The hoax of the miraculous speaking wall

Among the myriad anecdotes reported in the voluminous chronicle literature describing Cairo and Damascus in the Mamluk period appears an intriguing – and at first glance wryly amusing – case of fraud conceived and implemented by a woman, her jurist husband and their Sufi accomplice during the latter eighth/fourteenth century. The hoax was so spectacularly successful that it provoked widespread unrest throughout the Mamluk capital. The case involved an ingenious ruse in which a wall of a house owned by a local Hanafi jurist allegedly spoke miraculously, responding to questions put to it by individuals high and low concerned over personal crises or their future. The incident achieved a degree of notoriety sufficient to warrant its description decades later by three eminent chroniclers of Cairo: al-Maqrizi, Ibn Hajar al-‘Asqalani, and Ibn Taghri-Birdi. ¹ Al-Maqrizi, whose version is the earliest of the three, also produced the most nuanced discussion of events. His portrayal of both participants and their actions hints at his own perception of mispropriety by the culprits, and the assiduous detective work by the individual who solved the case. Ibn Hajar’s version, following Maqrizi’s, is shorter, but includes a satirist’s derision of the affair. His imputation of guilt differs somewhat from his predecessor’s. And he alone described how the hoax was carried out. Ibn Taghri-Birdi, who may have assumed his readers’ familiarity with Maqrizi’s rendition, provided the tersest account of the three. He nonetheless added a second short satire deriding the hoax, and focused his remarks on its ultimate prosecution by the atabak of Cairo.