Please join us for our upcoming seminar on: "Badr al-Jamālī's Armenian identity and its effect on Egyptian architecture and demography" by Dr. Moshe Yagur (Tel Aviv University)
Monday, November 23, 2020, from 17:30 to 19:00 (Israel time) via zoom.
Abstract:
Badr al-Jamālī, the omnipotent wazir of the Fatimid caliphate in the last quarter of the eleventh century, was originally an Armenian, who was enslaved, purchased by a local Muslim commander, went through military training and conversion to Islam, and quickly ascended to power. As a wazir he executed thorough reforms in Fatimid Egypt, including centralization of power, unifying all branches of government under his official and direct control, and turning the Fatimid caliph into nothing more than a religious symbol. Badr and his son ruled as wazirs for nearly half a century, marking a new phase in Fatimid history, which was dubbed 'the Armenian dynasty'.
Though by then Badr was a practicing Muslim and well-established in Egypt, he never forgot his Armenian origin. He was the first wazir to establish his own personal regiment, which was composed of Armenian soldiers, some converted to Islam while others were practicing Christians. For this end he allowed for the migration of the soldiers' families to Egypt, the consecration of Armenian churches for their use and even the ordination of the first ever Armenian patriarch in Egypt.
When Badr ordered the construction of Cairo's new city walls, he brought to Egypt Armenian engineers and stone masons. This much is claimed by al-Maqrīzī, several centuries later, but can be corroborated by examining the techniques, measurements and architectural elements of the gates in the new wall, as well as from other literary and epigraphic sources. Some of these techniques and elements had a profound and long-lasting influence on Egyptian and Islamic architecture, like the stone muqarnas for example.
The case of Badr al-Jamālī is an example of a cultural transmission with a long-lasting effect, brokered by a convert to Islam. Though the specific effect on Egyptian architecture was unintended, it clearly resulted from Badr's ongoing sympathies, affiliations and social ties with his former coreligionists. Badr's case raises important issues, among them the tension between religion and ethnicity, and the unique situation of mamlūk converts.
Moshe Yagur is a post-doctoral research fellow at The Zvi Yavetz School for Historical Studies at Tel Aviv University, in the department of Middle Eastern and African History. His current research project focuses on interfaith residential patterns in medieval Egypt, and the ways in which these patterns effected, and were affected by, religious identity. Yagur earned his PhD from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem (2018), and wrote his dissertation on religious conversion to and from Judaism in Fatimid and Ayyubid Egypt. He was since a post-doctoral research fellow at the University of Haifa (2018), University of Michigan (2019), and the Center for the Study of Conversion and Inter-Religious Encounters at the Ben Gurion University (2020).