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8 The Mulberry Tree in the Origin Myths Ahmed Çelebi’s account of the origin of the Faqari and Qasimi factions , wherein Sultan Selim plays such a pivotal role, is both the fullest version of the origin myth and the most perplexing. As I have noted elsewhere,1 this origin myth abruptly interpolates itself into the chronicler’s account of the end of the eighteenth-century Faqari grandee Qaytas Bey. The bey, a client of Ibrahim Bey b. Dhu’l-Faqar (d. 1691), was blamed, in large measure, for the excesses of the civil war that followed the revolt of the lower Janissary officer Ifranj Ahmed Baßodabaßı in 1711. ˜Abdi Pasha, appointed governor of Egypt in 1714, ordered Qaytas’ execution the following year; at the same time, he systematically eliminated Ifranj Ahmed’s supporters. Following Qaytas’ execution, the governor’s troops razed the bey’s mansion, the seat of his household.2 This in itself was not unusual; in fact, it was the typical dénouement to a grandee’s downfall. But, the chronicler points out, the governor’s men also took an axe to the enormous mulberry tree that grew in Qaytas Bey’s garden and under which he had constructed a council chamber, or divanhane, where the household head received people, heard complaints, and plotted strategy. Indeed, such “at-homes” were a typical feature of what David Ayalon has called the “open house” (bayt maft¶÷): the mansion of a grandee turned into a political headquarters , rivaling the governor’s council in Cairo’s citadel.3 Qaytas Bey, however, was the only grandee known to have held his “at-homes” under a mulberry tree. And this was no ordinary mulberry tree, either. “Nothing like this tree had ever been seen in Cairo,” Ahmed Çelebi marvels, “for it was nearly 500 years old.”4 At this point, the chronicler, whose tree fetish is noticeable at various points in his lengthy work,5 abandons Qaytas Bey while he expounds 135 136 A Tale of Two Factions on the tree. But he doesn’t go all the way back to the tree’s genesis, presumably during the Ayyubid era. Instead, he focuses on one of the tree’s illustrious previous owners, Sudun al-˜Ajami, commander (atabek) of the Mamluk sultan Qaytbay’s armies, who had been active some 150 years earlier, when the tree was a youthful 350 or so. Ahmed Çelebi identifies the historical Sudun al-˜Ajami with the legendary father of Dhu’l-Faqar and Qasim Beys, the namesakes of the Faqari and Qasimi factions. In order to keep his two sons from running off and joining Sultan Qansuh al-Ghuri’s futile defense against the Ottomans , in fact, Sudun supposedly imprisoned them in two enclosures (s. båb) that he constructed near his house. Qaytas Bey’s tree, then, provides the chronicler with a transition to his own version of the factional origin myth. Why he places the origin myth at this curious juncture is a question we shall explore presently. Ahmed Çelebi is, to my knowledge, the only chronicler to link the mulberry tree to the origin myth. Al-Damurdashi certainly remarks on Qaytas Bey’s possession of the tree; he has the unfortunate bey desperately gathering mulberries as a present for the governor in the hope that this feeble offering will stave off his execution.6 Does the mulberry tree have implications for the origin myth, or does Ahmed Çelebi pay it special attention just because he has an obsession with trees in general? As it happens, the mulberry tree does have certain mythological and religious connotations in a variety of cultural contexts . In European literature, the mulberry tree is most famous for its role in Ovid’s version of the Greek myth of Pyramus and Thisbe.7 Notwithstanding, those myths pertaining to mystical beliefs and foundation traditions of the Chinese and Turco-Iranian cultural spheres turn out to shed more light on this particular incarnation of the origin myth. Accordingly, this chapter will use these mythical traditions to ascertain the symbolic function of the mulberry tree in the myth of the Faqari and Qasimi factions’ emergence. The Yazidi Connection Qaytas Bey, as it happens, was a Kurd, although neither Ahmed Çelebi nor any other chronicler tells us anything about his background before he became Ibrahim Bey b. Dhu’l-Faqar’s client.8 We do know, however , that Kurdish mountain tribespeople who rebelled sporadically against Ottoman authority were not infrequently captured and sold as slaves...

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