On Roda Island in the Nile stands a stone column nineteen cubits (thirty-four feet) tall and nearly 1,200 years old. It is called the Nilometer. Before the construction of the Aswan Dam, an official would measure how high the river rose and from that reading determine the fate of the country’s annual harvest. By the eleventh century and continuing until the Ottoman Turkish conquest of 1517, the rulers of Egypt had made a tradition of exorbitant pageantry whenever the waterline reached sixteen cubits: the harvest would be reaped, the cosmic and communal order confirmed, the people fed and placated, and the land tax collected.
But not all Nilometer news was good news. If, by around the end of August, the water still had not reached sixteen cubits, the festivities and the land tax would be canceled, and the people would know that hard times lay ahead. Conversely, a continued rise to eighteen or nineteen cubits would mean the Nile was flooding and could take thousands of homes and people with it.
Some believed that such disasters were cosmic warnings against society’s sins, and that the ruling class — military cliques, government officials, and private landowners — was to blame for those sins. But God’s punishment did not fall only on the guilty. “Fear a trial which will not strike those who have wronged among you exclusively,” reads a verse in Al-Anfal, the eighth chapter of the Qur’an. Tyranny and corruption (fasad) were seen as a rot that spread through the entire communal order, as with the People of Lot before their destruction. Divine wrath was an elemental force, not a paper writ delivered to particular individuals. Popular protest was different, as the ruling classes were sometimes reminded. It could be just as sudden, furious, and overwhelming, but it was precise in its targets, and its moral and religious justification was plain to all.
The wealthiest members of society often profited most during these periods of heightened suffering. Merchants and nobles would hoard grain even in good times to anticipate a future shortage, but most forms of state discipline targeted only bakers and millers of the lower middle class, or what medievalists often call the “conjunctural poor” — those who fluctuated between subsistence and poverty as economic conditions shifted. Al-Musabbihi, a chronicler and official under the Fatimid dynasty (969–1171), lived through the famine of 1024–25 and wrote of grain shipments diverted to the palace, the sight of bodies buried without ritual washing or shrouds, and starving people reduced to eating grass.
The threat of popular violence put the palace on edge. On January 16, 1025, the caliph, making a procession through Cairo, was confronted by shouting: “Hunger, oh Commander of the Faithful, hunger! Neither your father nor your grandfather did such a thing to us.” Hunger spread from the civilian population to the black infantry of the caliph’s army, a corps composed of Sudanese slave soldiers. Soon both were rummaging for grain wherever they could find it, including in government warehouses opened by sympathetic or terrified officials.
That famine set a pattern that would hold for more than five hundred years. When the river failed, the people who controlled the grain found ways to profit, and the people who went hungry found ways to make them pay, or at least fear.
Not Merely Acts of God
The Fatimid regime was dismantled in 1171 by the Kurdish warlord Saladin, whose Ayyubid dynasty was in turn overthrown in 1250 by its own Mamluks — Turkic and Circassian slave soldiers who subsequently established a military-patronage state that controlled Egypt, Palestine, and Syria until 1517. Despite the perennial hum of coups and infighting around the sultan’s throne, 250 years of relative administrative continuity lent the regime enough time and resources to build towering institutions of religious welfare and political legitimacy, patronize a literary renaissance, and organize Egypt as the focal point of Mediterranean and Indian Ocean commerce.
Nevertheless, the limited safety net and trade money were parts of a system far more extractive than the Fatimid state had ever been. Mamluk captains, trying to control a potentially restive population and needing money to keep buying new Mamluks from the slave markets of Crimea, parceled out iqta (revenue assignments) among themselves and hoarded supplies to an unprecedented degree. The traditional lines between military and civilian roles blurred as some captains in turn leased their iqtas to non-Mamluk administrators, while they themselves lobbied the sultan for lucrative administrative positions, like that of muhtasib, the office responsible for policing the markets. Compounding disasters then made a bad situation far worse: the black death of the mid-fourteenth century wiped out the rural workforce, dikes and canals silted up (which meant the Nile had to rise higher for a sufficient harvest), and the effects of the Little Ice Age made the river itself far more erratic.
Matters came to a head in 1403 during the rule of the teenage Sultan Faraj ibn Barquq, when the Nile once again failed to rise just after the Turco-Mongol warlord Timur had ravaged Mamluk Syria and another wave of the black death approached. Mamluk amirs, or commanders, responded by fighting each other and squeezing their tenants even harder to keep their own ledgers balanced. Faraj and his government, unable to materially solve any problems or admit to their own failures, resorted to massive public prayers for rain and crackdowns on supposed expressions of moral decay like alcohol, prostitution, and religious minorities who flouted sumptuary laws. Adam Sabra writes in Poverty and Charity in Medieval Islam: Mamluk Egypt, 1250–1517 that during the 1403–4 crisis, chroniclers made no mention of any state-sanctioned relief efforts, though individual sultans and amirs were typically more generous with their alms whenever they themselves fell sick, hoping God would reward their charity with a cure.
The sense of insecurity and trauma brought by calamity and misrule may have encouraged Mamluk-era historians to increasingly supplement their record of events with commentary on the conditions of the wider city and common people. Al-Maqrizi (1364–1442), the most prolific among them, opined that the Nile disasters were not merely acts of God or unlucky natural patterns but a product of three human causes: a corrupt government lubricated with bribery, extreme rent-seeking and hoarding behavior by the moneyed and landowning classes, and the reckless policy of flooding the market with low-value, inflationary copper coins.
“Whoever reflects on this occurrence from its beginning to its end and knows its origin and development realizes that what has befallen the population is caused solely by the malfeasance of the leaders and rulers and their negligence with regard to the public interest,” he wrote in his treatise Helping the Community by Examining the Causes of Its Distress (Ighathat al-ummah bi-kashf al-ghummah). “Indeed, wherever the causes are known, it is easy for the knowledgeable person to remedy all conditions, whether significant or insignificant. I seek God’s help in facing both difficult and easy matters; indeed ‘He tells the truth and He shows the way.’”
The people in the streets had reached the same conclusion on their own. And when the powerful pushed too far, they pushed back.
Prayers Against the Sultan
Al-Maqrizi’s chronicles record the constant protests that emerged in reaction to state depredation. Throughout the Middle Ages and even more frequently during the Mamluk period, ordinary people channeled their frustration through tax evasion, smuggling, blocking the sultan’s or governor’s processions, collective petitioning (shouted or in writing), and, in extreme cases, violence.
Those activities often came hand in hand, with petition typically following demonstration. Protest had no realistic chance of overturning state power (nor was that its purpose) but could apply sufficient pressure on authorities hoping to maintain their government positions and protect their property from physical damage. In pursuit of material reward and social correction, crowds applied violence systematically, indicating that they had a clear sense of a moral economy and the wrongness of transgressing it.
One favored tradition of anti-profiteering protesters was finding the local muhtasib they deemed responsible and stoning him. The Mamluk-era historian Ibn Taghribirdi recorded how in 1435, a crowd in Cairo sent the muhtasib fleeing into the Citadel for protection. Another example of this occurred in 1487, when, amid rising grain prices, the muhtasib of Damascus was found to be mixing his government duties with his private involvement in the grain trade. Shams al-Din ibn Tulun recorded that an organized crowd found him patrolling the market and proceeded to unload its displeasure on him. These two officials may have suffered a nasty shock and some injuries, but they were fortunate compared to the governor and deputy governor of Damietta in 1417, who, as al-Maqrizi records, were “arrested” by the crowd, humiliated, and then struck dead.
The elite response to such protests was varied. Amina Elbendary writes in Crowds and Sultans: Urban Protest in Late Medieval Egypt and Syria of the fluidity of such crowds and indeed of social categories in general. The protesters, consisting not just of the “structural/permanent poor” but also artisans, shopkeepers, and lower-level clerics, often sought out members of the clerical establishment (ulama), or even a muhtasib they considered to be morally upright, to intercede with the government on their behalf. In the case of the 1417 incident at Damietta, the crowd brought some of their local religious judges to register a case against the same governor they were about to lynch.
These actions sometimes elicited refusal or even more punitive taxes. Other times, the protest and subsequent petition secured localized, temporary alleviation rather than structural reforms. But the broader tradition of protesting economic predation was understood by both rulers and the people as a constant threat or leverage that punished anyone who overstepped the line.
Muslims are instructed by the Qur’an and hadith to enjoin good and forbid wrong — a commandment that extends beyond personal survival and piety to the proactive pursuit of social justice. Innocent victims of misfortune could be seen as casualties of elite misconduct or, if they bore their suffering patiently, even as martyrs. But a society that accepted unjust rulers and did not rise up against them was itself complicit. Both sides, then, took their case to God. In a crisis, the ruling class organized mass public prayers for rain. Protesters often shouted “God is great” before a demonstration, and chroniclers described such moments by writing that “prayers against the sultan [or governor] increased.”
The Mamluk regime did not survive the collapse of its trade revenue, driven by Portuguese naval ambitions, and the Ottoman advance into the Levant and Egypt. Qansuh al-Ghuri, the penultimate Mamluk sultan, regarded by chroniclers as the most avaricious among the rulers of that period, supposedly died of a stress- and battle-induced stroke on the plains of Marj Dabiq in front of his Qur’an readers.
A change in regime, however, did not keep people off the streets whenever greed or misrule threatened their livelihoods. In 1591, not long after the Cairenes “prayed against” him, Awis Pasha, the city’s governor, died of a stroke.
This article originally appeared in Jacobin, a democratic socialist magazine publishing long-form essays and analysis on politics, economics, and culture. Subscribe to the print edition for $20 a year.