The mutual influence of the Mamluk interior architecture and urban planning in Damascus (original) (raw)

The Mamluk sultans were new to embrace Islam, and so their main reason for strengthening their rule over the Islamic region was to obtain legitimacy, through taking over the status as the defenders of Islam and its sacred places. To achieve this aim they applied several methods, some of which had a significant impact on the architecture and urban planning for the cities. The methods they used were as follows: Firstly: They launched their first mission to fight and expel the Crusaders from Jerusalem. Secondly: They protected the pilgrimage route to Mecca in all of the countries under their control , which led to the re-emergence of the pilgrimage route from Damascus to the south. Thirdly: The Mamluk policy to consolidate their rule also involved getting closer to the Islamic nations through other social and intellectual aspects, such as spreading fads that were related to religion and exaggerating the celebrations of religious ceremonies. The most important of these was the pilgrimage howdah, which was invented by El-Zaher Baybars in Damascus at the beginning of his reign in order to prove his sovereignty over the region. The pilgrimage howdah involved travelling through the pilgrimage route, and was launched from one of Damascus' mosques with grand celebrations. The previous two factors had a great impact on the urban planning of the city, as we will see, since the concept of pilgrimage rituals was connected to the need to establish grand spacious mosques that were located in places that were suitable for accommodating a large crowd to practice the rituals. They also led to the necessity to place these mosques on the route of the pilgrimage, starting from the gate of the citadel to the south that was in alignment to the western city wall. Fourthly: Trying to obtain blessing by getting closer to the buildings of their predecessors, who owned the real legitimacy to rule the Islamic State. Since the Mamluks took great care in choosing their buildings sites, the location of the building was seen to be as important as the architectural significance, and possibly more. In his book, Rabbat mentioned that the historians of the Mamluk era did not care about the aesthetic values of the buildings mentioned in their books, but that the Waqf documents were describing the distribution of the internal spaces without describing the ornaments or decorative elements in detail. Besides that, they paid great attention to announcing the location of the building and they mentioned all of the important buildings in the neighbourhood, which clarifies the importance of choosing the buildings' locations. Damascus was considered to be one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities; the archaeological studies on the old city of Damascus, carried out by Zack D. showed that it had been ABSTRACT: During the Mamluk era, Damascus was again the capital of the Levant area and the main passage for the Hajj convoys that travelled from all of the countries in the east to Mec-ca. This research establishes a study of the relationship between Mamluk political and religious concepts concerning the distribution of the main Islamic buildings in Damascus, the impact of this distribution on the urban planning of the city and, finally, the impact of all these factors on its interior design.