Proceedings, 9th ICAANE, Basel 2014, 935–947

Matthew Harrison

The Houses of Fusṭāṭ: Beyond Importation and InfluenceThis paper examines previous scholarship on the houses of Fusṭāṭ. Drawing on critiques from British vernacular architecture studies, I propose that a lack of critical reflection on (often implicit) explanatory notions in the scholarship needs to be addressed, moving towards a social interpretation of domestic space.

1. Introduction

In 1973 David Clarke described three stages of disciplinary evolution: consciousness, self-consciousness and critical self-consciousness (Clarke 1973). In 1997 Jane Grenville re-interpreted these stages as part of a review of scholarship on the medieval houses of Britain. For Grenville, consciousness could be equated with early scholarship’s restricted scope of collecting and categorising data. Self-consciousness was related to the introduction of explicit explanations of those data. Critical self-consciousness was the critical reflection on these explanations and their underlying theories. British vernacular architecture studies at large, Grenville lamented, had not yet reached this final stage, remaining largely detached from the theoretical debates in archaeology since the 1960s.

Grenville’s account was based on critical appraisals of this field by Roderick Lawrence (1983) and Matthew Johnson (1993) in the 1980s–90s. Johnson was, indeed, first to liken the scholarship in British vernacular architecture studies to a state of «innocence», as Clarke had described it. Post-war scholarship in the field was characterised by wide-ranging data collection but by «extreme theoretical conservatism» or even overt anti-theoretical senti-ments (Johnson 1990: 246).

What stage has been reached in the scholarship on the houses of Fusṭāṭ? Excavations at Fusṭāṭ (fig. 1) have provided one of the largest corpuses of domestic architecture of the Early Islamic period, revealed and interpreted over the course of a century. I will illustrate that the limitations scholars such as Grenville, Lawrence and Johnson identified in British ver-nacular architecture studies before 1990 are equally applicable to the scholarship on Fusṭāṭ

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from the same period. Yet, while these scholars successfully paved the way for a number of theoretically-rich and critically self-aware studies of medieval Northern European domestic architecture1, many of the limitations in the Fusṭāṭ scholarship still need to be addressed. By detailing some of these issues I hope to elucidate future avenues of research.

1 Johnson’s Housing Culture (1993) represented a major step forward; a range of theoretical approaches can be seen in a recent volume edited by Giles and Svart Kristiansen (2014).

Fig. 1. Location of Fusṭāṭ in Lower Egypt.

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2. Typology & Explanation

Typological studies, those that Grenville equated with the first stage of disciplinary con-sciousness, comprise the organisation of housing plans, building techniques, and decorative styles into types with temporal/spatial limits. As such they are descriptive and classificatory approaches, yet this does not mean that explanations are entirely absent (Grenville 1997: 14). Both the classifications themselves and the way in which examples are described often betray explanatory concepts held by scholars; it is only that the rationale underlying such explanation is not expressed. Consequently «implicit assumptions abound in this [typologi-cal] approach» (Johnson 1990: 247); even where explanations are explicitly stated, they rest on untested suppositions. It is precisely the implicit nature of explanation, and the reliance on untested assumptions, that I wish to draw attention to in the Fusṭāṭ scholarship.

Explanation was not the only issue raised regarding typological studies. Other problems, such as the lack of explicit quantitative bases for typology – i.e. explicit statements about how a sample of houses was chosen – have already been (at least partly) addressed by schol-ars involved in the 1964–78 ARCE2 mission in Fusṭāṭ directed by the late George Scanlon (Kubiak/Scanlon, 1989; Scanlon/Kubiak 1980, 1973, 1979; Scanlon 1965, 1966, 1967, 1974, 1976, 1981, 1984). A great debt is owed to Scanlon for his improved recording methods and scientific endeavour, seemingly reflected in his colleague Antoni Ostrasz’s (1977) typology, whose quantitative basis is far more explicit than those preceding it. These issues however, cannot be addressed fully in this paper; I will focus on the issue of explanation alone.

3. Explanatory Development

3.1 Fashion and TraditionTypological approaches are an important first step in architectural study. It should, there-fore, be no surprise that the earliest report on excavated housing in Fusṭāṭ – that published in 1921 by Ali Bahgat and Albert Gabriel – fits into this category. Bahgat sought to define the key stylistic and constructional commonalities of the housing style that reportedly domi-nated the site he excavated – a typology of one, as it were – crystallising the concept of the «Fusṭāṭ house» for future scholars.3 The «Fusṭāṭ house» is arranged around one or more

2 American Research Center in Egypt3 Since Bahgat’s excavations other styles of housing have emerged, though this kind is still perceived

as dominant. For the sake of brevity I will continue to refer to it as the «Fusṭāṭ house». The difficul-ties in identifying other styles, and their relative lack of scholarly attention, cannot be discussed at length.

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open courtyards; adjacent to which there is a tripartite arrangement of rooms, the central room opening onto a transverse hall or portico with two piers forming a tripartite entrance, as well as smaller rooms or alcoves centrally placed on the remaining sides of the courtyard (fig. 2).

There is no discussion of these architectural features in terms of their specific functions. Rather, the tripartite arrangement of rooms with its central T-shape is noted to have existed in other palatial and domestic architecture in the Near East, both earlier and later: at the Aʿbbāsid sites of Sāmarrāʾ and Ukhaiḍir, in traditional Iraqi housing up to the 19th century, and, citing Bell (1914), in a number of pre-Islamic cultures. It is therefore understood simply as an architectural type employed in diverse regions of the Muslim world up to the modern era (Bahgat/Gabriel 1921: 80). Why this particular form should be utilised over the region for such a long time is not addressed, seemingly relying on a notion of Islamic or Near Eastern «tradition» or «fashion». Such a reliance on a nebulous concept of «fashion» in lieu of substantive explanation is noted as a limitation of typological studies by Johnson (1990: 248).

Fig. 2. Principal features of the «Fusṭāṭ house».

939The Houses of Fusṭāṭ: Beyond Importation and Influence

3.2 Introduction and ImportationSubsequent to Bahgat’s report, a more defined explanation of the Fusṭāṭ house emerges: that it represents an architectural style introduced from Iraq during under the rule of Aḥmad ibn Ṭūlūn (r. 868–84 AD). The development of this hypothesis across the scholarship is nuanced and complex, and often the reader is forced to speculate as to its underlying reasoning. Central to the explanation are the similarities in form and decoration between Fusṭāṭ houses and those excavated by Herzfeld (1907) at the Aʿbbāsid capital of Sāmarrā ,ʾ Iraq (capital 836–892 AD), namely the T-shaped configuration and the resemblances in decorative wall stucco recovered from both sites. As noted, Bahgat had observed the similarities in plan, but attached no particular importance links between the two sites alone. Still, Bahgat’s dating of the houses to the Aʿbbāsid or Ṭūlūnid period (750–905 AD) was based on the similar-ity between stucco retrieved from the mounds of debris at Fusṭāṭ and that found in situ at Sāmarrā ,ʾ as well as at the Mosque of Ibn Ṭūlūn4 (Bahgat/Gabriel 1921: 122).

It is only in Creswell’s summary of Bahgat’s excavations (Creswell 1952: 119–30) that these similarities are used to propose that the form is an architectural import from Iraq. Creswell posits that it was introduced from Iraq «probably in Ṭūlūnid times» (Creswell 1952: 128), though it is not made entirely explicit why this should be the case. The direction of transmission is undoubtedly reliant on the identification of the T-shaped arrangement, what Creswell called the Iraqi-Persian bayt, in early and pre-Islamic Iraq by Bell (1914). The date of introduction presumably relies on Bahgat’s dating of the houses, combined with Creswell’s own identification of the in situ stucco decorating the house excavated by al-Hawary in Fusṭāṭ as Sāmarrāʾ «Style C» (Creswell 1940: 355–6). However, considering pre-Ṭūlūnid houses had yet to be identified in Fusṭāṭ5, it was admittedly speculative.

The link between the house plans of Sāmarrāʾ and Fusṭāṭ is acknowledged throughout Scanlon’s reports through the use of the term «Sāmarrāʾ bayt» for the tripartite, T-shaped arrangement, beginning in the initial season (Scanlon 1965). Yet it was unclear precisely what significance the term held for Scanlon. This is clarified in the report on the 1971 season of excavation, in reference to the «Eastern Complex», a set of buildings that did not conform to the dominant courtyard arrangement. This was proposed to represent a pre-Islamic housing tradition that «gave way rather more slowly than heretofore allowed to the new fashion introduced in the Ṭūlūnid period from Iraq» (Scanlon/Kubiak 1979: 110), seem-ingly alluding to the courtyard house with the T-shaped plan. It seems that Scanlon accepted Creswell’s explanation from his initial season, and it is this explanation that underlies his use of the term «Sāmarrāʾ bayt».

4 Kubiak/Scanlon (1973) would later show that these houses were likely to be Fāṭimid (969–1172 AD) 5 The significance of the Umayyad housing since excavated by Gayraud (1998), which does not

include this arrangement, is beyond the scope of this paper.

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The certainty with which Scanlon accepts Creswell’s hypothesis is evident in a later report, regarding to a house whose associated finds appear to date to the 8th and 9th centuries (Scanlon/Kubiak 1980: 83). Scanlon argues that because the building has lime mortar and this material has not been identified in any remains definitively older than those buildings including the «Sāmarrāʾ bayt», that the building fabric must be 9th century. The unstated assumption in this chain of inference is that the «Sāmarrāʾ bayt» was introduced into Egypt in the 9th century.

In summary, the discourse begins with Bahgat using parallels in stucco between houses of Sāmarrāʾ and Fusṭāṭ to suggest that they must be broadly contemporaneous (8th–9th century), while similarities in plan are interpreted as the result of a much wider housing tradition. Creswell moves on to use the parallels in plans to propose an importation or «introduction» from one locale to another in the mid-9th century. Finally, there is an implicit acceptance of this hypothesis to the extent of using it as a priori knowledge from which further claims are made.

Why was there a narrowing of date range between Bahgat and Creswell’s assessments? Assigning the date to the Ṭūlūnid period, a period defined by political change, seems to implicate the political élite, and arguably Aḥmad ibn Ṭūlūn himself, as an agent of change. The fact that Ibn Ṭūlūn had served in the Aʿbbāsid court of Sāmarrāʾ before taking gov-ernorship of Egypt, and that his congregational mosque and new extension of Fusṭāṭ (al-Qaṭaʾīʿ) are believed to have been modelled on the architecture and planning of Sāmarrāʾ are undoubtedly factors informing the importation explanation.

One might also consider that the Ṭūlūnid period is regarded largely as a period of strength for Egypt – owing to its rising political importance and the expansion of Fusṭāṭ – and that there is a distinct tendency in the scholarship to assign constructions to such episodes of prosperity and their abandonment to periods decline or catastrophe from the historical nar-rative. Scanlon at points used the reported burning of Fusṭāṭ in 1168 as a terminus ante quem in his dating (Scanlon 1966: 105), an event the Goitein would later find little evi-dence for in the documentary sources (Goitein, 1983: 103). Furthermore, the construction of houses is for Scanlon (and Ostrasz), assigned either to the Ṭūlūnid or Fāṭimid period, never to the intervening period comprising the second Aʿbbāsid and Ikhshīdid period (905–935; 935–969 AD). There is, therefore, an apparent slavishness in archaeological scholarship towards the historical (political) narrative. Despite the far broader chronological resolution of the archaeological data, low-level archaeological interpretations are made in terms of, or even superseded by, the established historical narrative.

941The Houses of Fusṭāṭ: Beyond Importation and Influence

3.3 Origins The continued focus on the origins of the «Fusṭāṭ house» as an explanation can partly be explained by certain failures to identify significant chronological trends in style. I have already noted that Bahgat’s houses were dated to the same broad period, interpreted only in terms of their commonalities. Scanlon, however, due to improved stratigraphic recording, was able to propose different dates for each houses ranging from the Ṭūlūnid to the Fāṭimid period. Ostrasz’s subsequent typology (fig. 3), which included Scanlon’s houses as well as those published by Bahgat, el-Hawary (1933) and Mehrez (1972), moved beyond the consist-encies within the corpus towards establishing different sub-types (Ostrasz 1977). However, Ostrasz could find no correlation between these types and period (classified as Ṭūlūnid or Fāṭimid), nor total area in plan, which Ostrasz attempted to use as a proxy for wealth.

The only period-based trends are noted by Scanlon himself throughout his preliminary reports (see Scanlon/Kubiak 1979: 108; Scanlon 1972: 417), consisting of a handful of archi-tectural elements associated with either Fāṭimid or Ṭūlūnid construction: mortar types, masonry techniques, paving types, basin shape, and regularity in plan of the courtyard. Why these changes might have taken place is not addressed. The features associated with Fāṭimid construction are frequently described by Scanlon as increased «suavity», «elegance» or «symmetry» in construction (e.g. Scanlon 1972: 417). Such descriptions, as well as the fact that these changes have not prompted explicit explanations, may indicate an assumption of

Fig. 3. Representation of Ostrasz’s (1977) typology of the «Fusṭāṭ house».

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increased domestic (aesthetic) comfort and technological competence over time, such as was held in early British vernacular architecture studies (Johnson, 1990: 247).

4. The Fetishisation of Buildings

The Ṭūlūnid introduction explanation is, in itself, limited in its development and what it can offer in terms of understanding. It comprises two explanatory concepts: geographic diffusion and social diffusion. The former refers to the transmission of ideas and styles of material culture between regions; while the latter refers to the notion that such intro-ductions, or innovations, begin at the highest ranks of society and filter down over time. Assumptions of social diffusion were commonly held in early British vernacular architec-ture studies (Johnson 1990: 247; Lawrence 1983: 22), less so geographic diffusion, no doubt due to the county-wide scope of its data collection.6 Yet geographic diffusion has a more prominent role in Islamic archaeology due to its wider spatial scope, and there is a long history of relating changes in Egypt’s material culture to Iraqi influence.

The element of geographic diffusion is overt in the introduction explanation, the element of social diffusion is only implied. As discussed, the explanation seems to implicitly attribute the introduction to the political élite, possibly Aḥmad ibn Ṭūlūn himself and his established emulation of Sāmarrā .ʾ Yet the style of housing appears to be widespread among the «mid-dling» class, which seems to assume a process of social diffusion occurred, though precisely how is unclear. One is missing evidence of a mechanism by which such a diffusion of style may have taken place (i.e. how the middling classes interacted with the élite and their archi-tecture) as well as motivation (i.e. why emulate this part of élite culture).

These omissions are symptomatic of a profound problem: that geographic and social dif-fusion explanations fail to consider human agency. This amounts to a «fetishisation» of buildings (Johnson, 1990: 248), where architecture itself becomes the intellectual focus as a thing-in-itself, divorced from the social lives of the people who built and used it. While I propose that ideas about the agency of the political élite likely motivated scholars to accept a Ṭūlūnid introduction, this is never explicitly considered. Rather, the form simply was intro-duced; the question of who, how and why are pushed into the background, as if documenting the origin, development and spread of an architectural form constitutes an end in itself.

As a result we are left with little enquiry into how changes in architecture were related to the lives of people who resided within. Was the introduction of the «Sāmarrāʾ bayt» accom-panied by changes in domestic activities? Were such changes a consequence or cause of architectural change? A social diffusion explanation seems to frame the architectural form

6 The exception being colonial architecture (Lawrence 1983: 22)

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as an arbitrary symbol of status and power, adopted regardless of, or in spite, its functional affordances or limitations. Yet one might also consider whether the object of emulation was not architecture itself, but the activities it housed.

5. Towards a Social Interpretation

One way in which the architecture may be related to the social lives of its inhabitant is to replace scholarly, anachronistic terminology (such as «Sāmarraʾ bayt» and «Iraqi-Persian bayt» 7, see fig. 4) with terms the inhabitants used. Contemporaneous nomenclature can act as a window (albeit a complex one) into past conceptualisations of space, as well as a platform from which to investigate the use of space in the textual sources. Such a re-phrasing has already emerged in scholarship on the documentary sources for Fusṭāṭ: namely

7 The use of «bayt» (house/home) in association with such an ensemble can be attributed to both Bell (1914: 82) and Creswell (1958: 147), yet Goitein (1983: 57) illustrates that documents from Fusṭāṭ use bayt only to indicate a generic room, or the household, but not a specific room.

Fig. 4. Terminology used by Bahgat (A), Scanlon (B), and Ostrasz(C) for the Fusṭāṭ house.

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in Goitein’s (1983) assessment of the Cairo Geniza documents and Sayed’s (1987) study of documents from al-Qāhira and Fusṭāṭ.

Goitein concluded that the most prominent room described in house deeds from Fusṭāṭ, the majlis (from j l s, to sit), must be main room of the tripartite form from excavations. He notes the two columns which are frequently described, relating to the two portico piers, as well as references to kummayn (two sleeves) belonging to the majlis, indicating the flanking rooms (Goitein, 1983: 64–5).

Sayed draws the same conclusion, highlighting the significance of a passage from 10th century scholar al-Masʿ udi (murūj al-dhahab, 4, pp. 4–5). The passage describes a palatial architectural ensemble called al- ḥīrī bi kummayn wa arwiqa, the «ḥīrī» (from al-Ḥīra, Iraq) with sleeves and porticoes. The central room is described as a majlis, flanked by kummayn (sleeves) and fronted by a riwaq (portico), clearly corresponding to the so-called bayt (fig. 5).

Sayed examines house descriptions in deeds of gift and sale, demonstrating a clear formal distinction between the majlis, imply flanking rooms and is closure by door, and iwan, which never has doors nor flanking rooms (as the iwans of Mamluk and Ottoman houses of Cairo). Crucially, this illustrates the inappropriate and potentially misleading use of the term iwan to describe parts of the Fusṭāṭ houses (fig. 4).

The identification of the T-shaped room as the majlis allows improved understanding of both architectural and textual evidence, as Sayed began to demonstrate. The specific archi-tectural form implied by the use of the term majlis in historical accounts of Early Islamic palaces had been, and continues to be, missed by scholars (e.g. Kennedy 2004: 151), yet it is crucial for contextualising the court ceremonial that these accounts describe. Such accounts (among others) may aid understanding of how the majlis functioned in the houses of Fusṭāṭ, if one can unpick the potential similarities and differences that may have existed between

Fig. 5. Terms used to describe the «Ḥīrī» by al-Mas’udi in Arabic and English.

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palatial and domestic uses – i.e. develop critical understanding of potential processes of social diffusion.

That a social interpretation of the space relies on the integration of textual and archaeolog-ical sources is further demonstrated by Goitein’s work on the Geniza documents. The fact that few of the rooms described in house deeds seem to have a specific function can partly be explained by importance of portable furnishing to transform space depending on occa-sion (Goitein 1983: 107). These are primarily revealed through trousseau lists, in particular the use of mattresses and pillows for sitting and sleeping, and the use of wall hangings and curtains for decoration and division. Re-contextualising objects such as these within the skeleton of the archaeological plan would give us a fuller understanding of the experience and use of these houses.

6. Conclusions

This brief review of the scholarship on Fusṭāṭ’s housing has highlighted that its constraints are much the same as those identified in other regions. Explanations based on notions of geographic and social diffusion provide an interpretative point of departure, yet remain detached from the social lives the inhabitants and have too often been accepted uncriti-cally. Future scholarship must interrogate the underlying assumptions of these theories and develop fuller explanations incorporating human agency, as well as the use and conceptu-alisation of space.

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Matthew Harrison, University of Southampton.