For God's sake, charitable people!

Author: Amr Abdel Aziz Mounir

In a city where the minaret and the whip intersect, and authority intertwines with sanctity, the beggar appears not as a fleeting shadow in the streets of Mamluk Cairo, but as a mirror reflecting the fragility of the social structure and exposing the chasm between the center and the periphery. This book examines the phenomenon of begging during the era of the Mamluk sultans as a significant representation of structural imbalances in a society torn apart by disparities. It re-reads the beggar as a complex character, where the images of the ascetic and the swindler, the Sufi and the merchant, the needy and the pretender, overlap. Through the narratives of historians and jurists such as al-Maqrizi, al-Suyuti, and Ibn Iyas, and through an analysis of body language, appearance, and visual discourse, the book traces how begging was formed as a craft and a symbolic practice within the urban landscape, and how it transformed into a point of contact between ethics and economics, between compassion and suspicion. In this bold study, begging is not read as an individual shame, but as a social and political sign that questions us: Is the one who extends his hand to be condemned, or the one who closed the doors of endeavor in his face? And is individual empathy sufficient if collective justice is absent? It is a book about the marginalized... and about all of us.