Cairo’s Cafour garden cannabis is destroyed by 1244

Cannabis growing in Cairo’s garden of Cafour was uprooted and burned on a sultan’s orders. The episode is often dated to 1253, following Ernest Abel’s modern history. An earlier textual account places the destruction before a poem recited in 1244. The surviving evidence supports an early suppression campaign, but its date needs more care than a simple “first ban” label allows.

A garden with a reputation

In Silvestre de Sacy’s translation of al-Maqrizi, the garden was associated with the cannabis used by fakirs. The passage preserves several poems celebrating the green plant as a substitute for wine. Their speakers praise its pleasures, its modest cost and its ability to make a poor man feel above an emir.

These are literary voices, not measurements of consumption. They nevertheless make the garden visible as a social place: cannabis belonged to companionship, arguments about intoxicants and the contrast between wealth and poverty. The poems also contest the shame attached to the plant. They are evidence that official condemnation did not exhaust contemporary attitudes.

The order and the fire

The translated account names the ruler as al-Malik al-Salih Najm al-Din Ayyub and the official charged with stopping cultivation as the emir Jamal al-Din Musa ibn Yaghmur. Finding a substantial quantity of the plant, the emir had it gathered together and burned.

The passage then introduces a poem lamenting the destruction, recited in Rabi I 642 AH, which falls in 1244 CE. This is a date for the reported recital. It establishes that the burning was already being remembered by then; it does not supply the precise day of the order or the fire.

Why 1253 appears elsewhere

Abel gives 1253 and describes cultivation moving outside Cairo after the garden was cleared. The year conflicts with the chronology of the earlier translated narrative. This entry therefore uses 1244 as a latest documented bound, rather than the established year of a newly discovered decree.

Resolving every stage of that discrepancy would require comparison with the Arabic manuscripts and their editions. The translated text is stronger evidence than a repeated timeline date, but it remains a transmission of al-Maqrizi’s account.

What the episode establishes

The order targeted cultivation in a named garden. It does not establish a comprehensive national cannabis statute, a ban on every use of hemp, or centuries of continuous enforcement. It belongs alongside the later Damascus prohibition as evidence of medieval restrictions, without making either episode the uncontested beginning of prohibition worldwide.^[1][2]