The two potential public spaces of political expression in the city, the mosque and the plaza, were denied their civic function for anywhere between thirty and fifty years of despotic rule across the Arab world depending on the country. Abrupt and violent revolts sometimes managed to stage their protests in one or the other for a short moment, but the reprisal of the regime was usually swift and ruthless.

: Mu1ammad Taqiyy al-Dīn al-Maqrīzī is undoubtedly the historian with the most expansive repertoire of the entire fifteenth century Arabic historiography. His al-Mawā’iẓ wa-l-i’tibār bi-dhikr al-khiṭaṭ wa-l-āthār, in particular, is a unique achievement, which manages to present a general historical discourse through the chronicling of buildings and topography. This unprecedented book, this paper argues, may have benefited from the author’s extended association with Ibn Khaldūn, the great interpreter of the notion of ’umrān. Ibn Khaldūn was al-Maqrīzī’s revered teacher for at (...) least thirty years. He seems to have influenced his pupil’s thinking about the city as the domain of civilization 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 the illustration of the underlying civilizational cycle. In the Khiṭaṭ, al-Maqrīzī seems to have applied his master’s theory to a concrete example – the city of Cairo – and drew from it pronounced moral lessons on the decline he was observing in the Mamlūk sultanate. This is probably why the Khiṭaṭ’s influence has endured for more than five centuries: a tribute to its author’s ardent passion and filial affinity with his city and country, as well as his interpretive framework, which he probably absorbed from Ibn Khaldūn. (shrink)

The Road Inns in Bilād al-Shām. By Katia Cytryn-Silverman. BAR S2130. Oxford: Archaeopress, 2010. Pp. vi + 290, illus. £58.