Mausoleum al-Salih Najm al-Din Ayyub

Al-Salih Najm al-Din Ayyub, a son of the Ayyubid sultan al-Kamil, ruled Egypt from 1240 to 1249^4,9. He built up a large mamluk corps, the Bahri or Salihi mamluks, with their own citadel on Rawda Island^8,15. In May 1242 clearing began on part of the Fatimid eastern palace at Bayn al-Qasrayn for his madrasa⁹. The antiquities ministry and Discover Islamic Art call it the first school in Egypt to teach all four Sunni schools of law^2,3,4. Gravely ill, al-Salih died in his camp at al-Mansura in November 1249, during the crusade of Louis IX^8,16,17. The ministry’s English page says he died in battle; his tomb’s door inscription and the TDV encyclopedia say he died in camp^2,16,17.

Shajar al-Durr kept the death secret until his successor Turanshah arrived, and had the tomb built against the madrasa; al-Maqrizi says the Maliki shaykh’s hall was pulled down to make room for it^2,6,9. The body waited over ten months in the Rawda citadel until the tomb was finished in 648 AH (1250)^9,2. Aybak, a former mamluk of al-Salih now ruling with the young al-Ashraf Musa, led the procession; the mamluks wore white and the rites lasted three days⁹. The Qalawun VR Project calls it the first founder’s tomb attached to a religious foundation in Cairo, a pairing that later Mamluk complexes along al-Mu'izz Street repeated^8,4,5. Newly invested amirs paraded here from the Citadel until the ceremony moved to Qalawun’s mausoleum opposite⁷.

The tomb is a domed chamber at the north-west corner of the madrasa, with its main façade and entrance on al-Mu'izz Street^8,2,9. The Sabil-kuttab of Khusraw Pasha, built in 1535, fills the angle between the tomb and the madrasa front⁹. In a study published by the Comité de Conservation des Monuments de l’Art Arabe in 1902, Max Herz compared this front with the Fatimid al-Aqmar mosque, more than a century older: on the tomb the niches hold windows and rise the full height of the wall, an innovation in his view⁹. In the Salihiyya’s façades he also noted the “Persian” form of the niche arches and the heavy moulding along their outline, details shared with al-Aqmar⁹. Under the muqarnas of the chamfered corner facing the sabil are two short inscriptions: “I trust in God” in naskh and “God is sufficient for me, and He is the best guardian” in Kufic⁹.

The marble doorway lost the tall niche that framed it when the minaret of the neighbouring madrasa of Baybars fell; one jamb of that portal survives, with a fragment of Kufic Quranic text⁹. The lintel carries a long inscription that names the sultan, describes his death at al-Mansura “facing the Franks” and dates it to the night of mid-Sha'ban 647^11,9,17. The Comité, whose reports give the madrasa and tomb the number 38 of the Grand Bey plan of Cairo, had the doorway repaired in 1893^9,11,12. In 1901 it cleared away ruins piled against the dome, which hid it and let rainwater into the building^13,14.

The carved wooden cenotaph names the sultan as al-Salih Najm al-Din Ayyub, son of Muhammad, son of Abu Bakr, son of Ayyub, and dates his death to the middle of Sha'ban 647; Bernard O’Kane’s survey of 1997-2004 found its inscription in very good condition^9,18. The Comité drew attention to it in 1891 for the quality of its carving and asked the Awqaf administration to protect it¹⁰. The antiquities ministry singles out the wooden enclosure inside the dome, with the inscriptions around it, as an example of Ayyubid woodwork^2,3. In 1902 Herz described a broad wooden band at the height of the capitals of the mihrab’s two columns, its inscription applied in stucco rather than carved, and short texts on the window shutters⁹. Max van Berchem published the building’s inscriptions in his Corpus Inscriptionum Arabicarum⁹.