Sufi Visionary of Ottoman Damascus: ‘Abd al-Ghani al-Nabulusi, 1641-1731 , by Elizabeth Sirriyeh. New York: RoutledgeCurzon, 2005. 172 pages, endnotes, bibliography, index. US$105.00 (Cloth) ISBN 0-415-34165-5

Abstract

could be brought to bear on some of the questions he raises (especially on his discussion of death) and reminds us of the long way we still have to go in fully integrating the Geniza into the study of medieval Muslim communities. Also surprisingly absent—given the close connection between Egypt and Syro-Palestine under the Fatimids—is any mention of the works of Josef Meri and Joel Kraemer on multiple religious communal pilgrimages in medieval Egypt. Two of the pieces, by Johannes Pahlitzsch and Lorenz Korn, provide detailed discussions of the fate of religious institutions of different kinds after the recapture of Jerusalem by Saladin. Pahlitzsch's larger question of the extent to which Latin religious institutions were transformed into Muslim institutions focuses on the example of the Khanqah as-Salahiyya. Readers will welcome his edition and translation of the waqfiyya of the Khanqah. Korn's careful and detailed discussion of Saladin's architectural activity includes an especially interesting comparison of the character of Saladin's patronage in Cairo, Damascus, and Jerusalem. Yehoshua Frenkel hypothesizes in his chapter that awqafYad a growing role in the public sphere of Mamluk Jerusalem. Where Korn indicates a decreasing importance attached to the city's sanctity after Saladin, Frenkel's chapter makes the case for a robust involvement by the Mamluks in the city, which he attributes to the sacred position of Jerusalem in the Mamluk world view. One wonders how this compares with the Mamluk view of the haramayn. Joseph Drory's contribution also deals with the Mamluk period, but in his case, with Jerusalemites who were living in Egypt. This piece does, in fact, deal with governance—but in Cairo, not Jerusalem. Drory's three anecdotes certainly provide evidence that Jerusalem produced some capable scholars—but they do not, in themselves, support the case for rehabilitating Jerusalem from its backwater status. The final entry in the volume is Mohammad Ghosheh's meticulous discussion of Jerusalem's walls and gates under Sultan Suleyman. Readers will find here a detailed account of the history of the walls from the Ayyubid period onwards, along with photographs of relevant documents and a number of maps. He demonstrates convincingly that even major aspects of Jerusalem's urban history must be reconsidered in the light of the legal documents he has studied. The volume as a whole raises the same expectation that we will see much of the conventional wisdom regarding Jerusalem's premodern history called into question as scholars continue to exploit new and little studied documentary material. Paula Sanders Rice University