization. In the Khitat, I am arguing, al-Maqr\z\ was the first to apply
his master’s theory of the cyclical movement of history (notwithstanding Ibn
Khaldun himself) to a concrete example – the city of Cairo – and to draw from it
some indication of how the decline he observed in Egypt would evolve.
The Structure of the Khit ˙ at ˙ and the Veiled Presence
of Ibn Khaldun
Based on internal evidence, al-Maqr\z\ seems to have worked on the Khitat between
1415 and 1439/40, two years before his death, with the bulk of it written
during the reign of al-Mu#ayyad Shaykh (1413–21). 49 He appears not to have completed
it by the time of his death as the book ends abruptly with a short list of the
churches of the Melkites in Cairo. The seventh section mentioned in the book’s
introduction that was supposed to analyze the reasons of Cairo’s decline in the
author’s time is altogether missing, although the theme of decline is diffused
throughout the book in the form of bitter comments added by Maqr\z\ to lament
the disappearance or destruction of cities, buildings, habits, and practices in his
own time. Moreover, many of the individual entries are still not finished and the
information in them is not always brought up to date. Sometimes, the text itself
is not even edited: many sections still reveal the layers of their modification, at
49 Sayyid, Musawwadat, 100; idem, Khitat, intro, 1: 66°–68°; Frédéric Bauden, “Maqriziana IX:
Should al-Maqr\z\ Be Thrown out with the Bath Water? The Question of his Plagiarism of al-
Aw1ad\’s Khitat and the Documentary Evidence,” MSR 14 (2010): 159–232, esp. 204–12, argues,
based on new evidence he discovered in the two volumes of the draft of al-Maqr\z\’s Khitat, that
at least these two volumes should be dated to between 811/1408 and 818/1415. Bauden’s dating
is meant to prove that al-Maqr\z\’s book is nothing but a plagiarized rendering of the draft of
Khitat by al-Aw1ad\ (761/1361–811/1408), al-Maqr\z\’s neighbor, colleague and posthumous
competitor, as asserted by al-Sakhaw\, Daw#, 3: 358–59, and idem, al-I^lan bi-l-Tawbikh, 266,
and as established by Bauden’s discovery of 19 leaves in the handwriting of al-Aw1ad\ attached
with alterations and erasures to al-Maqr\z\’s draft.