Muqarnas Online, 2011

Mamluk History Through Architecture: Building, Culture, and Politics in Mamluk Egypt and Syria (London: I. B. Tauris, 2010), 72-97.

2005

n AD 969, following the Fatimid conquest of Egypt, a new urban settlement was founded specifically to house the Fatimid court and those related to it; originally called al-Mansuriyya, its name was later changed to al-Qahira Cairo. Although designed as a walled royal precinct, Cairo was not totally inaccessible to the public. Thriving markets catered to the population at large, most of which lived to the south-west, in Misr-Fustat, an urban settlement located close to the Nile and developed following the Arab conquest of Egypt in the seventh century around the Roman fortress of Babylon. As an extended palatial complex, Cairo, although physically separate, was socially and politically part of the earlier settlement, which even then remained the nucleus of urban agglomeration in economic, administrative, and religious terms.

Mamluk Studies Review, vol. 15 , 2011

2021

Abū al-Ḥasan ʿAlī b. Mūsā Ibn Saʿīd al-ʿAnsī al-ʿAmmārī (610-685 H/1214-1286 CE) is one of the most important anthologists, writers, historians and geographers of the Islamic West, and the most celebrated member of the Banū Saʿīd family of Alcalá la Real, early supporters of the Almohads in their takeover of the Iberian Peninsula in the mid-6th/12th century. In al-Andalus Ibn Saʿīd witnessed a period of political turbulence and change, as Almohad control crumbled across the region and independent local powers emerged in the so-called third "Taifa Period". Especially successful at the beginning was Ibn Hūd of Murcia (d. 635 H/1238 CE), 1 who conquered much of Almohad al-Andalus. Ibn Saʿīd served him as governor of Algeciras for one year (631 H/1233-4 CE), replacing his father Mūsā. Ibn Hūd was in turn overthrown by another Andalusi military leader, Muḥammad Ibn Naṣr, who eventually became the first Naṣrid sultan. 2 In Seville, Ibn Saʿīd witnessed the death of the governor of the city, al-Muʿtaḍid al-Bājī, at the hands of the Naṣrid leader, 3 and it was then-fearing the new ruler-that he and his father decided to travel to the East. They left al-Andalus in 636 H/1238-9 CE never to return. Ibn Saʿīd thus spent the majority of his life outside al-Andalus, and finally died in Tunis in 685 H/1286 CE.