Torture and State Violence under the Mamluks (Thirteenth-Sixteenth Centuries)

The Mamluks were military slaves (Ar. mamluk, ‘owned [individual]', ‘slave'), mostly of Circassian and Kipchak origin, who wrested power from their lords, the Ayyubid sultans of Egypt (r.

Baybars, who went on to rule as the Mamluk sultan from 1260 to 1277, was famous for his stern sense ofjustice. While his contemporary, the courtier Ibn al-Nafis, is unreservedly positive about the fact that Baybars was ‘stout­hearted, cruel, and merciless',^[286] the nineteenth-century Egyptian scholar al- Bajuri criticises Baybars for being the first to introduce torture in Egypt, among which al-Bajuri counts burning, drowning, strangling and impaling.^[287] While instances of these practices are indeed attested in the sources, more commonly implemented capital punishments were hanging, crucifixion, and execution by the sword. The chroniclers often refer to, or rather pass over, these punishments in a matter-of-fact way. This makes it difficult to say with any degree of precision how regularly they were implemented, because the casualness with which the matter is dealt suggests that a lot of public executions find no trace in the sources.

Such is the case with the hanging of a judge's wife and that of her lover, himself a judge, in Cairo in 1513. The two were apprehended in flagrante by the husband, who then insisted on bringing charges against them. They were initially sentenced, by a military judge, to flogging and a fine, and suffered the ignominious spectacle of being paraded, sitting backwards on donkeys, through the city. However, when news of the story reached the ears of the sultan, Qansuh al-Ghawri (r. 1501-16), he demanded that the adulterers be stoned. When the four chief judges of Cairo refused to ratify his order, citing the lack of proper evidence and the repentance of the male lover, the sultan flew into a rage. He dismissed all chief judges and shouted at the legal scholar who had drawn up the lovers' defence: ‘By God, I hope you go home and find someone doing to your wife what al-Mashali [the wife's lover] did to the wife of Khalil [the cuckolded judge]!' The two lovers were then hanged (rather than stoned), tied to the same rope and facing each other, near the door of the house of one of the jurists who had objected to the death sentence.^[288]

It is clear why chroniclers showed interest in this event. Not only was the manner of execution highly unusual, and were the two victims members of the learned high society of Mamluk Cairo, but, more significantly, their trial had triggered a constitutional crisis, in which the sultan struggled to assert his power over the religious judiciary. He was not entirely successful, one might add, for one reading of the incident is that, in late Mamluk Cairo, Islamic judges had in fact enough clout seriously to challenge, and rein in, the sultan's autocratic exercise of penal power. Although the two lovers met a violent death, it is significant that they did not suffer stoning, the Sharia punishment for adultery.

As adumbrated above, the chroniclers did not pay much attention, except in particularly spectacular circumstances, to executions that derived their legitimacy from the above-mentioned five Sharia types of capital punish­ment. This may explain why one reads almost nothing in the chronicles about talionic executions, and why crucifixion, the Sharia punishment for brigandage, is often dealt with in off-hand fashion by the chroniclers. But when an execution took place that squarely contradicted Sharia provisions, it roused interest. This seems to apply to the crucifixion of a young boy-servant in Damascus in 1248, an event described at length by the historian Abu Shama al-Maqdisi (d. 1268).^[289] This young Turkish slave of an amir, writes Abu Shama, had been found guilty of murdering his master, but instead of being punished talionically, he was crucified:

His face was turned towards the east, and his hands, upper arms, and feet were fixed with nails, and he stayed alive from the noon of Friday till the noon of Sunday, then he died. He was said to have been courageous, brave, and pious, and he had taken part in a campaign at Ascalon and killed a number of Franks and also killed a lion notwithstanding his youth. There were some memorable things in connection with his crucifixion. He abandoned himself without resis­tance and fear but rather stretched his hands so that they could be nailed [to the beams]. Then his feet were nailed, and he looked on this without groaning or grimacing with pain or moving any of his limbs. This I was told by several people who were witness to this. He remained patient and quiet without groaning but just looked at his feet and his sides, to the right and to the left again, and sometimes he looked at the people. It was said that he asked for water but was not given any.

Although medieval Muslim chroniclers mention cases of crucifixion on ‘countless' occasions,^[290] the level of empathy shown by Abu Shama is unusual. From a comment by Abu Shama, one suspects that his master had sexually harassed the crucified young boy. Another aspect that deserves highlighting is the considerable effort Abu Shama spends on detailing how nails were driven through the boy's hands and feet. Crucifixion by nailing to a wooden con­traption is in fact one way in which the Mamluks seem to have exacerbated the brutality of the punishment. In previous centuries, crucifixion often involved no more than the tying of a body to a wooden contraption. Also, the legal literature never mentions nailing. In the Mamluk chronicles, how­ever, crucifixion by nailing (tasmir) is relatively common.^[291] In fact, it may be

conjectured that while some forms of the death penalty, such as burning, recede into the background in Mamluk times, others, such as nailing to the cross, bisection and impaling, become more visible. A combination of Mamluk-style capital punishments is reported by Ibn Hajar for the year 1391, when the governor of Damascus first nailed to the cross, and then bisected, a group of amirs.³⁶ Execution by bisection (tawsit), a punishment that appears to have a Central Asian pedigree, predates the Mamluks. The practice of cutting offenders into half, or splitting them lengthwise, was described by the traveller Ibn Fadlan (d. 922) as a mode of execution, applied to adulterers and thieves, customary among the Oghuz and Bulgars of the Volga.³⁷ There are also a couple of reports about the practice in Seljuq chronicles.³⁸ However, it appears that it was only under the Mamluks that tawsit became a commonplace capital punishment, or even ‘the usual method of execution'.³⁹ Unruly militaries were thus executed, for example after Sultan al-Salih Salah al-Din's (r.

On Monday, 12 November 1352, the sultan rode out from the castle, in midst his army, to the dais... The sultan sat down on the dais, and the army stood in front of him, at the foot of the citadel. The amirs whom they had brought with them from the area of Aleppo were brought forth, and they began to make each amir stand [in front of the sultan]. Then they consulted about him. Some were pardoned, others condemned to bisection. Seven [amirs] were bisected: five amirs of forty and two amirs commanding over a thousand [footsoldiers]... The rest were pardoned and thrown back into prison.⁴⁰

The premeditated and ordered, public performance of violent punishment served the Mamluks to disguise the fact that Mamluk society was often not orderly and well protected from unrest, but rather plagued by violence that was difficult to contain, even if it should be noted that the Mamluk empire enjoyed remarkable longevity. Public punishments were spectacles,

Fawwaz and Hikmat Kishli Fawwaz (Beirut: Dar al-Kutub al-‘Ilmiyya, 1424/2004), vol. xxx, p. 95 (s.a. 665/[1266-7]). See also the comment on tasmir made by Ibn al-Nafis, as quoted above (n. 11).

36 Ibn Hajar, Inba' al-ghumr bi-abna' al-‘umr, ed. Muhammad Abd al-Mu‘id Khan, 9 vols. (Beirut: Dar al-Kutub al-‘Ilmiyya, 1406/1986), vol. iii, p. 70 (s.a. 793).

37 Ibn Fadlan, K. Ahmad b. Fadlan, trans. James E. Montgomery (New York: New York University Press, 2014), p. 203 (shaqqawhu bi-nisfayn), 233 [§§ 19, 63].

38 Ibn al-Jawzi, Muntazam, vol. xvii, p. 3.

39 Schacht and Meyerhof, The Theologus Autodidactus, p. 81 (Excursus F).

40 Ibn Kathir, Al-Bidaya wa 'l-nihaya (Cairo: Dar al-Manar, 1421/2001), vol. xiv, p. 230 (s.

a. 753).

celebrations of the lack of power of the punished offenders, and thus man­ifestations of the power of the ruling elite. As one historian of the Mamluks has remarked, they were ‘a form of street theatre' too, such that ‘[w]hen the Emir Qusun was condemned [in the year 1342] to be crucified, street vendors cashed in by selling lollipops in the shape of the crucified victim'.^[292]

A common pattern in Seljuq and Mamluk times was that the members of groups of criminals were simultaneously executed in different spots in the city.^[293] Symbolically enveloping the city with his violence, the ruler thus claimed absolute control over the polity he governed.

Perhaps the most gruesome type of public parading, in fact of any public spectacle of violence, was the flaying alive of victims and parading of their stuffed skins. Leo Africanus (d. after 1550), who passed through Cairo in the dying years of the Mamluk sultanate, relates information about this practice, borrowing his description from the chronicle of Ibn lyas:

rebels or seditious persons they flay alive, stuffing their skins with bran until they resemble the shape of a man, which being done, they carry the said stuffed skins upon camelbacks through every street of the city, and there publish the crime of the executed. I never saw a more dreadful punishment, for the reason that the condemned lies so long in torment. Only when the torturer touches the navel with the knife does he yield up his soul; but this he may not do until the magistrate standing by commands it.^[295]

Death by flaying is also known to have been meted out under the Seljuqs and the North African Fatimids (r. 909-1171), who applied the punishment to rebels.^[296] In comparison, the Mamluk chronicles relate more instances of flaying, not only of rebels hut also of Bedouin brigands, murderers, grave robbers and thieves. In the final decades of the Mamluk sultanate, according to Bernadette Martel-Thoumian, the inhabitants of Cairo and other Mamluk cities witnessed a ‘superabundance of horror' (surenchere de l'horreur).^[297] According to Ibn lyas, even the Mamluk sultans started to have second thoughts about whether their violence was justified. When in August 1513 Sultan Qansuh al-Ghawri, known for his severity in punish­ment, was presented with the stuffed skin of a young Bedouin, dressed up like a mannequin in a silk garment and a hat, he was reportedly outraged. Ibn Iyas adds that the sultan had in fact never ordered such a macabre spectacle.^[298] In the end, the violence meted out by the Mamluk rulers to the populace caught up with them. On 14 April 1517, the last Mamluk sultan, Tuman Bay II, was ignominiously hanged at the Zuwayla Gate in Cairo, an execution that was instantly ‘re-created by the masters of the shadow­theatres, much to the delight of Egypt's new master, the Ottoman Sultan Selim the Grim [r. 1512-20]'.⁴⁸