Worship, Festivals and Pilgrimage in Mamluk Lands

Between 1250 and 1517, the Mamluk sultanate, ruled by sultans (Muslim sovereigns), governed Egypt and Syria. Muslims also travelled south to the Hejaz, the region of western Arabia that includes Mecca and Medina in present-day Saudi Arabia. Prayer at a mosque, visits to revered graves, an annual Muharram observance, the pilgrimage to Mecca and public processions gave worship a place in household and city life. Accounts from Tripoli, Cairo and Damascus show how worshippers gathered and how rulers and patrons supported particular ceremonies.

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Prayer, grave visits and Muharram observance

Muslims gathered for daily prayer and for the larger Friday congregation. Before prayer, worshippers performed ablution, ritual washing; a courtyard fountain could supply the water. In the prayer hall, a mihrab, or niche, marked the direction toward Mecca. The minbar, a pulpit, stood beside it for the Friday sermon. In Tripoli, Lebanon, the Mansouri Great Mosque was built in stages between 1294 and 1315. Amir Qaratay commissioned the mosque’s wooden minbar in 1326 for the Friday sermon.

A second form of local devotion was ziyara, a pious visit to a revered tomb. Historian Boaz Shoshan cites Mamluk records of annual visits to the grave of Husayn ibn Ibrahim al-Jaki, a Sufi shaykh, or Muslim mystic teacher, outside Cairo’s Succour Gate, where visitors made vows and offerings. At a separate annual gathering on the first day of Muharram, the first month of the Islamic lunar calendar, visitors to the tomb of Abu Muhammad Abd Allah ibn Abi Jamra recited sayings of the Prophet Muhammad that the shaykh had collected. Shoshan also describes how Ibn Ata Allah, a Cairene Sufi shaykh, taught audiences to seek God by repeating dhikr, devotional invocations, with the tongue and filling the heart with love of God.

Emergency fast and Damascus procession

The fourteenth-century Moroccan traveler Ibn Battuta’s account of the procession during plague in Damascus in 1348 records a public fast outside Ramadan, the Islamic month of daylight fasting. In late July, Arghun Shah, the Mamluk viceroy and the sultan’s deputy, ordered the city to fast for three days and prohibited cooking food in the markets during daylight. Ibn Battuta explains that many residents relied on food prepared there.

After the third day, on a Thursday, amirs, the sultan’s senior military officers, religious scholars, judges and other residents filled the Great Mosque and spent the night praying and reciting litanies. After dawn prayer on Friday, they walked south to the Mosque of the Footprints, where a rock was believed to bear Moses’ footprint. The procession grew to include men, women and children; Jews carried their Book of the Law, and Christians their Gospel. The amirs walked barefoot. The crowd prayed at the shrine until near midday, then returned to Damascus for the Friday service.

Hajj and Cairo’s ceremonial caravan

The hajj is the annual pilgrimage to Mecca. In 1326, Ibn Battuta joined the annual pilgrim caravan that left Damascus for the Hejaz. At Medina, he prayed near the Prophet Muhammad’s tomb and the pulpit in the mosque. He says pilgrims formed circles in the courtyard at night, lit candles, recited the Qur’an from books on stands, chanted litanies or visited holy tombs. Near Medina, at Dhu’l-Hulayfa, he bathed, removed his tailored clothes, put on the pilgrim garment and entered ihram, the state of ritual consecration for pilgrimage. His account says the caravan then entered Mecca’s sanctuary and began the rites. In a separate passage about another pilgrimage, he describes circling the Kaaba, Islam’s central sanctuary, and making the ritual visit between the hills of Safa and Marwa; illness forced him to complete these actions seated and on an amir’s horse. Mamluk authorities organized the caravans and provided protection along routes used by pilgrims from Syria and Egypt. The shared caravan itinerary contrasts with the court resources recorded for Tughay’s pilgrimage below.

In Cairo, the pilgrimage caravan carried the kiswa, the cloth covering of the Kaaba, alongside the distinct ceremonial mahmal. The earliest recorded Mamluk association of the mahmal with the Egyptian caravan dates to Sultan Baybars in 1266. Historian Doris Behrens-Abouseif describes it as a palanquin, a portable covered litter, with an embroidered yellow-silk tent topped by a spherical finial of gilded silver. It was paraded twice a year through Cairo and accompanied the Egyptian caravan. The mahmal remained empty; the kiswa and mahmal were prepared and dispatched together as separate objects. The caravan thus carried both the sacred covering and an unoccupied symbol of the ruler’s sponsorship.

Women’s pilgrimages and royal patronage

Tughay, a wife of Sultan al-Nasir Muhammad, made a pilgrimage in 1321 with an orchestra, sultanic banners and an escort of high dignitaries and amirs. Cows accompanied her to provide fresh milk, while camels carried pots planted with vegetables. Chroniclers praised her charitable deeds and donations along the way. Behrens-Abouseif reports that the sultan spent more than 80,000 dinars, gold monetary units, on the journey and exempted Mecca from taxes that year.