Shajar al-Durr

Biography

Nobody wrote down where she was born, or when, or to whom. The first thing the record knows about Shajar al-Durr is that she was for sale.

She was Turkic, most likely Qipchaq from the steppe north of the Black Sea, and she was bought as a concubine by al-Salih Ayyub, sultan of Egypt. She bore him a son named Khalil, which earned her freedom and marriage. The boy died as an infant. She went on calling herself Umm Khalil, mother of Khalil, for the rest of her life, and put it on her coins and her seal. In that world a woman's authority had to be borrowed from a man, and a dead baby was the man she had.

Her name means Tree of Pearls. Remember that, because she comes back to it at the end.

The three months nobody was told about

In November 1249 al-Salih died in camp at Mansurah, in the Nile delta. A French crusading army under Louis IX had taken Damietta five months earlier and was moving upriver. Egypt had no heir on the ground, an invading army in the country, and a dead sultan.

Shajar al-Durr told two people. Fakhr al-Din, the commander of the army, and Jamal al-Din Muhsin, the chief eunuch who controlled both the palace and the Mamluk regiments. Then the palace carried on as though nothing had happened.

Food was carried into the sultan's quarters every day. A physician made his rounds. Orders went out under the sultan's signature, and she forged it. The deception held for roughly three months, through the winter, while the army that would have fractured over a succession instead stayed in the field and fought.

It worked. The Crusaders were broken at Mansurah in February 1250 and destroyed at Fariskur on 6 April. Louis IX of France, a reigning king and a future saint, was taken prisoner by the Egyptians and had to buy himself back. The price was the city of Damietta and a million gold dinars, later negotiated down to eight hundred thousand.

By the day of that victory al-Salih's son Turanshah had arrived from the north and been installed. The capture was his sultanate, not hers. But the army that won it was the army she had kept together by pretending for three months that a dead man was still giving orders.

Turanshah then made the mistake of threatening the Mamluk officers who had done the fighting. They killed him on 2 May 1250, and put her on the throne.

Historical Context

Mamluks were slave soldiers, bought young, trained as cavalry, converted, freed, and turned into the professional core of the Ayyubid army. They were the most effective fighting force in the eastern Mediterranean and they had just watched the dynasty they served collapse into a farce. In 1250 they stopped serving sultans and became them. That state, the Mamluk Sultanate, ruled Egypt and Syria until 1517. It stopped the Mongols at Ain Jalut in 1260 and finished the Crusader states in the Levant.

Shajar al-Durr is where it starts. She is counted the first Mamluk ruler of Egypt, and she is the only person in that entire three-hundred-year dynasty who was both born a slave and reigned as a woman in her own name.

Islamic political practice had two public tests of sovereignty. Your name had to be struck on the coinage, and your name had to be spoken in the khutba, the Friday sermon in the mosques. Both were done for her. A gold dinar from the Cairo mint, dated 648 in the Muslim calendar, calls her Malikat al-Muslimin, Queen of the Muslims. Ibn Wasil, a historian alive at the time, records that decrees were issued at her command and the khutba was pronounced in her name as sultana of Cairo and all Egypt. He also, without apparent irony, uses the masculine word sultan of her.

What She Fought For

Not a cause. She was not a reformer and it would flatter her to pretend otherwise. What she fought for was the right to keep what she had won, and the record of how she was refused is one of the sharpest surviving statements of what a woman was not permitted to be.

The Abbasid caliph in Baghdad, al-Mustasim, would not recognise her. The line attributed to him by the chronicler al-Maqrizi has been repeated for eight centuries: if you have no men left, say so, and we will send you one. The Ayyubid princes in Syria refused her too. Even the inauguration was bent out of shape around her. She stayed inside the palace while the emirs came in one by one to swear allegiance, and the state procession that announced every new sultan to the city was simply cancelled, because a woman could not ride through Cairo at the head of it.

After about eighty days she was married off to Aybak, the Mamluk commander, and abdicated in his favour. It was the only settlement available.

Major Achievements

She ruled Egypt in her own name for roughly eighty days in 1250, with coinage, sermon and decrees, which is the full legal apparatus of sovereignty and is the reason historians cannot argue her away.

She then governed for seven more years from behind Aybak's throne. She kept control of the treasury. Ibn Abd al-Zahir, another contemporary, says plainly that the power of decision and administration stayed with her.

And she built. She raised the domed mausoleum of al-Salih Ayyub on Bayn al-Qasrayn, the ceremonial spine of Cairo, attaching a highly visible tomb to a working religious complex in a way nobody had done there before. Every great Mamluk patron who came after her copied it. The domes that give old Cairo its skyline follow a template she invented.

Then she built her own tomb, and put something inside it that nobody has ever quite got over. The mihrab, the prayer niche, is set with gold glass mosaic showing a tree hung with round pearl-coloured fruit. It is the earliest glass mosaic in Egypt and the only one of its kind left in Cairo. It is also a pun. Shajar al-Durr. Tree of Pearls. She signed the holiest surface in the building with her own name, in the one form of self-portrait a woman of her position was allowed.

How it ended

In 1257 Aybak moved to take a second wife, the daughter of the ruler of Mosul, a dynastic marriage that would have finished her. He was murdered in April, in the bath at the Citadel. Every chronicler says she ordered it. The evidence is testimony from men who had already decided what she was, and at least one modern reference work calls it unproven, but no version of the story has her innocent.

Aybak's Mamluks seized her. On 28 April 1257 the servant women of his former wife stripped her and beat her to death with wooden bath clogs, and her body was thrown from the wall of the Citadel and left lying in the ditch below. She was buried in the tomb she had built for herself.

Her Impact Today

The dome is still there, on al-Khalifa Street near the Mosque of Ibn Tulun, and the American Research Center in Egypt spent years pulling salt and cement out of its walls to keep it standing. The pearl tree is still in the mihrab.

The written record was made by men who treated her reign as a disorder that had to be corrected, and the further a chronicler sits from 1250 the more lurid the story gets. The coins, the dome and the mosaic have no opinion. They are simply there, saying that for eighty days the sovereign of Egypt was a woman who had once been someone's property, and that she spent the rest of her money teaching a city how to build.