Bani Mazar
Al-Bahnasa, a village on the edge of the Western Desert in northern Minya, is one of the most honoured burial grounds in Egypt. So many of the Muslims who…
Al-Bahnasa, a village on the edge of the Western Desert in northern Minya, is one of the most honoured burial grounds in Egypt. So many of the Muslims who fell in the conquest of Upper Egypt are buried in its sands that Egyptians have called it the second Baqi' and the City of Martyrs for centuries, and its cemetery is crowded with domes raised over Companions, members of the Prophet's ﷺ family, Successors and the commanders of the conquest. The ancient city Long before Islam this was one of the great cities of Egypt. The Egyptians called it Per-Medjed and the Greeks Oxyrhynchus, and it was the capital of its province and in Roman times one of the largest towns in the country. From 1896 onwards British archaeologists dug its rubbish mounds and found one of the largest hoards of papyri ever discovered, and Egyptian and Spanish missions still excavate the old city and its cemeteries each season. The conquest and the City of Martyrs After the fall of the Delta, Amr ibn al-As sent an army south under Qays ibn al-Harith al-Muradi to take al-Bahnasa. The city was strongly held, the siege was long, and reinforcements came from the Companions until it fell after some of the hardest fighting of the whole campaign. The story is told at length in the Futuh al-Bahnasa, a popular narrative of the conquest attributed to al-Waqidi and read in Egypt for generations, and tradition speaks of thousands of martyrs buried here, among them veterans of Badr. For a time the city was even called Madinat al-Qays after the commander of the army, and al-Maqrizi describes it in his Khitat as a land of martyrs and Companions. Who is buried here The cemetery stretches west of the village around the mosque of Ali al-Jamam, and its domes carry the names of the figures the people of al-Bahnasa have honoured for centuries. Among the members of the Prophet's ﷺ family are Sayyiduna Ziyad ibn Abi Sufyan ibn al-Harith ibn Abd al-Muttalib, whose father was the Prophet's ﷺ cousin and who is remembered as a commander of the conquest, and Sayyiduna Ja'far and Sayyiduna Ali, the sons of Aqil ibn Abi Talib, whose shared dome is one of the most visited in the village. Sayyid al-Hasan al-Salih, a descendant of Sayyiduna al-Husayn through Imam Ali Zayn al-Abidin, lies in the mosque that bears his name. The domes of the Companions and their sons include those of al-Qa'qa' ibn Amr al-Tamimi, whose dome stands among the graves of the senior Companions, Sulayman the son of Khalid ibn al-Walid, Muhammad the son of Abd al-Rahman ibn Abi Bakr al-Siddiq, Muhammad the son of Abu Dharr al-Ghifari, and Muhammad the son of Uqba ibn Nafi. Beside them are the graves of the heroes of the conquest remembered by the people of the village, among them Fath al-Bab and Abdullah al-Takruri, and on the western side of the village the domes of the Sab' Banat, the Seven Maidens, who are said to have helped the Muslim army and fallen in the fighting. Mosques and shrines The mosque of Sayyid al-Hasan al-Salih goes back to the Fatimid period and is known throughout Egypt as the mosque with two mihrabs. The mosque and dome of Ali al-Jamam honour al-As'ad Abu al-Barakat, chief judge of al-Bahnasa and an imam of the Maliki school, and a plaque by its door gives his name and office. Across the road stands the small museum of antiquities, and the domes of the cemetery, many of them whitewashed and restored, run out from the mosques towards the desert. The medieval city Under Muslim rule al-Bahnasa remained the capital of a province for centuries and was famous across the Islamic world for its textiles, above all its woollen cloth, embroidered fabrics and fine curtains. Ibn Battuta passed through in the fourteenth century and described a large city among orchards, where he met its judge Sharaf al-Din, and Ali Pasha Mubarak later recorded the memory of its four gates, its many ribats and the scores of villages that once belonged to it. The city declined over the following centuries into the village that stands today on the Bahr Yusuf canal. Visiting Al-Bahnasa lies about fifteen kilometres west of Bani Mazar, close to the Western Desert road between Cairo and Asyut. The village is busiest on Fridays and during the holidays, when families come from across Minya to visit the graves, and the domes, the two mosques and the Sab' Banat can all be visited on foot in a morning.