Ibrahim's childhood

Abstract

The recent collection of biographies by Edmund Burke III, Struggle and Survival in the Modern Middle East (1993), sets out to portray non-elite Middle Eastern men and women. Through these biographies the book intends to 'present Middle Eastern history as it might appear when viewed from the bottom up'.' Burke is concerned to 'rethink' Middle Eastern history which, in his view, has been presented as having being determined by such varying impersonal forces as religion, capitalism and imperialism. For the author a rewriting of history means, firstly, to explore the capacity of individual social actors to shape their own lives. Secondly, it helps to assess how these lives have been shaped by the actors' implication in specific relations of power, by their social location, gender, and membership of ethnic groups. Burke notes that whereas within the Western historical discipline biography has until recently been a marginal genre, there has, as a corollary of anthropological critiques of cultural representation,2 been a renewed interest in biography in the social sciences.3 According to the author, the main value of biographies lies in the fundamental insights they can provide into social and cultural processes. His main concern is with what Eickelman has called 'social biography' which, unlike Victorian biographies, is not necessarily predicated on the assumption of a cultural background shared by the subject and the audience.4 Burke argues that the social biography is less concerned with the subject's innermost self than with exploring 'the complex ways in which individuals navigate amidst social structures, processes, and cultural interactions'.' The manner in which the stories simultaneously highlight issues of gender, class and religion, and demonstrate the impact of regional historical processes on the lives of individuals, is impressive. The stories complement 'classical' historical genres for example the medieval biographical dictionaries by Muslim authors in significant ways.6 The apparent justification for omitting biographies of individuals of the elite is that traditionally such historical narratives have exclusively focused on them. According to Burke, historical works have privileged 'particular groups' understanding of the past', thereby delegitimizing the self-understanding of