In the first half of the 12th century, the Fâtimid dynasty in Egypt hastily changed her course on the decline through the domestic discords and the invasion of the crusades, but we have few historical materials on that period and it is not elucidated sufficiently yet.
Usâma ibn Munqidh (1095-1188) was an eminent warrior and man of letters, paticularly a poet, keeping friendly relations with Caliphs, Wazîrs, Amîrs and Francs in Syria, Egypt in those days. His memoirs, kitâb al-I'tibâr, give us valuable sources in elucidating this age.
By his memoirs, we can see many phases of Arabic society itself and those of military and cultual contacts between the Islamic world and Europe in those days, such as the living forms of Syrian amîrs and their civic life including hawking and methods of medical treatment, various forms of war and diplomacy, and the hasty changes of conflicting interests at home and abroad among Arabic powers, Frankish powers and the Byzantine empire.

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In the first half of the 12th century, Syrian cities entered into various kinds of agreements with the Crusaders who had secured their settlements in Syria, thus regarding these westerners as one of the local powers. Many economic agreements were concluded in the from of the appendix to a truce and were mainly in terms of an offer of money and horses, tribute, division of produce and public security on the main roads. Both the Syrian cities and the Crusaders considered these agreements as a economic policy in order to secure the produce from limited farm land and obtain commercial rights. Most of the agreemetns were renewed by occasional negotiation and bargaining, though we find abrogations and changes in conditions reflecting the balance of power. Military alliances were sometimes formed during the jihads, which were fundamentally the opposite of military alliances. Syrian cities merely used the jihad as a poicy to protect their own territory and even to weaken an opposing city. It was the same with the Saljuqid Sultan. They used military alliances and the jihads to ensure their own political stability and keep other powers from expanding. Syria was politically fragmented and had no dominant power. All the Syrian cities, including the Crusader States, maintained power by the economic agreements and conserved the balance of power through military alliances and the jihads. However, Aleppo in Northern Syria had been in a state of war for a long time, and its arable land had been reduced. Moreover, its balance of power policy, mostly agreements on division of produce, led to the financial crisis in Aleppo. To overcome these difficulties, the citizens of Aleppo tried to introduce a strong power from al-Jazira, but two of the three new al-Jazira rulers employed the same balance of power policy using both agreements and jihads, which caused distress in Aleppo to continue. It was the third ruler, Zangi, who began to break this balance of co-existence and confrontation. He aimed at the farm land of Southern Syria asa source of compensating the increase in war expenditure caused by his refusal to maintain the balance of power policy. He was a common enemy to both Damascus and the Crusaders, who had coexisted based on the agreements on division of produce from the farm land lying between them. They formed the military alliances to oppose Zangi.

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The aim of this paper is to re-examine the novels of Najib Mahfuz (1911-) in the light of urban space. Most of the novels and short stories of Mahfuz have their settings exclusively in Cairo, the capital city of Egypt where he himself was born and brought up. Adnan Haydar and Michael Beard, indeed, rightly assert that "the aesthetic of the city" is the subject of Mahfuz's work. When we examine the existing studies of Mahfuz's novels, however, we find that the main focus is on socio-political and religious interpretations of Mahfuz's work and "the aesthetic of the city" is only partially touched on. In fact, most of them tend to be contented with repeating rather worn-out cliches that Mahfuz is a chronicler of the 20th century Cairo etc. In this paper, therefore, I will concentrate my attention on what could be identified as urban aspects in Mahfuz's novels and try to grasp Mahfuz's city from as broad viewpoints as possible. Contrary to the common perception, I believe, Mahfuz's novels do not contain so many descriptions of the landscapes of the city; rather he uses the real place names of Cairo as symbolical signifiers which have acquired various meanings through history. We can say, in this sense, that Mahfuz depends heavily on the real Cairo as a historical product and that his main interest is almost always in the historical aspects of the city. The city loaded with its many histories and complicated relations between city dwellers of various origins and vocations often shows itself as an oppressive space in Mahfuz's novels. This we can see in his overwhelming use of 'eyes' in his novels. While we encounter these eyes everywhere in Mahfuz's city, the places where the characters can be liberated from them are limited to the peripheries of the city or the roofs of the buildings. In Mahfuz's novels, the dichotomy between Nature and Civilization is not represented by 'the country/the city' but by 'the desert/the city'. The eastern desert of Cairo at the foot of the Muqattam hill is often called al-khala' or 'the emptiness' in Mahfuz's novels. Al-khala' is an open space as against the closed space which is the city. Moreover, it functions as a timeless place against the historical city. The graveyard lies symbolically between the desert and the city as a border between Nothingness and History.

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The purpose of this study is the following; first is to examine the diet of the Prophet Muhammad (d. A.D. 632) in the cities of Mecca and Madma and also to examine food of the Bedouins in the early Islamic times. Second is to investigate how people of the Abbasids court regarded them in the 10^<th> century. The typical food eaten by the Prophet and his companions written in the Hadith (narrative relating deeds and utterances of the Prophet) included barley bread, milk-products, dates and a few vegetables, and occasional cooked dishes. As for the Bedouins, they used slaughtered cattle in order to gain honor and to humiliate enemy tribes. About three hundreds years later in the Abbasids dynasty, not only the celebrated al-khassa but also common people al-'amma began to despise Bedouins as eaters of reptiles such as snakes and lizards. In the Abbasid court's cookery book edited by al-WarrSq (in 10^<th> century) introduces five dishes of the Muhammad's food. These five dishes are also introduced in the books on dietetics written by al-Razi (d. A.D. 925 (935)) pointing out the attributes and faults of each food from point of view of bodily and spiritual well-being; the broth with vegetable (maraq) and potage with some grain and peas (harira) were for patients who had a fever or jaundice or cough or other such aliments. Dried meat (qadid) was eaten as a hors d'oeuvre with wine as digestive. Soup with crumbled bread (tharid) became famous nutritious dishes with many kinds of meat. Refined parched wheat or barley (sawiq) was eaten not only a nutritious in the hot season but also for preventing epidemic. There are two major reasons why these five dishes were introduced. The first is that for Muslims to follow the Prophet Muhammad's life and to eat his food has been considered to live up to the Muslim ideal. The second reason is that the Islamic medical scholarly ideas on dietetics had already been appreciated in the court.

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This article investigates the use of cereal barley (hordeum vulgare) in Islamic society between the 9th and 15th centuries. Among barley products, barley bread, boiled barley water, barley porridge, and parched barley are attested in dietetic works (both cuisine and medicine), agricultural manuals, works of literature, and so forth.

   Works of adab literature and the sole extant agriculture manual from the period (10th c.) show that between the 9th and 12th centuries, barley bread was the staple food of the peasantry and that barley was deemed the cereal most suitable to the peasants' nutritional needs.

   Among the many references to food in the hadith, both barley bread and barley porridge are mentioned as dishes enjoyed daily by the Prophet and his followers.

   The dietetic sources treat barley as a medicament for cooling the body. On the other hand, in the sole extant book of cooking recipes from the period (10th c.), barley does not appear except as the main ingredient of barley water. While barley continued to be prescribed for medicinal purposes, the members of the Abbasid court and the urban elite apparently did not consider it an important ingredient of their food.

   Sources from the 13th century on describe barely products being used in urban society under such conditions as hot weather, outbreaks of plague, or high fever. They show in particular that barley water was a daily household necessity for urban dwellers.

   The spread of the consumption of barley water and other barley products in the urban society from the 13th century on reflects the incessant outbreaks of famine and plague that cities in the Islamic society were suffering at that time.

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Toward the southwest from Cairo's citadel, there stretches a huge graveyard called "Qarafa (City of the Dead)", comprising tens of thousands holy tombs. It was a sanctuary from the twelfth to the fifteenth century, where masses of people visited to solve their difficulties and to purify their souls. On the sabbath and moonlit nights, crowds including women and children came on excursions, making it the most popular pleasure resort in Egypt. Until now Qarafa has scarcely attracted scholarly attention. After documenting the known manuscripts of pilgrimage guides, supplemented by chronicles, geographies, legal-related works, traveller's accounts and the Waqf documents pertaining to the period, the author of this paper investigates the various visitation activities and the mental structure of the visitor which have been commonly labeled as "Saint Worship" or "Popular Islam". Based mainly on the pilgrimage guides, the author undertakes to elucidate the actual conditions of visiting practices in the first part of this paper. Taking twenty provisos of visitation guidelines as an indicator, the paper details such manners and customs as rubbing the body over the grave, healing with sand from the graves, reciting the Koran, wailing, offering, and women's visitations. Furthermore, the divergence between the common practices at Qarafa and those of the idealistic learned men, especially the Hanbali scholors is illustrated. In the second part, the author considers the visitation from the persona of the pilgrim, an aspect that has never been explored before, and also analyzes the relationships of believers, saints and Allah in the context of the "Fulfillment of the Prayer (ijaba al-du'a')". The "Fulfillment of the Prayer" was of capital importance for them, and was achieved only through the saints' mediation (shafa'a) to Allah. The role of mediation within the structure of the "Fulfillment of the Prayer" is discussed and classified as well. Moreover, within a donation and exchange framework, the concept of prayer is reconsidered. The rational being that prayer is a gift from the pilgrim to the buried souls. The last chapter glances at the origin and daily occupations of the saints, looks at the miracles which led to sainthood, and finally reflects on their virtues and merits.

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