Unveiling the Harem: Elite Women and the Paradox of Seclusion in Eighteenth-Century Cairo

6. The City as Text: Space, Gender, and Power in Cairo

155 The City as Text Space, Gender, and Power in Cairo The lives of female and male Mamluks were bound up with the successes and defeats of the households they entered usually as slaves. Although their intrinsic abilities no doubt allowed them to take advantage of the opportunities presented to them, ultimately their fortunes were linked to those of their household (bayt), its head, their patron, and, for men, the career path they followed within the bayt. How well or badly they did within the Mamluk system was reflected in their rank and status and the titles they carried as part of their name. The words qadin or khatun after a woman’s name meant she was a woman of rank with status in the household as a concubine or wife of the master and with access to wealth that she could use to create a large estate of income-producing property. Just as her name tells us about her place within the household and the Mamluk hierarchy, so too does her residence. In the eighteenth century, the woman who lived in the great house known as the Bayt al-Razzaz outside of Bab Zuwayla, a very crowded and commercialized district in the Tabbana quarter of the city, was lower in the Mamluk hierarchy than a woman who lived on the western shore of the Birkat al-Azbakiyya, the small lake or pond that filled each year with the inundation of the Nile. The location of their houses represented the social and economic gulf between the unnamed woman living in the house known as the Bayt alRazzaz between Bab Zuwayla and the Citadel and al-Sitt Nafisa al-Bayda, the wife of ‘Ali Bey al-Kabir and the wife of Murad Bey, whose house on the western shore of the Birkat al-Azbakiyya was in the city’s most elite neighborhood. 156 • Life in Cairo That the wife of a katkhuda (officer) would live in the Bayt al-Razzaz and the wife of the head of the Qazdughli bayt would live on the western shore of the Birkat al-Azbakiyya was not a random event. The movement of Mamluks out of the old Fatimid city to the southern zone outside the walls between the Bab Zuwayla gate and the Citadel and then farther and farther to the west occurred in tandem with the shift in power from the Ottoman governor at the Citadel to the Mamluk bayts. The weakening of Ottoman authority in Egypt allowed the resurgent Mamluks to move their households farther away from the Citadel and an increasingly impotent pasha. As power shifted, the size of the amirs’ retinues increased, resulting in the need for larger and larger houses, which was made possible by their increasing control of the revenues of the country. Areas west of the old city provided the space needed for mansions the size of Muhammad Bey al-Alfi’s, which explains in part the movement of powerful amirs first to the Birkat al-Fil and then farther west to the Birkat al-Azbakiyya. According to André Raymond, A grand seigneur of Cairo was able to support a bayt of 150–200 persons. Thus, he needed considerable revenues to support his personnel and a residence large enough for the mamluks and followers to assemble there, the residence playing in case of internal trouble the role of fortress where all the party could assemble. The imposing dimensions of the residence not only had a sumptuous style, they constituted the ostensible manifestation of the power of the proprietor, which explains the importance of certain of the residences.1 In the eighteenth century, the most powerful amirs and the wealthiest merchants lived in the neighborhood of Azbakiyya lying west of Cairo between the city and the bustling port of Bulaq. As the beys and merchants left the crowded urban center behind in favor of the space and tranquility of Azbakiyya, only the narrowest segment of the amir-merchant elite were able to build their mansions on the banks of the Birkat al-Azbakiyya. Such was the reputed beauty of the Birkat al-Azbakiyya that European travelers like Claude Etienne Savary wrote ecstatically about the richly adorned boats skimming across the lake and the light from hundreds of lamps and lanterns that rivaled the brightness of the night sky. The City as Text • 157 Al-Jabarti in his chronicle quoted a long speech about Azbakiyya...