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

134 Nasser Rabbat
But if direct references to ^umran are absent in the Khitat, its signs and consequences
provide the backbone of the book’s narrative, which, after all, focuses
on settlements and urbanization and their relationship to prosperity. In fact, it is
possible to see the entire book as a long paean to the ‘umran of Egypt, which al-
Maqr\z\ planned to conclude, gloomily but historian-like, with a chapter analyzing
the reasons of the ruin of the country he observed during his lifetime. That
part does not seem to have been written, and the book’s text in its final edition
stops abruptly with the listing of the Melkite churches in Cairo as has been stated
above. Al-Maqr\z\, however, reveals the effects of the ruin in descriptive snippets
throughout the text and more than once mentions that he will analyze its causes
at the end of the book. 59 Ayman Fu#ad Sayyid appended his new edition with two
pages entitled, „on the reasons of ruin,” which he transferred from the draft of the
Khitat he had published in 1995. 60 Even these two pages, however, end suddenly
with an incident of taxing honey, suggesting that the section was never completed.
Its presence in the early draft at least proves that al-Maqr\z\ had intended
to complete his Khitat as he stated in the introduction with a chapter on the ruination
of the country, thus bringing the story to a close. That he has not even included
the skeleton of the chapter he had in his first draft in the final edition that
he left behind reinforces the belief that the book was still in slow gestation and
continuous composition when al-Maqr\z\ died.
Besides underscoring his pessimistic tone, al-Maqr\z\’s frequent mentions of
ruin and destruction in a book about building and planning suggest a recurrent
pattern. In fact, even though it is not directly articulated anywhere in the text, the
overarching cycle of the rise and fall of dynasties, which forms the basis of Ibn
Khaldun’s cyclical historical process, seems to have furnished the intrinsic structure
of the Khitat as well. Perhaps the actual history of Egypt in the Islamic era
lends itself to a cyclical interpretation with the successive dynasties building
their presence on the ruins of their predecessors. But this needed an observer
with a keen interest in historical patterns to extrapolate. Al-Maqr\z\ was that observer.
Prompted by his interaction with his sharp teacher and his heightened
sensibility to the fate of his beloved city, he seems to have subsumed the Khaldunian
cyclical structure as a way of classifying, understanding, and rationalizing
the vast amount of historical, topographic, and architectural data he collected
over the years and of explaining the changing fortune of Cairo over its seven centuries
of existence. In the Khitat, al-Maqr\z\ laid down an analogous cycle to Ibn
Khaldun’s in which periods of prosperity and urban expansion are followed by
59 Ibid., 4, 2: 1086.
60 Ibid., 4, 2: 1087–88.