Note 64 — Chapter VI

Ibn-Gubeyr, ed. Wright, 44, 45. This intelligent traveller to whom we owe so many interesting details of Saladin’s period, gives a curious description of the great Karáfa cemetery to the south of Cairo, which is one of the few places that carry one back to the days of the Arab conquest. Here lie the bones of most of the early warriors and poets and divines of the Town of the Tent, though nothing but tradition identifies their graves now. In Ibn-Gubeyr’s time the identification was evidently doubtful, for he declines to be responsible for what he has taken from the histories, though he adds, piously, that “their authenticity is above suspicion, if it please God.” Passing by such legendary tombs as those of the Prophet Sálih, and Reuben son of Jacob, and Pharaoh’s wife Asiya, we find descriptions of fourteen tombs of the male descendants of ‘Aly and five women, each in its own beautiful chapel with its keeper and endowment. Among them were Zeyn-el-‘Abidín, the son of the martyr Hoseyn, Zeyneb his great-granddaughter, and Umm-Kulthúm, the daughter of the sixth Imám Ga‘far es-Sádik. There were also the tombs of ‘Okba, the standard-bearer of the Prophet, of Abu-l-Hasan his goldsmith, of Sáriya of the Hill (who is also commemorated by a mosque in the Citadel, though there is nothing to connect him with Egypt), of two sons and a daughter of the caliph Abu-Bekr, of the son of ez-Zubeyr the general under ‘Amr, of Ibn-‘Abd-al-Hakam, of el-Gawhary; besides such notabilities as the Man of the Water-Pot, famous for wonders, the man who quoted the Korán when he was laid in his grave, the man who never spoke for forty years, and the bride to whom a miracle was vouchsafed when she unveiled to her husband. There was the Place of the Martyrs, where are buried the warriors who fell fighting for Islám under Sáriya, and the plain was dotted all over with the mounds of their graves. “All the buildings of the Karáfa, whether mosques or chapels, give hospitable shelter to all learned and pious strangers, as well as to mendicants, each building being provided with a grant of money, paid monthly on behalf of the Sultan, and the same in the case with the colleges both of Misr and Cairo. It was told us that the sum of those grants exceeded 2000 Egyptian dinárs a month, which is equal to 4000 Morocco dinárs; and as to the great mosque of ‘Amr at Misr we were informed that its revenues amounted to about thirty Egyptian dinárs a day for its upkeep and the salaries of the guardians, precentors, and Korán readers.”—Ibid. 42-6.