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Allah is the Light of the heavens and the earth. The similitude of His light is as a niche wherein is a lamp. The lamp is in a glass. The glass is as it were a shining star…
Quran Sura 24: Verse 35. Al-Nur, ‘The Light’.
Baybars died on 1 July 1277 whilst in Damascus, at the age of about 50. He had ripped the Mamluk Sultanate from the hands of a man he had fought alongside and then murdered, but the state that he had acquired by this treacherous deed was an exhausted and frightened one. The state that he left behind was one that boasted a powerful well-organised army, secure borders, an efficient bureaucracy and a firm economic base. But he left his successors much more than that; he left them a model for them to follow. He created a bastion for the survival of Islamic culture, and artisans and scholars flocked to Mamluk Egypt from every part of the old Islamic world to create perfection in the arts of glassware, metalwork, textiles and architecture. His emblem, a red lion, is seen on numerous exquisite pieces. Patronage of the arts became de rigueur for any emir of high rank and the Qurans, metalwork, and mosque lamps of the Mamluk period are perhaps the finest of any ever produced.
Despite this, he himself was a stranger from the steppes, a barbarian from outside the Dar al-Islam whose chief entertainment was daily training in the military arts from noon until evening. He was enthroned by a caliph who hailed from a family that had been titular heads of the Islamic world for 500 years whilst he himself had no parents beyond his slave merchant and first master. He fought, even as sultan, under the yellow banners of the family of Saladin but he had killed, with his own hands, the last Ayyubid Sultan of Egypt. He was confident and brave in his dealings with his adversaries and in public, but it is reported that he slept poorly and suffered from dyspepsia and nightmares. He kept loyalty with his khushdashiyya, his ‘brothers’ from his days as a cadet, but he was cruel in the extreme to enemies. He was not, however, rage-driven like Abagha or Hulegu; for him terror was a political instrument. He was king of the Egyptians but he married a daughter of the Khwarazmians and rarely spoke Arabic and was as much a Turkish warrior chief as an Islamic sultan. He rose by virtue of merit through a system that gave nothing by inheritance or by bloodline, but he tried, unsuccessfully, to secure the sultanate for his family’s line. He was the champion of orthodox Sunni Islam but he kept his own Sufi, a religious mystic who predicted the fall of Crusader cities and who practised a form of Islam more akin to that of the steppes than to the cities of Egypt. He ruled from his war charger but his mausoleum in Damascus is now Syria’s national library.
He was adept in international diplomacy but as likely to use assassination as negotiation. One version of his death has the sultan drinking from the wrong glass after flavouring its contents with poison meant for a minor Ayyubid emir. His biographer, al-Zahir, has it that, ‘fortune made him king’, but the sultan was in fact very much a self-made man.
