A woman born into slavery in 13th-century Egypt broke the glass ceiling of the time to become a sultan and changed the look of Cairo with her innovative architectural projects.

The first historical look at Shajar al-Durr written in English examines her life as well as the cultural and architectural development of Cairo and the influence of women at a time when they were largely invisible.1

The tomb that Shajar al-Durr built for herself in Cairo. This tomb and the one she built for her first husband, Sultan Salih Najm al-Din Ayyub, were both in disrepair when Ruggles visited them while researching her book. Conservation work since then has improved the condition of both tombs.

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The book uses Shajar al-Durr’s story to tell the cultural history of the time. While her architectural patronage was innovative and helped change the look of Cairo, many Islamic women were important patrons for buildings that served the common good, such as schools and mosques, Ruggles said.2

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One of Shajar al-Durr’s first acts as sultan was to build a tomb for her first husband. In her book, Ruggles refers to it as a “political tomb.” Its purpose was to commemorate her husband, but it also served as Shajar al-Durr’s credentials, proving that she had a right to rule, Ruggles said.3

The tomb is topped with a dome, which was common for the tombs in the cemeteries, but the only other domes in the city center were mosques. Because domes marked places for prayer, putting a dome over Salih’s tomb in the city associated him with saints, Ruggles said.4

Shajar al-Durr’s innovation became widespread, with many madrasas and other architectural complexes becoming commemorative monuments.

Shajar al-Durr also built a tomb for herself, outside the city in the cemetery zone, with its own innovative features. She reintroduced the use of mosaics, which had been used earlier in Egypt and then forgotten. Shajar al-Durr had a mosaic placed in the mihrab, or prayer niche, in her tomb.

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• 1. “Tree of Pearls: The Extraordinary Architectural Patronage of the 13th-Century Egyptian Slave-Queen Shajar al-Durr” was written by D. Fairchild Ruggles, a landscape architecture professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Ruggles studies landscapes of the Islamic world and their connections to society and social values. The book recently won the Nancy Lapp Book Award from the American Schools of Oriental Research.
• 2. They were able to serve that role because, even in medieval times, Islamic culture allowed women to be the legal custodians of their own money, she said. … “We need stories about the reality of the Islamic world. There is so much misperception, in the West and in the Islamic world, about what people could and could not do and how they lived their lives,” Ruggles said. “I think it’s really important to counter that with real stories about real people.”
• 3. The location of the tomb is significant. Most people were buried in large cemeteries on the outskirts of Cairo, not in the center of the city – which was the seat of power, surrounded by walls and filled with palaces and mosques. Salih’s tomb was attached to his madrasa, a college he established in the center of Cairo. By building the tomb inside the city and attached to the madrasa, Shajar al-Durr ensured that his identity as a ruler was not forgotten, with all the scholars at the school studying in his shadow, Ruggles said.
• 4. “You’ve got this big dome visible as you walk by on the street and from very far away in the city. Everywhere you are in Cairo, you see the dome and say, ‘That’s the sultan,’” she said. “Cairo today is full of domes like that. But in 1250, there were not that many domes, and they were meaningful. It had a lot of impact.”