685/1286) spent several years in Egypt.¹ In his description of Cairo Ibn Saʿīd observes that he found the city ‘particularly welcoming for the poor’ (al-faqīr), a term that clearly includes Sufis: The ...

In 1347 slave traders from the Black Sea brought with them something far deadlier than a cargo of future Mamluk warriors: the Black Death. Plague infested the whole of the known world, but nowhere ...

Beit Seheimi, with its garden courtyard and steam bath, was constructed in 1648 by a sheikh of Al-Azhar, Abdel Wahab al-Tablawi, in the rich style of the Mamluks who ruled Egypt from the 13th to ...

A large Mamluk-era Quran manuscript from the late 1470s is among the artifacts to be auctioned at Sotheby's today.