Tree of Pearls: Shajar al-Durr and
her Architectural Patronage
D. Fairchild Ruggles
Synopsis:
In the mid-thirteenth century, Shajar al-Durr—or “Tree of Pearls”—rose from slavery to become the first female sultan of Egypt, and ultimately the first in what would become the Mamluk line of sultans. With wealth and political power, she built innovative tombs for her husband and for herself that changed the architectural fabric of Cairo. Her claims to urban space and distinctive self-expression belie the widely accepted belief that women in the medieval Islamic world were anonymous and silent.
References:
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Hampikian, Nairy. Al-Ṣāliḥiyya Complex Through Time. Heidelberg: Heidelberger Orientverlag, 2004.
Al-Ibrashy, May. “Sultana of Pearls: Preserving the Dome That Honors a Historic Female Ruler,” Scribe: Bulletin of the American Research Center in Egypt (September 2018): https://www.arce.org/sultana-pearls.
Levanoni, Amalia. “Šağar ad-Durr: A Case of Female Sultanate in Medieval Islam,” in Egypt and Syria in the Fatimid, Ayyubid and Mamluk Eras III, ed. Urbain Vermeulen and Jo van Steenbergen, 209–18. Leuven: Uitgeverij Peeters, 2001.
O’Kane, Bernard. Monumental Inscriptions (monument 169), https://islamicinscriptions.cultnat.org/About.html (accessed 20 July 2023)
Ruggles, D. Fairchild. Tree of Pearls: The Extraordinary Patronage of the 13th-Century Egyptian Slave-Queen Shajar al-Durr. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020.
Wolf, Olivia. “‘The Pen Has Extolled Her Virtues’: Gender and Power within the Visual Legacy of Shajar al-Durr in Cairo,” in Calligraphy and Architecture in the Muslim World, ed. Mohammad Gharipour and Irvin Cemil Schick, 199–216. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014.
Citation:
D. Fairchild Ruggles, “Tree of Pearls: Shajar al-Durr and her Architectural Patronage,” Khamseen: Islamic Art History Online, published 7 March 2024.
D. Fairchild Ruggles is Professor at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, with appointments in Art History, Architecture, Landscape Architecture, Medieval Studies, Spanish & Portuguese Studies, Gender and Women’s Studies, the Center for Global Studies, and the Center for South Asian and Middle East Studies. She holds the Debra Mitchell Chair in Landscape Architecture and the Presidential Chair in Social Science and the Humanities, and she directs the university’s program in Criticism and Interpretive Theory. She is the art and architecture field editor for the Encyclopedia of Islam and has authored and edited numerous award-winning books on Islamic landscape and architectural history, heritage, and the arts patronage of women in the Islamic world and South Asia. Her most recent book, Tree of Pearls (Oxford University Press 2020), won ASOR’s Nancy Lapp Popular Book Award.