Ibn Tulun was one of the most famous rulers of Egypt during the
early Islamic period, but it is his
son, Khumaraweh, who was a most interesting character in Egyptian
history. Like so many sons inheriting a strong father's wealth he
was softer and able to indulge in eccentricities. He turned
his father's big midan into a lovely and exotic garden, and planted
its vast acreage with tropical trees, roses, jasmine, lilies, and
shrubs. But Khumaraweh hated the unsightliness of the stalks
of trees, so every tree had its trunk and branches coated in sheets
of gilded copper which were lined with lead water pipes, so that
every tree was not only a gilded lily but a pretty fountain running
through the shady gardens. Not only were there exotic trees
but exotic fruits, such as apricots grafted onto almonds, and a
complicated and lovely pigeon house. The birds of Fustat-Katai
were famous for their color and their noisy singing. Since he
had used up his father's sports ground to build his garden,
Khumaraweh built another midan even larger than his father's, but a
little distance away. And since he was mad over horse racing,
there were races almost all night and day.
Khumaraweh lined the walls of some of the rooms and passages of his
palace (where the Hasan mosque now stands) with thin sheets of gold
studded with lapis lazuli. In one suite called the House of
Gold, which was entirely lined with gold, he set up wooden statues
of himself and his wives, each statue dressed in cloth of gold.
They were larger than life, and his own statue had golden trousers
and his turban was encrusted with jewels. Every night Khumaraweh
would sit on one of the terraces or in his golden room or in his
garden listening to the poets reciting, or to his favorite slaves
singing. He also built a magnificent zoo, and he was
passionately fond of lions. There was a special house of lions
(dar el assad), and every chamber of it housed a lion and a lioness.
Each cage had a special door where the keeper could enter to feed
them and clean out the place and sand the floor, and each one had
running water. It was a really clean and spacious menagerie,
and sometimes Khumaraweh would free all the lions into the courtyard
of the zoo, and all Fustat would shake with the roars of the lions
fighting and playing with each other all night. Every lion was
trained to go back to his quarters when his keeper called him by
name.
The most extraordinary of all these lions was one that Khumaraweh
kept as his own pet and bodyguard called Zouraik (little blue)
because it had blue eyes. Khumaraweh led him around by a
collar of gold, and Zouraik slept near Khumaraweh, no matter where
he was. Khumaraweh fed him chickens and goats and brushed his
coat. But as well as lions Khumaraweh kept ponies, racehorses,
camels, leopards, giraffes and elephants in his city. What is
charming about Khumaraweh is that he could also be kind to human
beings. Instead of turning them out on the street as often
happened, he installed the mothers of all his prolific father's
children in the harem, and he also looked after any of his own
divorced wives who had presented him with children - a not illiberal
gesture from a ruler as eccentric as this one.
But perhaps this isn't really the half of it, because Khumaraweh
conceived what is probably the ultimate in sybaritic self-indulgence
- something even Texas hasn't thought up yet. Khumaraweh was
an insomniac, and his physicians told him that he ought to be rocked
gently to sleep every night. To achieve this Khumaraweh dug
out a lake thirteen hundred feet square in the garden of his palace.
This lake was filled with mercury (as from thermometers) and he
slept on the lake every night, rocked to sleep on an air
mattress made of inflated skins. The mattress was tied
to the edges of the lake with silken cords, and the movement of the
mercury made small waves which moved it gently to and fro. In
an alcove nearby, his favorite singers (four at the time) sang him
sacred and profane songs and chanted his favorite verses from the
Koran, and if he couldn't sleep on his lake Khumaraweh would get up
and walk around his palace or sit in his gardens or entertain his
lady friends.
Makrizi loved this sort of anecdote and he finds it difficult to
tear himself away from lengthy descriptions of Khumaraweh's
excesses. Fustat-Katai under Khumaraweh lived in a sort of
permanent nonviolent Roman holiday, and as Lane Poole says: "So
brave, so terrible and so gallant a figure was this superb prince
that his subjects dared not speak, much less sneeze, as he passed
by." It was also considered bad luck if they did speak or
sneeze. But according to Makrizi (Casanova), he was never the same
man after his favorite wife Bouran died. It was for Bouran
that he had built his House of Gold, and after her death everything
in life seems to have lost charm for him.
Khumaraweh was strangled in his bed in Damascus in 896 by his
servants and his concubines. His lion Zouraik and his black
bodyguard couldn't save him, and his murderers were crucified.
His body was brought home to Fustat and buried near his father's,
somewhere at the foot of Mukattam. Just as he was being put
into his tomb the reciters of the Koran "happened to be
chanting" the verse which says: "Seize him and hurl him
into the fire of hell," which was probably a genuinely popular
story and comment on what all this sumptuous self-indulgence meant
to the people of Fustat-Katai - zoo, gardens, lions, and his
personal bravery notwithstanding.
El Katai itself was destroyed by Khumaraweh's successor. The
Tulunids had managed to keep Egypt for themselves as a private
kingdom for thirty years, but Khumaraweh's sons were too weak to
hold on to it.
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