Medina the Illuminated - Medine-i Münevvere

When the seventeenth-century Ottoman traveler Evliya Çelebi visited the city of Medina and the Prophet Muhammad’s tomb (the Rawdah Mubarak) he explained that there were “700 black eunuchs who serve the Prophet, each wearing a magnificent sable fur. They are all under the authority of the shaykh al-ḥaram who is also a eunuch.”^[1] This post is meant to give a brief insight into the shaykh al-ḥaram and the unique role of African eunuchs and the governing of early modern Ottoman Medina.

Figure 1: 19^th Century image of Medina (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/be/Ca._1883_Ottoman_Turkish_lithograph_-_Medina._Das_erleuchtete_Medina.jpg)

Eunuchs in Medina

The city of Medina in the early modern Ottoman Empire had no formal Ottoman governor, paid no taxes to the Ottoman state, provided no soldiers in times of war, and offered no tribute to the sultan. In many ways, Medina, the home of the Prophet Muhammad’s tomb within  Al-Masjid an-Nabawi, was both deeply connected to the Ottoman Empire since the conquest of the Mamluk Sultanate in 1517 and simultaneously disconnected from standard structures of Ottoman imperial authority. In this uncertain space of sovereignty, Medina’s counterpart, Mecca, was ruled by the Sharifs of Mecca who often styled themselves as the “sultan of Mecca” during the early modern era.^[2] However, by the late seventeenth century, the Sharifs of Mecca lost much of their nominal claims over Medina to a powerful leader in the city, the shaykh al-ḥaram of the Prophet’s tomb. By the seventeenth century, the shaykh al-ḥaram was by tradition an African eunuch who had retired from the Ottoman imperial haram of Topkapı Palace in Istanbul.^[3] This direct informal connection to the Ottoman palace provided the necessary support for Sultan Mehmed IV in the late seventeenth century to declare that even if Medina and the larger region of the Hijaz were not formalised into an Ottoman province, the shaykh al-ḥaram of Medina would serve as the “Ruler of Medina.”^[4] This same declaration explained that the Sharif of Mecca was only allowed to visit Medina once a year, had to lodge outside the city walls, and was “not [to] interfere in any way in the affairs of the city.”^[5] Invested with this authority from the sultan, the shaykh al-ḥaram was to “run the government” of Medina with the support of some five hundred soldiers.^[6] This declaration, which served to recognise the power of the African eunuchs in Medina, established Medina as the only early modern major city outside of the African continent consistently governed by leaders of African descent until the Haitian Revolution a century later. 

The African Diaspora in Medina

The shaykh al-ḥaram was not the only African eunuch in Medina, for the city was noted as having an entire quarter in the city, known as the Agawat, reserved for the eunuchs adjacent to the Prophet’s tomb.^[7] In the Ottoman stipend and endowment records from 1671 some 1,500 people are noted as possibly being eunuchs or related to them in both Mecca and Medina, with the majority being found in the city of Medina.^[8] The prominence of the eunuchs of Medina is shown when one sees that in the yearly Ottoman stipend records for the city one of the largest amounts of stipend payments is designated for the upkeep of the dormitories for the eunuchs of the Prophet’s tomb.^[9] The scholar Jane Hathaway notes in her work that many of the eunuchs of the Prophet’s tomb were symbolically married to “black and Abyssinian slaves” forming African eunuch households as part of the sacred elite of the city who then appear in the Ottoman stipend registers.^[10] While it appears that there were many African eunuchs in Medina, the chief among them, numbering in the hundreds according to the Ottoman traveler Evliya Çelebi and the Moroccan pilgrim Abu Salim al-‘Ayyashi, served as both the Shaykh al-ḥaram and as the elite custodians of the Prophet’s tomb.^[11] In the Ottoman stipend registers, many of these eunuchs are generally noted in the record as being from Habeş and Takrur, the general terminology for East and West Africa respectively with some specific cities in East Africa and West Africa noted with their names, such as Gao in modern day Mali.^[12]

Figure 2: Image of a Black Eunuch and Sultan Mehmed IV (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ralamb-2.jpg)

Why Eunuchs

The privileges granted to eunuchs in the sacred spaces of the Harameyn, the term for the sacred spaces of Mecca and Medina, had to do with the idea that these sacred spaces bore similar notions of public and private space as the household harem found in discussions of court culture in the Islamic world.^[13] Jane Hathaway notes that “eunuchs were the logical occupants of the liminal space between the sacred space of the tomb and the public space outside the tomb precinct,” which is parallel to the eunuch’s role in the imperial harem in the palace in Istanbul.^[14] Therefore, as the interlocutors between one of Islam’s most sacred spaces, the Prophet’s tomb, and the public political sphere of the management of Medina, the eunuchs served a vital role for Ottoman power in the city of Medina, a place in which they lacked the formal provincial governing structures as found elsewhere in the empire.

Conclusion

Through this relationship, the shaykh al-ḥaram in his direct connection to the Ottoman family, the management of the endowments in Medina, and his rulership over the city in the name of the Ottoman sultan, helped to cement his role as the most important figure in early modern Medina, making it the only major city outside of early modern Africa consistently governed by someone of African descent. To this day, there are still African eunuchs who protect the Prophet’s tomb, and while the practice stopped in the mid-twentieth century, the remaining eunuchs from that era reside still in Medina today and have been documented in Adel Quraishi’s Portraits of the Guardians exhibition.^[15]

^[1] Evliya Çelebi, Evliya Çelebi in Medina: The Relevant Sections of the Seyahatname, ed. and commentary Nurettin Gemici, trans. Robert Dankoff, (Leiden: Brill: 2012), 99.

^[2] BNRM, Ms 419 J, f. 75a-75b. Letter addressing the Sharif of Mecca as the “Sultan of Mecca”.

^[3] Jane Hathaway, The Chief Eunuch of the Ottoman Harem: From African Slave to Power Broker, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 118-125.

^[4] Evliya Çelebi, Evliya Çelebi in Medina, p. 35.

^[5] Ibid., 34-37.

^[6] Ibid., 36-37.

^[7] al-Šayẖ ‘Abduallah ben Muḥammad al-‘Ayyāši, al-Riḥla al-‘Ayyāšiyah lil-beqʿa al- Ḥijāziyah [Al Ayyashi’s Trip to Al Hidjaz], Al- Šayẖ Aḥmad Farīd al-Mizyadi, ed., vol. 1, (Lebanon: Dar al-Kotob al-Ilmiyah, 2011), 365-363.

^[8] Compiled from Başbakanlık Osmanlı Arşivi [The Ottoman Archives of the Prime Minister’s Office] (BOA)  EV.HMK.SR, 165,166,167,169,170,171,172,173,174,175, 176

^[9] EV.HMK.SR, 165, fol. 5a.

^[10] Jane Hathaway, The Chief Eunuch of the Ottoman Harem, p.124.

^[11] Evliya Çelebi, Evliya Çelebi in Medina, pp. 98-99, and al-‘Ayyāši, al-Riḥla al-‘Ayyāšiyah, pp. 365-363.

^[12] Compiled from EV.HMK.SR, 165,166,167,169,170,171,172,173,174,175, 176.

^[13] See Leslie Peirce, The Imperial Harem: Women and Sovereignty in the Ottoman Empire, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993) and Jane Hathaway, The Chief Eunuch of the Ottoman Harem…, and Shaun Marmon, Eunuchs & Sacred Boundaries in Islamic Society, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995).

^[14] Jane Hathaway, The Chief Eunuch of the Ottoman Harem, p. 121. She is also summarizing Marmon’s argument from and Shaun Marmon, Eunuchs & Sacred Boundaries, p. 85-92.

^[15] See https://www.meer.com/en/18131-adel-quraishi-the-guardians