Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland

232 t CHAPTER NINE
course to the earliest days of Islam. But the Muslim public buildings
were mostly built between about 1250 and 1450 by the successor
dynasty to Saladin’s own, the Mamluks. These structures
are, overwhelmingly, madrasas, Sufi convents, and related institutions,
most of them with boarding facilities, for the teaching of
Islamic law and the cultivation of Islamic piety. They cluster like a
frame around the Haram and on the streets leading north and west
from it, since in Jerusalem, as in all other holy places, nearer is
better. These institutions were founded chiefly by sultans in Cairo,
their governors in Damascus—during most of the Middle Ages
Jerusalem was an appanage of Damascus, which was in turn a
provincial center for the capital in Cairo—or Mamluks banished
for reasons to what was judged to be the healthy but politically
impotent climate of Jerusalem.
There was considerable Mamluk investment in Jerusalem in the
fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, as there was in Mecca and Medina
in the same era. One reason was that the Mamluks had problems
with their Islamic legitimacy—they were former military
slaves—and as the Jewish Herod, the Christian Justinian, and many
other rulers had observed, there is no better guerdon of legitimacy
than the generous endowment of a holy place or a holy city. And
Jerusalem was now in fact a genuine Islamic holy city. If after that
first extraordinary gesture of the Dome of the Rock, succeeding generations
of Muslims had grown careless of the Haram and even
somewhat indifferent to Jerusalem, the Frankish Crusades and the
sentiments they eventually provoked had refocused Muslim attention
on the city. The Merits of Jerusalem tracts had leavened Islamic
thinking about Jerusalem. One ruler after another left his architectural
signature on the increasingly crowded Haram, and around it
monumental gates, arcades, and stairways were set up to frame and
enshrine the Dome of the Rock and the Aqsa mosque.
The Pious Visit al-Quds
Two general types of activities are called “pilgrimage.” The first
refers to the performance of certain acts of worship that can be