Abstract
Shihāb al-Dīn Ahmad al-
ijāzī (1388–1471) was an unexceptional legal student in Mamluk Cairo who, at the age of 24, overdosed on marking nut, a potent plant drug valued for its memory-enhancing properties. As a result of the overdose, boils broke out all over al-Hijāzī's body, he was unable to eat or sleep, and he lost significant cognitive power. After recovering from the overdose, he abandoned his legal studies and became a leading poet. Most interestingly, al-Hijazi wrote a letter to his dear friend 
alā
al-Dīn al-Asyū
ī (d. 1455) on the tenth night of overdose detailing his suffering, his social isolation and the solace he had found with an unidentified Turkish slave soldier who was suffering the same physical, psychiatric, and social discomforts. The letter is an indictment of his fellow Cairenes who had ignored or mocked him in his illness, though the non-Arab, unfree soldier condemns most forcefully the social body of fifteenth-century Cairo and their misguided constructions of blighted bodies.
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Notes
A 31-year-old man was recently treated in Burnley, England, for ‘redness, itching and blistering [on his forearm] followed by skin necrosis’ after having applied marking nut extract obtained in Pakistan to the area in order to remove a tattoo. After treating the eczema, the dermatologists found the man's arm had healed ‘without scarring, any visible remnants of the tattoo, or the need for debridement’ (Hafejee et al., 2006, 62).
When capitalized, the term ‘Mamluk’ refers to the Mamluk dynasty and its royal members. The term ‘mamluk,’ which literally means ‘one who is owned,’ refers to the slave soldiers employed by the Mamluk dynasty.
My translation is an adaptation of Arberry's in Poems of al-Mutanabbi (Arberry, 1967, 72).
Modes of social configuration in Mamluk and early Ottoman academic circles are interesting sites of friendship analysis, especially as they relate to categories of physical difference. Bonds were formed according to professional guilds, fraternal orders, clans and tribes, among other group identifiers, but social clusters were occasionally based on physical characteristics or nicknames. Ibrāhīm al-Kharīzātī al-Sālihī al-Utrūsh (d. 18 January 1527) is identified by one biographer as ‘one of the partially deaf authors of masterpieces (a
ad al-mud
a
īn al-u
rūsh),’ suggesting the existence of a group of deaf writers. See Ibn al-Mullā al-
a
kafī, 1:248. For sixteenth-century Syrian uses of the word u
rūsh, see Mu
ammad b. Ibrāhīm b. al-
anbalī (d. 1563) (Cairo, 1990, 255).
ad al-mud
a
īn al-u
rūsh),’ suggesting the existence of a group of deaf writers. See Ibn al-Mullā al-
a
kafī, 1:248. For sixteenth-century Syrian uses of the word u
rūsh, see Mu
ammad b. Ibrāhīm b. al-
anbalī (d. 1563) (Cairo, References
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Richardson, K. Drug overdose, disability and male friendship in fifteenth-century Mamluk Cairo. Postmedieval 3, 168–181 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1057/pmed.2012.12
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/pmed.2012.12