Tree of Pearls, Queen of Egypt

Tree of Pearls: An Afterword

 Tree of Pearls AN AFTERWORD Roger Allen what’s in a name? My own acquaintance with the woman known as “Tree of Pearls”—Shagret ad-Durr, to cite the Egyptian pronunciation of her name—goes all the way back to my graduate student days in Cairo in 1966. At that time I was Director of Music at the city’s Anglican Cathedral and had diplomats as members of the choir, and was thus fortunate enough to be invited to live in a British embassy house. The house stood on Shagret ad-Durr Street in Zamalek, the treelined island community close to the center of the city that was then devoid of the multiple high-rise buildings that have now completely transformed its appearance . Needless to say, I was curious to find out about the person, and a female person at that, after whom the Cairene street in which I was living was named. Thus did I discover the history of this illustrious woman. Tree of Pearls belongs on a relatively short list of Muslim women who played significant roles in the public life of their region and culture during the pre-modern era of Islamic history. Among those women we would also include two elegiac poets from the earliest period of poetic creativity: Al-Khansa’ (d. after 644) and Layla al-Akhyaliyya (d. 704); two princesses of caliphal families: the Umayyad Wallada bint Mustakfi in Spain (d. ca. 1091), and ‘Abbasa (9th cent.), the sister of the Abbasid caliph, Harun al-Rashid, in Baghdad; and the renowned Sufi, Rabi‘a al-‘Adawiyya (d. 801). If we were to expand the purview to include Middle Eastern women from various time frames and regions, we would also need to cite from pre-Islamic times Cleopatra of Egypt (d. 30 BCE) and Zenobia (d. ca. 274) of Palmyra in Syria; and, from the contemporary era, Benazir Bhutto of Pakistan an afterword |  (d. 2007), Shaykh Hasina (b. 1947) of Bangladesh, and Megawati Sukarnoputri of Indonesia (b. 1947). In the case of Tree of Pearls, Shajar al-Durr (the Library of Congress’s preferred transliteration of her name), we are dealing with Egypt in the thirteenth century. In fact, she herself already had a female predecessor as de facto ruler of that particular country, namely Sitt al-Mulk (d. 1023), the sister of the Fatimid Caliph Al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah (d. 1021). However, the circumstances in which Sitt al-Mulk assumed power were somewhat different. Her Fatimid caliph brother was widely believed to have severe mental problems (perhaps diagnosable now as schizophrenia). He certainly issued some peculiar decrees in his lifetime: banning the pilgrimage to Mecca; requiring that Egyptians work at night and sleep by day; and ordering the destruction of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem because he did not like the sound of bells. However, his ecstatic utterances proved to be inspirational for a community of his followers who, after his mysterious death, moved to the mountains of Syro-Lebanon, where they became the Druze community, regarding Al-Hakim as having gone into occultation. The actual circumstances of the caliph’s death are obscure, in that he “disappeared” while indulging in his favorite pastime of star-gazing. Certain historians are of the opinion that his sister, Sitt al-Mulk, was involved in what was actually a case of murder. But whatever the truth of the matter, for the two years until her own death she became the de facto ruler of Egypt as regent on behalf of her young nephew, Abu al-Hasan ‘Ali (known as Al-Zahir li-I‘zaz Din Allah). By way of contrast, when we consider the life of the later female ruler of Egypt, the woman renowned as “Tree of Pearls,” we find ourselves dealing with the almost fabulous career of someone born a slave of Turkic origins who becomes the concubine and wife of a Sultan and accompanies him to Egypt. Her husband’s death coincides with the arrival in Egypt of the European forces of the Seventh Crusade (led by King Louis IX) in 1249. Thus, in full collusion with Egypt’s governing authorities, she conceals her husband’s death and rules in his place before being declared “Sultana” in 1250. Her brief reign witnesses enormous amounts of political intrigue, as the defenders of Egypt, primarily the Mamluks (themselves manumitted slaves), fight against the Crusader armies and amongst themselves. In fact, her reign can be seen as marking the end of...