beirut’s last mamluk monument 215 HOWAYDA AL-HARITHY WEAVING HISTORICAL NARRATIVES: BEIRUT’S LAST MAMLUK MONUMENT Throughout history, monuments have been built or inserted into existing urban contexts to celebrate his- torical events, commemorate individuals, or convey ideologies. And throughout history, monuments have been appropriated or have become associated with new events or figures of significance. The Dome of the Rock is an excellent example of the complexity of meanings that can be attached to a single monument, as Oleg Grabar has shown in several studies devoted to the building and its immediate context of al-Haram al- Sharif. These studies are interpretations of the Dome of the Rock that address its Umayyad builders’ intended meaning, religious associations with the ascension of the Prophet acquired in later centuries, and contem- porary references to religious piety or political claims. 1 The process of meaning construction is equally com- plex. Only rarely is it instantaneous, and only rarely are multiple narratives born from a single event or pro- cess. In this paper I will investigate the recovery of a monument, rather than its making, and the multiple narratives that were constructed by different authors almost simultaneously, within the short time span of four years. The building at the center of this investi- gation is the zawiya of Ibn {Arraq, dating to the year 1517. It is located at the southern edge of the souks of Beirut, more specifically the southern end of Souk al-Tawileh. It will be investigated as an architectural sign employed in the construction of multiple his- torical narratives during the process of the postwar reconstruction of the Beirut Central District. “Archi- tectural sign,” as used here, is not a static sign with a single fixed signifier, as in the Saussurian model, but one that is dynamic, as in the Derridan model. 2 In The Truth in Painting, Derrida argues that a sign is not the conjunction between a signifier and its single, univocal signified, but the movement from one signifier to another, the motion between them. As motion, visual signification is therefore incompatible with boundary, threshold, frame; it is a passepartout. 3 The process of meaning construction addressed in this paper is the postwar reconstruction of Beirut’s Central District began after the Ta}if agreement of 1989 and the end of the civil war in Lebanon. In December 1991, Law 117 was passed, giving “… the municipal administration the authority to create real estate companies in war-damaged areas, and to entrust them with implementation of the urban plan and promotion, marketing, and sale of prop- erties to individuals or corporate developers.” 4 After the late Prime Minister Rafik Hariri took office, in 1992, the Lebanese Company for the Development and Reconstruction of the Beirut Central District—a private real estate company known as Solidere 5 —was formed. It took charge of the postwar reconstruction of the district, following the proposed master plan of 1991. 6 The grand vision behind this master plan—to take a tabula rasa approach in rebuilding the city center—led to the demolition of a large number of buildings and the clearing of many sites, including the area of the souks. During this process of reconstruction, a small domed structure, the zawiya of Ibn {Arraq (fig. 1), was revealed and stirred public reaction, 7 becoming “subject to all the vicissitudes of reception” 8 and “encounter[ing] from that moment on the ineradicable fact of semiotic play.” 9 The architectural sign was entered into multi- ple narratives woven by different viewers whose spec- tatorship or text I will attempt to reconstruct in light of the notion that “the text or artwork cannot exist outside the circumstances in which the reader reads the text or the viewer views the image, and that the work cannot fix in advance the outcome of any of its encounters with contextual plurality.” 10 THE FIRST NARRATIVE Immediately upon the recovery of the structure, in April 1992, a group of Shiites rushed to the site and