Ottoman Damascus Research Articles

The Status of Samaritans in Sixteenth-Century Ottoman Damascus

AbstractIn this article, we explore the status of Samaritans in early modern Ottoman Damascus through a focus on a particular firman—a sultanic legal decree. The firman orders that Samaritans—a religious group that traces its origins to ancient Israel but differs from Jews in several aspects—are not to be employed as clerks by Ottoman authorities. We argue that the firman indicates Ottoman officials engaged in religious status management despite the lack of legal terminology for minority in the document. The significance of the firman regarding conceptualizing status, we suggest, is that it points to an alternative model of minoritization that is not based in modern European legal approaches to religious minority status and law but which accounts for people’s experiences of minority status before modernity.

Power and light, profit and loss: the establishment and operation of the Damascus Electricity and Tramway Company, 1903-1914

This article addresses the shift of power that occurred in Ottoman Damascus as a result of the establishment of its electricity and tramway network that started operating in 1907. The company, which ought to have been public, in the ownership of Ottoman-Syrian investors, ended up being owned by a Belgian consortium. The central argument in the article is that the Damascene elite families rationally refrained from the risk of establishing the Electricity Company but paid the price of losing control over power and light in the city. An informal network of Ottoman officials and Belgian businessmen, led by the second secretary of Sultan Abdülhamid II, the Damascene İzzet Pasha, orchestrated the buyout. Therefore, Damascus’s encounter with its first electric grid, which was naturally complex in the first place, was also subjected to the tensions of outsourcing a local-municipal power to an external network that the Central Ottoman Government imposed. This article is an outcome of research on the electrification of Damascus, based on the papers of the Ottoman Ministry of Public Works from the Ottoman Archive and the company’s records from Belgium’s National Archive, the Ottoman-Syrian press, and the British and American consulates’ archives.

Emir Abd al-Qadir al-Jazairi and the legacy of Ibn Arabi in Ottoman Damascus

The article analyzes the late period of the life of the hero of the anti-French struggle in Algeria, Emir Abd al-Qadir al-Jazairi (1808—1883) in Ottoman Damascus in 1855—1883. Refusing to continue the fight against the French colonialists after being released from captivity and moving to Ottoman possessions, Abd al-Qadir devoted his later life to charity and teaching the mystical teachings of Muhyi al-Din Ibn Arabi (1165—1240). The activities of Abd al-Qadir in Ottoman Damascus were inscribed in the moral, religious and political context of his era, when the Ottoman Empire was subjected to increasing pressure from the European powers. Abd al-Qadir sought to find an Islamic response to this external challenge through spiritual perfection based on the teachings of Ibn Arabi. Abd al-Qadir al-Jazairi from a young age belonged to the followers of Ibn Arabi and therefore perceived his life in Damascus not as an exile, but as a way of approaching the comprehension of the mystical insights of Ibn Arabi, who at one time also lived for many years in Damascus where he was buried. In Damascus, Abd al-Qadir enjoyed great spiritual authority and provided patronage to his countrymen — immigrants from Algeria and other countries of the Maghreb. The circle of his chosen disciples was also replenished with local Syrian ulama. Under the influence of Abd al-Qadir, close relations were established between immigrants from Algeria and local Sufis on the basis of Islamic mysticism. The intellectual activity of the circle of followers of Abd al-Qadir in Damascus contributed to the strengthening of the position of Sufism in Ottoman Syria on the basis of the spiritual convergence of the beliefs of the followers of various Islamic mystical teachings.

Blood libels, Elite Competition and Inter-Confessional Violence: Jewish-Christian Relations in Ottoman Damascus in the first part of the 19th

Blood libels, Elite Competition and Inter-Confessional Violence: Jewish-Christian Relations in Ottoman Damascus in the first part of the 19th

Paths Crossing in Damascus: Familiarity with Persian among Eleventh/Seventeenth-Century Arabic Literati

Abstract This article explores the phenomenon of familiarity with Persian among Arabic literati of the early modern period, with a focus on the eleventh/seventeenth century. It has long been recognized, in a general sense, that some scholars from the Ottoman Arab world had knowledge of Persian literature. Only recently have we seen the beginnings of detailed research on this topic. In the current article, the works of four authors are examined with an eye toward their discussion of things Persian or Iranian: Muḥammad Amīn al-Muḥibbī (d. 1111/1699), Shihāb al-Dīn al-Khafājī (d. 1069/1659), Ḥasan al-Būrīnī (d. 1024/1615), and ʿAbd al-Ghanī al-Nābulusī (d. 1143/1731). We find that, although familiarity with Persian was far from unheard-of in Arabic literary circles, the degree of interest varied widely. At one extreme is al-Muḥibbī, who goes out of his way to share samples of the work of prominent Persian poets that he has translated into Arabic. Closer to the opposite end of the spectrum is al-Khafājī, of whom it is not obvious whether he could read Persian. The remaining authors fall somewhere in between. One insight that becomes clearer through this study is that Ottoman Damascus was a place in which Persian could be learned. There were enough migrants and visitors from the Persianate realm, and sufficient circulation of texts, that a scholar like al-Būrīnī could attain fluency without traveling.

Between Lamenting Vicissitudes of Life and Celebrating Ottoman Authority in the Sixteenth Century: Māmayya al-Rūmī’s (d. 985–7/1577–9) Times and Poetry

Abstract This study investigates the status of poets and poetry in sixteenth-century Ottoman Damascus by focusing on soldier-turned-poet Māmayya al-Rūmī (d. 985-7/1577-9). As a poet he received patronage from local centers of prestige; however, such support seems to have been at best sporadic. While his dīwān (collection of poetry) is replete with poems celebrating his poetic ingenuity—notwithstanding the fact that he was not a native Arab, it is also a testimony to his frustrations with lack of financial security and his diminishing social status. In addition to gloomy poetry, he also composed a great number of panegyrics in honor of Ottoman sultans, scholars, and administrators. What was Māmayya’s position in the literary culture of sixteenth-century Damascus as a Rūmī? What was the role of panegyric poetry in this period? Did poets voice their concerns about lack of appreciation? This study explores these questions by focusing on a selection of poems by Māmayya al-Rūmī with references to his contemporary, and later poets.

Connoisseurs of the senses: tobacco smoking, poetic pleasures, and homoerotic masculinity in Ottoman Damascus

ABSTRACT In seventeenth-century Damascus and other Ottoman cities, a number of Arabic poets wrote about tobacco smoking, suggesting that this relatively new habit was not only a question of law and social mores for scholarly communities but also pleasure and connoisseurship. Focussing on The Wafting Scent of Fragrant Herbs and a Splash of Liquor in the Tavern, an anthology by the Damascene Muḥammad al-Muḥibbī (d. 1699 CE), this article examines how these poets incorporated tobacco into their poetic world through intertextuality, drawing analogies with other desirable sensory experiences such as wine drinking, and putting tobacco pipes center stage in poetic scenes of homoerotic love. More broadly, it argues that multisensorial perception provided metaphors for literary connoisseurship and sociability in the Ottoman period. This “sensory connoisseurship” – and the incorporation of tobacco as an object of its attention – contributed to articulations of masculinity among poets and audiences who shared poetic and sensory pleasures.

Forcing the Wealthy to Pay Their Fair Share? The Politics of Rural Taxes in 17th-Century Ottoman Damascus

AbstractFocusing on the province of Damascus, this study shows that individuals of the ʿaskarī class were obligated to pay village taxes in proportion to the amount of property they owned, and that it was the village cultivators who had the primary authority for individuating and collecting these taxes. Providing a detailed picture of the relations between the ʿaskarī class and peasant communities before the rise of the a’yān in the eighteenth century, the study explores how peasants sought to enforce their decisions on these powerful individuals and to what extent they were successful in doing so.

Notes on Contributors

Notes on Contributors

EDITORIAL FOREWORD

This issue opens with two articles that explore “Ottoman Belonging” during two significant moments bookending the Ottoman past. The first of these moments is the Ottoman Empire's incorporation of Arab lands after its defeat of the Mamluk Sultanate in 1515–17; the second is the emergence of Ottoman imperial citizenship in the period between the 1908 Constitutional Revolution and World War I, which precipitated the empire's collapse. Helen Pfeifer's article, “Encounter after the Conquest: Scholarly Gatherings in 16th-Century Ottoman Damascus,” traces the intellectual component of the Ottoman Empire's absorption of formerly Mamluk subjects after rapidly conquering an immense territory stretching from Damascus to Cairo to Mecca. As Western European states expanded to control new territories and peoples, the Turkish-speaking Ottomans from the central lands (Rumis) had new encounters of their own—with the Arabic-speaking inhabitants of Egypt, Greater Syria, and the Hijaz. The conquest transferred the seat of political power in the Islamicate world from Cairo to Istanbul. Yet, as Pfeifer discusses, the Ottomans understood that their newly acquired political power had no parallel in cultural and religious domains, where prestige belonged predominantly to Arab scholars. Focusing on majālis (sing. majlis), or scholarly gatherings, in Damascus, Pfeifer traces “one of the greatest instances of knowledge transmission and cultural encounter in the history of the Ottoman Empire,” through which this asymmetry was overcome. By facilitating the circulation of books and ideas, she argues, scholarly gatherings—two depictions of which are featured on the issue’s cover—gave rise to an “empire-wide learned culture as binding as any political or administrative ingredient of the Ottoman imperial glue.”

Traditional and Institutional Medicine in Ottoman Damascus

Traditional medicine in the first three centuries of Ottoman rule in Damascus was practiced by local doctors who studied medicine, in addition to other Islamic studies, with their fathers or with others. It also included visitations to spiritual healers and shrines. Time-honoured procedures, such as cupping and the use of leeches, were also practiced. Biographical dictionaries, a major source for traditional medicine, mentioned only Muslim doctors, whereas the Islamic court records at the time mentioned Christian doctors. A turning point occurred in the nineteenth century when the state took over the initiative in establishing institutional medicine, as happened under Egyptian rule in Syria in the 1830s when a hospital was built and quarantine was introduced. The peak occurred under Sultan Abdülhamid II who ordered the building of a hospital in Damascus in 1899 and the establishment of a medical school in 1903.

Her Majesty's Protected Subjects: The Mishaqa Family in Ottoman Damascus

The protégé system that the Ottoman Empire encountered as the result of diplomatic relations with European powers later became a clear threat to the very existence of the empire. Among these powers, Britain, until the nineteenth century, executed its consular affairs via the Levant Company in the Middle East, but later employed local people, mostly non-Muslim Ottomans, as dragomans, consular agents and vice-consuls to execute its services in the region. The dragomans not only translated treaties and official documents, but also commented on the messages to and from the authorities and this gave them much more important roles. In this regard, members of the Mishaqa family served the British and later American interests under different posts ranging from dragoman, to consular agent and vice-consul. As they gained confidence, they were accorded British consular protection which provided them considerable privileges, and passed their duties to their sons. Unlike similar Levantine families who assumed dragomanship in the imperial centre as a household tradition, members of the Mishaqa family were deeply embedded in the local society and therefore could give insights on social and political changes in the Ottoman province of Damascus. After attaining British protection in 1840, members of the family served in British and American consulates until the beginning of the First World War. However, the protégé status of the family members paved the way for continued debates over their nationality and citizenship. This article attempts to present the basic codes of consular protection and Ottoman responses within the context of the story of Mishaqa family.

Indian Roots of Modern Islamic Revivalism

19 Journal of South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies Vol. XXXVI, No.4, Summer 2013 Indian Roots of Modern Islamic Revivalism** Itzchak Weismann* In the Muslim geographical imagination the Arab world is conventionally regarded as the center. This rests on the fact that the Arabian Peninsula was the cradle of Islam: there at the beginning of the seventh century the Prophet received the call and thence his followers spread the new faith to West Asia, North Africa, and the rest of the globe. This image has been sustained throughout the ages in the consciousness of the umma by the direction of the daily prayer to Mecca (qibla), the annual pilgrimage (hajj), and the privileged status accorded everywhere to the alleged descendents of the Prophet (sada, ashraf). It seems to have been further strengthened in premodern times through students who flocked from all directions to the prestigious al-Azhar university in Cairo, the increasing claims to universality of the Ottoman Sultanate-Caliphate, and the spread of the Arabian puritan Wahhabi creed. This article argues that, contrary to this image, in modern times in some important respects the Indian subcontinent has superseded the Arab countries as a center of the tightening network of the Muslim umma. A relative latecomer to the community of believers, and long at its edge, from the seventeenth century on, and more evidently in the nineteenth and *Itzchak Weismann is Professor of Islamic studies and Head of the Jewish-Arab Center at the University of Haifa. His research interests focus on modern Islam, particularly fundamentalist and radical Islamic movements and Sufism. He is the author of Taste of Modernity: Sufism, Salafiyya, and Arabism in Late Ottoman Damascus, Leiden: Brill, 2001, The Naqshbandiyya: Orthodoxy and Activism in a Worldwide Sufi Tradition, London and New York, 2007, and co-editor of Ottoman Reform and Islamic Regeneration, London, 2005, and Islamic Myths and Memories: Mediators of Globalization, forthcoming. He also published numerous articles on Islam in modern Syria, the Arab East at large and India. As head of the Jewish-Arab Center, Prof. Weismann works to promote good relations between Jews and Arabs in Israel. Itzchak can be contacted at Weismann@research.haifa.ac.il **An earlier version of this article was presented in the conference at Maulana Abul Kalam Azad Institute of Asian Studied in Kolkata and published in Priya Singh and Susmita Bhattacharya (eds.), Perspectives on West Asia: The Evolving Geopolitical Discourses. New Delhi: Shipra Publishers, 2012. 20 1 Richard Bulliet, Islam: The View from the Edge. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994, 7-9. twentieth centuries, Indian Islam became a major source of influence for the Arab and other Muslim regions in both terms of reformist thought and new modes of collective organization. The rise of South Asia as a major center of Islamic revivalism took place in the setting of the political and cultural crisis of Indian Islam—from the disintegration of the Mughal Empire to British imperial rule to partition, and was facilitated by the introduction of new means of communication and transnational exchange. Since the crisis was felt earlier and deeper than in the Ottoman Empire and its successor states, the Indian men of religion were quicker and more profound in responding to the challenge and in formulating new ideas and institutions to meet it. These would later be adopted and adapted by their counterparts in the Middle East and other part of the Muslim world. The article begins with a brief theoretical discussion in the Muslim context of the major components of my conceptual framework: the center, the edge, and the network. I then demonstrate the influence exerted in the past two centuries by some major Indian Islamic trends and movements on their counterparts in the Arab world. Their evolution reflects the range of modern Islamic revitalization efforts, from shari’a-minded Sufism through the Modernist and Salafi trends to moderate and radical Islamism. In the last part I consider the factors that led to the ascendency of Indian Islam in the modern era and offer some preliminary observations about the reconfiguration currently underway in the worldwide Islamic network under the impact of globalization. Center, Edge, and Network Two views have been suggested in...

Objects of Everyday Life in Ottoman Damascus

La confrontation des documents d’archives aux découvertes archéologiques faites dans les fouilles de la citadelle de Damas permet, d’une part, de mieux cerner la nature des objets employés pour le transport des denrées, leur stockage, la préparation des mets et leur service ainsi que pour l’éclairage du xvie au xixe siècle, et d’autre part, d’esquisser le cadre dans lequel ils étaient utilisés. Ces poteries locales ou importées livrent ainsi des informations sur la vie quotidienne des janissaires, des commerçants, des artisans et de leurs familles qui vivaient ensemble dans cette forteresse devenue ville-garnison.

Processes of Formation of Ottoman Damascus

Cet article s’appuie sur une analyse de la morphologie urbaine de la ville à partir des cartes de Damas dressées au cours du Mandat français. Il a pour but l’étude du processus de fabrique urbaine de la période médiévale sur les traces de la cité préislamique – jusqu’à la période ottomane, en portant une attention plus particulière aux cours des maisons damascènes. Il ne s’agit pas ici de donner une description exhaustive de toutes les étapes et de tous les processus de formation de la Damas ottomane mais plutôt de fournir une analyse de la ville intra muros, de loin la plus complexe étant donné la stratigraphie accumulée au cours de l’histoire, en essayant de décrire les principales transformations qui ont présidé à la mise en place de la structure de la ville ottomane.

الخشب وحرفة الخشب في دمشق في نهاية العصر العثماني: تحليل لقاموس الصناعات الشامية

Cet article a pour objet l’étude de la place de l’artisanat du bois à Damas à la fin du xixe siècle et au début du xxe siècle et porte plus particulièrement son attention sur les différents types de bois, produits localement ou importés, utilisés par les artisans syriens à cette époque. La source principale de cette étude est le Qāmūs al-ṣināʿāt al-Šāmiyya, un dictionnaire de l’artisanat damascène composé entre 1890 et 1906. L’un des apports de cet article est de montrer qu’à cette époque ce secteur de l’économie damascène parvenait à résister relativement bien aux objets d’artisanat importés d’Europe. Il contribue également à mettre en évidence le fait que les artisans adaptaient leurs activités en fonction des goûts changeants du marché.

Women in the Shari῾a court records of Ottoman Damascus

Qassam registers give detailed information about the estates of deceased people, the size of their households, the number of times they were married, the number of children, and the male-female ratio of minors and adults. The estates of deceased Christians in Damascus are reported more frequently in nineteenth-century qassam registers due to the application of the Tanzimat which advocated equality among all subjects and the tolerance shown towards the Christians by Egyptian rule in Syria in the 1830s. The registers indicate that monogamy was dominant in Damascus due to a low-to-average life-span. Marriage patterns and the composition of the estates of deceased women and men are examined in six qassam registers spanning a period of over a century (1750-1861). The establishment of religious endowments (vakıf) by Muslim and Christian women, and the varying titles given to these women in the court records are also discussed.

An Arabic Description of the Activities of Antique Dealers in Late Ottoman Damascus

This article presents an analysis of a chapter in an Arabic dictionary of the crafts of Damascus (Qamus al-Sina'at al-Shamiyya) detailing the activities of antiquities dealers. Written sometime between 1890 and about 1905, this description contains information on the items traded by antiquities dealers in the last years of the Ottoman period (1516–1918) and the manufacture in Syria of imitations/forgeries of ancient artefacts. The last section of the article establishes the economic and cultural context of the trade in artefacts in Syria during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with a particular emphasis on objects of the Islamic period.

Popular Politics, the New State and the Birth of the Iranian Working Class: The 1929 Abadan Oil Refinery Strike

Popular Politics, the New State and the Birth of the Iranian Working Class: The 1929 Abadan Oil Refinery Strike

Leisure Gardens, Secular Habits: The Culture of Recreation in Ottoman Damascus

Leisure Gardens, Secular Habits: The Culture of Recreation in Ottoman Damascus