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Was al-Maqrizi’s Khitat Khaldunian History? 133
quarters, streets, squares, famous mansions, hammams, khans, rab^s (apartment
buildings), markets, hukrs (urban zones), bridges, ponds, hippodromes, citadels,
mosques, madrasas, hospitals, khanqahs, shrines, zawiyas, cimeteries, mausolea,
synagogues, and churches are arranged in this order, and are each recorded,
dated, and described. Woven into this typological narrative are brief passages on
the country’s Ayyubid and Mamluk sultans and biographical notices on the patrons
of the city’s main monuments, in addition to copious entries on its wonders
and religious merits, the ceremonies observed by its various religious groups, and
the sectarian history of Islam.
Al-Maqr\z\’s most impressive achievement in this book is primarily conceptual:
he is the only historian in the medieval period to have presented the city as a
human artifact replete with intentions, competitions, scheming, vanity, and good
deeds. His book still resonates with modern commentators on Cairo not just as an
invaluable historical source, but also, and perhaps more powerfully, as a challenging
and emotional discursive oeuvre laced with political and sociocultural pronouncements
dispersed throughout the narrative ambitions and disjunctions of
the encyclopedic and cosmocentric thrust of the text. 57 This, in my opinion, is a reflection
of al-Maqr\z\’s love of Cairo and his vocal distress at its rapid decline, at
least as he was seeing it in the early fifteenth century. But it may also indicate an
indebtedness to Ibn Khaldun’s overall theorizing of ^umran (a concept ranging
between settlement and civilization), even though there is no reference in al-
Maqr\z\’s text to the concept, and only one mention of the book in which it was developed,
which suggests that he at least had access to the Muqaddima when he
wrote his Khitat. 58
10, 2 (2006): 81–139; “Maqriziana II: Discovery of an Autograph Manuscript of al-Maqr\z\:
Towards a Better Understanding of His Working Method: Analysis,” MSR 12, 1 (2006) 51–114:
“Maqriziana IV: Le carnet de notes d’al-Maqr\z\: l’apport de la codicologie à une meilleure compréhension
de sa constitution,” Manuscripta orientalia 9 (2003): 24–36; “The Recovery of Mamluk
Chancery Documents in an Unsuspected Place,” in The Mamluks in Egyptian and Syrian
Politics and Society, Michael Winter and Amalia Levanoni, eds. (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 59–76;
and “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.”
57 Most modern historians of Cairo rely heavily on al-Maqr\z\’s data and many even adopt his
methods and reflect his cosmocentric attitude by considering the city’s architectural history an
autonomous development, see my “Writing the History of Islamic Architecture in Cairo,” Design
Book Review 31 (Winter 1994): 48–51; also my “The Medieval Link: Maqr\z\’s Khitat and Modern
Narratives of Cairo,” in Making Cairo Medieval, eds. Nezar AlSayyad, Irene Bierman, and Nasser
Rabbat (Lantham, Md.: Lexington Press, 2005), 29–47.
58 al-Maqr\z\, Khitat, 3: 606, and note 1, quotes a long passage from the Muqaddima about the
evolution of the Arabs’ relationship to the sea.