The Urban Social History

of the Middle East,

1750–1950

Modern Intellectual and Political History of the Middle East

Mehrzad Boroujerdi, Series Editor
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 The Urban Social History of the

Middle E
1750-1950 st,
Edited by
peter sluglett

SYR ACUSE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2008 by Syracuse University Press
Syracuse, New York 13244-5290
All Rights Reserved

First Paperback Edition 2011

11 12 13 14 15 5 4 3 2 1

Mohamad El-Hindi Books on Arab Culture and Islamic Civilization are published
with the assistance of a grant from the M.E.H. Foundation.

∞The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of

American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper
for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48–1992.

For a listing of books published and distributed by Syracuse University Press,

visit our Web site at SyracuseUniversityPress.syr.edu.

ISBN (paper): 978-0-8156-3267-2

ISBN (cloth): 978-0-8156-3194-1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:
The urban social history of the Middle East, 1750–1950 / edited
by Peter Sluglett . — 1st ed.
p. cm. — (Modern intellectual and political history of the Middle East)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8156-3194-1 (cloth : alk. paper)
1. Cities and towns—Middle East—History. 2. Urbanization—Middle
East—History. 3. Middle East—History. I. Sluglett , Peter.
HT147.M53U73 2008
307.760956—dc22
2008034043

Manufactured in the United States of America

 Contents

Tables vii

Preface ix

Contributors xiii

1. Introduction
peter sluglett with edmund bur ke iii 1

2. Interdependent Spaces
Relations Between the City and the Countryside
in the Nineteenth Century
sar ah d. shields 43
3. Political Relations Between City and State in the Middle East,
1700–1850
dina r izk khoury 67

4. The Economic Organization of Cities in Ottoman Syria

abdul-k ar im r afeq 104

5. Political Relations Between City and State in the Colonial Period

leila fawaz and robert ilbert 141

6. The Demography of Cities and the Expansion of Urban Space

ber nar d hourcade 154
vi | CON T E N TS

7. Moving Out of Place

Minorities in Middle Eastern Urban Societies, 1800–1914
gudrun kr ä mer 182
8. Urban Social Movements, 1750–1950
sa mi zubaida 224

Glossary 257

Bibliography 261

Index 315
 Tables

1. Credit Transactions in Hama, 1535–36 123

2. Creditors, Debtors, and Value of Credit in Hama, 1535–36 124
3. Creditors: Commodities, and Credit in Hama, 1535–36 126
4. Debtors: Commodities and Credit in Hama, 1535–36 127
5. Demographic Growth of Middle Eastern Cities, 1800–1970 158
6. Ten Largest Cities in the Middle East, 1800–1970 159
7. Dominant Position of the Major Cities 160
8. Global Demographic Growth of Major Cities, 1800–1970 160
9. Differential Demographic Growth According to City Size 161
10. Demographic Growth of Ten Largest Cities, 1800–1970 163
11. Comparative Regional Evolution of Middle Eastern Cities 168
12. The Population of Cities in the Maghrib, 1930 178

vii
 Preface

• I A M D E L I G H T E D , and somewhat amazed, that this book at last seems

inexorably bound to reach the reading public. There were dark days, dark
months, even dark years, when its appearance seemed to hang in the balance,
and I am more than grateful to all the contributors, who greeted each further
delay with a combination of equanimity and resignation, as well as with a mea-
sure of kindly sympathy.
My own interest in Middle Eastern cities dates back to my fi rst visit to
the region, at the end of my fi rst year as an undergraduate in the summer of
1963. I took a train from London to Istanbul and then went on by bus and
train to Syria, which I entered from Bab al-Hawwa, arriving in Aleppo late in
the evening. Sitt ing in one of the open-air cafés under the citadel a few days
later—and with a few weeks in Turkey already behind me—I realized I had
found something I had not quite known that I was looking for: I had always
wanted to be a historian, and I had toyed with working on Italy (which I had
visited) and on Central America (which I had not). After Aleppo, I knew that
I would work on the Middle East. Whether this decision was wise, or brave, or
foolhardy is difficult to say: it is a choice that I have never regretted and one
that has brought extraordinary richness to my life.
When I fi rst came to Aleppo and, to a greater extent, when I returned to
the city with a more informed understanding of what I was looking at, I was
profoundly excited by the suqs, the mosques, the citadel, the streets of the med-
ina, and the magnificent mansions of the wealthy, both in the historic center
and in the outer quarters. I had the great good fortune to get to know many
families in the city, to visit them in their homes, and to understand the history
ix
x | PR E FAC E

of Syria and the complexities of its present politics through long conversations
with them. I also remember wonderful excursions to the countryside, to Kurd
Dagh, and to Qala‘at Sam‘an.
I had taught Middle Eastern history for several years before starting to
think thematically about the social history of cities. In the late 1980s, I began
to work on the history of Aleppo in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries, but other preoccupations have meant that the monograph that I still
intend to write has so far eluded me. Like most of my contemporaries, I was
profoundly influenced by the work of the two great pioneers of the study of the
Islamic court records, André Raymond and Abdul-Karim Rafeq, the latter one
of the loyal and patient contributors to this volume. Over the last twenty-odd
years, I have attended a number of conferences with Raymond and Rafeq, and
have had the great good fortune to get to know them in both academic and
social contexts.

I am enormously grateful to those who have made this book possible. First
and foremost, obviously, I must thank the contributors, who have stayed the
course, updated their texts and bibliographies, endured different bibliographi-
cal regimes, and in some cases rewritten their chapters completely. I would like
to thank Edmund Burke III, who suggested the project in the fi rst place and
kindly agreed to write part of the introduction.
Second, it is a great pleasure to thank Mary Selden Evans of Syracuse
University Press, and Mehrzad Boroujerdi, the editor of SUP’s series on the
Modern Intellectual and Political History of the Middle East. Both were
enthusiastic about the project when it was fi rst submitted to them and encour-
aged me to bring it to fruition. I am especially grateful to Julie DuSablon,
whose editorial skills and attention to matters of detail and consistency are
truly extraordinary.
Th ird, I should like to thank the Warden and Fellows of All Souls’ Col-
lege, Oxford, for awarding me a Visiting Fellowship for the Hilary and Trinity
terms in 2003, during which I was able to write most of the introduction in
extremely congenial surroundings.
Fourth, I would like to thank my colleagues Harris Lenowitz and Peter
von Sivers at the University of Utah for their careful reading of the introduc-
tion and their many valuable comments, most of which I have incorporated. I
 Preface | xi

am also extremely grateful to Stefan Weber for his speedy assistance in devis-
ing a memorable cover for the book and for his friendship in many other ways.
Finally, I would like to thank my family. My stepchildren on both sides
of the Atlantic have been more or less aware of this project for a long time,
and have expressed only occasional skepticism about my capacity to “produce
it in the end.” It is difficult for me to express sufficient gratitude to Shohreh,
who has indirectly absorbed more about the travails of editing a book than she
could ever have imagined. More important, she has brought both excitement
and contentment into my life with her unique amalgam of volatility, serenity,
and solicitude. Merci, azizam.
 Contributors

E D M U N D B U R K E I I I is director of the Center for World History at the University

of California at Santa Cruz, where he teaches Middle East and North African history,
Mediterranean history and world history. He is the co-editor of Genealogies of Orien-
talism: History, Politics, Theory and The Environment and World History, 1750–2000.

L EI L A FAWA Z is founding director of the Fares Center for Eastern Mediterranean

Studies and Issam M. Fares Professor of Lebanese and Eastern Mediterranean Studies
at Tufts University. She has published Modernity and Culture from the Mediterranean to
the Indian Ocean, An Occasion for War: Mount Lebanon and Damascus in 1860, State and
Society in Lebanon, and Merchants and Migrants in Nineteenth Century Beirut. Dr. Fawaz
is currently working on the social history of the Levant in the late Ottoman period.

BER NA R D HOURCA DE is a geographer, formerly director of the French Institute of

Iranian Studies in Tehran (1978–1993) and of the groupe de recherche “Monde Iranien.”
He is currently senior research fellow at Centre National de la Recherce Scientifique
(Paris). He works on the political and cultural geography of Iran and on the city of Tehran.
His most recent work (with Seyyed-Mohsen Habibi) is an Atlas of Tehran Metropolis.

ROBERT ILBERT is professor of history and director of the Maison Méditerrané-

enne des Sciences de l’Homme at the Université de Provence at Aix-en-Provence. His
publications include Héliopolis: Le Caire 1905–1922—genèse d’une ville and Alexand-
rie 1830–1930: Histoire d’une communauté citadine.

DINA R IZK K HOURY is associate professor of history and international affairs

at George Washington University. She is author of State and Provincial Society in the

xiii
xiv | CON T R I BU TOR S

Ottoman Empire: Mosul 1540–1834 as well as several articles on Ottoman Iraq. She is
currently working on a book on war and remembrance in modern Iraq.

GUDRUN K R Ä MER is professor of Islamic studies at Freie Universität Berlin, a

member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences, and one of the executive
editors of the third edition of the Encyclopaedia of Islam. She has published extensively
on Middle Eastern history, Islamic movements, and Islamic political thought.

A BDUL-K A R IM R A FEQ holds the William and Annie Bickers Professorship in

Arab Middle Eastern Studies at the College of William and Mary in Virginia. He was
formerly professor of Modern Arab History and chairman of the Department of His-
tory in the University of Damascus. His most recent book is The History of the Syrian
University, 1901–1946 (in Arabic).

SA R A H D. SHIELDS is associate professor of history at the University of North

Carolina, Chapel Hill. She has worked on the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire
in the last century of the Ottoman Empire and has published Mosul before Iraq, Like
Bees Making Five-Sided Cells. Her current research explores the creation of national
identities in the Middle East in the decades between the two world wars.

PETER SLUGLETT is professor of Middle Eastern History at the University of

Utah, Salt Lake City. He taught at Durham University for nineteen years before mov-
ing permanently to the United States in 1994. He is co-author of Iraq since 1958: From
Revolution to Dictatorship and author of Britain in Iraq: Contriving King and Country,
about the British occupation and mandate. He has co-edited (with Nadine Méouchy)
a volume on the British and French mandates in the Middle East.

SA M I ZU BA I DA is emeritus professor of politics and sociology, Birkbeck College,

London University, and has held visiting positions in Cairo, Istanbul, Berkeley, Paris,
and New York. He has written and lectured widely on religion, culture, law, and poli-
tics in the Middle East and on food and culture. His works include Islam, the People
and the State, A Taste of Thyme: Culinary Cultures of the Middle East (co-edited with
Richard Tapper), and Law and Power in the Islamic World.
The Urban Social History
of the Middle East,
1750–1950
 1
Introduction
PETER SLUGLETT W ITH EDMU N D BU R K E III

• U R B A N S O C I A L H I S T O R Y is one of the most fruitful and exciting areas

of enquiry in the contemporary historiography of the Middle East. The open-
ing up and utilization of Islamic court records and Ottoman administrative
documents over the past few decades has greatly changed the parameters of
our knowledge of the cities of the Middle East and North Africa between the
seventeenth and early twentieth centuries, and in particular of the major cities
of the region. The present work attempts to review the state of the art in this
field in a number of different areas and is directed primarily toward an audi-
ence of historians and other social scientists seeking a background on the state
of the literature on urbanism in the Arab Middle East.1
The statement that Islam is an “urban religion” may raise as many ques-
tions as it answers, but it is certainly the case that, with its institutionalization
over the early centuries, it became a commonplace that “the good Islamic life”
could be lived more to the full within cities than outside them.2 The “other-

Pages 1–15 and 25–42 are by Peter Sluglett , pages 15–25 by Edmund Burke. Peter Slu-
glett would like to thank Harris Lenowitz and Peter von Sivers for their comments.
1. The most recent bibliography of the field is Bonine et al. 1994.
2. In the context of a discussion comparing rural and urban Islam in the Ottoman period,
Bruce Masters states that “it was perhaps only in the Ottoman cities that Islam was practiced
in its more recognizable, contemporary form. There the Ottoman sultans sought to promote
a state-sponsored version of Islam, preached by men who were graduates of state-supervised
1
2 | PET E R S LUG L ET T W I T H E DM U N D BU R K E I I I

worldly” ethos generally characteristic of Christian monasticism, in both its

anchoritic Near Eastern and its communal or “Benedictine” versions, 3 had
no widespread echoes or equivalents in Islam. Like the yeshiva, the madrasa,
when it appeared in Islamic cities in the eleventh century, functioned more
as an academic than as a contemplative institution, whose members either
had, or would have when they graduated, family and social lives very similar
to those of the rest of the urban community around them.4 Again, cities con-
tain two of the major normative establishments of Islamic society, the Friday
mosque and the law court. Prayer is a corporate, social act, not invalidated,
certainly, if performed in private or in isolation, but somehow more “pleasing
to God” if performed in public. The title of an article by Baber Johansen, “The
All-Embracing Town and Its Mosques” (1981a), conveys this sense particu-
larly well. As far as the law courts are concerned, a very large numbers of the
studies examined in the following pages are based on the mass of records that
they generated after the Ottoman conquest in the early sixteenth century.
The two hundred years between 1750 and 1950 have been selected as the
beginning and end points of this book largely for pragmatic reasons. First, for
much of the eighteenth century, as Abraham Marcus says, we are “on the eve
of modernity” (Marcus 1989), and thus in many important ways, “still” able to
examine societies which, though by no means functioning in isolation, had yet
to experience the cataclysmic changes they would undergo in the nineteenth.
Second, at the other end of the time period, the revolutions in the Middle East
in the 1950s, and the general lack of access to contemporary documentary
materials that followed them, has made it difficult to carry out historical stud-
ies on cities after that time. 5
In general, then, cities in the Arab Middle East and North Africa have long
attracted the attention and interest of historians, although a good deal of earlier

seminaries and paid salaries from the sultans’ coffers as urban Islam became institutionalized to
a degree unknown before.” Masters 2001, 27; italics added.
3. Christian monasteries in both East and West were often located in remote, sometimes
barely accessible, rural areas.
4. In this connection, what were regarded as the “private” or “secret” aspects of Sufi sm
att racted considerable suspicion for much of the classical period.
5. For studies of urban political anthropology, see Wikan 1980 and Singerman 1995.
 Introduction | 3

writing on the topic tended to concentrate either on architecture and the built
environment or on attempts to track down and identify the elusive notion of the
“Islamic city.” Although the fi rst of these categories remains significant (Gaube
and Wirth 1984; Escher and Wirth 1992; Marino 1997) the second has become
somewhat passé, indicating as it does a quest for an essentialism that has ever
diminishing relevance in a post-Orientalism world. “Middle Eastern cities,”
then, as far as this collection is concerned, are simply cities in the Middle East.
Some of the cities discussed in this volume are of great antiquity, founded and
flourishing as major centers of exchange long before the mid–eighteenth cen-
tury; others may be able to date their foundation to a remote past, but owed
their nineteenth- or twentieth-century prosperity to a combination of their
geographical location and sets of specific socioeconomic conjunctures.
As far as the geographical and scholarly coverage of the volume is con-
cerned, it has been decided to concentrate mainly on the Arab Middle East,
that is, Egypt and the Fertile Crescent, and because it is intended primarily
as an introduction to the field for nonspecialists, on publications in English,
French, and German. Some of the contributors have special interests out-
side the core area and have thus been able to introduce a broader perspective.
Readers may wonder why Anatolia/”Turkey” has not been covered more thor-
oughly; although a good deal of interesting work has been done for earlier cen-
turies,6 there do not appear to be any substantial studies of Turkish cities for
the period on which this volume is focused.7
Thus, the principal concern of this volume is urban social history, the
dynamics, sometimes apparently static, sometimes obviously changing, of
urban life. The period under study forms an intersection or transition between
the last century and a half of the Ottoman Empire and the beginnings, here

6. The list is impressive: see Çanbakal 2006 on seventeenth-century ‘Aintab, Ergene

2003 on Çankırı and Kastamonu in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, Faroqhi
1984 and 1987 on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Ankara and Kayseri, Gerber 1988 on
seventeenth-century Bursa, Greene 2000 on late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century
Crete, and the many important articles on Anatolia and Cyprus by Jennings, especially those
collected in Jennings 1999.
7. A possible exception here is Çelik’s study of nineteenth-century Istanbul (Çelik 1993),
although the author, an architectural historian, is more interested in the development of the
built environment than in urban social history.
4 | PET E R S LUG L ET T W I T H E DM U N D BU R K E I I I

earlier, there later, of sustained European economic and political influence

and, in some places, control. The principal focus is the nineteenth century, a
time of far-reaching change at all levels in the Ottoman Empire. It was also
the period when many Western European nations began to focus increasing
attention on their near neighbors in the Mediterranean and the Middle East,
assessing the potential of these areas both as sources of agricultural and other
raw materials and as markets for European manufactured goods.
In the same way that the notion of an “Islamic city” has largely ceased
to occupy the attention, or interest, of scholars over the past few decades, 8
att itudes toward the Ottoman period have also changed. In the introduction
to his monograph on Aleppo, published in 1941, Jean Sauvaget has litt le time
for the Ottoman period; he sees a thrusting, vigorous Europe overtaking an
“Islam” that has ceased to flourish “comme frappé de sclérose.”9 In contrast,
in Les grandes villes arabes à l’époque ottomane, published in 1985,10 and in
other books and articles, André Raymond has drawn attention to the dra-
matic growth experienced by most of the major Arab cities in the Ottoman
Empire between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, both in terms of spa-
tial extent and of population. It is clear from evidence both of commercial and
manufacturing activity, and of the scale and number of religious endowments
initiated under the Ottomans, that these centuries can no longer be regarded,
or accurately described, as a period of unremitt ing economic decline.11 It also

8. For a summary of recent writing, see Eickelman 1974; al-Azmeh 1976; K. Brown 1986;
Chevallier 1986; Abu-Lughod 1987; Ellis Goldberg 1991; Raymond 1994a. See also chapter
6 by Hourcade.
9. Sauvaget 1941, 191: “En face d’une Europe toujours mieux outillé, toujours plus entre-
prenante et plus audacieuse, l’Empire ottoman se présente ainsi comme un État moralement
divisé, affaibli dans sa structure économique comme dans son organisation administrative,
amoindri dans sa force de résistance et à l’ingérence de l’étranger.” For a similar mindset, see
Longrigg 1925.
10. Parts of the book appeared a year earlier in English (Raymond 1984). For a summary
of Raymond’s notions of urban expansion under the Ottomans, see Raymond 1974 and 1979–
80. He takes the increase in the numbers of public baths and fountains as indicators of spatial
and population growth.
11. See, for example, Doumani 1995; D. Khoury 1997a; van Leeuwen 1999. For a con-
vincing critique of the decline theory, see Quataert 2003.
 Introduction | 5

emerges, again in contradiction to much of the received wisdom, that the bulk
of the trade of, say, late eighteenth-century Ottoman Egypt, was with areas
farther East—mostly Iran and India—(36 percent) and with other Otto-
man provinces (50 percent), rather than with Europe (14 percent) (Raymond
1985, 44).
Another major topic of inquiry in the study of Middle Eastern and North
African cities is the question of the changing nature and extent of the control
exercised over the city by the central state.12 In “Urban Life in Pre-Colonial
North Africa,” the Tunisian sociologists Stambouli and Zghal (1976) situated
state/city relations on a continuum running between the more or less autono-
mous medieval Italian commune on the one hand, and on the other, the Chi-
nese imperial city, which was completely controlled by the crown. Arab cities,
or more accurately, the cities in early modern North Africa that feature in the
article, are evidently somewhere near the Chinese end. As in early modern
France, Portugal, and Spain, all senior appointments (such as, for example,
governorships of provinces) were made by the central state, and appointees
were constantly rotated, often with bewildering frequency.13 In addition, the
officials from Istanbul were often set apart from the local population during
the Ottoman period by the fact that they spoke a different language. Thus
in any given city most of the military and the upper bureaucracy tended to
be outsiders, originating from other parts of the Empire, with no local roots,
reflecting an attempt on the part of the state to prevent the officials making
common cause with the people they had been appointed to rule.
Of course, it was not necessarily (if ever) the case that the local elites were
any more solicitous of the welfare of their fellow townsmen simply because
they were locals. During the long period of great disorder between the mid-
1770s and the beginning of the nineteenth century,14 when the central govern-
ment lost control of Aleppo and several other provincial cities to members of

12. Dina Khoury discusses this topic in greater detail; see chapter 3.
13. For provincial administration in the Ottoman classical age, see Kunt 1983. Kamil al-
Ghazzi (1926) lists the thirty-two governors appointed to Aleppo between 1850 and 1900—
that is, at the height of the Tanzimat reforms.
14. At a time when the empire was also involved in a series of disastrous wars with Austria
and Russia; see Th ieck 1985.
6 | PET E R S LUG L ET T W I T H E DM U N D BU R K E I I I

the provincial elites, the seizure of power by local strongmen does not seem to
have brought about any obvious improvements:

The increase in the power of [the Janissaries and ashraf] was actually disad-
vantageous to most of their fellow Aleppines, who in some respects suffered
greater abuse than in the preceding period of effective Ottoman control.
Unlike government officials, the local power figures worked from a perma-
nent base in the community and an intimate knowledge of its inner working.
They saw in their increased power a license to exploit the public rather than
a civic responsibility to serve it. (Marcus 1989, 94)15

Stambouli and Zghal tried to calculate how much autonomy the urban popu-
lation had in the politics and administration of the city, and in the organiza-
tion of its economic, cultural, and religious activities. In terms of politics and
administration, while the urban notables may have played an important, often
crucial, role in the economy, they certainly did not enjoy “autonomy.” In addi-
tion, they frequently became divided into factions who fought one another
for control over local resources; they only rarely challenged the state directly,
since they were dependent upon it for confi rmation in their official positions.
On the other hand, as far as economic autonomy was concerned, local control
over the agricultural surplus16 and over the day-to-day functioning of trade,
crafts, and manufacture through the guilds generally ensured that provided
the city or region paid something approximating to its prescribed tax liabilities
to the central state, the state would rarely interfere in the details of the city’s
economic activities.
The same can also be said of cultural and religious activities, because these
generally conformed to the norms and ideological premises that the state itself
upheld and only rarely featured as matters of dispute between center and periph-
ery. The state would nominate members of the local religious notability to the

15. Some provincial warlords of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries such
as Zahir ‘Umar in Galilee and Ahmad Jazzar Pasha in Acre have been represented as proto-
nationalists, seeking freedom from Ottoman imperialism, but it is difficult to interpret their
motivation as other than personal gain.
16. For examples of partnerships between Ottoman officials and local merchants and
landowners in Mosul and Baghdad see D. Khoury 1997a and Fatt ah 1997.
 Introduction | 7

posts of mufti and naqib al-ashraf, and lesser figures as imams in neighborhood
mosques or teachers in madrasas, and after the Ottoman state’s takeover of
(Sunni) endowments in 1826 the salaries of religious officials were paid from the
central treasury.17 For this and other reasons, the Sunni ulama generally tended
to act as legitimators of political power and the social order. In all spheres save
the narrowly political, therefore, the notables themselves were involved in the
reproduction of the system, so that the whole question of their relationship to
the state, and, even more broadly, the nature of the state itself, needs to be more
carefully conceptualized and defined.18 Hourani’s article on the notables of the
Arab Middle East in the nineteenth century (Hourani 1968), written forty years
ago, still serves as a starting point for studies concerned with relations between
Ottoman state and its provinces (P. Khoury 1990; Provence 2005, 6–8).

European Urban Social History:

A Note on the Literature

What follows is an attempt to examine some of the topics that have att racted
the attention of colleagues working on the postmedieval history of cities in
Europe (and in some European colonies) over the past few decades, because
this was the original focus of urban social history as a discrete field of study.
To aim at anything like comprehensiveness would be unrealistic, but it seems
worth trying to place the urban social history of the Middle East in the context
of at least part of the rest of the field.19
If we discount traditional histories of cities, written sometimes well, some-
times badly, by local antiquarians from the late eighteenth century onward,
what might be called the serious study of European (perhaps more specifically,
British) cities and their societies as discrete entities is generally agreed to have
been initiated by H. J. Dyos (1921–1978) at the University of Leicester in the

17. The Ottoman state organized the department of religious endowments (evkaf) into a
Ministry in 1837.
18. See chapter 3 by Dina Khoury.
19. A useful, if inevitably rather dated, bibliography of European urban social history is
Engeli and Matzerath 1989. For a variety of reasons, including the fact that most North Ameri-
can cities can best be described as postindustrial, it did not seem reasonable to include them
in this brief survey.
8 | PET E R S LUG L ET T W I T H E DM U N D BU R K E I I I

1950s and 1960s. Dyos was the fi rst British historian to have a chair in urban
history; he came to Leicester in 1952 and remained there for the rest of his life.
His particular interest was the history of Victorian London; his major work
was Victorian Suburb: A Study of the Growth of Camberwell (1961). To quote an
appreciation written by a close colleague, he was “the chief inspiration, pros-
elytiser and ambassador of urban history in Britain.”20 In addition to supervis-
ing a large number of postgraduates (and thus ensuring the future of the field),
Dyos understood the importance both of bringing the subject to the attention
of a wider audience and of disseminating news of developments in the field
to a widely scattered body of practitioners. He produced the Urban History
Newsletter between 1963 and 1973, followed by the Urban History Yearbook
(1974–91), itself superseded by a quarterly journal, Urban History, in 1992.21
Broadly speaking, Dyos and his students were and to some extent still are
interested in various aspects of urban growth and urban change, especially,
but not exclusively, since the early nineteenth century.22 Those working on the
history of European cities in the modern period are fortunate to have at their
disposal a variety of voluminous and generally accessible collections of local
materials, including censuses, parish registers, court proceedings, assessments
of rateable value, title deeds, charity records, the minutes of town councils, the
records of municipal planning commissions (especially in Britain) and so on,

20. See Reeder 1979, which contains a bibliography of Dyos’s writings. Both Reeder and
the present professor of urban history at the University of Leicester, Richard Rodger, were
colleagues of Dyos.
21. All three publications have surveyed and continue to survey the field through a run-
ning bibliography, reviews of recent theses, and reports on the subject from the front line. For
instance, the 1979 Yearbook has an article entitled “Australian Urban History: A Progress
Report”; the 1980 Yearbook has a twelve-page article entitled “Urban History in France”; the
1981 Yearbook has an article on urban history in India; and the fourth volume of Urban History
in 2001 has an essay entitled “Urban History in Latin America.” Hence, albeit in a somewhat
ad hoc manner, the yearbooks and the journal have enabled interested readers to keep abreast
of major developments in the field.
22.”From the later 1970s urban history went into abeyance, tainted with antiquarianism
in some quarters and overtaken by social history, but it has undergone something of a renais-
sance since the mid-1990s. The reasons for this are various, but it is undoubtedly linked to the
resurgence of interest in the city, urban cultures and the experience of urban life evident in
wide areas of the humanities and social sciences.” Gunn 2002, 59.
 Introduction | 9

as well as such invaluable secondary sources as novels, contemporary diaries,

newspapers, popular literature, and broadsheets. It is difficult for those of us
working on Middle Eastern and North African cities in this period to avoid
at least some pangs of jealousy at our colleagues’ enjoyment of such extraor-
dinary abundance, although it has become clear, over the past three decades,
that Middle Eastern and North African urban societies in which a substantial
corpus of Islamic court records has been preserved can also be studied in very
considerable detail.23
Although Dyos’s pioneering role is widely acknowledged, there have been
a number of more recent works of synthesis discussing the rise of the city in
Europe. I will look briefly at The European City, by Leonardo Benevolo (1993),
and The Making of Urban Europe 1000–1994, by Paul M. Hohenberg and Lynn
Hollen Lees (1995). Benevolo is primarily an architectural historian, inter-
ested in spatial growth and experimentation in construction, but he also pays
attention to political structures, especially in Italy: “A good proportion of the
medieval centres survive today as local administrative units . . . characterized
by limited but not artificial autonomy and a real and living role in popular cus-
toms and imagination.”24 He also emphasizes the fact, so obvious in Mexico
today, that the Spanish and Portuguese exported late Gothic architecture
to the New World and replicated what gradually became almost standard-
ized models of their own cities at the time in their new sett lements in Nueva
España such as Cholula, Huejotzingo, Oaxaca, Puebla, Querétaro, and Vera-
cruz, generally building on top of previous urban sett lements (Crouch, Garr,
and Mundigo 1982)—Tenochtitlan, on which Mexico City was constructed,
is probably the best known example. Th is is an interesting contrast to the villes
nouvelles of North Africa, like Fez Jadid or the new city of Meknès, which were
constructed alongside the older urban structures.
Hohenberg and Lees extend themselves over a wide canvass, concen-
trating on three main issues. How and why did cities originate, and what

23. See the discussion of the work of Abdul-Karim Rafeq and André Raymond later in
this chapter; for some recent studies involving extensive use of sharia court records, see Hanna
and Abbas 2005; Agmon 2006; Hudson 2008.
24. Benevolo 1993, 73, and 76, 102–3 below.
10 | PET E R S LUG L ET T W I T H E DM U N D BU R K E I I I

characterized their early development? What economic and demographic

processes are particularly characteristic of urban populations? What are
the social consequences of urban life, that is, the psychological and cultural
differences between urban life on the one hand and rural life on the other?
The second and third of these questions (the fi rst precedes the chrono-
logical framework of this book) have not, on the whole, been asked about
Middle Eastern cities in the same way. European cities experienced highly
uneven processes of growth, relatively rapid between 1000 and 1350, much
less sharply between the fi fteenth and eighteenth centuries, and then more
or less explosively after 1750. Until the eighteenth century, Hohenberg and
Lees suggest, “cities retarded the development of nation-states,”25 since, as
is clear from their foundation charters, they often enjoyed a wide measure
of autonomy. By 1700, European urbanization was no longer concentrated
in the Mediterranean basin; by 1900, northern and western European cities
were growing exceedingly rapidly, with relatively new towns such as Birming-
ham, Glasgow, Manchester, Berlin, and St. Étienne experiencing enormous
growth. 26 As Bernard Hourcade’s chapter indicates, many Middle Eastern cit-
ies, especially the Mediterranean ports engaged in trade with Europe, experi-
enced comparable growth, beginning in the second quarter of the nineteenth
century and continuing exponentially into the twentieth. One major contrast
between cities in Europe and cities in the Middle East (and in much of the rest
of the developing world) has been the emergence of huge capital cities, often
two or three times the size of the second and third cities in their countries,

25. “To the west and east of the [old European urban core on the north/south trade routes
to the Mediterranean], where post-feudal monarchs and their armies could dominate them, cit-
ies were turned into agents of centralization by princes intent on binding the territories of the
realm even more tightly to the crown. By borrowing their money and selling them royal offices
with perquisites of status att ached, French kings co-opted the urban middle classes almost
as effectively as they did the courtiers at Versailles. . . . Cities therefore helped to provide the
cultural cement that molded urban residents into citizens and that lifted regional notables into
a national aristocracy.” Hohenberg and Lees 1995, 170–71.
26. Berlin owed its growth partly to industrialization and partly to its emergence as the
capital of (a unified) Germany in 1871. It had 30,000 inhabitants in 1701, 170,000 in 1800,
400,000 in 1850, and 1.6 million in 1890. By 1925, 4 million Berliners lived in a city that
extended over 325 square miles.
 Introduction | 11

largely because of the extreme centralization of political and administrative

functions in the developing world.
Apart from the emergence of nation-states after 1648, the most important
event affecting the growth and changing the nature of European cities was the
Industrial Revolution.27 The qualitative changes that took place in the century
between c. 1760 and c. 1860 were fueled by a combination of the breakdown
of previously institutionalized socioeconomic barriers, the spread of techno-
logical innovation, and major new investments in agriculture that gradually
increased productivity. Many cities in Europe grew to such an extent that they
could not easily be supplied with food from their immediate hinterlands, and
a long distance grain trade grew up that eventually extended to the eastern
Mediterranean in the middle and later nineteenth century. More generally, the
countryside became (permanently) subjected to the rule of the cities. For the
Middle East and Ottoman Europe, Owen (1981a), Quataert (1996), and Todo-
rov (1983) have shown that there was a fair degree of innovation, especially in
textile manufacture, but in most other ways the domination of the advanced
capitalist countries meant that the region remained largely confi ned to the
periphery of the global economy (Rafeq 1983, 1991).
In Western Europe, industrialization was qualitatively novel in a number
of important ways. It required major investment in social overhead (housing,
sewage, transport systems) as well as a degree of more or less rapidly intro-
duced government regulation (factory acts, public health acts, and so on). Hol-
lenberg and Lees chart three phases: proto-industrialization followed by early
coal-based industrialization, and then the second industrial revolution, during
which the discovery or utilization of new sources of mechanical power meant
that location (for example, near coalfields) became less important. Especially
in northern England (Barnsley, Dewsbury, Halifax, Leeds, and subsequently
Bolton, Bury, Preston, and Stockport) and in the Ruhr Valley (Bochum, Essen),
manufacturing villages gradually developed into industrial towns, a process
that sometimes produced large conurbations, some planned, some not.
It took some time for factory industry to dominate the urban landscape,
probably not until well into the latter half of the nineteenth century. In Milan

27. Some of the growth had evidently taken place rather earlier; Madrid had grown from
6,000 in 1520 to 150,000 in 1780, and Moscow from 36,000 to 238,000 over the same period.
12 | PET E R S LUG L ET T W I T H E DM U N D BU R K E I I I

in the 1890s, for example, only half the working population was in industry;
others were involved in transporting, packing, cooking, and moving food, all
of which came from the city’s immediate hinterland. The interdependence of
town and country was a vital part in these processes of growth. These changes
have proved both cataclysmic and durable.28 In addition, the expansion of
shops, offices, banks, and other services introduced new occupations for both
men and women. Although the total population of Europe doubled between
1800 and 1910, the urban population grew sixfold. The process followed dif-
ferent patterns in different European countries; Britain urbanized very fast,
France much more slowly. In spite of this, the population of Europe was still
more rural than urban in 1918, and, if the USSR is included, remained so in
1945. In the Middle East, extremely rapid urban growth was a marked feature
of the latter part of the twentieth century. By 1977, for example, 64 percent of
the population of Iraq lived in cities and only 36 percent in the countryside,
the exact opposite of the situation in the census of 1947 (Farouk-Sluglett and
Sluglett 2001, 246). Th is was the result of three tendencies: the extreme cen-
tralization already mentioned, the greater availability of services in the cities,
and fi nally, social and economic conditions in the countryside that made agri-
culture increasingly unprofitable and unatt ractive.29
Let us briefly consider two case studies of France and one of Germany. Rob-
ert A. Schneider, The Ceremonial City: Toulouse Observed, 1738–1780 (1995);
John Merriman, The Margins of City Life: Explorations of the French Urban
Frontier, 1815–1851 (1991); and Jan Palmowski, Urban Liberalism in Impe-
rial Germany: Frankfurt am Main, 1866–1914 (1999). Like many historians of
urban Europe, Schneider is concerned with the changing function of public

28. “It was also imperative to prod and guide the transformation of the countryside,
without whose food, labor and increasing custom the whole enterprise must grind to a halt.
Th is became the quintessentially urban role, the truly ‘basic’ productive function of the urban
system, which extended from quiet market centers and manufacturing towns like Bochum to
great nerve centers like London and Milan, whose administrators, fi nanciers and entrepre-
neurs masterminded the flow of information and goods.” Hohenberg and Lees 1995, 213–14.
See also Tilly 1992.
29. To which should be added the extreme concentration of private landholding that had
increased exponentially in most of the Arab Middle East since the end of the First World War.
See chapter 2 by Sarah Shields.
 Introduction | 13

space. Increasingly, it seems, in the decades before the French Revolution, a

number of large public squares were cleared and opened up in several parts
of Toulouse, which provided “new and vastly expanded arenas for urban cere-
mony,” including “gigantic festivities [such as fi rework displays, which] would
have been inconceivable without the new public space that now accommo-
dated them” (185). Executions and other forms of punishment for criminals
had of course long been carried out in public (as in the rest of Europe and in
the Muslim world at the time), but while this continued, more generally festive
large-scale public events, where “the state” or “the crown” was “represented” or
celebrated, became increasingly common. Of course, the newly created spaces
could be used for demonstrations as well as for military parades, whether in
eighteenth- and nineteenth-century France or in the anticolonial world of the
Middle East in the middle decades of the twentieth century.
In The Margins of City Life, Merriman studies the phenomenon of the
growth, and the perceived menace, of the urban margin or urban periphery,
the new areas on the outskirts of French cities where the “dangerous classes”
lived, hard by the new factories. The newly inhabited areas were feared by
wealthier and longer established city-dwellers because of the presence of
“marginal people,” or rootless “new barbarians,” associated with various
forms of dissoluteness and criminality (Merriman 1991, 5, 12, 224). 30 Here
again, large open spaces enabled people to gather together to vent their griev-
ances and to press their demands on employers or the state. French cities
grew at the edges because land was cheaper there, but also because the new
inhabitants could avoid paying the octroi, which was levied at the official lim-
its of the city. City walls were no longer needed for defensive purposes by the
1840s, and the ramparts were allowed to fall into disrepair, permitt ing and
facilitating growth extra muros. Th is process had begun much earlier in, for
instance, Aleppo, where new quarters had grown up outside the city walls
as early as the fi fteenth century (Gaube and Wirth 1984, 88). Links binding
townspeople to the rural hinterland remained strong: 37 percent of the popu-
lation of Narbonne and 23 percent of the population of Angoulême worked in

30. Nevertheless, the forbearance, suffering, and often the nobility of individuals living
in dreadful conditions are major themes of Germinal, Our Mutual Friend, and numerous other
novels of the period. See also 231 below.
14 | PET E R S LUG L ET T W I T H E DM U N D BU R K E I I I

agriculture in 1851. 31 By the end of the century, however, many of the new sub-
urbs had developed into “forts of socialism” (Merriman 1991, 82)—around
Paris (Belleville, Bobigny, and Ivry) and the Rotgürtel around Vienna. Urban
elites considered the “conquest” and policing of the suburbs as vital objec-
tives of city governments and also encouraged the building of churches on
city peripheries to bring about the socialization of these areas. Merriman also
points to an interesting contrast between French and North American cities;
in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century United States, elites generally lived
in the suburbs and the working class in the center, whereas the situation in
France was the reverse. 32
The subject matter of the German case study highlights another important
contrast between a city in the industrialized heart of late nineteenth-century
Europe and the cities of the Ottoman Middle East. Palmowski’s Urban Liberal-
ism in Imperial Germany (1999) is concerned with local government and urban
politics, contrasting the frailty of the national democratic tradition in Ger-
many with the far more lively and vigorous participation of German towns-
people in local affairs, especially matters concerning education and municipal
taxation. Thus “with reference to Benedict Anderson, the nation was clearly
an imagined, if not artificial community, whereas this was less clear about a
local community with which people readily and naturally identified” (312).
In the Ottoman Empire in these years, there was only a very limited notion of

31. “Rural life remained . . . an integral part of cities and towns well beyond the middle
of the nineteenth century.” Merriman 1991, 113. Like many barrios in South American cit-
ies, some more recent sett lements on the edges of Middle Eastern cities are named after the
villages or rural areas from which the majority of their inhabitants originated. However, in
contrast to the situation in the barrios, whose inhabitants often form associations to pay for
wells to be dug or schools to be built in the villages they have left behind, such att achment to
“home” on the part of the new urban dwellers of the Middle East and North Africa is largely
confi ned to migrants from the mountainous regions, where living conditions were generally
less oppressive.
32. For a study of changing elite habitat in Aleppo in the nineteenth and twentieth centu-
ries, see David 1990. Sadly, the departure of the elite families to the suburbs (generally in the
late 1940s and 1950s) was often accompanied by the destruction of family records, deemed
too dirty (or too voluminous) for storage even in the most spacious urban apartment. Personal
observation, Aleppo 1987–90.
 Introduction | 15

identification with the local community in the sense of the-city-as-a-totality,

partly because of the lack of local autonomy and partly because of a general
tendency to identify fi rst and foremost with the religious community into
which one was born. 33 (For similar reasons, the notion of Ottoman citizenship
was equally elusive, although it had been introduced in the two main reform-
ing edicts of the Tanzimat, the Hatt-i Şerif of Gülhane of 1839 and the Hatt-i
Hümayün of 1856.) For a variety of reasons, the institution of the municipality
only made a fairly late and sporadic appearance in the Middle East, where its
most significant manifestations were in cities or suburbs with large European
populations, such as Alexandria or the more cosmopolitan parts of Istanbul
(Rosenthal 1980a; Çelik 1993; Reimer 1993; Seni 1994; Lafi 2005).
Let us now turn to the history of scholarship on Middle Eastern cities, begin-
ning with its origins in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century France.

French Scholarship on Middle Eastern

and North African Cities

The study of Middle Eastern cities has a long history in French scholarship.
The modern tradition began with the late eighteenth-century French travel-
ers in the Middle East, most notably with Volney, whose Voyage en Egypte et
en Syrie (1787) paid special attention to Middle Eastern cities. Volney sought
to develop a scientific methodology for the study of other societies that would
provide an alternative to orientalist representations. His self-consciously
scientific approach to Middle Eastern society later found fulfi llment in the
Description de l’Égypte, a twenty-four volume monument to contemporary
French orientalist scholarship. Despite the manifest insufficiencies of many of
the essays in the Description and the imperial auspices under which the proj-
ect was conceived, the État Moderne section contains three important essays
by Chabrol de Volvic (1822), Girard (1812) and Jomard (1822) on Cairo and
Cairene society. Taken together, they constitute a source of documentation
on the city at the end of the eighteenth century that has been much utilized
by later scholars. Thus André Raymond drew heavily upon their work in his
magisterial Artisans et commerçants au Caire (1973–74).

33. Although it cannot be emphasized too often that there was no necessary connection
between inherited religious identity and religious belief.
16 | PET E R S LUG L ET T W I T H E DM U N D BU R K E I I I

It is important to emphasize that the work of Volney and the Description

stand in sharp contrast to much subsequent French scholarship on Middle
Eastern and North African cities over the period 1830–1950. Nothing in
French colonial ethnography on Algeria and Morocco comes close to the effort
of careful statistical documentation of standards of living and precise attempts
to chart the ways of life of ordinary Egyptians that can be found in the early
essays of Chabrol de Volvic, Girard, and Jomard. Nowhere else does one fi nd
a major effort to map a particular city street by street, including its workshops,
mosques, baths, and other public buildings. It was only after 1960 that this
tradition reemerged as a major characteristic of French urban historiography
of the Middle East and North Africa.
Why were these early studies so successful in developing a statistical doc-
umentation of the social and economic characteristics of the Cairene popula-
tion? Why did they refuse to utilize orientalist categories? To be schematic,
Volney and the authors of the Description were imbued with the universalist
values of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. Men like Chabrol de
Volvic were strong believers in the importance of placing science at the service
of the state. Some years later, when he was Prefect of the Département de la
Seine, Chabrol de Volvic developed a statistical study of the population of the
Paris basin that drew upon the methods fi rst employed to make a statistical
map of the urban population of Cairo (Bourguet 1995). Later French oriental-
ist scholarship on Middle Eastern cities would move away from the univer-
salistic concern with the lives of ordinary people and public health, operating
in terms of a set of categories based upon the supposedly primary formative
influence of Islam. 34
After the conquest of Algeria in 1830, French interest in the Middle East
shifted to the Maghrib. However, since Algerian cities were for the most part
easily conquered and quickly remolded according to French tastes and desires,
the subject of cities did not figure large in the orientalist imaginary. (Given the
protracted difficulties encountered in the course of the attempted conquest

34. See the work of the brothers William (1872–1957) and Georges (1876–1962) Marçais,
and their younger colleague Gaston Deverdun. William Marçais was a linguist and philologist;
Georges Marçais was an architectural historian of the Maghrib and Muslim Spain. Deverdun
is best known for his two-volume study of Marrakesh: Deverdun 1959.
 Introduction | 17

of Constantine, which might have provided a degree of motivation for urban

studies, this is not entirely self-evident; Grangaud 2002.) Instead, resistance
was based primarily in the North African countryside, rather than in the cities,
and French ethnographers were more focused on matters concerning the tribes
and rural religion. As a result, French nineteenth-century ethnographic stud-
ies of Algeria seem preoccupied with rural religion, including the Sufi orders
and maraboutism, as well as with the political organization of the tribes.
In the era of colon dominance that followed the defeat of the last major
rural uprising, the Mokrani rebellion (1871–72), the North African field was
also being transformed by metropolitan intellectual and institutional cur-
rents. Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges’s La cité antique (1864) proved widely
influential among urban historians. It proposed a radical reading of the Greek
polis based upon the apparently formative role of its ancestral religious cults.
It played a particularly important part in shift ing the scholarly agenda back
to cities in France and was taken up by Émile Durkheim and his followers,
thereby influencing the newly emerging discipline of sociology. It also inspired
Émile Masqueray (1843–1894), a graduate of the prestigious École normale
supérieure, who was appointed Rector of the University of Algiers in 1878. His
doctoral thesis, La Formation des cités chez les populations sédentaires de l’Algérie,
was intended as a critique. Utilizing Fustel de Coulanges’s criteria, Masqueray
examined different Algerian Berber polities (Kabylia, Awras, Mzab) as forms
of tribal republic (Masqueray 1886). By audaciously fi nding the roots of urban
polity in North Africa, his dissertation sought to correct Fustel de Coulanges’s
eurocentrism. Although litt le understood in its day, Masqueray’s work showed
the way toward refashioning the study of North African society into a topic of
interest to those working on the history of metropolitan France. However, it
was not until after World War I that his example began to bear fruit in a series
of important studies of North African cities.
The conquest of Morocco in 1912 provided the impetus that led to the
renewal of the study of Middle Eastern urban history in France. The diplo-
matic context of the Moroccan Question dictated that a French takeover could
occur only if approved by the Moroccan ulama and urban notables, but the
French were largely ignorant of North African cities, since the resistance in
Algeria had been based in the countryside and the cities had been litt le stud-
ied. French policy makers were convinced that mastery of the cities was a key
18 | PET E R S LUG L ET T W I T H E DM U N D BU R K E I I I

to the eventual establishment of a protectorate, with the result that a crash

program in studying Moroccan cities was in order. After 1912, this interest
was carried forward by a series of volumes under the collective title of Villes et
Tribus du Maroc, prepared by the members of the native affairs section of the
protectorate administration. Because of its religious and commercial impor-
tance, Fez in particular att racted a great deal of attention. Urban studies con-
stituted the core around which the early French studies of Moroccan society
tended to gravitate.
Given these concerns, it is not surprising that the French should have been
vitally interested in obtaining precise information about the city of Fez, long
regarded as one of the essential keys to Morocco. Fez was the political and
religious capital of the country as well as a national and international center
of trade and commerce. Prior to 1904, French studies on Fez were limited, but
with the publication of Eugène Aubin’s Le Maroc d’aujourd’hui in 1904 and
Henri Gaillard’s Une ville d’Islam: Fès in 1905, things began to change. Th is
was followed by a series of articles by Charles René-Leclerc on the economy of
Fez and another series of articles in Archives Marocaines devoted primarily to
the role of Islam in the city. By 1912, the picture was all but complete; thereaf-
ter the literature largely fi lls in the blanks, adding detail and color, rather than
developing new categories of analysis. The relatively short time required for
the elaboration of an ethnography of Fez (the same is true of Morocco more
generally) is quite striking. So too was the development of certain research
topics and the neglect of others. The only significant opening of a new topic
was the emergence of a literature on the artisan craft guilds of Fez, beginning
with the work of Louis Massignon (1920, 1924).

1919–56

French studies of Middle Eastern cities underwent important changes after

World War I. The chief center of French urban studies in the interwar period,
and indeed until the Suez expedition of 1956, was Cairo. The Institut Français
d’Archéologie Orientale (whose origins can be traced back to Napoleon’s Institut
d’Égypte) provided the institutional context in which generations of scholars
were introduced to the study of the city. It was fi rst directed by Gaston Wiet
(1887–1971), an orientalist who was broadly interested in the urban history
and culture of Mamluk Cairo, including epigraphy, the history of architecture
 Introduction | 19

and Islamic art, and Arabic manuscripts. Wiet produced over fi ft y works over
the course of a long and distinguished career, including a major translation of
the classical author al-Maqrizi’s study of the markets of Cairo (Raymond and
Wiet 1979; Rosen-Ayalon 1977).
A second major center for the study of cities was Damascus, where the
Institut Français d’Archéologie de Damas (later the Institut Français d’Études
Arabes de Damas) provided a context for the study of the Levant comparable to
that provided by Cairo for Egypt (Avez 1993). Here the central figure was Jean
Sauvaget, who helped train a generation of French and Syrian urban historians
until his early death in 1950. Sauvaget is best known for his history of Aleppo
(Sauvaget 1941) and for his editions of Arabic historical manuscripts, many of
which relate to the life of Syrian cities. 35 Now thought of primarily as an ori-
entalist, Sauvaget in fact had broader interests that included medieval Syrian
art history as well as material life (including a book on the postal service and
horses). A third major figure in the study of Middle Eastern cities was Rob-
ert Mantran (1917–1992), whose Istanbul dans la seconde moitié du XVIIe siècle
(1962) is still a basic text on Ottoman Istanbul.
Against this background, Roger Le Tourneau’s Fès avant le Protectorat
(1949) stands as a fitt ing capstone to a tradition of urban ethnography and
social history. With Le Tourneau (1907–1971) one also begins to see a different
approach to the history of Middle Eastern cities on the part of French scholars.
In its time, Fès avant le Protectorat was a major innovation; it was one of the fi rst
books by a European scholar to take the social history of a Middle Eastern city
as a discrete object of study. Although it drew heavily on the existing Arabic and
European written sources (published and unpublished), it was also the product
of intensive ethno-historical field studies of the artisan guilds—their specific
histories, technologies, and economic basis—many of which were published
separately. As such it was an innovative blending of the genres of history and
sociology. Not since the authors of the Description de l’Égypte sought to make
an inventory of the classes of Cairene society had the urban working classes of
Islamic societies appeared on the French scholarly agenda. Le Tourneau’s Fès

35. For his career, see Sourdel-Thomine 1954. For a critical account of the activities
of the French Institute in Damascus in the context of le savoir colonial, see Métral 2004 and
Trégan 2004.
20 | PET E R S LUG L ET T W I T H E DM U N D BU R K E I I I

was therefore not just a work of social history, it was also marked by the sign of
power: how best to manage the city so as to avoid provoking hostilities. In this
context, Fez was viewed at the time as one of a number of Arab cities in which
a volatile new political chemistry was brewing.
Thus, French interest in the cities of the Middle East and North Africa
increased further after World War II. In part, this new interest derived from the
centrality of urban spaces in the challenges to French colonial rule posed by
national liberation movements throughout the region. In this there is much to
remind us of the historic role of French urban political upheavals in stimulating
the emergence of sociology in France in the nineteenth century, as portrayed
by countless studies of the role of the working classes in the French revolution
and its nineteenth-century aftershocks. 36 It is hard not to see the influence of
Louis Chevalier’s study of the Paris working class on French authors writing
about Middle Eastern and North African cities in the 1950s and 1960s (Che-
valier 1958; Merriman 1991). One can also trace this influence in studies of
urban shanty towns by Robert Montagne (1952) and André Adam (1972) as
well as Adam’s political history of Casablanca before 1914 (1968). Roger Le
Tourneau’s Les villes musulmanes de l’Afrique du Nord (1957) was an attempt to
provide an historical overview of the changes affecting the post-1945 cities of
North Africa. Thus, the struggles over decolonization had a significant impact
on the way French authors interested in Middle Eastern and North African
cities approached their subject. The new urban history, however, was to come
from a different quarter.

André Raymond and His Students

The work of André Raymond is central to any appreciation of the study Middle
Eastern cities in the Ottoman period. 37 Trained during the era of decoloniza-
tion, Raymond was an early critic of French colonialism as well as an advocate
of modern methods of research and training that were at variance with the
shibboleths of French Orientalism, which remained resolutely focused upon

36. Karl Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon is the classic instance.
37. For an overview of Raymond’s career see Hourani 1990. Between 1951 and 1953, Ray-
mond completed his D.Phil. at Oxford (1953) under Hourani’s supervision. See also Rafeq
1998 and Hanna and Abbas 2005:1–6.
 Introduction | 21

the study of Arabic classical texts largely to the exclusion of other sources.
Th ree things distinguish Raymond’s approach from earlier French stud-
ies. Artisans et commerçants au Caire au XVIIIe siècle (1973–74) was the fi rst
full-length work to exploit the sharia court records as a source for the social
and economic history of Middle Eastern cities. Th rough the study of Islamic
wills, Raymond was able to add a quantitative dimension to an evaluation
of economic change in the period. Second, Raymond and his team of gradu-
ate students and others also innovated in developing an archeological survey
map of the buildings of old Cairo, and the history of their construction and
of the development of the urban space of Cairo (see Maury et al. 1982–83).
Here Raymond built upon the work of his mentor Gaston Wiet, who had pio-
neered the epigraphy of Cairene monuments, and sought to produce a reliable
edition of al-Maqrizi’s description of the markets of Cairo, a task that Ray-
mond completed after Wiet’s death (Raymond and Wiet 1979). A third fea-
ture of Raymond’s work on Cairo was his use of the archives and publications
of the French Expedition to Egypt in 1798, notably the twenty-four-volume
Description de l’Égypte, previously litt le used by historians. Another aspect of
Raymond’s work was equally innovative: his early conviction that the eigh-
teenth century, long neglected by historians of the Middle East as a period of
stagnation, was in fact crucial to any understanding of how the region came
to modernity (cf. D. Khoury 1997a, 3–16).
Raymond’s influence on the development of the urban history of the
Middle East and North Africa is incalculable, both because of the number of
graduate students, both French and Middle Eastern, who were trained under
him as well as his enormous energy and productivity and his broad vision of
the place of urban history in the larger history of Middle Eastern societies. A
partial survey of his publications lists more than a dozen books and some sixty
articles, several of which are in English. Perhaps his best known book is Les
grandes villes arabes à l’époque ottomane (1985), part of which has appeared in
English as The Great Arab Cities in the 16th–18th Centuries (1984), and Le Caire
(1993). Two important retrospective collections of his major essays appeared
in 1998 and 2002. 38

38. La Ville Arabe, Alep, à l’époque Ottomane (XVIe–XVIIIe siècles) (1998); Arab Cities in
the Ottoman Period: Cairo, Syria, and the Maghreb (2002).
22 | PET E R S LUG L ET T W I T H E DM U N D BU R K E I I I

Middle Eastern urban history in France is thus is largely the fruit of what
might be called the Raymond school, which also includes several distinguished
scholars working on periods before the eighteenth century. Robert Ilbert has
focused upon the impact of the incorporation of the Middle East into the
world market and on the political struggles over colonialism as viewed in two
rather different Egyptian cities. Ilbert’s two major studies, Héliopolis (1981)
and Alexandrie 1830–1930 (1996) explore the inner workings of two Egyptian
colonial cities. His central concern is the way in which the urban fabric was
successively remolded in the century following 1830 as a result of the decline
of the old social classes and the rise of new ones, the imposition of colonial
rule, and major cultural and social changes. Other scholars associated with
or students of Raymond writing in French about the history of Middle East-
ern cities include Jean-Claude David, Colette Establet, Nelly Hanna, Farouk
Mardam-Bey, Brigitte Marino, Jean-Paul Pascual, and Tal Shuval. There are
numerous edited volumes on aspects of Middle Eastern cities by Francophone
scholars, including La ville arabe dans l’Islam (Bouhdiba and Chevallier 1982);
Etat, Ville et Mouvements Sociaux au Maghreb et au Moyen Orient (K. Brown et
al. 1989); Villes et territoires au Maghreb (Hénia 2000); Society and Economy
in Egypt and the Eastern Mediterranean 1600–1900 (Hanna and Abbas 2005).
The urban history of the Middle East and North Africa long remained a French
quasi-monopoly, and Anglophone authors have only begun to challenge this
state of affairs since the 1960s.

American Studies of North African Cities

Until the mid-1960s, there was a general tendency in the Middle Eastern field
for scholarship to follow the flag, with British scholars studying “their” Mid-
dle East, while the French studied theirs. As the colonial boundaries receded,
however, important changes occurred. Modern-trained scholars from the for-
mer colonial dependencies became increasingly involved in scholarship on
the region, while indigenous sources, especially in Arabic, gradually became
more central to the scholarly enterprise. At the same time, scholars began to
develop interests that no longer reflected the old colonial division of scholarly
labor. The end of empire and the rise of the United States as a leading player in
the politics of the region did not immediately change this division of labor, at
least at fi rst. American scholars were primarily interested in those parts of the
 Introduction | 23

Middle East that had been under British rule (Egypt, Palestine/Israel, Jordan,
Iraq, and Iran), while the former French, Spanish, and Italian domains were
primarily studied by metropolitan and indigenous scholars trained in those
contexts. The result of these changes was a deepening of historical scholar-
ship. As we have seen, scholarship on the Maghrib remained predominantly in
French until the early 1960s. Th is soon began to change as a new generation of
American scholars began to devote their attention to North Africa. The result
was the rise of the history of North African cities as an important American
subject of research. A number of notable contributions can be mentioned.
Among the fi rst American historians of North African cities was Kenneth
Brown, whose People of Salé was published in 1976. Brown combined extended
ethnographic fieldwork among the urban populations of Salé with a compre-
hensive study of Arabic source materials relating to the subject. Brown’s Salé
is not the timeless city of the orientalists; rather, it is historically situated in
the context of the transformation of Morocco in the period. Brown analyzes
the differential impacts of successive changes as they affected Slawis of differ-
ent classes and occupations. Deeply immersed in the details of the life of the
guild and merchant communities, it is informed by a generous and humanistic
vision of Moroccan society. In some respects, notably its effort to document
already fading guild and other urban structures and practices, Brown’s People
of Salé is clearly inspired by Le Tourneau’s Fès avant le Protectorat (1949), with
which it merits comparison.
Very different in focus is Janet Abu-Lughod’s Rabat, a sociological study
of postcolonial Rabat (1980). Abu-Lughod is an urban demographer and soci-
ologist of rural to urban migration, best known in this context for her Cairo:
1001 Years of the City Victorious (1971). 39 Unlike Brown (and Le Tourneau
before him) her book shows litt le interest in the social and cultural life of
the inhabitants. Instead it focuses upon the historical origins and political
consequences of urban sett lement patterns, or what she describes as “urban
apartheid.” She traces the long-term political consequences of the sett lement
patterns of successive generations of rural migrants, largely against the wishes
of the authorities, whether French or Moroccan. In retrospect, Abu-Lughod’s
research seems inspired by contemporary ghetto riots in American cities and

39. A projected third volume on Tunis never appeared.

24 | PET E R S LUG L ET T W I T H E DM U N D BU R K E I I I

the report of the Kerner Commission on their causes. Her research on rural
migration and urban social tensions thus reflects an opportunity to develop a
set of comparative cases to test against American data.
Daniel Schroeter’s Merchants of Essaouira (1988) is a third major Ameri-
can study of a Moroccan city, which reflects the changing research context in
Morocco as well as the maturing of urban history itself.40 It was one of the fi rst
books to have been based on Moroccan state archives as well as on Arabic,
Hebrew, and European sources. Unlike Fez, Rabat, and Salé, Essaouira was of
relatively recent origin, founded by royal fiat in 1764 as the principal Atlantic
port for the trade of southern Morocco. Essaouira thus serves as a convenient
window through which to observe the incorporation of Morocco into the
world market in the nineteenth century. Basing himself upon a wealth of docu-
mentation, Schroeter paints a complex and nuanced portrait of the life of the
city. Of special interest is his study of the city’s commercial relations with the
Moroccan interior and with Europe, in which he is able to follow the fortunes
of individual merchant families as well as to develop aggregate figures for the
overall trade. The book provides an important corrective to French colonial
speculations about the evolution of Moroccan foreign trade in the nineteenth
century and the onset of economic dependence. Indeed, it merits comparison
with Raymond’s more comprehensive study of Cairo, discussed elsewhere in
this introduction.
Another American study of a Moroccan city that may be mentioned here
is Meaning and Order in Moroccan Society, by Clifford Geertz, Hildred Geertz,
and Lawrence Rosen (1979). Primarily an anthropological investigation, the
book provides a kind of model study of the bazaar economy, social relations,
and kinship in Sefrou, a small city 90 kilometers south of Fez on the edge of the
Middle Atlas mountain range. The three essays in the book deploy historical
evidence as well as data from oral fieldwork in an effort to explore the com-
plexities of the Sefrou marketplace. The book’s careful and detailed attempts
to reconstruct the workings of the bazaar economy of Sefrou, a major rural and
urban market, make it relevant to historians of Middle Eastern cities. Mean-
ing and Order in Moroccan Society also includes an important photographic

40. The book is based on his doctoral dissertation at Manchester University, where he was
supervised by Kenneth Brown.
 Introduction | 25

documentation of the life of Sefrou, which can be compared with the abun-
dant photographic images in Le Tourneau’s Fès avant le Protectorat. Although
North African cities were the subject of other U.S. dissertations in the 1970s
and 1980s, they seem gradually to have lost their att raction for American
scholars, perhaps temporarily. Since the 1980s, American academic interest
in the social cities of cities has tended to shift to the Arab East, notably Aleppo
and Mosul.41

Abdul-Karim Rafeq and André Raymond:

Pioneers in the Use of the Islamic Court Records

In recent decades, the urban social history of the postmedieval Middle East
(between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries) has been given new direc-
tion by the work of two major figures, Abdul-Karim Rafeq of the University
of Damascus and the College of William and Mary (Richmond, Virginia) and
André Raymond of the University of Aix-en-Provence, whose contribution
has already been discussed, and the work of their students, colleagues, and
those influenced by them in Europe, the Middle East and the United States.
Rafeq, one of the contributors to this volume, studied under Peter Holt and
Bernard Lewis at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University
of London in the late 1950s and early 1960s42 and has worked almost entirely
on the area which is now the state of Syria. Raymond has written on Egypt,
Greater Syria, and to a lesser extent Ottoman North Africa. Both Rafeq and
Raymond would recognize the crucial role played in this field by Albert Hou-
rani, whose extraordinarily influential article on the politics of the notables
(Hourani 1968; P. Khoury 1990) drew many of his students and colleagues
into the study of the urban history of the Middle East.43
The major contribution of both Rafeq and Raymond, based on their inten-
sive use of court records, has been to shift the focus of the study of Middle

41. For Aleppo, see Masters 1988, 1990; Marcus 1983, 1989; Meriwether 1999; and
Watenpaugh 2006. For Mosul, see D. Khoury 1997a and Shields 2000.
42. See Rafeq 1962–63 and 1970. See also Sluglett forthcoming.
43. Ira Lapidus’s influential Muslim Cities in the Later Middle Ages (1967) focuses on
Mamluk Egypt and Syria, that is, on a period very much earlier than any of the works dis-
cussed here.
26 | PET E R S LUG L ET T W I T H E DM U N D BU R K E I I I

Eastern cities from the perspective of the outside to the inside. In contrast to
earlier socioeconomic historians, who made litt le or no use of locally generated
materials and based their work mostly on consular reports and travel accounts,
Rafeq and Raymond and their students have written their histories principally
from the documents generated by the Islamic courts, which are abundant for
the period from the Ottoman conquest until the early twentieth century.44
These hitherto unexploited materials have opened up a treasure trove of con-
temporary information for Christian and Jewish as well as for Muslim commu-
nities. In addition, given the nature and scope of Islamic law, the procedures of
the court system covered, and were applied to, very broad areas of economic
and social life.
As well as being the place of resort for the resolution of disputes, courts
were used for notarial purposes, recording transactions such as debts and
house and land sales, as well as some, though not all, marriages and divorces,
and the fi nancial transactions that accompanied them. As Raymond shows
extensively in Artisans et commerçants au Caire, a court official (the qassam
shar‘i) made inventories of the possessions of the deceased, in order to arrive
at the canonically correct proportions to be distributed amongst the heirs.45
A comparison of sets of inheritance documents over a particular time span

44. After the promulgation of the Ottoman Civil Code (the mecelle) in 1876, large areas of
jurisdiction were transferred to the purview of the new civil courts. The records (sijillat) of the
Islamic courts (mahkama/mahakim shar‘iyya) of Ottoman Syria have survived largely intact
(and are preserved at the Centre for Historical Documents in Damascus). Unfortunately, less
attention was given to the preservation of the records of the “new” civil courts during the last
forty or fi ft y years of Ottoman rule (and indeed for much of the mandate), which seem to have
disappeared. The court records of what is now Jordan have been preserved at the Centre for
Archives and Manuscripts at the University of Jordan, Amman; see the handlist by Muham-
mad ‘Adnan al-Bakhit (1984). In Egypt, some of the court records have remained in the provin-
cial centers, and others are in Dar al-Watha’iq in Cairo. Najwa Al-Qatt an (2003) has surveyed
(and partially catalogued) the surviving sharia records of Beirut between 1843 and World War
I. It is possible that many of Iraq’s mahkama documents were destroyed or looted after the fall
of Baghdad in April 2003. Dina Khoury made extensive use of the Mosul court records in State
and Provincial Society in the Ottoman Empire (1997a).
45. Pascual and Establet (1994, 1998) used the succession registers for early eighteenth-
century Damascus; Hudson (forthcoming) used them for the late nineteenth and early twen-
tieth centuries.
 Introduction | 27

shows how the fortunes of families rose and fell. One important conclusion
for the period in question is that it was only ulama families who maintained
significant fortunes through their control of awqaf for any length of time.
The qadis (judges in the Islamic courts) adjudicated in all kinds of family
matters and ordered debtors to deceased individuals to discharge their debts to
the family of the deceased. They drew up the foundation documents of awqaf
(Roded 1988, 1990), and were frequently called to adjudicate on matters aris-
ing from them. As well as acting as notaries, judges pronounced (inter alia)
on matters affecting guilds and markets, prescribed the width of streets, and
gave or withheld permission for extensions to houses. Of course, since legal
procedures were not provided free of charge, it must be assumed that many
less-well-off people did not avail themselves of the courts, and to that extent
the historical record is incomplete. On the other hand, as Abraham Marcus
observes for mid-eighteenth-century Aleppo, “Women and ordinary people,
who barely figure in most other sources, appear on virtually every page of the
records.”46 Focusing on the court records, or sijillat, often gives us the oppor-
tunity to study social history in minute detail; changes in bride-price, urban
house prices, changes in the nature of pious foundations, the activities of the
guilds—the list is extremely comprehensive. Of course, the documents do not
by themselves constitute “unproblematic reflections of social reality,” as James
A. Reilly has remarked (2007); in addition, although this may seem a some-
what subjective observation, the major disadvantage of this material is that the
absence of what might be called surnames (or other forms of identification)
means that the information obtained is often generic rather than personal.
Thus, there may be a long case involving an individual, but short of reading
through every document (and even that is not foolproof) it is difficult to see
where, or if, he or she figures in the records again, whether the sentence was car-
ried out, or if the defendant or the plaintiff appeared in court again. So it is dif-
ficult, for instance, to piece together the details of an individual’s life or to write
wonderful micro-histories like those of Le Roy Ladurie or Carlo Ginzburg.47 It

46.”It bears remembering that the source material on eighteenth century Aleppo recounts
in its totality no more than a tiny fraction of what took place. As in other past societies, most of
the historical information was never recorded at all.” Marcus 1989, 11.
47. Th is has been attempted occasionally; see Toledano 1993.
28 | PET E R S LUG L ET T W I T H E DM U N D BU R K E I I I

is conceivable that all these legal registers—between five and seven for Aleppo
every year between 1540 and 1918, for example— might one day be computer-
ized and indexed, but that is probably quite a long way off. Another source of
considerable potential value that has been litt le utilized so far is the collection of
what are called in Arabic awamir sultaniyya, the general administrative decrees
and specific orders sent out by Istanbul to the provinces, which are available for
most of the Ottoman period.48

The Contributions to the Volume

In “Interdependent Spaces: Relations between the City and the Countryside

in the Nineteenth Century,” Sarah Shields emphasizes the linkages between
cities and their hinterlands. Rural dwellers depended on city merchants to
sell their crops or their sheep for them, to lend them money in hard times, and
to put out materials for rural textile manufacture. They depended on the gov-
ernment to maintain, or to attempt to maintain, security in the countryside,
so that crops and flocks would not be damaged or stolen. The state depended
on rural producers to provide foodstuff s to feed the cities and to generate
agricultural surpluses, which could either be remitted to Istanbul in cash
or be used locally to feed, clothe, or pay the state’s soldiers and bureaucrats.
Merchants and “landowners” were dependent on peasant labor for their own
fortunes; the rest of the urban population depended on rural production for
its own sustenance.
Although an obvious symbiosis characterized these relations for most of
the Ottoman period, major changes took place after the early nineteenth cen-
tury as the world-system penetrated more thoroughly into areas such as rural
Egypt, Iraq, and Syria. These changes gradually tilted the economic balance
of power fi rmly in favor of wealthy city dwellers and gradually disempow-
ered the cultivators and herders, or at least put them in positions of increasing
dependence. A particularly crucial instrument in this process, as a signifier of
these developments and as a major accelerant, was the Ottoman Land Code
of 1858 (Farouk-Sluglett and Sluglett 1983a; Sluglett and Farouk-Sluglett
1984), which effectively instituted a regime of private property on grain-
growing land. Th is facilitated the wider spread of hierarchical social relations

48. Masters (2001) has made extensive use of these documents.

 Introduction | 29

in the countryside and caused many peasants who could not prove their title,
or who believed that land registration was simply a prelude to conscription,
to lose their lands. Merchants often created famines or artificial shortages,
either to keep out foreign competition or to increase their own short-term
profit, and the local representatives of the Ottoman state regularly connived
in these activities (Fatt ah 1997, 139–57). Hence the nineteenth century saw
the beginnings of the increasing impoverishment of the peasantry, a process
whose many ramifications would bring widespread social unrest to the whole
region in the 1950s and 1960s.49
In “The Economic Organization of Cities in Ottoman Syria,” Abdul-Karim
Rafeq shows how a synthesis was made in the premodern period between dif-
ferent contemporary legal systems to produce pragmatic means of regulat-
ing the economy. Over time, especially in the nineteenth century, legal codes
would be imported from Europe to regulate the growing volume of European
and Ottoman trade. One of the principal urban economic institutions was the
guild, a form of organization that seems to have survived more or less intact
at least from the sixteenth to the mid–nineteenth century. The guilds grouped
together craftsmen engaged in the same fields of production, sale, and services,
and members of the various guilds would appear as a group for a variety of pur-
poses before the qadi in his court. Some guilds (butchers, builders) were closely
controlled by the Ottoman government, but most were not. New guilds were
developed as new tastes and activities arrived in the Syrian cities; associations
of those who sold coffee or ran coffee houses, of those who sold tobacco or pro-
vided spaces where pipes could be smoked. Many guilds were linked with the
Sufi orders, and progression from one rank to another (apprentice/journey-
man/master) was often marked by religious ceremonies. The guilds tended
to practice a closed shop in the sense that only guild members were permit-
ted to practice a certain occupation within a defi ned geographical area (nor-
mally a city), and they also maintained (or specified) quality and price control.
Some occupational guilds were mixed, containing Christians, Jews, and Mus-
lims (or any two of the three), while some only contained members of a single
religious community. There are examples of Muslim guild members electing
a Christian guild master or shaykh; we know about guild members’ religious

49. See Batatu’s studies of Iraq (1978) and Syria (1999); for Egypt, see Abdel-Fadil 1975.
30 | PET E R S LUG L ET T W I T H E DM U N D BU R K E I I I

affi liations because these are mentioned in the records on the occasions when
they appeared together before the qadi.
Rafeq also discuses aspects of business practice, especially the complex
question of credit and interest, both forbidden in Islamic legal theory, but evi-
dently practiced widely and recorded regularly before the qadi.50 The records
enable us to identify the lenders and the borrowers, and show, for instance, in
sixteenth-century Hama, that peasants were the most indebted social group
and the military the most frequent and the wealthiest lenders. In cases com-
ing to court between the 1730s and 1850s, interest rates ranged from 15 to 25
percent, often for periods as brief as six months.
There were radical changes in Syria after the French and Industrial Revo-
lutions. Trans-desert overland trade gradually declined, especially after the
opening of the Suez Canal in 1869; pilgrims going on the hajj could make the
journey much less strenuously by sea. Raw materials, especially cotton, silk,
wheat, and wool, were exported cheaply to Europe. Although the story is com-
plex (in that there are examples of positive or innovative adaptation to chang-
ing economic circumstances), most Syrian textile manufacturers suffered to
a greater or lesser extent in the late nineteenth century (Issawi 1986, 374–75;
Quataert 1993b; Sluglett 2002). Commercial courts, with a mixed composi-
tion of foreign consuls and their protégés and local Ottoman subjects, were
introduced in Aleppo in 1850 and Damascus in 1855. These changes, accom-
panied by novel and psychologically unsett ling declarations of the equality of
all Ottoman citizens on the part of the sultan and his representatives, brought
about the sense of a world turned upside down, which seems to have been at
the heart of the sectarian clashes of the 1850s and 1860s in Syria, Lebanon, and
elsewhere. By the early twentieth century, economy and society had existed
in a confusing state of transition for many decades, and many familiar social
institutions had been transformed beyond recognition (Fawaz 1994; Harel
1998; Masters 1990, 2001; Rafeq 1988a; Rogan 2004).
In “Political Relations between City and State in the Middle East,
1750–1850,” Dina Rizk Khoury begins with a brief discussion of the recent

50. Compare: “Despite Islam’s well-known ban on usury, a dependence on credit in vari-
ous forms permeated the entire fabric of Aleppo’s commercial life.” Masters 1988, 153. See
also Jennings 1973.
 Introduction | 31

historiography of the Ottoman Empire, commending recent trends in his-

tory writing that stress the importance of looking at the sources from both
the imperial (Ottoman) and provincial-urban (Arab) perspective. However,
as she remarks in chapter 3, historians are laboring at a considerable disadvan-
tage because “with some notable exceptions, there have been very few mono-
graphs based on the use of a combination of local and imperial records that
have explored the ways that the power of the state impinged on the lives of
ordinary subjects.”
After the Ottoman conquest, the cities of Anatolia and the Fertile Cres-
cent became the inheritors of the legacies of the Byzantines and the Seljuks.
From the Byzantines came the notion that provisioning cities and armies
would guarantee social order and facilitate the expansion of the empire;51
from the Byzantines and the Seljuks (and the Mamluks in the Fertile Cres-
cent) came the belief in the state’s obligation to control the price and qual-
ity of goods. Judges and governors were appointed to each province or city
directly from the center, so a model of the society resembled the spokes of
a wheel with (at least in theory) a highly centralized state at the hub. The
legal system was based on a combination of Islamic law (sharia) and imperial
edicts or statutes (qanun).
However well or badly the traditional system may have worked in earlier
periods, the capacity of the Ottoman state to enforce its will over many of the
provinces had largely broken down by the late eighteenth century. In Egypt
and Iraq, a succession of Mamluk rulers took power, while in Syria and Pales-
tine various condott ieri took advantage of the vacuum to impose their will on
the local population. 52 However, Khoury cautions against an unquestioning
acceptance of the standard interpretations of late seventeenth- and eighteenth-
century Ottoman history. She considers that the institution of tax farming,
rather than being symptomatic of the disintegration of state control, gave
some members of the local gentry a stake in the system (and thus had a cer-
tain integrative function, although it is not clear whether this was the intention

51. Hence the frequent attempts by the Ottoman state to ban wheat exports. See Braudel
1975, 1:592–94, and Masters 1988, 186–215.
52. See note 14 above. For eighteenth-century Egypt, see Hathaway 1997. For eighteenth-
and nineteenth-century Iraq, see Lier 2004.
32 | PET E R S LUG L ET T W I T H E DM U N D BU R K E I I I

of the Ottoman government). Also, state and city relations varied consider-
ably throughout the empire, according to the nature and economic power of
the urban elites, even within a given geographical area (such as “Egypt” or
“Syria”). Khoury suggests a categorization of urban centers in ways that may
make meaningful generalizations possible: major administrative and commer-
cial centers, port cities, small interior towns, and urban pilgrimage centers.
The rest of the chapter concerns the fi rst two categories.
In theory, Ottoman provincial governance was divided into three
spheres—administrative, military, and judicial—although by the early eigh-
teenth century this compartmentalization had largely ceased to function. In
the larger cities, the state negotiated agreements over military mobilization
and taxation, under which powerful local elites and their families became pro-
vincial governors and bureaucrats while individuals outside these elites were
given long-term or lifetime tax farms(malikanes), thus creating a degree of ten-
sion between the two groups. Thus, for example, the ‘Azms of Damascus and
the Jalilis of Mosul set up households that were able to maintain power locally
with the tacit acquiescence of Istanbul. Gradually, the judges lost their power
to the governors; they were no longer in charge of military provisioning, as
this function had devolved to local elites or to the governors themselves, who
would buy the provisions that the military consumed on the open market or
produce them on the lands that they owned themselves. They had also lost
charge of the recruitment of mercenaries and of the policing of the cities, in
both cases to the governor or to members of his household.
For a variety of reasons, the military functions of the janissaries gradu-
ally declined in the course of the eighteenth century, and most of the former
soldiers became absorbed into the urban social fabric as artisans or small mer-
chants. The relationship between the provincial notables, or a‘yan (that is, those
on lower rungs of the socioeconomic ladder than, say, the ‘Azms or the Jalilis)
and the state also changed in the late eighteenth century. The state became
increasingly reliant upon the a‘yan for the collection of taxes, and those with
malikanes had litt le incentive to forward more than a bare minimum to the
center and thus became increasingly independent of it.
The fortunes of the port cities were much more varied, depending on their
location and the political situation in their hinterlands. By the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries the ports had become heavily involved in trade with
 Introduction | 33

Europe, and the Ottoman state had far less control over them than it had over
other cities in the empire. Khoury concludes by sett ing out several items on
a future research agenda. In the fi rst place, the Ottoman Empire was clearly
not a monolith, and it is important to assess its impact, and the extent of its
power, from city to city. How did the interaction between state and society
shape power at a local level? Did the trajectories of urban elites vary from place
to place? Did the Tanzimat really represent such a sharp break with the past
as the received wisdom suggests? Finally, what can an examination of state
and city relations between the eighteenth and mid–nineteenth centuries tell
us about Middle Eastern urban society?
In “Political Relations between City and State in the Colonial Period,”
Leila Fawaz and Robert Ilbert discuss the transition from Ottoman to Euro-
pean rule at various times in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. They
point out that the role played by the Ottomans in the urban administration
of their Arab provinces has sometimes been presented in a rather negative
fashion by British, French, and Arab writers, the British and French seeking to
draw favorable conclusions from comparisons of their own administration of
the cities with that of the Ottomans (Sauvaget 1941; Longrigg 1925); in later
times the Arabs tended to paint the Ottomans as proto-colonialists. The prin-
cipal beneficiaries of the major shift of the region’s trade toward Europe were
the entrepreneurs of the port cities, especially those of Alexandria, Izmir, and
Beirut. As has been noted, these cities increased greatly in size throughout the
nineteenth century, att racting a mass of migrants from their rural hinterlands,
who often brought their sectarian fears and prejudices with them.
Well into the semicolonial and colonial periods, cities and their elites con-
tinued to play the pivotal roles they had played under the Ottomans. With the
arrival of the mandatory regimes, for instance, the notables developed new
contacts both with the colonial administrations and with a new generation of
“national” politicians. In addition, with the fall of the Ottoman Empire, the
political and socioeconomic elites of Aleppo, Basra, or Mosul no longer had
direct access to the center of power and thus were obliged to redefi ne their
identities within the parameters of the newly constructed nation-state. In the
process, some of the old notables lost what remained of the mediating role they
had played under the Ottomans, since they were considered to have thrown in
their lot too wholeheartedly with the colonial (or occupying) power. Th is was
34 | PET E R S LUG L ET T W I T H E DM U N D BU R K E I I I

particularly true of Iraq, but less so of Syria, where popular disenchantment with
French rule made collaboration a much less easy option. However, although the
colonial powers profoundly influenced the histories of the Arab states of the
Middle East, they made less impression on the physical environment, 53 in strik-
ing contrast to French North Africa, with its many villes nouvelles.
The authors stress the continuing importance of connections, wasta in
Arabic, of go-betweens mediating between individuals or groups and the state
(and its various bureaucracies), in spite of the widespread adoption of mod-
ern technologies. In the modern period, cities have also served increasingly
as communications and media hubs, and it has unfortunately been the case,
at least until the comparatively recent arrival of the Internet, that the media
has played a crucial role in the maintenance in power of highly centralized and
controlled dictatorial regimes throughout the region.
The military coups of the 1950s and 1960s largely broke the power
of the urban notables who had played a crucial role under the Ottomans,
under the various colonial regimes and, for a while, after independence in
most of the states. Of course, especially in the twentieth century, it is not
always easy to arrive at an accurate defi nition of “notable.” Should that defi-
nition have been applied to Nuri al-Sa‘id, fourteen times Prime Minister of
“Independent Iraq,” a military officer originally from a lower middle class
background, like many of his closest associates, but who became a tenacious
defender of the privileges of the class to which British assistance had ele-
vated him? After the overthrow of the various anciens régimes, the Middle
East has experienced a new phenomenon, the seizure of power by military
men, most of whom have originated from small country towns. Th is is not,
it can be confidently asserted, a modern instance of Ibn Khaldun’s cycles
of urban brilliance, followed by urban corruption and decline, followed by
renewal and reinvigoration from the desert or remote rural areas. Although
it may not have been immediately obvious, it soon became clear that the
middle ranking officers who replaced the notables turned out to be far more
dangerous, and single-mindedly ruthless, than their predecessors.

53. Shepherd (1999, 1–2) notes how litt le of British mandatory Jerusalem remains vis-
ible today. However, see chapter 5, note 13, on the influence of Michel Écochard on the urban
landscape of contemporary Damascus.
 Introduction | 35

In “The Demography of Middle Eastern Cities and the Expansion of Urban

Space,” Bernard Hourcade presents a survey of the principal population trends
in the region during the period. He draws attention to the dominant role played
by the two great cities of Istanbul and Cairo, the heterogeneity of Middle East-
ern and North African cultural contexts and the existence of several different
types of city, varying in age and economic activity. In 1950, the Middle East
was 24 percent urban, occupying an intermediate position between Europe
and North America (around 54 percent) and the major rural subcontinental
regions such as China and West Africa (around 10 percent). Of course, precise
statistics for most of the period before the late nineteenth century are hard to
fi nd, and Hourcade has made extensive use of recent monographs on the his-
tory of the region, using a sample of fi ft y cities. In general, the population of
the region probably quadrupled between 1800 and 1950, from about 27 mil-
lion to about 111 million.
At the beginning of the period, there were only “traditional” or “oriental”
cities (although Hourcade’s categorization is extremely broad). By the end of
the period “dual cities” had emerged, with suburbs inhabited by Europeans
or the new local elites, alongside the older city. It is interesting to see how the
list of the ten largest cities in the region has fluctuated over the centuries; only
Cairo, Istanbul, and Damascus remained on the list between 1800 and 1970.
In more recent times, two of the main demographic trends in the region have
been substantial rural to urban migration beginning in the 1950s and the dis-
proportionate growth of capitals in comparison with the sizes of the next larg-
est cities. 54 For most of the nineteenth century, however, demographic growth
was as litt le as 1 percent per annum, rising to 1.5 percent per annum between
1870 and 1930, followed by a spurt of rapid growth that has continued to
increase exponentially ever since. Slow growth in the nineteenth century was
due partly to cholera and other epidemics, together with high mortality and
fertility rates, but also by a degree of rural and urban integration. Thus, much
craft industry was carried out on a subcontracting basis, with urban entre-
preneurs providing, say, rural weavers, with piecework or work at a particular
stage in the production process. Improvements in sanitation and advances in

54. Thus, according to U.N. figures for 2002, Greater Baghdad had a population of 6.7
million, followed by Mosul (1.79 million), Basra (1.4 million).
36 | PET E R S LUG L ET T W I T H E DM U N D BU R K E I I I

medicine brought about declining mortality rates, and, as noted above, rural
people began to migrate to the cities in large numbers by the 1950s.
Hourcade uses a number of examples to illustrate different factors pro-
moting population growth or decline: the emergence of new capitals under
the mandates, the relative integration of subregions into the world economy,
and in the case of Istanbul a massive out-migration of Greeks, Armenians, and
Jews by 1923, resulting in a declining population, and in the case of Tel Aviv,
mushrooming growth due to Jewish immigration.
In the nineteenth century, even under conditions of fairly slow demo-
graphic growth, Middle Eastern and North African cities became overcrowded,
largely because of their confi nement within their city walls. The streets were
narrow and crowded and there were few open public spaces. At least as long as
the original foundations remained in existence, waqf properties were main-
tained and kept in order; of course they could not be sold, which meant that a
significant proportion of urban real estate was frozen. Th is partly explains the
fairly long survival of traditional inner cities, at least until the appearance of
the revolutionary regimes of the 1960s and 1970s. 55
At the end of the nineteenth century, rulers who had visited Europe or
had European advisors began to reconstruct their capitals; this took place in
Teheran, Cairo, and Istanbul. Major transformations took place after 1870,
with new European cities being built alongside the medinas of Algiers, Mek-
nès, Marrakech, and Rabat; the North African cities generally lacked an indig-
enous modern bourgeoisie. New “Western” suburbs were built in Aleppo and
Cairo, and, rather later, in Tehran, which was extensively redesigned under
Reza Shah. Thus, between 1800 and 1950 many Middle Eastern and North
African cities found new identities, largely as a result of the recasting of the
relationship between their traditional cores and their modern peripheries.
In “Moving Out of Place: Minorities in Middle Eastern Urban Societies,
1800–1914,” Gudrun Krämer discusses the changing role of the minorities
in the twin contexts of nation-formation and modernization, suggesting that
non-Muslims were the most visible consumers and agents of modernity. She
is concerned with three sets of questions: fi rst, what was the extent to which

55. For a discussion of the “problem” of urban waqf in mid-twentieth-century Aleppo and
the state’s attempts to tackle it, see David and Hreitani 1984.
 Introduction | 37

social and physical boundaries were modified or redrawn in the course of mod-
ernization? Second, how far did the effects of modernization involve a break
with traditional patterns of interaction between Muslims and non-Muslims?
Th ird, how general was the phenomenon, and how far was it characteristic of
nineteenth-century Middle Eastern urban society?
Of course there were and are many kinds of minority in the Middle East:
ethnic, religious, heterodox Muslims, and so on. Much of the literature on
minority communities focuses on the larger cities, and it is the case that Jewish
communities have been studied more widely than Christian ones. Again, the
diverse functions of the minorities in different cities, and the very varying state
of knowledge about them, means that it is often difficult to generalize.
Clearly, religious affi liation was and, although not always in the same
ways, still is an important marker of group identity in the Muslim world.
“Built-in” Muslim privilege was not necessarily a cause of tension, since those
involved knew the rules well enough. Historically, Muslim/dhimmi relations
were regulated by placing clear and visible boundaries between the two. Most
obviously, all able-bodied adult male dhimmis paid an additional tax, the jizya,
until its abolition by the Ottomans in 1856. The situation of the non-Muslims
varied according to historical circumstances; thus the Crusades ushered in a
period where the lot of the Christians became noticeably harsher, and at other
times conversion to Islam (especially among Christians) caused the commu-
nities to diminish in number over time. By the early nineteenth century the
millet system in the Ottoman Empire gave the communities so designated
(and more were added in the course of the century) a degree of communal
autonomy under the authority of their bishops, patriarchs, rabbis, etc. Of
course, as has already been noted, this kind of autonomy did not prevent the
minority communities from pursuing, for example, cases against one another
in the Islamic courts.
Except in Morocco and Iran at various times, there was no enforced social
segregation of the communities, although there was a tendency for communi-
ties to concentrate in specific neighborhoods. Jews tended to live in largely
Jewish quarters grouped round the synagogue (Judaism has a series of regula-
tions on the subject of how far one can walk on the Sabbath), and there were
some city quarters, in Aleppo, for instance, which were entirely Christian,
grouped round the city’s churches. Gaube and Wirth’s tables show that out
38 | PET E R S LUG L ET T W I T H E DM U N D BU R K E I I I

of the ninety-nine quarters of the old city, fi ft y were entirely Muslim, one was
91 percent Jewish, eighteen were more than 80 percent Christian, and the rest
more thoroughly mixed. 56 In any case, “quarters” were far less static in some
cities than in others; some were enclosed by walls and gates which were shut at
night, while others were not.
The only major instance of labor segregation was in the military, where
non-Muslims did not serve. Otherwise, Muslims and non-Muslims worked
alongside each other in most occupations (see chapter 4). Non-Muslims were
disproportionately represented in long-distance trade, often supported in
these endeavors by, for instance, the Safavid state in the case of the Armenians
of New Julfa and the sultans of Morocco in the case of the Jews of Mogador.
Jews and Christians often held sizeable tax farms and acted as bankers to Otto-
man provincial governors.
In the course of the Tanzimat reforms, various Islamic legal provisions
relating to the minorities were relaxed, culminating in the formal ending of
legal inequality between Muslims and non-Muslims and the creation of a form
of universal Ottoman citizenship. Non-Muslims could now serve in the army
(or, as most did, pay an exemption fee). Christians and Jews could now build
churches and synagogues, if they could obtain the necessary building permits
from the Ottoman authorities. The capitulations (in Arabic imtiyazat [ajnabi-
yya]), which had benefitted foreigners and their local protégés since the six-
teenth century, were greatly extended in the nineteenth century, so that many
thousands of locals and their descendants acquired either foreign protection or
(more rarely) foreign citizenship. More generally, the powers acted “officially”
as the protectors of the various minority communities, although the benefits
of this connection did not always flow very far down the social scale. On the
other hand, less respectable foreigners often lived beyond the reach of the law
in many Middle Eastern cities (Alexandria, Cairo, Istanbul, Izmir), because it
was extremely difficult for the local authorities to arrest or try them.
The nineteenth century also saw considerable growth in the urban non-
Muslim population, composed partly of foreigners (in Alexandria, Istanbul,
and Izmir), and partly of rural immigrants. One of the reasons for this was

56. Gaube and Wirth 1984, 427–33. The tables are derived from volume 3 of al-Ghazzi
1926.
 Introduction | 39

the considerable liberalization in trade with Europe after the signature of the
Treaty of Balta Liman (the Anglo-Ottoman Commercial Treaty) in 1838,
which was followed by similar agreements with other European powers. Once
more, non-Muslims played a disproportionately large role, although Muslims
still dominated the grain trade and much of the trade with the hinterlands of
the inland cities. 57 Local non-Muslims, educated in schools run by foreign
missionaries or by the Alliance Israélite Universelle (founded in 1860), could
be extremely useful to European businessmen, in that the non-Muslims could
communicate with them and generally knew both Arabic and Ottoman Turk-
ish. In spite of all this it must be remembered that most Middle Eastern Chris-
tians and Jews remained as poor, illiterate, and cut off from the benefits that
modernity was showering as much upon their richer co-religionists as their
Muslim counterparts.
With the Tanzimat reforms came various declarations of equality for
the non-Muslims, accompanied by the abolition both of barriers to social
mobility and of the distinctive markers that had enabled members of the
various communities to recognize each other in public. Wealthy Christians
and Jews could now build houses as opulent as those of wealthy Muslims and
increasingly shared the fashionable suburbs with them. 58 Of course, centu-
ries of legally superior and inferior status could not be made to disappear
overnight with the stroke of a pen, and “the ‘vertical’ element of religious
and ethnic identification was never fully supplanted by the ‘horizontal’ ele-
ment of class.” Other chapters in this volume mention the violent incidents
that wrought havoc in Aleppo in 1850, Damascus in 1860, and elsewhere,
explaining them less as the result of sectarian antagonism than as stemming
from a general sense, especially on the part of the Muslim Lumpenproletariat,
that a familiar world order was crumbling about their ears, which made them
lash out in panic against those whom they saw as the source of their misfor-
tunes. But, as Krämer emphasizes, these were not religious wars against non-
Muslims. Poor Christians and Jews, especially those living in the quarters of

57. For an analysis of a list of merchants trading in various commodities in Aleppo in

1908, see Sluglett 2002.
58. Non-Muslims formed 91 percent of the population of the six new suburbs built out-
side Aleppo between 1868 and 1895; see Gaube and Wirth 1984, 434.
40 | PET E R S LUG L ET T W I T H E DM U N D BU R K E I I I

Damascus with Muslim majorities, were rarely att acked and indeed in many
instances were protected by their Muslim neighbors. On the other hand,
the better-off non-Muslims were regarded as associates and agents of the
European powers, a sort of local economic fi ft h column, helping outsiders to
weaken the infrastructures of the state. They became objects of suspicion on
the part of their contemporaries, their loyalty to the Ottoman state increas-
ingly open to question.
In “Urban Social Movements, 1750–1970,” Sami Zubaida describes the
gradual emergence of modern politics from old patterns of urban popular
mobilization in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In traditional
urban politics, the principal actors were, fi rst, the ‘askaris, the Ottoman mili-
tary rulers, the pasha with his retinue of soldiers and administrators. Ottoman
cities also had janissary regiments, but, as has been noted already, the janissar-
ies’ functions as soldiers of the crown had gradually declined over time, and
they had become increasingly absorbed into the local population. Apart from
the military, the urban power elite consisted of the notables, both religious
and civil (merchants and landowners), whose fortunes and families were often
intertwined.
Below the power elites were the ra‘ya, or subjects, who (together with
their peasant contemporaries) paid the taxes exacted by the state, often set
quite arbitrarily by governors bent on making profits as quickly as possible.
Ordinary taxes were supplemented by extraordinary ones (such as those to
fi nance military campaigns to subdue local tribes). The Christian and Jewish
communities were frequently subjected to Draconian demands that would be
rescinded in return for cash payments.
Much urban confl ict in the premodern period concerned taxation and the
provision (or the shortage) of food. Often with the connivance of the authorities,
merchants hoarded food to force prices up, and the poor would riot in protest.
Although the exactions of the Ottoman state were often extremely harsh, local
notables behaved no less brutally during the periods when the state temporar-
ily lost control, as in much of Syria and Egypt in the late eighteenth century. In
“Urban Social Movements, 1750–1950,” Sami Zubaida gives vivid examples of
popular activity in the poor quarters of Cairo in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries and then again in the early nineteenth centuries (particularly during
the events between the Napoleonic invasion and the installation of Muhammad
 Introduction | 41

‘Ali as viceroy). In the earlier period, food shortages, price fluctuations, and cur-
rency debasements would cause crowds to assemble at the citadel; stones would
be thrown and stores looted. Reactions would vary; sometimes severe repres-
sion would follow, sometimes edicts regulating prices and supplies would be
issued. Such incidents were relatively rare at times of stable prices.
Such instances of popular protest were generally tied to purely material
demands, although there would often be calls for a “just prince” to sett le mat-
ters justly by applying sharia law in an equitable manner. (There was also an
element—however tongue in cheek—of “If only our ruler knew what crimes
his servants were committ ing in his name.”) Notions of right and wrong were
invariably tied to religious concepts, although the ulama, especially the higher
ulama of, say, al-Azhar, rarely protested against the imposition of noncanoni-
cal taxes, and their interests were seldom close to those of the masses.
With the advent of Muhammad ‘Ali and the fairly universal application of
the Tanzimat reforms in Greater Syria by the 1840s, and in Iraq by the 1870s,
the foundations of what became, or were to become, centralized nation-states
were laid throughout the region. 59 New classes emerged: the secular (that
is, modern educated rather than religious educated) intelligentsia, and the
industrial workers. However, the mass of the urban population, swollen in the
twentieth century by increasing rural to urban migration, was only casually or
occasionally employed, and then mostly in “the informal economy” (Santos
1979). Sometimes the urban poor could be mobilized by the Communists, as
in mid-twentieth-century Iraq and Iran, sometimes by the Nasserists, and per-
haps most obviously by the Islamists in Iran in the late 1970s.
In Egypt in the 1940s there was a struggle for control of the labor move-
ment between the Wafd, the Communists, and the Muslim Brothers; in Iraq
the Communists were more fi rmly in control. The main actors in all these
movements were from the modern secular intelligentsia: teachers, junior mili-
tary officers, bureaucrats, students, and organized workers. Iran centralized
much later, so elites retained power in provincial cities for much longer. In the
late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries there were protests against the
Qajar shahs’ grants of concessions to foreigners, and of course the Constitu-
tional Revolution of 1905–11, which contained a complex mix of traditional

59. Th is did not take place in Iran until the reign of Reza Shah (1925–41).
42 | PET E R S LUG L ET T W I T H E DM U N D BU R K E I I I

and modern elements, led to a long civil war between royalists and constitu-
tionalists. As in other comparable situations, the poor were on both sides of the
divide, according to their view of which faction best supported their own mate-
rial interests.60 The struggles of the 1940s and 1950s, and in a sense the Iranian
Revolution, all represent an extension of this confl ict. By the beginning of the
twenty-fi rst century “the newly urbanized poor [had] been largely cut off from
any source of political organization or mobilization, except, that is, for ‘Islam,’
which was generally able to escape repression through the mosque, communal
networks, and welfare services.”
The chapters in this book represent a variety of approaches to urban social
history and range over a number of different topics in economic and social his-
tory. The contributors are generally agreed on a number of points: the inter-
connectedness of city and countryside until the region’s more thoroughgoing
exposure to the forces of the world market; the often cataclysmic effects of that
exposure in the nineteenth century; the importance (and freedom of maneu-
ver) of local political actors in what is often characterized as the apparently
despotic and highly centralized Ottoman Empire); the general absence of
deep-rooted sectarian hatreds; and the explanation of sectarian violence as
having economic rather than religious roots. As the Middle East and North
Africa begin the long and fitful march toward democracy and civil society, it is
essential that urban organizations and institutions, however battered they may
have been by the events of the last half century, will be able to play their part
in the political revitalization of the region, and in particular in implementing
visions of a better future for its long-suffering inhabitants.

60. Cf. the following salutary warning, here in the context of the Peruvian “middle class”
in the fi rst half of the twentieth century: “At the very least, we must reject the idea that social
classes speak with a single voice, act as a single individual or play a single role in the shaping of
historical destiny.” Parker 1998, 6.
 2
Interdependent Spaces
Relations Between the City and the
Countryside in the Nineteenth Century
SA R A H D. SH I ELDS

• I N T H E C O U R S E of the nineteenth century, cities and their hinterlands

throughout the world became more intricately linked together as increasing
demand for raw materials both on the part of growing local populations and of
expanding European industries made agricultural production more valuable.
City people with money to invest in the countryside found lucrative oppor-
tunities, but at the same time the consolidation of their control over rural
production left both peasants and urban dwellers vulnerable, especially the
former.1 The rural Middle East was a diverse world, with a variety of languages,
architectural styles, clothing, and terrain. Peasant customs, land tenure, and
methods of cultivation varied substantially between the highlands of Iran

1. As perceptively summarized for rural Syria more than seventy years ago: “The depen-
dence of the rural areas on the city is an essential feature [of the relationship]. . . . The relative
situation of the parties is inherently unequal. On the one hand, the city has the monopoly of all
power: wealth, education, political and administrative capacity, even religious pre-eminence,
since Islam is an urban religion. On the other, the peasant, the ‘fellah,’ without resources, is
permanently at the mercy of a bad harvest; without education, he is at the mercy of administra-
tive or private exactions; without both political power and religious knowledge, he can only
obey the wishes, or the whims, of the city dwellers.” Weulersse 1934, 30 (translated from the
original French).
43
44 | S A R A H D. S H I E L DS

and the Syrian desert. What rural inhabitants did have in common was their
importance as laborers, consumers, and producers of food and raw materials.
Peasants grew wheat, barley, and legumes, the basic food crops of the region.
In addition, they harvested fruits, vegetables, tobacco, and nuts; collected dye-
stuffs; and raised animals.
Even as the nineteenth century opened, the city and the countryside lived
not in separate impermeable spaces, but in a mutual space, sharing people, the
things they made, and the things they used. Labor was exchanged between the
urban and rural populations, and regular movements of people were common.
In Mount Lebanon, for example, silk production tied the city and the hinter-
lands together, as peasants from Mount Lebanon traveled to the suburbs of
Beirut to help with the silk harvest, and merchants from the mountain came to
conduct business (Fawaz 1983, 39). Herds of cows leaving Tripoli each morn-
ing and returning to the city every evening attested to the continuing connec-
tions between the city and rural areas.2 Harvesting raw material crops, which
were required for both internal industry and foreign trade, contributed to the
creation of bonds between the city and the countryside. Peasants coming to
the city may have been a bit uncomfortable with its ideas and its novelties, but
they would still have found the place familiar and would certainly have used
the journey as an opportunity to enter the marketplace. During difficult times
visitors may have sought to sell their own labor, and during celebrations they
might visit relatives who had migrated earlier. Thus by the middle of the nine-
teenth century, food and clothing, people, tools, and luxuries had been going
back and forth between the two spheres as long as anyone could remember
(Toledano 1990, 196–206).
The very structure of the city illustrates the intimate connection between
the urban space and its rural hinterland. The commercial district of a city was
often geographically contiguous with its principal hinterland. In Damascus, the
city was divided between areas servicing the grain trade, a “localist” area with
“intimate ties with the grain and meat-producing hinterland” on one hand, and
on the other, the central rectangle, which was oriented toward external trade

2. Faroqhi 1989, 3–34, describing Abdel Nour’s work (Abdel Nour 1982a). Cf. the
remarks on Narbonne and Angoulême in chapter 1.
 Interdependent Spaces | 45

and “high Islamic and imperial culture.” Merchants often acted as mediators
between the urban and rural economies (Schatkowksi Schilcher 1985, 16).
When approaching the city of Mosul from the Tigris, a peasant would have
crossed over a bridge of boats and, immediately inside the gate, would have
found himself inside the city’s busy commercial center. Th is hub extended
from the currency exchange in the geographical center, in a cone shape, to
the river. The cone included all of the city’s major institutions: the small shops
where goods were manufactured and sold, grouped in large bazaars; the khans
for merchants and travelers; the citadel housing the government and troops,
and the great mosque (al-Janabi 1981, 17–19, 25; Raymond 1985, 228–71).
Thus, all the most important functions of the city opened immediately onto
the countryside, expressing the critical connection between those inside and
those outside the city walls.

Change in the Nineteenth Century

Urban structures and economic institutions had been connected with the
surrounding countryside for centuries, but military, economic, and demo-
graphic changes had led to increasing interdependence. The circumstances
of war and other military requirements fueled some of the growth in agricul-
tural production in the nineteenth century. For instance, Ibrahim Pasha, the
son of Muhammad ‘Ali, the ruler of Egypt, required large amounts of grain to
feed his army of occupation in Syria in the 1830s. At the same time, the pres-
ence of such an extensive military force provided the security necessary for
the safe harvest of the crops. Rural security also meant that the taxes could be
collected. These taxes, often taken in kind, provided more food for the army
(Sluglett and Farouk-Sluglett 1984). As the need grew even greater, new lands
were brought under cultivation. 3 During the Crimean War, both the Ottomans
and their European allies needed extra food for their forces. Cereal prices leapt
upward, making investment in agriculture increasingly att ractive.
During the nineteenth century, growing Middle Eastern populations con-
tinued to require increasing proportions of their own crops, both for food and

3. For the notion of the Syrian “desert line” and the expansion of the area under cultiva-
tion in the nineteenth century, see N. Lewis 1987, 15–24, 49–57.
46 | S A R A H D. S H I E L DS

local industries.4 The countryside fed the city population and provided the
wherewithal for its manufacturing at a time when synthetic fertilizers and pes-
ticides could not dramatically alter output, when many areas farmed without
the benefit of irrigation, and when mechanization was still in its infancy. 5
At the same time that local and regional needs were growing, demand for
Middle Eastern crops was expanding into ever broader circles. Global inter-
est in the region’s rural products reflected recurrent European political crises,
population growth, industrialization, and better communications. Algerian
grain fed Napoleon’s armies, and quarrels over the debts that the French had
contracted in purchasing it led to the invasion of 1830. Britain’s repeal of the
Corn Laws in 1846 opened previously protected markets to Middle Eastern
exports. Exports of agricultural goods were not restricted to grain. Thus, when
the American Civil War cut off supplies of New World cotton in the early
1860s, Middle Eastern producers and officials responded not only by plant-
ing more cotton, but also by beginning work on the ginning factories needed
to process the crop and the railways needed to transport it. The cultivation of
silkworms led to the production of raw silk, Lebanon’s most important export
crop, which increased dramatically during the pébrine epidemic in France.
Tunisia’s growing oil exports provided essential materials for Marseille’s flour-
ishing soap industry, while increasing demand fed the wool trade of Mosul.
Growing demand for raw materials in the mechanized factories of Europe
encouraged massive exports of both cotton and wool.6
Heightened interest in agricultural produce at home and abroad led mer-
chants to develop innovative strategies to secure their own supplies. In both

4.”During the nineteenth century the population of the . . . Middle East [specifically Tur-
key, Greater Syria, and Iraq] increased by roughly 300 percent, from somewhere between 11 to
12 million to approximately 32 to 33 million.” Owen 1981a, 287.
5. In Tunisia, droughts caused declining harvests during many years of the fi rst half of
the nineteenth century, to the extent that the authorities were often obliged to import grain
(Valensi 1985, 222–23).
6. İslamoğlu-İnan 1987; Pamuk 1987; Kasaba 1988; Owen 1981a, 111; Owen 1981b,
532–33; Valensi 1985, 224; Shields 2000, chapter 5. The literature on the social and economic
consequences of the new emphasis on production for the world market is growing. See Dou-
mani 1995; Cuno 1992; İnalcik 1973a; Khater 2001; Tucker 1985; Quataert 1983; Rafeq 1983;
Raymond 1974.
 Interdependent Spaces | 47

the sett led agricultural and pastoral sectors, merchants acquired increasing
control over the means of production as a way of guaranteeing their commodi-
ties.7 Their direct investment in the rural areas increased over the century,
leading to more intricate connections between cities and their hinterlands,
and changed the ways in which families acquired wealth and power.

Agriculture

The consumption of food reflected the most fundamental interaction between

the cities and their hinterlands. Although some space was set aside inside city
walls for cultivation, large cities remained dependent on rural people to pro-
duce the ingredients for their meals. In both prosperous and in difficult times,
the dinner of an urban family in the nineteenth century would be based on
wheat. For less affluent families, and in times of hardship, city dwellers literally
survived on wheat, the most important commodity in most of the nineteenth-
century Middle East.
Peasants planted the seeds, cultivated, watered, tended, and worried over
the crops. In a good year their labor-intensive harvest might yield eight grains
of wheat for each one they had put into the soil. Those eight grains would have
to be divided, one to be set aside for the next fall’s sowing, some to feed the
family until the next harvest, and some to pay the tax collector. Anything left
over could be sold for cash or traded for necessities. Floods, drought, or inse-
curity in the countryside could destroy the crops and with them both the peas-
ants’ income and the food for the urban and rural population.
Images of the peasant walking into the city marketplace alongside a don-
key cart overflowing with grains, fruits, and vegetables tell only a small part
of how the surplus from the countryside came to the urban center. In most
places, indeed, regular market days saw an influx of farmers from the rural hin-
terland into the cities to sell whatever crops they might have over and above
what they needed to feed their families and pay their debts. 8 Far more of the

7. It is important to note the development of stratification within the peasantry, with

wealthier peasants also engaged in the struggle for the rural surplus. Because this chapter deals
with connections between city and countryside, I have not included a discussion of the conse-
quences of class changes in the countryside. See Cuno 1992; D. Khoury 1997a.
8. Cuno (1992, 49–55) described the market system in Egypt.
48 | S A R A H D. S H I E L DS

food found in the cities, however, reflected the methods by which urban people
came to control the agricultural surplus during the nineteenth century: taxes,
credit, and landownership.
Urban investment in rural products was hardly new in the Middle East
during the nineteenth century, as urban merchants had long retained ties to
agricultural producers. Nonetheless, a combination of growing local and inter-
national demand drew astute urban investors with the prospect of both wealth
and power. Indeed, many historians have sketched a transition during the late
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as power was increasingly shift ing from
those with strictly urban property and investments in long-distance luxury
trade to those with strong rural connections who acquired their wealth from
the products of the city’s rural hinterland.9

Tax Collection

Taxes were essential to the Ottoman state, and from its inception, taxation on
agricultural produce of all kinds had formed the main staple of the empire’s rev-
enue. For a time, taxes were based on extensive cadastral surveys, and revenues
from specific lands were assigned to individual military leaders and officials to
compensate them for their services to the empire. Changes in the military and
bureaucratic structures of the empire rendered the old system of paying “tra-
ditional” military leaders superfluous. On the other hand, centralized bureau-
cratic tax collection that would have required moving tax collectors to the site
of all the farming villages would have entailed prohibitive expense in the far-
flung Ottoman Empire.
By the end of the sixteenth century, direct collection was gradually evolv-
ing into a system of tax farming, in which prominent urban notables bid for the
right to collect the taxes and then sent a lump sum to the central government.
As long as the tax collector provided the amount agreed, the central govern-
ment had litt le interest in how much was demanded from the peasants, the

9. Schatkowski Schilcher commented that this power changed internal politics in Damas-
cus: “The success of the grain cartel transformed provincial politics from the mid-nineteenth-
century onwards, for the profits made in the countryside eclipsed those of the overland urban
trade in luxury wares which had been the economic base of the dominant urban faction since
the eighteenth century.” (1991a, 173, 181). Faroqhi (1989, 13–14) also reviews this issue.
 Interdependent Spaces | 49

time when the taxes were to be paid, or the form in which they were demanded.
During periods of decentralized government, tax collecting provided both a
route to, and a reflection of, wealth and power. By the beginning of the nine-
teenth century, many tax farms had become hereditary, allowing elite fami-
lies to consolidate the wealth that came from control over tax collection, and,
ultimately, the power that came from control over the food supply of the city
population. The Ottoman government’s intermittent attempts to rationalize
and centralize tax collection during the nineteenth century did not succeed in
ending the use of various kinds of contract tax collection.10
The three major elements over which the central government ceded con-
trol—the amount, timing, and type of tax collection—had enormous impact
on both the peasantry and the urban population. Tax farmers could, and often
did, claim exorbitant amounts in taxes, leaving the peasants too few of the
eight grains for their own use. That could lead directly to famine, not only in
the countryside but also in the city. The interconnecting web becomes clear
here: if the seed grains were no longer available because of extortionate taxa-
tion, the next crop could not be planted, the family would not be able to eat, the
peasants would flee the land and correspondingly less food would be available
for the city during the succeeding year.
Taking taxes at irregular times and switching from taxes in kind to taxes
in cash also had a significant impact upon the city; these variations changed
the relationships between the city and the countryside. Sometimes tax farm-
ers estimated payment before the crop was harvested, with payment to be
made after harvest. Of course, before the grain could fi nally be brought in
and handed over, the farmer might incur losses in harvesting, through hail,
or through the voracious locusts that all too frequently devoured the crops.
In that case, estimated taxes based on the yields that the tax farmer had pro-
jected months earlier would reflect a huge proportion of the fi nal crop. Some
tax farmers demanded payment before the harvest, and the peasants had to
borrow money in order to pay. In the absence of banks, the cultivators were

10. For a description of the classical system, see İnalcik 1973b. For the reforms, see Shaw
1975. Barkan argued that the standardization of tax rates had inherent problems, caused by
the lack of uniformity in previous taxes, local customs, and local production conditions (1940,
354, 357–58).
50 | S A R A H D. S H I E L DS

forced to rely either on a rural elite that was present in some places, or, more
commonly, on the urban elite.
When the tax farmers demanded that taxes be paid in cash, this created
ripples throughout the rural economy. Changing to taxation in cash some-
times meant a change in the kind of products that peasants grew. If the cul-
tivator needed cash to pay taxes, he or she had to be careful to grow a crop
that could be sold on the market. In places with adequate irrigation, a second
crop, perhaps cotton or rice, could be grown during the summer for sale on the
market. In places where peasants were unable to acquire cash from the sale of a
second crop, the introduction of taxation in cash, like increasing taxes, simply
led to greater indebtedness among the rural population.11

Money Lending

When the rural population was forced to borrow money as a result of high
taxes, cash taxes, or tax demands in advance, the lenders were usually located
in the city. Urban moneylenders provided advances against part of the next
year’s crop so that peasants could pay taxes. Whatever the demands of the tax
collectors, few cultivators had ready money for the ordinary expenses associ-
ated with farming. They often purchased on credit from merchants, with the
loans payable at the harvest. The lender sold grain for seed or food back to the
cultivators, often at prices higher than he had originally paid to the farmers
themselves. Sometimes the peasants borrowed additional money for animals
or other expenses. Debts often took years to pay off, and in spite of the Islamic
prohibition on usury, interest terms were often excessive, and repayment peri-
ods could range from twenty to as much as sixty years.12
The credit available to peasants tied them directly to urban moneylenders,
who competed with the tax collectors for access to the rural surplus (Rafeq

11. Owen (1981a, 37) described larger repercussions in some places. It is worth pointing
out that, miserable as the peasant’s lot undoubtedly was, the fact that a certain level of agricul-
tural production was able to continue at all meant that there must have been at least some room
for maneuver and/or “resistance.” See Scott 1985, especially 28–47.
12. Rassam to Canning, 9 August, 6 September 1845, Great Britain, Foreign Office (FO)
195/228 (National Archives, Kew); Meriwether 1987. See also Rafeq’s article in this volume
(chapter 4) and Jennings 1973.
 Interdependent Spaces | 51

1984a). Lending money to the rural population was not only a lucrative activ-
ity for the merchants, who received substantial interest and could impose
harsh payment terms, it also secured their access to rural commodities. In
1858, Christian Rassam (d. 1872), one of the leading merchants of Mosul, who
had been British Vice-Consul since 1839, agreed to hand over all the grain he
received (15 percent of the harvest) to pay the grain tax. His profit would come
from the irrigated summer cash crops: he would receive half of all the cotton,
sesame, and rice. From this half, he would pay all taxes on the summer crops,
the money for a conscription levy, the costs of seed, and repairs to irrigation
works. Nonetheless, that still left him an estimated profit of 20 percent of the
irrigated summer crops.13
Urban creditors were clearly tied into the economy of the countryside, and
the sheer amount of money owed to these agricultural moneylenders some-
times appeared as a threat to the government. When the crops seemed likely
to fail, as in 1845, the governor of Mosul specifically forbade the townspeople
to demand their debts from cultivators, fearing that the small surplus, if paid to
the creditors, would leave him with nothing left to collect as taxes. Th is com-
petition was dangerous for the merchants, as Rassam pointed out: if the gov-
ernment took the entire surplus, the urban creditors might lose not only their
interest, but also access to the crops which constituted their merchandise.
To protect the peasantry from the poverty that could be brought on by
the high interest rates on agricultural loans (up to half of the crop if the lender
provided irrigation and maintenance as well as tools and seed), a rudimen-
tary agricultural savings bank was established in Mosul in 1884. Richards,
the British consul, described the working of the bank and explained its lack
of success:

Th is bank lends to those in need at the rate of 1 per cent per month, with a
lien on the borrower’s land for twice the amount, such loans not being made
for a period exceeding a year. If the loan be not returned with interest at
the end of the year the property given as a guarantee will be sold, and the
amount due to the bank recovered from the proceeds of the sale, the surplus,

13. Rassam to Alison, 10 July 1858, FO 195/603 (National Archives, Kew) ; “Correspon-
dence between Mr. Rassam and the Pasha of Moossul 1858.”
52 | S A R A H D. S H I E L DS

if there be any, being returned to the borrower. It appears that these con-
ditions have had a considerably deterrent effect upon many peasants who
otherwise would have been only too glad to profit by so useful an institu-
tion. . . . I am given to understand that the experiment so far is not generally
considered a success.14

The experiment in commercial credit continued, but peasants still relied pri-
marily on the familiar moneylender. Salam contracts, under which speculators
bought crops well before the harvest, were common throughout the region
because they provided the peasant with the capital needed for agriculture
while providing merchants with much coveted agricultural products. Although
technically illegal under Islamic law, these contracts seem to have been ubiq-
uitous in the Middle East and significantly increased the connection between
urban and rural populations. Valensi noted the existence of salam contracts
for Tunisian oil in the 1830s. Doumani described the system as applied to oil
from Nablus; Cuno, for rice in the Egyptian Delta; and Shields, for wool from
Mosul.15 Th is indebtedness gave the urban tax collector or moneylender secure
access to crops to sell and substantial control over the adjacent countryside, a
means of control that, Meriwether argued, was more powerful in the long term
than mere tax collection (1987, 69–70).

Landowning

By the middle of the nineteenth century, new demands and expanding markets
encouraged urban merchants to increase and diversify their involvement and
investment in the countryside. There were clearly enormous profits to be made
from lending money, from the sale of wheat, from the skyrocketing demand for
rural produce in neighboring areas, and from foreign demand for agricultural
goods. In order both to ensure their access to the crops that would provide
their profits, and to lessen their dependence on rural food producers, urban
dwellers increasingly sought to become landowners during the nineteenth

14. British Parliamentary Papers 1884–85, 180, Richards report for 1884. Quataert 1973,
137–8; 1980.
15. Valensi 1985, 226, 236; Doumani 1995, 14, ch. 4; Cuno 1992, 55–56; Shields 2000,
ch. 4.
 Interdependent Spaces | 53

century. At the same time, the Ottoman government wanted to centralize

its power throughout the empire, a part of its “self-strengthening” impulse.
That required, fi rst, more efficient tax collection, and second, the encourage-
ment of reliable elites willing and able to help control the countryside. The
urban merchants wanted more secure access to rural goods, and the govern-
ment wanted to register land and make sure it got its share of the rural surplus.
These two trends, urban investment in the countryside and the government’s
desire for regular revenue collection, came together in the Ottoman Land Law
of 1858.16
Historians have debated the impact of the 1858 Land Law, which provided
title deeds to land to those who could prove long-term habitation or continu-
ous cultivation. The law seems to have had varying effects in different places.
Land tenure changes resulted in large plantation agriculture in a few places
in the Ottoman Balkans, Egypt, and scattered areas elsewhere in the Middle
East.17 In the mountainous parts of Syria and Lebanon, numerous peasants did

16. Burke 1991, 29. For connections between the central government’s relationship with
the new rural moneylending and landowning groups and their political implications, see Burke
1991, 29; Meriwether 1987, 70–73; Cuno 1992, 106–9; İnalcik 1991, 17–53. For usury in Ana-
tolia, see Jennings 1973 and Issawi 1980, 351, 356.
17. “Dead” or uncultivated arable land (mawat) was also available for sale. Th is is thought
to be the origin of the large plantations that developed during the nineteenth century to pro-
duce cash crops for the world market. These large plantations(çiftliks) are a source of great con-
troversy. See Keyder’s introduction in Keyder and Tabak (1991) and the articles by Veinstein
(1991) and İnalcik (1991). In Mosul, Vice-Consul Rassam claimed that notables, conspiring
with local officials, would try to frighten the peasants with a large tax or imminent conscrip-
tion to force them to flee, and this would enable them to purchase an entire village for a small
amount. The foreign representatives in the city were troubled by these sales, because it meant
that they would not have free access to the products of the land, nor would they be able to
engage in moneylending to the people farming the crops. Başbakanlık Arşivi (Prime Minis-
ter’s Archives, Istanbul), Irade, Dahiliye 30, 679, reports on the sale in 1860 of fourteen pieces
of arable land found deserted, and may refer to the results of this sort of behavior. Rassam to
de Redcliffe, 12 February 1855, FO 195/394. In 1919 a British report on Mosul described the
practice of imprisoning peasants who refused to sell their land (Great Britain 1919, 21). Mar-
cus (1989, 138) described abandoned villages around Aleppo during the eighteenth century,
the result not of conscious efforts to dispossess villagers, but of heavy tax burdens occasioned
by war and general rural insecurity.
54 | S A R A H D. S H I E L DS

register their lands and claimed ownership. In southern Iraq, peasants feared
that registering their land was simply a trick, making them more visible to the
government and therefore more eligible for exploitation (principally higher
taxation and conscription). In many cases they simply agreed to have the tax
collector or the tribal shaykh register their property for them. Of course, the
collector or the shaykh registered the land in his own name. The implications
of this new control over land could be substantial in some places. For example,
when one merchant owned an entire village, all the surplus produce would be
marketed through him, an explanation for some merchants’ objections to the
new practice. In the tribal lands of southern Iraq, the shaykhs’ registration of
land dramatically changed the relationships among tribal members. In time,
the tribesmen became share-croppers on land officially belonging to the chiefs
(Quataert 1991, 38–49; for lower Iraq, see Jwaideh 1984, 333–56, and Farouk-
Sluglett and Sluglett 1983a).
Geographical variations alone do not account for some of the more dra-
matic disagreements over the impact of the land laws on urban-rural relations.
The arguments center round whether the law simply legitimized preexisting
realities or created new ones, and whether it changed production or relation-
ships between peasants and landholders. Some argue that the Land Law meant
continuity, and was simply making legal a de facto reality. In this view, some
tax collectors had already developed a relationship with the villages that was
very similar to ownership. The tax collector or creditor decided what to plant,
made sure people worked the land, lent money to the farmers for seed, helped
maintain irrigation, and collected most of the crop either as payment for inter-
est or as taxes. These historians argue that there was litt le change as a result
of the new legislation. The older system of hereditary tax farming (iltizam or
malikane) was, they argue, essentially indistinguishable from landownership
anyway, and agricultural products continued to be shared between urban
merchants and government officials (Sluglett and Farouk-Sluglett 1984, 416;
Owen 1981a, 140).
Others argue that the impact of the new laws in Egypt and the Fertile
Crescent was enormous. Pointing out that even hereditary tax farms were
often confiscated by the state, some historians have claimed that, by creat-
ing true private property, the new laws introduced dramatically different
relationships into the countryside. Particularly in places where government
 Interdependent Spaces | 55

officials and urban notables acquired title deeds, the law created a whole class
of absentee urban landlords at the same time that it transformed peasants
into landless rural laborers. Cuno points out that the very existence of these
documents transformed peasants’ rights, as officials increasingly refused to
recognize transactions that were not substantiated by the new deeds. As the
rules changed, peasant claims lost their legitimacy and their families lost their
autonomy, becoming merely hired hands on an urban notable’s estate.18
It seems clear in any case that, whether or not the Land Law changed the
status of the parties and the nature of the relationship between city and coun-
tryside, the underlying situation continued, changed in degree or method
rather than in nature. Whether the urban elites owned the land, or merely col-
lected the taxes and lent the capital, the nineteenth century witnessed a grow-
ing tendency for them to be more directly in control of producing the wheat, of
grinding the flour, of marketing the grain, and of determining the prices that
city people would pay for their bread.

Controlling the Rural Surplus: Urban Consequences

The city’s constant need for grain clearly left urban dwellers dependent upon
the countryside. When harvests were bad and bread became expensive, the
city people rioted, attacking grain stores and trying to block grain exports. In
Sivas and Erzurum, in the years immediately before the revolution of 1908,
city dwellers and villagers sacked granaries in protest over food shortages, high
prices, and excessive taxes (Schatkowski Schilcher 1991a, 177; Quataert 1991,
45). Th rough their investment in grain, those who lent money to the peasants
demanded their taxes, collected their rents, and marketed their products and
thus became an increasingly powerful elite, not only in the countryside, but
also in the city. Their success in controlling the marketing of crops also meant
that they were able to manipulate the food supply. Indeed, control over wheat
meant essentially the power of life and death. Historians have described “cre-
ated famines” during the second half of the nineteenth century in both Bagh-
dad and Damascus, the result of merchants purposely keeping wheat away from
the urban markets, hoarding it in the hope that scarcity would result in higher

18. Cuno 1992, 202–3. Nowshirvani (1981) claimed that this did not happen in Iran,
where most landlords remained on the land.
56 | S A R A H D. S H I E L DS

prices. In both places, de facto monopolistic cartels resulted from alliances

between urban merchants and “corrupt” government officials (Fattah 1997,
99–150). Aiming to control the market, they limited exports, required that all
trade should take place through members of a small cartel, and prevented for-
eign interests from becoming involved in the grain trade (Schatkowski Schil-
cher 1991a, 167–90; Fattah 1991, 152, 157).
Abraham Marcus noted the existence of “created famines” in Aleppo in
the late eighteenth century. Despite government responsibility for ensur-
ing the urban food supply, local profiteering exacerbated famine conditions.
Especially when the authority of the central state was weak, local notables
were able to evade price controls and to keep back grain from the market by
storing it either in the villages or in urban warehouses. Marcus described the
resourcefulness of the elite in profiting from scarcity during the famines of
the 1780s and 1790s, when the janissaries and the notables managed to buy
up all the grain brought to Aleppo. Wheat, flour, and bread vanished from the
shops and markets during the daytime; at night the city came alive as black
marketeers sold the new stocks at twice the officially allowed price. “Resi-
dents purchased their bread on dark street corners from dealers who charged
exorbitant prices for inferior loaves.” The situation was so desperate that the
governor himself bowed to reality and also bought bread for the troops at
black market prices (Marcus 1989, 134). No wonder, then, that the urban
population ransacked the granaries and att acked officials in times of famine
(see Burke 1989, 1991 and chap. 8 below).
At the same time, the cartels functioned to keep out foreign competi-
tion. British representatives complained constantly about price manipulation,
oppressive taxes, and favoritism. In late nineteenth-century Baghdad, it seems
that famines may have been created partly to freeze out foreign competitors, a
form of manipulation that necessarily involved the collusion of the provincial
government. Famine prices ruled in the grain market, and starvation seemed
imminent. The government railed hypocritically at monopolists and hoarders
while working hand in glove with these very profiteers, to the point where it
stubbornly refused to distribute grain from its own ample stores even as the
population of Baghdad and its environs clamored for food. Many grain mer-
chants were ruined and the market became dominated by government-allied
merchants (Fattah 1991, 151–58).
 Interdependent Spaces | 57

Eleven years later, the grain cartels again drove up prices, and again the
provincial government’s grain reserves were not made available. Famine
threatened, despite a prohibition on grain exports, as the local government
ignored orders from the central government in Istanbul to open its own grana-
ries and those belonging to individual merchants. When prices were driven as
high as they could go, the merchants and governments fi nally sold their grain,
and Baghdadis were once again able to eat. Hala Fattah points out that these
“famines” had important political uses, in mitigating the influence of foreign
interests, in reinforcing the importance of ties to the powerful notables and
officials of the city, and in facilitating the latter’s acquisition of great wealth.19
Although control over wheat had been important in endowing the urban
notables with wealth and power before the beginning of the nineteenth cen-
tury, soaring global demand greatly increased the profits to be gained from
providing credit and investing in the countryside. Urban food requirements
continued to rise as city populations grew. At the same time, industrialization
and improvements in transport proceeded apace, creating rapidly expanding
demand for certain products from the Middle Eastern countryside. In some
areas, this new demand for export crops encouraged a few city notables to
invest in the countryside not only as tax collectors and moneylenders but also
as entrepreneurial owners of farm land and of the machinery to process the
crops. As those areas switched to cash crops for the world market, investing in
wheat-growing lands became even more att ractive, since the demand for bread
in areas producing nongrain export crops had to be met from the remaining
grain areas.

The Pastoral Economy

The gradual process by which merchants increased their control over grain
production found an echo in the pastoral economy. Just as there was a funda-
mental interdependence between the merchants who needed grain and the

19. The British challenged the tax farmer’s right to market the crop that he collected as
taxes, calling it a hidden monopoly that contravened the provisions of the treaty, which the
British and the Ottomans had signed in 1838. The Ottoman government disagreed: “Ottoman
bureaucrats insisted that once the multazim discharged his liabilities to the Treasury, he was
free to dispose of the produce in any manner he saw fit.” Fatt ah 1991, 160–2.
58 | S A R A H D. S H I E L DS

rural population who provided labor, skills, and access to the soil, so there
was a degree of mutual reliance between the city merchants who needed
wool and the nomads who grazed the sheep. Tensions mounted between
the absentee “owners” and the producers as urban people moved gradually
toward more control and ultimately ownership of land and sheep, in an effort
to secure supplies.
Nomads living in the hinterland had long cultivated intricate connections
with urban centers. These pastoralists were crucial as consumers of the city’s
goods, as purchasers of the rural products sold in urban markets, as guarantors
or destroyers of the rural security needed for trade and cultivation, and as pro-
ducers of essential raw materials for city looms and urban tables. More impor-
tant, during the nineteenth century, pastoral products became the principal
items of both regional and international trade. Large numbers of sheep were
transported on the hoof from northern Iraq to be slaughtered for meat in Syria
and Egypt, and their wool became an important commodity. Urban dwellers
were unable to raise large numbers of sheep for meat and wool within the city
as they had neither the space nor the skills; sheep were raised by nomads living
in the hinterland. The story of how the merchants acquired access to those cru-
cial products in northern Iraq provides a good example of economic interaction
between the city and the rural areas, another story of mutual dependence.
Although some nomads subsisted solely on the products of the animals
they grazed, many Middle Eastern pastoralists ate wheat bread. They acquired
the flour in the villages and cities in exchange for animal products: meat,
hides, skins, milk. These animal raisers could be found frequenting city mar-
kets when their relations with the government were good. When they failed
to pay their taxes, when the government involved itself in the details of inter-
nal tribal successions or political struggles, or when the nomads encroached
on farmland because fodder was scarce, the government tried to punish them
by refusing to allow them access to urban markets. The nomads’ resistance to
urban domination and the merchants’ dependence on the nomads became
most evident when the government tried to enforce these prohibitions. Hav-
ing come to depend upon wheat as a dietary staple, the nomads responded by
raiding villages, creating insecurity on the roads, and attacking other tribes.
The insecurity that they created outside the city affected not only the mer-
chants but the entire population, since it halted all transport and prevented
 Interdependent Spaces | 59

all commerce. When the nomads disrupted the harvest, wheat would not be
available in the cities. When they attacked transport, goods could not go in or
out. The nomad's control over security, combined with their ability to disrupt
production, explains the increasing frequency of government campaigns into
the countryside to pacify the tribes. In 1857, the head of the ‘Anayza confed-
eration demanded free access to urban markets before ending hostilities with
the provincial government. Merchants worried about the Shammar tribes,
anticipating plunder as soon as the governor of Baghdad refused them access
to the city’s markets in 1862.20
In an evolution similar to that by which the merchants took control over
agricultural production, urban entrepreneurs increasingly came to domi-
nate the region’s wool production. As Middle Eastern wool became a “crop”
demanded by Europeans, merchants sought new ways to secure adequate sup-
plies. In the past, merchants had simply sent agents to the nomadic tribes at the
sheep shearing in order to choose and purchase fleeces. As demand for wool
increased, the merchants began to speculate, paying in advance for later deliv-
ery of fleeces, thereby securing their future merchandise. Advancing money
made the urban merchants dependent on the honesty and goodwill of the
tribes while putt ing the nomads in debt to urban dwellers.
Even this system did not provide enough of a guarantee for many of the
merchants of Mosul. It soon became clear that speculative loans would not
produce adequate stocks, and merchants began to purchase their own flocks.
Still, the urban merchants possessed neither the skills nor the land to graze the
sheep, and intensive animal husbandry was still many decades in the future.
Hence they hired various tribes in the hinterland to raise the sheep for them,
and to “harvest” the fleeces on their behalf. Thus, in spite of their ownership
of the animals, they were unable to achieve independence and control over
production (N. Lewis 1987, 43–44; Shields 1992, 773–89).
During disputes between the nomads and the government, particularly
when the urban markets were closed to them, tribal leaders understood that
the merchants’ dependence upon them offered a new kind of power. They
could make it difficult for merchants to claim their fleeces, or they could raid

20. Rassam to de Redcliffe, 14 December 1857, FO 195/394; Rassam to Bulwer, 26 May

1862, FO 195/717.
60 | S A R A H D. S H I E L DS

the merchants’ sheep being grazed by another tribe. The new organization of
wool production led city merchants and nomads to become dependent upon
each other and tied up in the other’s political struggles. The results could be
seen in the evolving political power of the nomads and in new political align-
ments within the city (Shields 1992; Nowshirvani 1981, 572). Merchants
found themselves in economic control as long as things went well, but when
tensions reached a high pitch, they found that their dependence on both prod-
ucts and security forced them to compromise, if only briefly.
Tensions reached that point in 1860, after two years of wrangling between
the government of Mosul and the Shammar tribal confederation outside the
city. The governors of Mosul and Baghdad disagreed on who should be recog-
nized as paramount shaykh of this large and important confederation. The par-
amount shaykh had a crucial role in the countryside, protecting transportation
and keeping other groups from plundering villages. In early 1860, the local
government deposed Shaykh Farhan, creating protest throughout the coun-
tryside not only from Farhan’s supporters but also from the local population.
It soon became evident that the new paramount shaykh was unable to keep
order, as Farhan’s supporters began to pillage neighboring villages and raid
caravans. But when they plundered some sheep owned by Mosul merchants
the uproar became overpowering. The urban merchants condemned the local
government and demanded action to recover 30,000 sheep stolen in the raid,
sheep owned by the city’s notables. In response the governor marched into the
desert, accompanied not only by his cavalry, artillery, and irregulars, but also
by “a motley group of upwards of 200 people from Moossul chiefly owners of
sheep” (Shields 1992, 781).

Mutually Dependent Power

The intensifying connections between the urban merchants on one hand and
nomads and peasants on the other required that the city become involved with
its hinterland not only as a source of supply and as a market but also as an
integral part of an interdependent economic and political unit. Taxation and
landholding (and control over food and seed) combined to create a power-
ful urban merchant class and also an increasingly powerful rural population,
whose power derived directly from their role as irreplaceable producers of the
city’s most essential commodities. They seldom expressed their discontent in
 Interdependent Spaces | 61

ways that would create transformative change; nonetheless, their ability sim-
ply not to produce or to disturb others’ production gave them some ability to
mediate their own increasingly impoverished living conditions.
Even as urban commercial control over the countryside grew and peasants
became increasingly dependent upon urban elites, the rural populations were
also able to exert some form of control simply because they were the people
with the labor and the skills, and sometimes the property, to control produc-
tion itself. As we have seen, one of the most common and effective forms of
peasant protest was simply not to produce (Scott 1985, 28–47). If demands for
taxes, conscription, or labor became too high, the rural population refused to
farm, fled, or hid. If peasants refused to pay taxes, the government sent troops
to collect the amount due to ensure that adequate food supplies reached the
cities. In extreme conditions, especially following such official efforts, peas-
ants abandoned entire villages in massive rebellions against the government
and the urban notables.21 The merchants needed good relations with the peas-
antry, because control over grain contributed to the acquisition of political
influence within the city itself. In times of hoarding, popular anger could jeop-
ardize their positions and threaten their power. Philip Khoury has argued that
the Damascus notables who attained power after 1860 achieved their promi-
nence largely because of their control of tax farms. Many of the urban notable
families participating in the informal Hawran cartel would eventually form
the root soil in which Syrian Arab nationalism grew in the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries. When the embatt led Ottoman government failed
to protect or adequately supply the local population during World War I, the
Damascus-based Syrian Arab nationalists were able to supply the Hashimite-
led Arab Revolt of 1916–18 with logistical support through the Hawran (Fawaz
1983, 90; P. Khoury 1983, 12, 19, 27–28, 31, 44–45).
Even power was at least partly interdependent. The urban elite’s control
over wheat left them in a position to exploit and endanger both the livelihoods
of the peasants and the food of the city dwellers. At the same time, urban mer-
chants desperately needed rural produce in order to be able to make their own
fortunes and engage in long-distance trade. Despite the urban elite’s monopoly

21. Schatkowski Schilcher 1991b, 50–84; Burke 1991, 24–25. For passive resistance, see
also Quataert 1983, 18–25, and Scott 1985.
62 | S A R A H D. S H I E L DS

of wealth and the control that they were able to exercise, the rural populations
could retaliate by acting in a variety of ways to endanger the livelihoods of the
urban notables.

Manufacturing

Viewing the rural population simply as agricultural producers would be to

ignore their important connection with manufacturing. Peasants not only pro-
vided a large market for urban-based production, but during the nineteenth
century their labor responded to growing demand from urban entrepreneurs.
Peasants manufactured textiles both as a migrant labor force within the cities
and as the labor force for a growing putt ing-out system. Largely because of the
need to pay taxes in cash, rural populations agreed to use their skills as laborers
to produce goods beyond the immediate needs of their own households.
In the new agricultural conditions of the nineteenth century, many urban
laborers were transplanted peasants. They worked in both the cities and the
hinterlands, forming yet another human bridge between the two realms. In
Manisa, one of the leading textile production centers in the province of İzmir,
urban weavers wove in the winters and worked as agricultural laborers during
the rest of the year. They maintained their connections with the hinterland,
connections that “sustained many weavers in the highly competitive condi-
tions that prevailed during the nineteenth century” (Quataert 1993a, 83).
Many other rural people sold their labor to urban merchants while staying
at home. Textiles provide the best known example of this system of putting-
out. Merchants often took cotton and wool for spinning or yarn for weaving
into the countryside, where people spun and wove at home in the off-season or
when farm work was fi nished for the day. Even the delicate fi nishing processes
were done in the countryside. Girls embroidered cloth in villages throughout
the province of İzmir, using silk and gold thread made in Istanbul.22
Although some rural people produced for the city, many urban workers
depended on the rural hinterland for both markets and materials. Indeed,

22. Quataert (1993a, 82–85) suggests that in areas of greater agricultural productiv-
ity, peasants would spend less time with commercial manufacturing. In those areas, weaving
would be an urban occupation. In poor areas, peasants wove much of the cotton, and house-
holds engaged in both agriculture and manufacturing.
 Interdependent Spaces | 63

many of Mosul’s workers earned the money to pay for their bread by creating
the products that the peasants required to produce their wheat. Thus, farriers
shod horses and mules, and woodworkers and blacksmiths created farm imple-
ments, horseshoes and horseshoe nails, chains, and harnesses for beasts of bur-
den. Some city workers created textiles strictly for rural consumption. Weavers
created coarse indigo-dyed fabric made from locally spun yarn that would be
purchased only by nomads and peasants (townspeople preferred other textiles
despite the low cost and durability of this fabric). Common urban products
intended for rural consumption included striped fabrics for men’s robes, wool
and cotton for cloaks, and felt for hats. By the end of the nineteenth century,
Mosul’s estimated one thousand hand looms were weaving these specialized
fabrics to market in the rural areas surrounding the city.23
Urban workers also depended on the rural hinterland for their materials.
Tanners and butchers relied on pastoralists and dye-stuff collectors. Urban
laborers pressed olives and sesame seeds; cleaned, carded, and spun both cot-
ton and wool; milled flour, baked bread, and processed dairy products. Bakers
needed flour, millers needed wheat, spinners and weavers needed cotton. Even
after foreign textiles and yarn were imported into the city, Mosul’s weavers
still received substantial amounts of cotton yarn spun in the villages surround-
ing the city by both men and women seeking extra income.24

Interdependence: The Arguments

Arguments over the nature of urban-rural relations in the modern Middle East
have been raging for decades. While some historians see two distinct realms
engaged in continuous confl ict, others insist on long-term ties between city
people and those living in the cities’ hinterlands. Ira Lapidus argued that dur-
ing the later Middle Ages there had been extensive contact between Middle
Eastern cities and their rural hinterlands. Albert Hourani and Kenneth Cuno
agreed, claiming that city and countryside had been mutually interdependent,

23. Issawi 1988, 74, quoting FO 195/2243.

24. Salname-i Vilayet-i Musul, 1308, 1310, 1312, 1325 and Archives du Ministère des
Affaires Étrangères (Paris), Correspondance Commerciale; Mossoul 1:66–67, 2:321–38, 331,
338, 421; Rassam, 4 August 1863, FO 195/771; Great Britain, Naval Intelligence Division,
1917–18, 174.
64 | S A R A H D. S H I E L DS

tied even before 1800 by market and credit networks. According to Roger
Owen, it was even a stretch to differentiate the two into separate realms:
“Indeed, so intimate was the connection with the rural hinterland that it is
certainly wrong to think of the city as belonging to a different economic or
political order” (Owen 1981a, 45). On the other hand, Gabriel Baer argued
that, by the modern era, integration had ceased. He went further, arguing that
the economic disconnection between urban and rural populations was accom-
panied by a cultural chasm evident even in agricultural style and religious
practice. Baer argued that Egypt was home to two exclusive worlds, urban
and rural, which were essentially different, economically exclusive and alien-
ated from each other. If we include pastoralists among rural populations, the
adherents of this belief in the disconnection and animosity between the city
and the hinterland become quite numerous. Recent scholarship cited in this
essay suggests, however, that by the modern period, the cities and the country-
side constituted reciprocally dependent economic entities whose needs had
become intertwined. By the nineteenth century, rural people did not conduct
their exchange predominantly with their neighbors using barter, but produced
the essentials that permitted cities to flourish, exchanging them either as taxes,
as cash, or to repay credit (Baer 1982, 49–100; Hourani 1968; Lapidus 1967;
Gran 1987, 27–41; Cuno 1992, 3, 9–14).
The debate over the processes and results of nineteenth-century agrarian
change arises from the larger controversy over models of transition. Attempt-
ing to defi ne relations between the city and the countryside, historians have
been guided by arguments over the stages through which Middle Eastern
economies were passing. If Peter Gran’s argument that exchange had long
taken place in cash and that agricultural laborers produced for the market
is accurate, it would allow historians to argue that some forms of capitalist
development had indigenous roots in the Middle East. If the Middle East was
wallowing hopelessly in a subsistence economy until the beginnings of con-
tact with Europe, modernization theory would seem to apply to the region,
encouraging historians to fi nd the roots of development in contact with the
outside. A transition from a monetized traditional economy to production for
global markets would reinforce the claims of world-systems theory proponents
that the integration of the Middle East into the world economy was a result
of the emerging global system with Europe at its core. The debate relates to
 Interdependent Spaces | 65

larger historiographical disputes about the nature of capitalism, some arguing

that trade led to the development of capitalist structures, and others fi nding
the roots of capitalism in internal struggles between the rising and declining
classes within society.25
Despite differences over the larger theoretical issues, historians of the
nineteenth century appear to agree that agrarian change reflected larger tran-
sitions in the relations between the Ottoman government, urban elites, rural
populations, and a growing European presence. Interactions between city and
countryside changed as the government responded to the merchants’ needs
for more direct access to the wealth being produced by the peasants. Th is
chapter argues that previously existing ties between the city and the country-
side intensified over the last century of Ottoman rule as urban people acquired
more direct control over the products of the countryside, and that gaining this
control had dramatic consequences for both urban and rural populations.

Conclusion

During the nineteenth century, with demand for the products of the country-
side increasing, important local merchants and officials grew wealthy and pow-
erful as the countryside produced food and raw materials for their tables and
their businesses. Margaret Meriwether describes the holdings of the Jabiris, a
prominent Aleppo family, in a town 64 kilometers distant from Aleppo. The
Jabiri family owned outright “twelve orchards of olive trees, three vineyards,
three gardens, several orchards of various kinds of fruit trees, some land . . . a
soap factory, two wheels for grinding grain, two olive presses, and ten shops.”
The family not only owned the land that produced the raw material, in this
case olives, but also the press that extruded the oil, a soap factory in which the
oil was processed, and shops in which it was sold. Clearly this urban family in
the fi rst decades of the nineteenth century obtained wealth from the coun-
tryside and invested it not only in land but also in the equipment to process
its own product, exhibiting a sophisticated—and lucrative—understanding of
vertical integration. As the nineteenth century wore on, such crops became

25. Gran 1987, 27–41; Cuno 1992, 3, 9–14. See Gran’s review of Cuno’s book (1994,
289–91); Brenner 1976, 30–75; Brenner 1977, 25–92; Hourani 1981, 26–27; Owen 1981a, 45;
Hansen 1981, 477.
66 | S A R A H D. S H I E L DS

increasingly important in both foreign and regional trade, and the urban mer-
chants who had invested in them profited handsomely from the new global
demand (Meriwether 1987, 68–69). Urban merchants in the Middle East
gradually came to acquire control over rural production, evolving from being
collectors of crops as taxes on behalf of the government to becoming credi-
tors who collected the surplus on their own account. As they needed to make
their supplies even more secure in an age of increasing demand, urban dwellers
became the owners of the means of production, in this case land and tools. The
same process took place in the pastoral economy, as merchants moved from
simply buying wool to contracting for a still-unharvested clip, and fi nally to
purchasing flocks of their own.
Greater direct urban control over the rural surplus had widespread reper-
cussions not only in the countryside, where indebtedness and landlessness
increased, but also in the city. Merchants used their control over grain supplies
to manipulate prices, in some cases even inducing famine. Their ownership of
flocks brought political consequences as it tied the city even more closely to
the nomadic pastoralists.
To argue that city and countryside existed in two essentially separate
spheres no longer seems tenable in the light of recent scholarship on the Mid-
dle East and North Africa. As economic historians turn away from meta-mod-
els of development and follow the lead of social historians, more details of the
consequences of urban-rural dependence will provide an increasingly compre-
hensive picture of the limits and possibilities of the shared space encompassed
by Middle Eastern cities.
 3
Political Relations Between City and State
in the Middle East, 1700–1850
DI NA R IZK K HOU RY

• A S W I T H A L L historiographies of multiethnic empires, that of the

Ottoman Empire has always been subject to the vagaries of nationalist poli-
tics. Until recently, most of those who studied cities in the Arab provinces
tended to view Ottoman control as inimical to the development of an urban
civil society that remained only partially integrated into the Ottoman “sys-
tem.” Implicit in this analysis was the view that the cities formed part of a
local identity, defi ned either in “nationalist” terms or in terms of a form of
“urban patriotism” that worked against any meaningful integration into the
Empire. Th is was especially true of scholars who studied Cairo, Baghdad,
and the North African cities where the Ottoman presence often appeared to
be tenuous. Such scholars tended to rely on local sources, rarely utilized the
Ottoman archives in Istanbul, and were only superficially familiar with the
overall history of the Ottoman Empire. The focus of such studies was often
the urban notables, a‘yan, who were seen as the upholders of local interests
against “predatory” imperial demands.
Although this kind of scholarship predominated until the 1980s and
still has its strong defenders, it is being gradually supplanted by two newer
trends. The fi rst of these represents a recognition on the part of both West-
ern and Arab historians that the four centuries of Ottoman rule left a power-
ful imprint on urban life. Ottoman as well as Arab sources are now utilized,
and scholars are increasingly likely to establish links between the Ottoman
67
68 | DI N A R I Z K K HOU R Y

government and urban society. The work of Abdeljalil Temimi and his center
in Tunis is the best example of this trend in the Arab world, and the recent
work of a widening circle of Western historians offers a major departure from
earlier scholarship.1
The second recent trend in scholarship on Ottoman history is an Isla-
mist one that seeks to reexamine the Ottoman Empire as a viable political
alternative to its successor national states, with their repressive regimes and
dependent economies. In intention and scope, this trend runs parallel to the
rehabilitation of the Habsburg Empire now being undertaken by some schol-
ars of Eastern and Central Europe. Those who write from this point of view
express differing views of the Ottomans, some echoing the conservatism of
religious scholars, others the fiery radicalism of Jamal al-Din al-Afghani. 2 The
most interesting among them have come from the liberal Islamist tradition
that seeks to revive the autonomy of civil society and that symbiosis of cul-
tural outlook between the state and urban society that supporters of this view
believe existed under the Ottomans. 3
If the general tendency of scholars who study Arab cities was to look at
the Ottoman presence as something external to the social life of the city, their
counterparts who study the Ottoman Empire from the center, utilizing the
Ottoman archives, are more apt to assign to the Ottoman state a greater degree
of control over its urban centers. Focusing primarily on western Anatolian and
Balkan cities where Ottoman control was strong, historians have tended to gen-
eralize from the experiences of these cities. Furthermore, they tend to speak of
the Ottoman Empire as an undifferentiated homogeneous unit, without ques-
tioning what the Ottoman Empire really meant. Thus, major regional differ-
ences between, for example, Ottoman authority in Cairo, Aleppo, Baghdad,
or the cities of the Hijaz, are merely acknowledged and glossed over without

1. For the most recent survey in the English language of Arab historiography of the Otto-
man Empire, see Barbir 1996a; see also Abou-El-Haj 1982. Abdeljalil Temimi founded the
Centre d’études et de recherches ottomanes, morisques, de documentation et d’information
(CEROMDI) at Zaghouan, Tunisia, and publishes the journal Arab Historical Review for Otto-
man Studies.
2. See al-Shinnawi 1980–83. For a radical Islamist perspective, see al-‘Azzawi 1994.
3. Wajih Kawtharani has published several interesting books on this theme; see Kawtha-
rani 1988, 1990.
 Relations Between City and State in the Middle East | 69

calling for a reconsideration of what such differences actually contributed to

the nature of Ottoman state hegemony.4
In part this is due to the type of the sources examined. By their very nature,
the voluminous archival sources generated by the Ottoman bureaucracy, and
now generally available in Istanbul, create the illusion that the Ottoman state
was in full control of its population. These documents, which include tax-farm
registers, complaints by ordinary citizens, imperial orders, and detailed regis-
ters of expenditure, give the impression of an efficient state good at recording
its revenues and responding to crises of all sorts. Yet we know very little about
the actual workings of the state at the provincial level, largely because, with
some notable exceptions, there have been very few monographs based on the
use of a combination of local and imperial records that have explored the ways
that the power of the state impinged on the lives of ordinary subjects. 5
The major barrier to a less state-centered interpretation of Ottoman urban
society derives from the biases of scholars who spent their formative years in
a political milieu in which the modern secular Turkish state played a predom-
inant role in remapping social urban society and identity. However, the past
decade has seen a number of attempts to bridge the gap between those who
study the Ottomans from the Turkish perspective and those who study them
from the Arab perspective. In part this has been inspired by contemporary Isla-
mist challenges to the secular Turkish state and the drive to fi nd commonalities
of experiences between Arab and Turkish Muslims. However, among historians
who write in Western languages, the driving force has been the development of
closer contacts, professional and institutional, between scholars who write on
the two areas and the beginnings of a dialogue between the two scholarly com-
munities at a time when “traditional” secular, modernization, and nationalist
paradigms are coming under closer and more critical scrutiny.6

4. See İnalcik and Quataert 1994. Of all the contributors, only Suraiya Faroqhi attempts to
discuss the implications of such differences among urban centers on the defi nition of empire.
5. Singer 1994; Ze’evi 1996; Peirce 2003; Ergene 2003; and Çanbakal 2006 deal with the
sixteenth to the early eighteenth centuries; Grehan 2007 focuses on consumer culture in the
eighteenth century.
6. See Akarlı 1993 and Kayalı 1997. For the earlier period, see Singer 1994; Ze’evi 1996;
and Masters 1988.
70 | DI N A R I Z K K HOU R Y

I hope it will be evident from this brief overview of the historiography

of the political relations between the Ottoman state and urban society that a
promising new scholarship is emerging that builds on the work of earlier histo-
rians, sometimes incorporating their perspectives, but also slowly transform-
ing our understanding of the relations between state and city. In what follows,
I will try to incorporate the work of these scholars and attempt to make some
tentative conclusions on the basis of their work. I will focus in my analysis on
the major and well-studied cities of the empire located in the Fertile Crescent:
present-day Turkey, North Africa, and Cairo, by far the best documented city
in the empire.
I have excluded Istanbul because its position as imperial capital raises a
number of issues that do not pertain to other cities within the empire, and
dealing with such issues is quite difficult in a short essay.7 More frustrating
for the generalist is the lack of systematic studies on state and urban soci-
ety relations in Iran during this period. Th is can partly be explained by the
lack of political stability in the country after the defeat of the Safavids by
the Afghans in 1722 and the subsequent disruption created by the impe-
rial ambitions of Nadir Shah. By the last quarter of the eighteenth century,
political power was fragmented among different regional power elites. The
establishment of Qajar rule in 1797 gradually built up the state structures, yet
most studies of Iran under the Qajars focus on the second half of the century
when the modernizing reforms began to take hold. Significant studies have
been undertaken on land tenure and the relation of the ulama to the state, but
litt le has been done on the relationship of the state to various urban institu-
tions prior to 1850 (Lambton 1953, 1987; Algar 1969; Arjomand 1984; and
Ett hadieh 1983).

7. In addition, although there are several studies of Istanbul during earlier periods,
there is remarkably litt le on the period between 1750 and 1950. One exception is Çelik 1993,
although her main focus is the built environment; see also Duben and Behar 1991, on families
and fertility; and Rosenthal 1980a, on the Istanbul municipality. Suraiya Faroqhi has written
on Ankara and Kayseri in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (1984, 1987). One of the few
studies in English on the Anatolian towns of the interior in the nineteenth century is Erim’s
article on Erzurum (1991).
 Relations Between City and State in the Middle East | 71

State and Urban Society, 1700–1850:

From Centralization to Decentralization?

The Ottoman state was formed as a principality on the edges of the Byzan-
tine Empire in the late medieval period. By the early sixteenth century it had
defeated its main Christian rival and conquered many of the Middle Eastern
cities that had been under the control of the Seljuk and Mamluk dynasties
for centuries. Straddling much of southeastern Europe and the Middle East,
the Ottomans became the inheritors of both the Byzantine and the Seljuk
and Mamluk methods of urban governance. From the Byzantines they bor-
rowed the belief that provisioning cities and armies was the prime motor of
preserving social order and of expanding empire. Th is provisionalist vision
largely explained the attempts of the government to regulate the flow, and set
the prices, of primary goods.8 On the other hand, the legacy of the Seljuks and
Mamluks can be inferred from Ottoman attempts to fi x prices and control the
quality of essential articles produced by the artisan population of the city. Th is
was in the spirit of an Islamic vision of a “moral economy” in which the ruler
had the mandate to ensure that exploitation of any kind was held in check.9 The
rule of sharia and state law in the city was maintained through the local Islamic
court by judges appointed by the central government and was enforced by the
police of the provincial governor. Hence, a “moral” and provisionalist ethic
informed the series of laws (qanunnamler) that were appended to the censuses
undertaken by the Ottomans after the conquest of all Middle Eastern cities
from Aleppo to Cairo.
The central question for us in this brief overview of the political rela-
tionship between the state and the urban communities is whether such
regulations worked between 1700 and 1850. The overwhelming consensus
of scholarship is that if such controls over Ottoman economy and popula-
tion had worked at one time, they were in serious trouble by the second half
of the eighteenth century. Some maintain that the government’s abilities to

8. For a discussion of this aspect of Ottoman economic philosophy, see Masters 1988,
186–215.
9. See Burke 1989; Grehan 2003; and Sami Zubaida’s chapter in this volume (chapter 8).
72 | DI N A R I Z K K HOU R Y

impose legal and administrative controls were quite effective in the sixteenth
century, but appear to have receded largely because of the prolonged fi scal
and military crises of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. They draw
their conclusions from studies of such large urban centers such as Istanbul,
Cairo, Aleppo, and Damascus as well as a number of Balkan cities. Accord-
ing to such analysis, the state was able to rule through rotating provincial
governors trained in the palace household and by posting provincial military
forces, both infantry and cavalry, whose loyalty was more to the central gov-
ernment than to provincial governors based in the large urban centers. The
sultan ensured the loyalty of his military by rotating his troops’ assignments
to urban outposts and by reassigning military prebends to those who best
served his empire (İnalcik 1979).
For a variety of reasons, this system had begun to break down as early
as the end of the sixteenth century. The process culminated in the eighteenth
century in the disintegration of state control and the emergence of local power
holders (cf. Th ieck 1985), which meant that the state’s military and admin-
istrative control in the major urban centers passed into the hands of local
political elites. Local urban power holders acquired leverage and control over
regional economies, sponsoring commercial growth based on control of both
the agricultural hinterland and of international trade. At the same time, state
controls over the movement of primary products as well as the provisioning
of cities and armies eroded in the face of the twin pressures of international
demand for such products and the state’s inability to compete effectively with
local merchants and contractors. Much like some states in the late twentieth
century, the Ottoman state began to contract out some of the process of tax
collection as well as the provisioning of cities and armies. Thus, by the late
seventeenth century, the Ottoman state had developed a conscious policy of
contracting out its administrative and military functions as a means of cop-
ing with its fi nancial and military troubles. Th is policy backfi red after 1750,
when local power holders who had sometimes started their careers as agents
and tax farmers for the government challenged its supremacy, often by out-
right rebellion as in Egypt, the Balkans, and northern Palestine (for example,
see McGowan 1994; Joudah 1987).
Local power holders, members of political and bureaucratic provincial
households, came to dominate the urban economy, its major administrative
 Relations Between City and State in the Middle East | 73

positions, and the policing of the city. Those who write urban history from
the provincial perspective tend to view the fi rst sixty years of the eighteenth
century as a period of economic prosperity, urban renewal, and consolida-
tion and also as a period of the articulation of regional identities and cultures.
Those who write from the perspective of the center regard the second part of
the century as a period of administrative chaos, military defeats by Europe,
and rebellion by local power holders. Both groups view the fi rst decades of
the nineteenth century as a transitional period in which ideas of administra-
tive and military reform were discussed and implemented. The reforms were
initiated by Sultan Selim III in 1792, carried out successfully by Muhammad
‘Ali, the autonomous ruler of Egypt after 1805, and subsequently crowned by
a series of measures in the Ottoman Empire, beginning with the abolition of
the old and unruly military forces known as the janissaries in 1826 and culmi-
nating in the edicts collectively known as the Tanzimat reforms promulgated
between 1839 and 1876.10
The reforms of the nineteenth century marked a drastic break with past
practices of governance. They were based on new Western-inspired models
that often ran contrary to the provisionalist and “moral” vision of the premod-
ern state. In concrete terms, this meant that subjects in urban centers were
now to regard themselves as citizens, with certain rights and obligations;
they were to pay taxes directly to the state rather than to tax farmers who had
been local grandees, and those local grandees who had gained a measure of
autonomy from the state were now either politically marginalized or incorpo-
rated into the provincial administrative structures of the state, such as local
administrative councils. Although the state and the local judicial system had
tried to maintain some measure of control over prices and the organization of
guilds until the eighteenth century, these controls gradually eroded as a result
of competition from European goods and were sometimes abolished or viewed
as monopolistic in the nineteenth century.
If this narrative of a modernizing state draws too unproblematic a pic-
ture of the transition between early modern and modern, it is because until

10. For the provincial perspective, see Cohen 1973; Schatkowski Schilcher 1985; Rafeq
1970, 1975, 1977; Marcus 1989; Fatt ah 1997. For a central state perspective, see Shaw and
Shaw 1976–77; Genç 1976; and McGowan 1994.
74 | DI N A R I Z K K HOU R Y

recently it presented a fairly neat explanation of the transition from the decen-
tralization and apparent chaos of the eighteenth century to the modern order
and rationality of the nineteenth. It also posited a convenient break between
the premodern and modern and infused nineteenth-century Middle Eastern
states, such as the Egyptian and Ottoman states, with overwhelming power
to transform urban and rural societies. Th is is a narrative that is being ques-
tioned by the most recent scholarship on the Middle East, although it still
dominates the way most introductory books portray the transition to moder-
nity in the area.11
There has been some serious questioning of the extent and effectiveness
of Ottoman control of the economy and the administration of urban societies
outside major urban centers like Aleppo and Damascus. In fact, what is gradu-
ally coming to light is the tenuousness of Ottoman dominion over such cities
as Cairo, Baghdad, Mosul, and Izmir in the sixteenth and seventeenth centu-
ries.12 Even Aleppo and Damascus experienced major rebellions throughout
the period of “centralized” control. Thus, it is hard to make blanket statements
about the state’s control of urban society that gradually disintegrated in the
face of the rise of local power holders in the eighteenth century, when such
controls seem neither to have been uniform for all cities in the empire, nor to
have remained unchallenged for any length of time. Furthermore, most recent
scholarship is pointing toward a new understanding of the eighteenth century.
Rather than merely focusing on the politics of rebellious provincial grandees
and ineffective administrators, scholars are beginning to look in a new way at
the workings of the system of tax farming, exemptions, and stipends that per-
vaded the relations between state and society in the eighteenth century.
Traditionally, the development of tax farming has been considered to be a
sign of the diminution of state control over resources in favor of local notables
and local power holders. However, rather than seeing this as a harbinger of the

11. See B. Lewis 1979; Shaw and Shaw 1976–77; Davison 1963; and Cleveland 2004, all
of which provide a good introduction to modern Middle Eastern history. However, the transi-
tion between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries remains problematic.
12. Toledano 1990. For Izmir, see Goff man 1990; for Basra, see D. Khoury 1991 and
Abdullah 2001. For Syria in general, see Abdel Nour 1982a; for Aleppo in the seventeenth
century, see Masters 1988. For Mosul, see D. Khoury 1997a.
 Relations Between City and State in the Middle East | 75

end of the old regime, scholars are now viewing it as a means of incorporating
wider sectors of provincial urban society into the Ottoman system by giving
them a stake in it.13 Work on Aleppo, Mosul, and Diyarbakır has shown that the
extension of the tax-farming system helped create a local gentry that drew its
support from Istanbul, challenged the traditional elite of the city, and provided
the backbone of support for the Tanzimat reforms (Th ieck 1985; Meriwether
1987; Masters 1991). Furthermore, work on the Mamluk power elite in Cairo,
viewed until recently as the quintessential independent regional grandees of
the eighteenth century, has demonstrated the intimate political and cultural
links between this elite and the government in Istanbul (Hathaway 1997).
Scholarship on eighteenth century Cairo, most notably that of Marsot (1984a),
stresses the continuity between forms of political control and urban organi-
zation that existed in Cairo in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
Khaled Fahmy’s study (1997) of Muhammad ‘Ali, while focusing on the new
perception and implementation of the “new order” in the conscripted army, is
careful to place the “founder of modern Egypt” within the factional political
culture of the high Ottoman elite of the early years of the nineteenth century.
Finally, Juan Cole (1993) has demonstrated the potency of “traditional” ulama
and guild networks in mobilizing popular support for the nationalist revolu-
tion in Egypt as late as the 1870s.
All such work amounts to a serious challenge to the traditional para-
digms that posit a clear narrative of a strong state with effective power over
its urban population, giving way to a decentralized and chaotic period, only
to end in the Tanzimat and Muhammad ‘Ali’s reforms, which reimposed state
control over urban society. The modernizing Ottoman and Egyptian states
of the nineteenth century had to build on alliances that cut across the state/
society divide and exhibited remarkable continuities in administrative prac-
tice between the late eighteenth and the fi rst half of the nineteenth centuries.
The break with past practice only came after the second half of the nineteenth
century with the introduction of new administrative regulations, new com-
mercial and penal codes, and the development of a new group of provincial
Ottomans that would challenge the older group on whose goodwill and

13. Salzmann 1993; see also her doctoral dissertation (1995), which is based on a study of
tax-farming practices in Diyarbakır.
76 | DI N A R I Z K K HOU R Y

support the earlier reforms had been built.14 The continuity in the structures
of power and in class and group alliances between the eighteenth and nine-
teenth centuries is perhaps as important as the break implied in the borrow-
ing of the Western models of reform and their vocabulary that occurred in the
nineteenth century.
Finally, as more studies of smaller urban centers are being carried out,
it is becoming imperative to deconstruct such territorially rooted terms as
“Egypt” and the “Ottoman Empire.” That is to say, it is somewhat misleading
to speak generically of political relations between state and urban society in
these regions based on analyses of a few cities that were particularly crucial
to the empire. Studies of Jerusalem, Bulaq, Nablus, Tunis, Algiers, southern
Iraq, and northern and central Arabia have demonstrated the variegated
experiences of urban communities and the relationships to centers of power
(N. Hanna 1983; Doumani 1995; Fatt ah 1997; Ze’evi 1996; L. Brown 1974;
Valensi 1977). The ramifications of these differences in urban experiences of
state power are profound. Th is new scholarship challenges the conventional
view that urban communities in the Middle East lacked autonomy, had no
legally defi ned civil institutions independent of the state, and were hence
incapable of balancing the power of the state. What emerges from these stud-
ies is the degree to which the balance of local forces and the nature of the
political economy of different urban centers largely determined the extent of
state control, maintaining a degree of civic autonomy and ensuring the local
organization of society.
Given this variety in the political relations between city and state, how is
one to articulate an understanding of the nature of power relations between
the two? It is useful to turn to a work on the comparative history of these rela-
tions in Europe. In his introduction to Cities and the Rise of States in Europe,
Charles Tilly draws our attention to the close and formative links between the
social structures of cities and the nature of the states that rules over these cit-
ies. Central to his thesis is the view that cities “shaped the destinies” of states,
in as much as they circumscribed the abilities of the latter’s ruling elites to

14. The classic work on Syria is P. Khoury 1983. See his reassessment of some of his con-
clusions in P. Khoury 1990; see also Roded 1984. For Egypt, see Toledano 1985 and 1990; and
Cole 1993, 23–52, 84–109.
 Relations Between City and State in the Middle East | 77

control resources and mobilize populations to wage war.15 Two implications of

Tilly’s work are relevant to our discussion of the relationship between city and
state. First, state policies and controls were conditioned by the social matrix of
the city itself, that is, the nature of the indigenous power elite, the ability of the
state to co-opt them, and the nature and availability of resources in the city.
Second, and as a consequence of the fi rst, it is difficult to speak of a homog-
enous and uniform relationship between the state and the various different
urban centers in the Middle East (Tilly and Blockmans 1994, 8).
Perhaps the best approach is to devise a tentative categorization of urban
centers based on their position in the regional and international commercial
order as well as on their position within the Ottoman imperial system. Four
categories emerge, although it should be stressed that these are quite fluid,
with a number of cities falling into more than one category. First, let us con-
sider cities that were provincial administrative centers, centers for mobiliza-
tion and provisioning, as well as centers of trade. These included the largest
cities of the empire such as Damascus, Aleppo, Baghdad, Mosul, and Cairo.
Second, there were port cities, which served as conduits of international and
regional trade and in some instances as frontier provinces of the Empire. Of
particular importance here are the cities of Izmir, Acre, Basra, Tunis, and
Algiers. The third category consists of interior towns and cities with smaller
populations and fewer connections to the provincial and imperial centers of
power. Unfortunately these are the least studied cities in our period; the work
of Doumani on Nablus (1995), N. Hanna on Bulaq (1983), and Reilly on Hama
(2002) are good examples of an emerging trend of studies of these smaller
centers. Finally, the fourth category is of urban pilgrimage centers such as
Karbala’, Mecca, Medina, and Jerusalem that were often governed under dif-
ferent administrative arrangements. Large infusions of capital from endow-
ments fi nanced at times by powers at least nominally hostile to the Ottomans
(for example, the Qajars) were the mainstay of these centers’ economies. The
relationship of their elites to the central government was often determined by
the degree of their dependence on appointments to manage such endowments

15. Compare the view of Hohenberg and Lees (1995) that the autonomous status of
European cities tended to retard the development of nation states: see also Tilly and Block-
mans (1994).
78 | DI N A R I Z K K HOU R Y

at the local level. The local elites of Karbala’ and Najaf maintained a level of
autonomy commensurate with their ability to support themselves and their
civic organizations outside the channels of imperial endowments.16 For brev-
ity, I will focus on the fi rst two categories.

Cities as Administrative, Commercial, and Provisioning Centers

Cairo, Damascus, Aleppo, Mosul, and Baghdad were the principal administra-
tive centers in the Arab provinces of the Empire. Ensconced in their local gov-
ernment buildings, citadels, and sharia courts were governors appointed from
Istanbul, a number of military regiments known as janissaries, and judges
appointed to their offices by the highest Islamic legal authority at the center
of the empire. Ideally, these three components of Ottoman rule in the major
administrative centers of the Empire were to balance one another, each report-
ing directly to a different authority in Istanbul, but this system of administra-
tive checks and balances had largely ceased to function by the beginning of
the eighteenth century. In an effort to devise a workable system of provincial
administration to replace the rather chaotic situation in the provinces in the
wake of the conclusion of the Treaty of Carlowitz in 1699, the central gov-
ernment initiated a two-pronged policy. On the one hand, it negotiated an
agreement with provincial political and economic elites over two essential
issues, mobilization for war and taxation.17 Increasingly, wealthy local families
became the backbone of the provincial administrative apparatus, providing
the state with provincial governors and bureaucrats. On the other hand, the
state initiated a fiscal policy that gave long-term proprietary rights to local tax
farmers drawn from outside the provincial bureaucratic elites. Urban confl icts
during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were partly caused by the
tension these policies ultimately produced between, on one hand, the locally
based Ottomanized elite and, on the other, groups of urban and rural gentry
who had benefited from the expansion of various entitlements but were fi nding

16. Cole 1985; Faroqhi 1994b; on the political implications of fi nancing imperial endow-
ments in Jerusalem, see Peri 1983.
17. Abdel Nour 1982a provides a very good overview of what these changes entailed in
the Syrian cities.
 Relations Between City and State in the Middle East | 79

themselves obliged to succumb to the predatory demands of a well-entrenched

provincial elite.
Th ree features had emerged in all our cities by the 1750s. First, the gov-
ernors had acquired more policing, provisioning, and military functions
than before. They were mostly self-made men who had begun their careers in
the numerous military or paramilitary regiments stationed in the provinces.
In their bid to turn themselves into a political elite, they acquired urban or
rural tax farms and built an urban constituency by transforming themselves
into households. The ‘Azms of Damascus, the Jalilis of Mosul, and the Mam-
luks of Baghdad were able to obtain and maintain their positions in the fi rst
half of the eighteenth century because they were effective in mobilizing and
fi nancing mercenaries and local paramilitary forces to maintain internal
security and wage war against foreign enemies.18 Egypt presents an admin-
istrative anomaly in this provincial system. Its governors were drawn from
the Ottoman elite of the center but maintained very litt le authority in the
province. The real rulers were the Mamluk beys, who governed under spe-
cial institutional offices such as shaykh al-balad (city chief) and amir al-hajj
(leader of the pilgrimage). Notwithstanding the uniqueness of the Egyptian
form of political power, Jane Hathaway has demonstrated that these Mam-
luk households fit within the general Ottoman nomenclature of provincial
elites in this period. The Mamluk beylicate was an Egyptian adaptation of
an Ottoman form of provincial political leadership. Like governors in other
major administrative centers of the empire, the Mamluks were granted their
positions as large tax farmers, and privatized offices that allowed them to
subcontract the collection of taxes to various elites within urban society in
an effort to win their allegiance. Governors set up elaborate households mod-
eled on the imperial one, purchased slaves to run their private households
as provincial bureaucracies, won clients through largesse and intimidation,
and attempted, sometimes quite successfully, as in the case of the Mamluks
in Egypt and Baghdad, to monopolize the receipts of foreign and domestic
trade in an alliance with large merchants and landowners. Only the governor

18. See Schatkowski Schilcher 1985; Barbir 1980; Rafeq 1977; Bodman 1963; D. Khoury
1997a; Nieuwenhuis 1981; Lier 2004; Crecelius 1981; and Hathaway 1997. All the conclusions
in this section are based on these sources.
80 | DI N A R I Z K K HOU R Y

of Aleppo was unable to control the economic life in the city, largely because
the office of principal tax collector (muhassil) remained outside his influence
and was usually monopolized by members of the local elite (Bodman 1963,
36–37; Th ieck 1985).
Central to the governors’ control of urban resources was the development
of a stable tax farming system that allowed the elite and their allies to monopo-
lize agricultural revenues over long periods of time and, as the main collec-
tors of urban artisan and commercial taxes, to maintain control over the urban
economy. By the second half of the eighteenth century, when the Ottomans
were fi nding it increasingly difficult to fi nance their wars with Russia, these
local governors maintained a large measure of autonomy. The Mamluk Qazdağli
household of Egypt conducted an independent foreign policy, contacting the
enemies of the Ottoman state and invading Syria in an attempt to wrest it from
Ottoman control. Not all local governors were quite as adventurous, and Otto-
man imperial power remained a powerful centripetal force despite the weaken-
ing of controls in these administrative centers of the Empire.
Especially after the second half of the eighteenth century, a second trend
appears to have been the decline in the independent power of the judge and
the market inspector, who were responsible for ensuring that the prices and
quality of goods were maintained according to certain standards. Increasingly,
the function of maintaining prices and policing the market fell into the lap
of local judges who did their policing only when complaints were lodged by
artisans. The local police chief (subashi), who was drawn from the governor’s
private household by the second half of the eighteenth century, enforced the
rulings of the judge. Despite the fact that market inspectors continued to exist
in Middle Eastern cities in our period, their authority and prerogatives had
evidently diminished.
Judges, who were appointed by Istanbul, were often drawn from the local
pool of religious scholars. When they were not, they often appointed local dep-
uties who were the real arbiters of both religious and state law in the city. They
provided an effective balance to the power of the governor and often shielded
urbanites from the demands of powerful local men. Until the second half of
the eighteenth century, they performed a large array of administrative func-
tions. They called for the mobilization of local auxiliaries when the govern-
ment needed them; they ensured that the flow of goods into the city remained
 Relations Between City and State in the Middle East | 81

controlled and that the provisioning of urbanites and soldiers functioned

according to government regulations. Together with the local notables and
the heads of the quarters they determined the division of the taxes imposed
on the population. Clearly, they played a pivotal role in the Ottoman urban
administrative structure, and because they often outlasted the governors of
the province, they were quite powerful in the city. Grehan (2003) highlighted
the centrality of the judge in the Ottoman urban order, arguing that the judge
and the courthouse had become the central node of popular discontent in
Damascus by the early nineteenth century. Grehan fi nds this development
indicative of the “Ottomanization” of urban popular politics.
By the second half of the century, however, the judges had lost two of their
administrative functions to the governors of the city.19 As the Ottoman gov-
ernment began contracting out the provisioning of troops to wealthy private
individuals who were often governors of the province, the judges lost their
function as inspectors of the provisioning process. With the privatization of
the provisioning process, the governors often bought primary products (that
is, mostly foodstuffs) on the open market and were also the owners of the agri-
cultural lands that produced the goods. Hence, the judges lost the power to
ensure that the provisioning process did not lay a heavy burden on the local
population. They were no longer able to temper the monopolistic practices
of the governors and their cohorts among the large merchants and landown-
ers. Furthermore, the judges became obliged to hand over the task of recruit-
ing mercenaries for various military campaigns to the provincial governors,
who were now the chief military contractors for the state, responsible for the
recruitment and feeding of troops. In this way judges lost another function
that had allowed them to check the governor’s demands on the local resources
of the city and its hinterland.
The third feature, equally crucial to the political life of the urban popula-
tion, was the function of policing the city. Whereas the janissaries, in coop-
eration with local quarter chiefs, had been responsible for maintaining the
security of the city and enforcing Ottoman law, by the second half of the eigh-
teenth century the police chief answered to the governor rather than to the

19. For Aleppo, see Marcus 1989, 173. For the impact of such changes on the political life
of the city, see Bodman 1963 and Abdel Nour 1982a, 186–94.
82 | DI N A R I Z K K HOU R Y

judge.20 By the end of the century, most urbanites in the larger administrative
centers of the empire were increasingly subject to the demands of governors,
who suffered few legal checks on their powers to extract taxes, control provi-
sions, and recruit men. As a result of these political shifts, all the major cities
under discussion here experienced urban uprisings compounded by attempts
at reform on the part of the central government during the fi rst twenty years of
the nineteenth century.

Political Actors in an Urban Sett ing

The janissaries and the local notables dominated the urban political arena in
these major administrative centers. Despite countless monographs on the role
of these two groups within urban societies, we retain a very vague understand-
ing of how their role in the local stage was tied to imperial politics. Th is was
due in large part to the factional and fluid nature of their solidarities and the
porous nature of their corporate identities. It is essential, however, to try to
present a clearer understanding of their changing position within their own
societies and within the empire as a whole if we are to understand how these
groups negotiated (or survived) the modernizing measures of the state in the
second half of the nineteenth century.
Perhaps the most disruptive shift in the political relations between state
and urban society in the eighteenth century was the transformation in the
nature and role of the military regiments stationed in the major cities.21 The
state had posted janissary regiments in all these cities to ensure security and
maintain order. The regiments formed corporate bodies, entitled to their own
privileges and provisions, governed by their own rules, and headed by a leader
who sat on the local governor’s council and was responsible to his superior in
Istanbul. A number of developments proved crucial in changing the role of
the janissaries in the cities in the eighteenth century. The janissaries became
more integrated into the artisan population and urban merchant community
that dealt in such primary commodities as grain and meat. In Damascus, for

20. Th is was particularly problematic in Egypt where the janissaries lost such powers to a
new element of “mamlukized” households often derived from janissary officer corps; see Mar-
sot 1984a, 5; Hathaway 1997, 32–51.
21. For the political role of the janissaries in Istanbul, see Olson 1974.
 Relations Between City and State in the Middle East | 83

example, they came to monopolize the grain trade with southern Syria and
the Hawran and established trading links with the coastal cities of southern
Syria (Schatkowski Schilcher 1985, 30–35; Rafeq 1975). In Aleppo, they were
closely linked with industries that catered to the caravan trade and drew their
support from the new sett lers who competed with the older more established
artisan population. In Cairo, they dominated the craft corporations, collecting
their taxes and providing them with protection. In both Mosul and Baghdad
they were closely associated with the trade in livestock and meat.
What allowed the janissaries this monopoly over urban life was their
capacity to parlay their legal privileges into political capital by transforming
themselves into arbiters over urban life. As members of the military estate
(askeriye), janissaries were tried in their own court, were entitled to daily pro-
vision (uluf), and were exempt from taxes. The slew of privileges and entitle-
ments, combined with the strength individuals could draw from joining the
regiments, provided a powerful incentive for urbanites to buy such privileges
for themselves.22 The Ottoman government had legalized the sale of such
privileges in the fi rst half of the eighteenth century, an admission on its part
of a practice that had been taking place for some time to allow the janissar-
ies to supplement their income (McGowan 1994, 642–45, 658–72). However,
because professional mercenaries became increasingly important in the con-
duct of war in the eighteenth century, the government became less dependent
on the military readiness of the janissaries.23 As more members of the local
population were able to buy into various janissary regiments, their numerical
and political strength increased. In Aleppo, for example, it is estimated that
by the end of the eighteenth century 15,000 men out of a total population of
90,000 claimed affi liation to the janissaries. They dominated the life of the city
until the fi rst decade of the nineteenth century. In Damascus, their support
was based in the southern section of the city; they dominated its politics and

22. Bodman 1963, 65–66; Raymond 1991; Raymond 1995, 52–59. Raymond elaborates
on the links between the janissaries and coffee merchants, stating that a number of coffee mer-
chants found it useful to belong to the janissary corps to strengthen their economic and politi-
cal positions.
23. Aksan 1998, 1999. I would like to thank Virginia Aksan for allowing me to read these
articles prior to their publication and for our many discussions on the janissaries.
84 | DI N A R I Z K K HOU R Y

effectively challenged the hegemony of the ‘Azm governors. In Egypt, they ran
the life of the “litt le people,” protecting them from the exactions of Mamluk
governors until they themselves became, to put it in Raymond’s term, “mam-
lukized,” integrating a form of princely Mamluk political authority with a fol-
lowing among the regimental officers and the rank and fi le (Raymond 1995,
28; Hathaway 1997, 32–51).
However, the expansion in the numbers of urbanites who claimed affi li-
ation to the janissaries evidently meant the term “janissary” no longer signi-
fied a purely military function. A large number of irregulars often joined the
ranks of the janissaries simply by paying their leaders to include their name in
the janissary register. In addition, the lack of exclusiveness within the corps
meant that pressures on the corporate ethic that held its members together
increased. The leadership of the janissary regiments formed political house-
holds with followers and retainers and expected allegiance to their households
against potential rivals within the janissary corps. By the second half of the
eighteenth century the ascendancy of the janissaries in the political life of the
cities was seriously threatened. In Cairo, Mosul, Baghdad, and Damascus, the
military and bureaucratic elite households who monopolized the office of gov-
ernor recruited their own mercenary troops who threatened the preeminence
of the janissaries in the city. In Mosul, Cairo, and Baghdad, these households
were successful either in co-opting or liquidating competitors within the jan-
issary leadership.24 In Damascus, the janissaries of the Maydan quarter were
able to withstand the ascendancy of the ‘Azm household and established inde-
pendent economic and political links with southern Syria and with the power
holders in the coastal cities. In Aleppo, which did not develop homegrown
bureaucratic or military households that could challenge the ascendancy of
the janissaries, the local challengers were the ashraf households who claimed
descent from the Prophet. Even in Aleppo, however, the janissaries who had
actually run the city at several points in the eighteenth century had lost their
control by the beginning of the nineteenth century thanks to the concerted

24. Hathaway 1997, 52–106, presents the most detailed analysis of how this was done by
the Qazdağli household in Cairo. For Mosul, see D. Khoury 1997a, 120–41. In Jerusalem and
Mosul a sector of the janissaries joined the ranks of the local notables; Ze’evi 1996, 63–85. For
Damascus, see Marino 1997.
 Relations Between City and State in the Middle East | 85

efforts of the reforming government of Mahmud II and the cooperation of the

ashraf. In Baghdad, officers in janissary regiments were among the holders of
large rural and urban tax farms until the mid–eighteenth century, after which
they lost their economic and political ascendancy to Mamluk governors and
their households. The violent factional politics of late eighteenth- and early
nineteenth-century Baghdad was fueled in part by the downward mobility of
this janissary elite (Lier 2004; D. Khoury, 2008).
Th is brief account of the janissaries leaves us with a very sketchy picture
of one of the most powerful groups in urban political life in the eighteenth
century. Although we know a great deal about their allegiances in the heat of
factional urban politics and rebellions, we do not as yet have a clear picture
of how they operated on a daily basis, how they were able to control urban
life, the exact nature of their relationship to the central government, or what
their various economic roles were. In other words, despite major changes in
their composition and their military and policing roles, we still do not have
an exact defi nition of who a janissary was. Studies by Raymond, Rafeq,
Schatkowski Schilcher, Bodman, Marcus, Masters, and Hathaway have done
much to enlighten us about their political and economic role at certain peri-
ods. Yet we still lack a coherent explanation of the changing relationship of
these janissaries to the central government at a time when their military role
was being supplanted by mercenaries and their policing functions in the city
were being threatened by the household troops of local governors. Th is gap
in our understanding is especially critical when we try to explain the transi-
tion between the old Mamluk and Ottoman orders and the modernizing mea-
sures of Muhammad ‘Ali, Selim III, and Mahmud II, all of whom initiated
reforms that did away with the system of military privileges. What happened
to the janissaries in the wake of these reforms? Why, after Mahmud II’s edict
abolishing their corps and Muhammad ‘Ali’s reforms, did they vanish from
the political landscape with hardly a whimper after dominating urban life for
such a long time?
The second group of political actors in the city was collectively known as
the a‘yan or notables. Even more problematic as a descriptive term than the
janissaries, scholars of Syrian and Iraqi cities have expended much effort in
devising a more precise defi nition of who the a‘yan were in the late nineteenth
century, only to end up discussing a miniscule elite (Roded 1984, 63–94;
86 | DI N A R I Z K K HOU R Y

P. Khoury 1990). Historians of Syrian cities where the role of the a‘yan has
been analyzed for the medieval, early modern and modern periods have done
the most systematic studies of this group (Lapidus 1967; Chamberlain 1994;
Rafeq 1970; Schatkowski Schilcher 1985; Barbir 1980). Even with the exis-
tence of a relatively well-developed body of literature on Syrian cities, the
term a‘yan, used by historians to describe a local civil elite, can obfuscate as
well as illuminate the dynamics of state and society relations. Nowhere is this
more clearly seen than in the attempts to explain their changing relations to
the central government in the transition from the late eighteenth century, dur-
ing which their independent mediating role between urban populations and
the central government was at its most significant, to the second half of the
nineteenth century, during which they lost their autonomy as the result of the
centralizing efforts of the state.
For historians working on Arab cities, the a‘yan as a group appear quite
amorphous, encompassing men from the scholarly community, men of sacred
descent (ashraf or sadah), merchants, heads of quarters, and sometimes heads of
craft corporations. They were a loosely defi ned civilian elite that helped main-
tain order and facilitated access to power through informal networks among
the various groups in the city. The term has a more specific defi nition for his-
torians working on the Anatolian and Rumelian areas of the Ottoman Empire.
A‘yan denotes a group of local men, of rural or urban backgrounds, who had
become the major power brokers for the Ottoman government by the eigh-
teenth century. The Karaosmanoğlus, Cennetoğlus, and Cihanoğlus of western
Anatolia were new men of fortune who made themselves indispensable to the
government because of their ability to monopolize violence and trade. Their
relationship to the government and their place within the Ottoman provincial
hierarchy is much less difficult to analyze than that of the congeries of people
in Arab cities designated as a‘yan at least since the late medieval period. In con-
trast, the Anatolian and Rumelian a‘yan were a social group that emerged in
the seventeenth century and were successfully subjugated to the centralizing
state by the reform measures of the nineteenth (McGowan 1994).
Albert Hourani’s paradigm of “the politics of notables” (1968) has domi-
nated the field despite some attempts to modify it. According to Hourani, local
notables acted as mediators between the government and the local population,
deriving their legitimacy from their ability to maintain a precarious balance
 Relations Between City and State in the Middle East | 87

between the need of the population to mitigate government demands and the
need of the government to maintain a semblance of imperial order in the cit-
ies. Theirs was a politics based on forms of patronage and social connections
enhanced by wealth but not necessarily tied to it. The nineteenth century
reform measures, according to Hourani, undercut the mediating abilities of
these local elites by co-opting them into provincial administrative structures.
Although quite effective in presenting a partial explanation for the fac-
tional politics of elite households in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries, the “politics of notables” paradigm does litt le to explain changes
in the meaning of the term “notables” or the composition of the group it des-
ignated between 1700 and 1850. Nor is it especially useful in explaining the
political dynamics that governed the relationship between political power
holders in Egypt and the representatives of the Cairene population. More
recently, work by some historians has begun to refi ne, if not overturn, the para-
digm.25 It is becoming clear that by the second half of the eighteenth century
the term “notable,” while still used in official documents and local histories to
denote a group of local representatives, had come to denote a group of people
with different economic backgrounds and political roles vis-à-vis the state. The
catalysts for such change were the transformation in the taxation system in the
empire and the introduction of new tax-farming arrangements.
By the seventeenth century the Ottoman government had devised a sys-
tem of taxation that allowed local notables to divide the tax burden among
the urban and rural populations. Th is was a principle that had been followed
previously but had only applied to the collection of dues from different quar-
ters where locally elected representatives had divided up the taxes among the
inhabitants. It had not applied to the collection of market and artisan dues. By
the eighteenth century, these urban dues as well as all kinds of rural taxes were
apportioned and sometimes collected by the notables or their representatives.
In effect, the notables became agents for the state. Long before becoming its

25. Marcus 1989 warns against viewing the notables as representative of the local ele-
ments against the interests of the government. Schatkowski Schilcher 1985 draws a clear
picture of the redefi nition of the word “notable” in late eighteenth-century Damascus. For
seventeenth-century Palestine, see Ze’evi 1996, 63–67. For the second half of the nineteenth
century, see P. Khoury 1983, 1990.
88 | DI N A R I Z K K HOU R Y

administrators in the second half of the nineteenth century, their mediating

role had already been seriously compromised. In their work on Aleppo, Bod-
man (1963) and Masters (1990) found that the hostility the local population
felt toward these notables in the second half of the eighteenth century went a
long way to explaining the rise of the ashraf and the janissary households as
the true upholders of local interests. Th ieck (1985), Meriwether (1987), and
Masters (1991) have shown that a section of those designated by the local
population and the government as a‘yan had become the main beneficiaries
of the new fi scal policy that allowed them to purchase long-term tax farms
and to keep portions of rural revenues over generations. By the end of the
eighteenth century, they had become a service gentry whose interests were
tied to the state.
The fiscal and administrative policies of the state were pivotal in trans-
forming the stratification among the a‘yan as a group. In Aleppo, for example,
the cohesiveness of the ashraf as a corporate group, with privileges and exemp-
tions, was strained by the development of a powerful elite able to lionize the
tax-farming market and develop elite households. Those less adept at using the
system to their advantage, as the ashraf households and larger landowners had
done, found in their allegiance to the state a means of maintaining a political
role in the city to counter the ascendancy of the wealthier local elite. A similar
pattern of division and group alliances emerged in Mosul during this period,
but with different actors and different political results. In Damascus, class and
group alliances were again somewhat different, but it is clear from Schatkowski
Schilcher’s work (1985) that the notables as a group were no longer easily iden-
tifiable as a political bloc, and their mediating role was being usurped by the
janissary leadership, or by clients of the ‘Azm family.26
The implications of such work for our understanding of local groups and
their relations to the state are important. First, it is an oversimplification to
speak simply of a stratum of independent a‘yan as representatives of local
interests and as mediators with the state in the late eighteenth century. Long

26. Schatkowski Schilcher (1985), Th ieck (1985), Masters (1990, 1991), Meriwether
(1999), D. Khoury (1997a), and Ze’evi (1996) make a distinction between political households
and notables in the provinces. They posit that the notables developed a clear corporate, if not
class, identity by the nineteenth century. Ze’evi locates the change in the seventeenth century.
 Relations Between City and State in the Middle East | 89

before the nineteenth-century administrative reforms, a section of the local

population, dubbed as notables by the local literati, who often came from their
ranks, had become part of the Ottoman administrative system through their
apportionment of taxes and through their control of tax farms over the gen-
erations. Second, like the janissaries, the notables themselves had become
divided along economic lines that created political boundaries between those
who had a great deal (notable households) and those of more modest means
(service gentry). It is important to try to analyze the implications of such divi-
sions for the relationship of these local actors to the central government. Th ird,
we need to deconstruct the term “notable” itself; although it continues to be
used as a descriptive term, it is also highly charged ideologically. It carried
political meanings for those who used it to denote relations of power as well as
to mask such relations. Finally, it is important to contextualize the use made
of the term in the literature if we are to understand how the place of notables
in urban society in the late eighteenth century differed from that in the late
medieval period. Both biographical dictionaries and local histories use the
term in a generic fashion that is often rather misleading. To understand how
individuals were initiated into the stratum of the a‘yan by contemporaries,
it might be useful to undertake a textual analysis of histories and of govern-
ment documents of the period, keeping in mind that the term does not defi ne
a clearly articulated “estate,” but a mutable, disparate collection of individuals
who were invested politically and economically in inventing and reinventing
themselves as notables. By historicizing the moment of their inclusion into
this ill-defi ned category, we will be able to understand their fluid role within
urban society. Furthermore, a textual analysis will allow us to understand the
enduring ideological pull that the term notable maintained as a means of social
identification for upwardly mobile urban groups, despite drastically different
historical contexts.27
The pattern of relationships between the state, local governors, janissar-
ies, and local notables that held for most of the eighteenth century began to

27. For particularly interesting analysis of the shift ing defi nitions of notability, see Vashitz
1984. Class itself is not merely a category that is identifiable by economic markers and an “inte-
gral” consciousness; it is also, to use a much abused term, an “invented” category imbued with
contested meanings in the political arena.
90 | DI N A R I Z K K HOU R Y

unravel by the beginning of the nineteenth. In the cities of both Syria and Iraq
the tensions created by the changes in local solidarities were exacerbated by
the reforms initiated fi rst by Selim III in 1792, and later by Mahmud II start-
ing in 1812, culminating in the abolition of the janissaries in 1826. Ibrahim
Pasha’s invasion of Syria in 1831 only added fuel to an already tense situation.
In Egypt, the French invasion and Muhammad ‘Ali’s eventual liquidation of
the Mamluks ushered in a period of military reform and fiscal reorganization.
Perhaps the clearest break with the eighteenth century was the disappearance
of the janissaries as a corporate group, if not as a political factor, from urban
life, and the liquidation of the bureaucratic and military households that had
dominated these urban centers. Yet the central questions about the internal
roots of this dynamic remain unanswered. Was this forcible ending of old
political forms a measure enacted by reforming sultans and strong autocrats
who drew their inspiration from European models? Or did the apparent vio-
lence with which these changes were enforced really conceal continuities in
group alliances and relations between the state and urban society?
Although it is important not to underestimate the changes in the relations
between the state and urban society in the second half of the nineteenth cen-
tury, it is essential to keep in mind that the process of modernization was based
on the internal historical dynamic of these relations that had been in the mak-
ing at least since the beginning of the eighteenth century. Thus, despite what
appears to be the loss of administrative control by the central government to
locally based governors, these governors themselves initiated processes that
touched on security, the recruitment of mercenaries, and the erosion of con-
trols over urban markets, which did much to facilitate the reforms of the sec-
ond half of the nineteenth century. Especially significant in this period was
the erosion in the autonomy of the judicial system in issues of recruitment and
provisioning, and its subordination to the power of local political households,
a process that accelerated in the nineteenth century under the pressures of the
centralizing state. At the same time, the expansion of the system of tax farming
and entitlements that appears to have eroded the central state’s control over
resources allowed it to create a wider base of support among ordinary subjects
outside the classical system of estates that had existed in the seventeenth cen-
tury (Abou-El-Haj 1991; Salzmann 1993; Masters 1991; D. Khoury 1997a). If
we take these developments as indications of the transition to a new order, it
 Relations Between City and State in the Middle East | 91

becomes evident that such an order was born and rooted in the internal dynam-
ics of the old even as it initiated new methods and vocabularies of control.

Port Cities and the state

While the specific ways with which state control and urban local forces inter-
acted were quite different in Cairo and Mosul, there were discernible patterns
that allow us to make generalizations about state and urban society relations.
It is more difficult to make broad statements about such relations for port cit-
ies such as Izmir, Acre and Basra, or Algiers and Tunis, because the historical
evolution and the political power relations that developed in them were quite
different. It is instructive to discuss each one briefly if only to demonstrate
how the local, regional, and imperial interacted and shaped the political life of
these port cities.
The eighteenth century was marked by a restructuring of the commercial
ties of the Mediterranean with Europe on one hand and the increasing Euro-
pean penetration of Indian Ocean trade on the other, developments that trans-
formed trading patterns in the area (Frangakis-Syrett 1991a; Owen 1981a,
1–82). In the eastern Mediterranean, European demands for grain, cotton,
and silk spawned an expansion of regional economies based on trade in these
goods. Port cities such as Acre and Izmir emerged to service such trade, acting
as conduits between agricultural interiors and European markets. Local gran-
dees, such as the Cennetoğlu and Karaosmanoğlu in western Anatolia, Zahir
al-‘Umar in Galilee, and Ahmad Jazzar Pasha in Acre, monopolized agricul-
tural revenues and ensured that they had the lion’s share of trade with Europe.
French merchants, who dominated the trade of the eastern Mediterranean
until the Napoleonic invasion, had no choice but to deal with these grandees.
Tunis and Algiers, the frontier port cities of the Ottoman western Medi-
terranean, present a distinctive version of the interaction between Ottoman
forms of government and limitations created by shifts in the balance of eco-
nomic and political power in the area. In Tunis, the Husaynids, an Ottoman-
ized local dynasty, were able to forge an autonomous state built on the wealth
created by privateering and trade with France on one hand and taxes extracted
from the countryside on the other. They succeeded in creating the rudiments
of a proto-national state under the umbrella of Ottoman rule. In Algiers, the
Ottoman elites remained a military overclass (ocaks or deys), distinct from
92 | DI N A R I Z K K HOU R Y

the local population and almost completely dependent on privateering and

the slave trade. When profits from piracy declined in the late eighteenth cen-
tury, the rulers of Algiers found themselves unable to withstand pressure from
European commercial interests. Unwilling to forge effective links with the
local elites, the eighteenth-century deys saw their control eroding as Algiers
was gradually transformed into a proto-colonial city, in which European trad-
ing communities began to sett le and play a dominant political role.28
The maritime trade of the Persian Gulf gradually became dominated by
Britain, which established factories in Bandar ‘Abbas and Bushire on the Per-
sian side and Basra on the Ottoman side. The British found that they had to
deal with two political contenders in the area, tribal confederations, who set
up market towns and small trading ports in response to the expansion of trade
with India and Europe, and local power holders in Basra and Baghdad, who
were anxious to monopolize trade, customs, and profits (Fattah 1997, 13–61).
Much of the vicissitudes of the political life of the cities under discussion here
consisted of maneuvering between European traders, indigenous merchants,
local power holders, and the Ottoman state. Yet the ways in which these forces
worked in each of our cities is quite distinct.
Izmir was a city of European and minority migrants and merchants and
was never a major administrative center in the empire. 29 As such, it retained the
aura of a port city with a large degree of autonomy and control by merchants. It
developed as a large trading emporium in the seventeenth century, thanks to
the sett lement of European merchants anxious to circumvent Ottoman prohi-
bitions on the export of primary products from the Empire, and soon came to
challenge the monopoly of Istanbul over the grain trade of western Anatolia.
By the eighteenth century, European merchants found their principal allies

28. For my analysis of Tunis and Algiers I have relied on Julien 1970, 273–335; Man-
tran 1970; Raymond 1970; Valensi 1977; and L. Brown 1974. I use the term proto-colonial to
denote a town that does not have the administrative structures of colonial rule but in which
European mercantile interests are maintained by an active foreign trading resident commu-
nity. For further discussion of the distinctions between proto-colonial and colonial cities, see
Prochaska 1990, 1–28.
29. My information on Izmir is based on Goff man 1990 and particularly on Eldem, Goff-
man, and Masters 1999. I have also used Veinstein 1976 and Frangakis-Syrett 1991b.
 Relations Between City and State in the Middle East | 93

in the grandees-cum-warlords who controlled large agricultural tax farms and

maintained security in western Anatolia through the mercenary bands they
employed. It was a workable compromise, allowing European merchants and
their local agents, usually Ottoman Christians and Jews, to circumvent Otto-
man controls over customs and the movement of primary products.
Izmir became a port town that linked a regional network of trade and
power to Europe. Because it had developed out of the needs of the merchant
community of the area and had no history as a locus of administrative control,
the presence of Ottoman officials in it was overshadowed by the power of the
landowning grandees based in western Anatolian towns such as Manisa. Goff-
man, who has done extensive work on the city during our period, fi nds that
the Ottoman government was only able to enforce its writ sporadically, and it
adjusted its demands to the reality of the local situation.
The European and minority population shaped the spatial grid of the city
and dominated its economic and social life. Jewish merchants controlled the
tax farm of the customs house; Christians and Jews built churches and syna-
gogues and practiced their religious observances quite openly; Europeans
bought tax farms from the government and built their own quarter with cafés
and wine shops. European and minority merchants were exempt from Otto-
man law through the capitulations. In a city so dominated by European mer-
chants and their allies, a dual legal system, one for foreign and one for local
merchants, seems to have worked more effectively than anywhere else in the
empire. Yet, in the eighteenth century, the Ottomans were able to counter
such local autonomy through two strategies. The fi rst was the development of
an alliance with Ottoman Muslim merchants that allowed the latter to limit
the Europeans’ direct access to internal markets. The second strategy was to
invest the office of local judge with wide powers to adjudicate on issues of trade
between European and Ottoman merchants. In the absence of a strong Otto-
man administrative presence, the judge became an important arbiter in Otto-
man and European matters. The situation in the city began to change in the
early nineteenth century when the government curtailed the power of local
grandees, and in consequence the Greek minority emerged as the main agents
of the trade with Europe (Frangakis-Syrett 1991a). The role of non-Muslim
minorities in the political life of the city became more visible as the indigenous
Muslim power elites were liquidated. In the second half of the nineteenth
94 | DI N A R I Z K K HOU R Y

century Ottoman control over Izmir became more tenuous once again as
the city was transformed into a proto-colonial port town, an enclave of Euro-
pean commercial and political power on the northern littoral of the eastern
Mediterranean.
Further south, on the coast of northern Palestine, the city of Acre devel-
oped into the stronghold of a tribal leader who built his economic base on
tax-farming privileges and the monopolization of the trade with the French
(Cohen 1973; Joudah 1987). The governor of Sidon, then the major trading
town on the southeastern Mediterranean littoral, administered Acre. Until its
conquest by Zahir al-‘Umar, it had been a small port where French merchants
and Corsican corsairs had established themselves in an attempt to escape the
customs dues of the governor of Sidon. Zahir had begun his career as a tax
farmer in the hills of northern Palestine, trading in cotton and oil with French
merchants. By the middle of the eighteenth century he had conquered Acre,
set up a government in alliance with regional merchants who treated the port
as a tax haven, and proceeded to monopolize the sale of cotton, forcing French
merchants to buy it through him at fi xed prices.
The Acre of Zahir al-‘Umar was a small commercial state, based on the
returns from trade and outside the administrative control of the central gov-
ernment. It drew its strength from the migrant population of greater Syria who
found in its prosperity an opportunity for employment and trade. Thomas
Philipp found that its mercantile community was drawn from minority immi-
grants, Melkites, Greek Orthodox, and Jews from Syrian cities. They drew their
strength from their ability to work with Europeans, to service Zahir al-‘Umar’s
fi nancial demands and to draw on the support of networks of powerful men in
Damascus and Istanbul. The city was run as a family patrimony, and its ruler
was the main arbiter of justice and political power in the area (Philipp 2001).
Unlike Izmir, which was never ruled directly by the warlords of the western
Anatolian interior, Acre in many respects resembled the small commercial
city states so common in the Aegean and the Italian Mediterranean: it was
only nominally Ottoman, if at all. After several attempts to win recognition
from the Ottoman government, Zahir al-‘Umar allied himself with the Mam-
luk rulers of Egypt, who invaded Syria and threatened the Ottoman central
government by allying themselves with its enemy, Russia. Unable to maintain
his ascendancy in the area because of the instability of his local power base
 Relations Between City and State in the Middle East | 95

and the hostility of the central government, Zahir was defeated. Ahmad Pasha
al-Jazzar, a former Mamluk from Egypt, succeeded in staving off Napoleon’s
army and set up a quasi-Ottoman form of rule based on his own household of
retainers, but he continued to follow the monopolistic trading practices of his
predecessor. However, the drop in the price of cotton combined with his inabil-
ity to create a stable political environment drove the minority merchants away,
and Acre gradually lost its place as a commercial town to Beirut and Haifa. In
contrast to Izmir, where Greek merchants emerged as the most powerful bro-
kers in the face of receding Ottoman control, the Syrian Christian immigrant
minority in Acre found itself increasingly under attack from the community of
Muslim religious scholars who had gained preeminence in the city.
The relationship of Tunis and Algiers to the Ottoman government can be
analyzed from two perspectives. From the perspective of Istanbul, these cit-
ies were frontier outposts, essential to the expansion of Ottoman control over
western Mediterranean trade and the struggle of the state against the Span-
ish, Venetians, and French. The central government’s concern was limited to
maintaining a strong military contingent and absorbing within its administra-
tive framework the privateering activities of the infamous “Barbary corsairs,”
the most notable being the Barbarossa brothers of Algiers. From the local per-
spective, the prerogatives of the central government were circumscribed by
the nature of distinct local institutions and pressures created by the increasing
commercial might of the French and British in the western Mediterranean.
Ottoman North Africa has been described by one scholar as the “forgot-
ten frontier,” in part because twentieth-century historians often overlooked
the region’s centrality to the Ottoman state in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries (Hess 1978). Both Algiers and Tunis presented unique local adapta-
tions of Ottoman administrative structures with different results. The military
importance of Algiers for the Ottomans lay in its position as the major port
town for the privateers who attacked European ships in the western Mediter-
ranean in the sixteenth century. The Ottomans contracted out the business
of waging war against the infidels to sea captains based in Algiers and drawn
from all over the Mediterranean world. In the circumstances of the “recon-
quista” of the Iberian peninsula by the Most Catholic Kings in the fi fteenth
and early sixteenth centuries, the line between privateering and fighting a
Holy War was a fi ne one. The Ottomans appointed the privateers as governors,
96 | DI N A R I Z K K HOU R Y

supported them with a fresh influx of troops from Anatolia, and had no choice
but to allow the military regiments (ocaks) to rule the city quite independently
of the central government. As in other cities of the empire, the military leader-
ship of these groups formed political households and reinforced their strength
by fresh recruits from Anatolia (Mantran 1970, 254–56). The descendants of
marriages between the Turkish soldiery and local women were excluded from
the elite, a situation unique in an empire in which the ranks of the military
had become replete with local elements by the eighteenth century. Raymond
believes that this policy explains in part the weakness of the Algerian politi-
cal elite and their inability to build up institutions that provided the basis of a
modern state (Raymond 1970, 266).
The prosperity of Algiers in the seventeenth century was fueled by piracy
and the slave trade. Its internal affairs were run by coalition of powerful mer-
chants (ta‘ifat al-ru‘sa‘) drawn from the corsair leaders within the population
and the Ottoman military establishment (Julien 1970, 302–24). Tal Shuval’s
work on Ottoman Algiers has qualified our understanding of the eighteenth
century as one of unmitigated political and economic decline. According to
Shuval, the period brought stable government and a measure of prosperity that
only dissipated during the last decades of the century (Shuval 1998, 2000).
The constant attacks by European powers on the “Barbary corsairs” succeeded
in limiting that trade. The concessions granted to European merchants and
the growth of rival port towns such as Bône (‘Annaba) relegated Algiers to a
peripheral position. Furthermore, as Ottoman power in the western Mediter-
ranean waned, Algiers lost its centrality to the state as a frontier outpost. The
internecine struggles between its power elites, combined with their predatory
policies toward the rural population of Algeria, contributed to the inability of
Algiers to cope with European pressure. Historians portray the late eighteenth
and early nineteenth centuries as an inevitable prelude to the fateful incident
between a French merchant and the dey that led to the colonization of the city
in 1830 (Raymond 1970, 278–85).
Tunis presents us with a conundrum. The city had been the administrative
capital of the pre-Ottoman Hafsid state and, unlike Algiers, which retained
its character as an unruly frontier and corsair port, the Ottomans found that
Tunis had a relatively strong administrative tradition on which they would
build their provincial government. Yet the commercial role of Tunis was the
 Relations Between City and State in the Middle East | 97

most critical element in the defi nition of its relationship with the central gov-
ernment. Its elites were able to maintain a great deal of autonomy because they
did not rely on the central state to dole out resources, and its local merchant
class were strong partners with the Ottomanized local rulers, a situation that
had no parallel in any of the major administrative centers of the empire. These
reasons may justify its inclusion in the category of port cities.
During the seventeenth century, the city built its prosperity on the corsair
trade and on the influx of some 80,000 Moriscos expelled from Spain in 1609
(Julien 1970, 307). The administration of Tunis was taken over by the leader-
ship of the janissaries (deys), and the governor appointed by Istanbul became a
mere figurehead. Deys ruled the province with the cooperation of the admiral
of the fleet (kapudan bashi), and the city had a large European merchant com-
munity with well-established commercial houses. Unlike Algiers, the activi-
ties of its corsairs seem to have been more strictly regulated and less central
to the economic well-being of the government. By 1714, however, the military
elites, who were often drawn from Anatolia, lost ground to an Ottomanized
local bureaucratic household, the Husaynids, who established themselves as a
hereditary ruling dynasty in Tunis. As in other administrative centers in the
empire, the autonomous beys of Tunisia were able to subordinate the military
regiments by relying on irregulars drawn from the sons of Anatolian janissar-
ies and local women (kuluoğlular) and by striking an alliance with local nota-
bles in Tunis (L. Brown 1974, 57). The Tunisian court adapted an Ottoman
form of political and administrative control to Tunis by building an elaborate
household with an internal bureaucracy steeped in the rituals and hierarchy of
elite provincial households elsewhere in the empire (L. Brown 1974, 104–6).
Rural areas that paid tribute to the state were known as bilad al-makhzan, and
the governors undertook two annual expeditions to collect rural taxes. They
co-opted rural leaders by appointing them as cavalry (sipahis) and used them
quite effectively to counter the power of the janissaries. In the city of Tunis
itself, the Husaynid beys built an alliance with merchant princes and tax farm-
ers who formed a local political elite with remarkable longevity.
To bolster their control of the urban population the governors followed a
two-pronged approach. On one hand, they removed the task of policing the city
from the military regiments and delegated it to the civil authority of the heads
of quarters who adjudicated disputes through customary law (‘urf) (L. Brown
98 | DI N A R I Z K K HOU R Y

1974, 122–23). On the other hand, the beys worked at building an institutional
framework with a clear hierarchy of bureaucrats, at the top of which was a mili-
tary and bureaucratic elite attached to the household, supported by a judicial
and clerical local establishment, and a slew of other formalized consultative
bodies such as the city council (diwan) and the council of merchants (L. Brown
1974, 98–99). By the beginning of the nineteenth century, the Husaynids had
succeeded in creating relatively stable government institutions based on the
support of a well-defi ned political class. The Ottoman sultan remained as a
figurehead and an example to emulate, although his authority over his western
Mediterranean provincial capital was purely nominal.
There seems to be unanimity among historians of Tunis that the modern
history of the nation state goes back to the founding of the Husaynid dynasty
in the eighteenth century. Thus, Brown’s book on Ahmad Bey, the fi rst mod-
ernizer of Tunis, takes care to place him in the context of the political culture
of the eighteenth century. Unlike other areas of the empire, the narrative of the
modern period does not start with the Westernizing reforms of the nineteenth
century but with the founding of the proto-national state under the Husaynids.
The question that needs to be asked is why Tunis presents such an anomaly.
Are its distance from the center of power and its pre-Ottoman historical expe-
rience sufficient to explain its exceptionalism, or should one look more closely
at the way the Ottomanized elite were able to create alliances and connections
to civil society despite the diversity of that society?
Basra presents us with another variation of a port city. It was the main
gateway for Indian goods into the empire. Because India was one of the main
trading partners of the Ottomans, control of the city and its trade was very
important for the state (Özbaran 1972; D. Khoury 1991; Fatt ah 1997; Nieu-
wenhuis 1981; Abdullah 2001). Until the Ottoman conquest in 1539, it was
a tribal commercial town, dominated politically by the Muntafiq federation,
with a strong independent merchant community and a trade diaspora that
hailed from India, Arabia, and East Africa. The Ottomans established it as
an administrative center, from which they attempted to control the Indian
and Persian Gulf trade, and also set up a mint to control the flow of bullion
in and out of the empire to and from the India trade. To counter the Portu-
guese presence in the Indian Ocean, they made Basra a center of a fleet and
the kapudan bashi, the admiral of the Ottoman fleet, remained a powerful
 Relations Between City and State in the Middle East | 99

presence in the city until the second half of the eighteenth century. Unlike
Izmir and Acre, Basra was not a commercial port developed by European
merchants or renegade warlords: it was at the heart of the Ottomans’ vision
of themselves as a maritime and commercial power in Asia. However, by the
late eighteenth century, several factors had combined to transform Basra to
a political appendage of Baghdad and to curtail the prosperity and indepen-
dence of its merchant community.
By the eighteenth century the Mamluk governors of Baghdad had become
indispensable to the Ottomans as military contractors who protected the east-
ern frontiers of the empire and controlled the tribal populations that threat-
ened the security of trade through Iraq. Like their counterparts in Mosul,
Damascus, and Egypt, they proved effective in transforming their households
into small bureaucracies, and in recruiting and fi nancing mercenaries. As part
of the return for their loyalty, they were gradually allowed to turn Basra into a
political and commercial satellite of Baghdad. Basra’s administrative status was
downgraded from a province in the sixteenth century to a dependency of the
province of Baghdad in the late eighteenth. The highest Ottoman office holder
was the lieutenant governor (mutesellim), who was appointed by the Mamluk
governors of Baghdad, assisted by a judge, a small contingent of janissaries, and
a council of local notables. Two other administrative posts attest to the posi-
tion of Basra as a major trading center: the kapudan bashi, who was appointed
by Istanbul at the beginning of the eighteenth century and controlled a fleet
of some fi ft y to sixty ships, and the shahbandar, who was the head of the mer-
chants and the main controller of the customs house. In most respects, Basra
had the administrative trappings of a typical Ottoman city. 30
However, the division of power within the city differed somewhat from
that in Baghdad or other cities in the Fertile Crescent. Basra had always had
a strong merchant community with commercial and family ties to the tribal
leadership in its hinterland. The great merchants sat on the local council, inter-
married with the local elite, and were often central to the resolution of con-
fl icts between tribes and city government over control of land and sea trade

30. Abdullah 2001, 29–36, 99–120. Most of the material on eighteenth-century Basra is
based on Abdullah’s work; for late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Basra, see Visser
2005. For the impact of Baghdad’s policies on the regional trade network, see Fatt ah 1997.
100 | DI N A R I Z K K HOU R Y

routes. While other cities in the empire were gradually being dominated by
local landowning elites whose wealth was based on increasing demand for
agricultural goods, Basra’s merchant community drew its economic strength
from long distance trade, establishing commercial houses along the Persian
Gulf littoral and in the Indian coastal cities (Abdullah 2001, 83–98). Per-
haps because the sources of their wealth did not depend on an agricultural
tax-farming system deeply embedded in the local system of power, they were
able to exercise a measure of control and retained a fair degree of social and
geographical mobility. They seem to have had more power to mediate confl ict,
resist the demands of power brokers, and control the commercial life of the
city than their counterparts in the administrative centers of the empire. Their
ascendancy in the city may go some way to explain the relative marginality of
military and paramilitary groups in its political life.
However, Basra’s merchant community found itself subject to the same
pressures as in other cities in the empire. The Mamluk governors of Baghdad
began appointing local judges and administrators and engaged in an active
policy of diverting the caravan trade from Basra to Baghdad. Furthermore,
they made several attempts to turn Baghdad into the main stop of the riverain
trade, thus diverting important customs dues from Basra. By the second half
of the eighteenth century the governors of Baghdad appointed the kapudan
bashi, and in consequence his fleet declined to twelve ships (Abdullah 2001,
30). Th is policy of subjugating the administrative apparatus of the city and
diverting its trade receipts had deleterious effects on the merchants. Wars with
Persia and a series of natural disasters compounded the problem and led mer-
chants either to relocate their operations to newly emergent port towns on the
Persian Gulf or to migrate to India.
More significant for future developments in a number of port towns in
the empire was the growing power of the British trade representative in Basra.
Challenging the power of the Mamluk governors and the local lieutenant gov-
ernor, he interfered in matters of local government and challenged the suprem-
acy of the larger merchants in Basra. As in Aleppo, he found allies among the
Christian (mainly Armenian) trading community who became partners in
the British trade in the area. Unlike in Izmir, however, the growing power of
foreign merchants in Basra did not mean that the city became a colonial port
town. It remained an important administrative center in Iraq, and at some
 Relations Between City and State in the Middle East | 101

point in the nineteenth century, the writ of its governors was extended to the
port towns of the Persian Gulf littoral, such as Kuwait and al-Hasa.
I have sketched this brief history of five port towns to demonstrate the vari-
ety in patterns of relationship between state and urban society in the Ottoman
Empire. Notwithstanding the difficulty of making generalizations, these cities
shared some common features. Europeans and their trade became essential
components of the power structures in these cities, although there was great
variety in the manner in which the local and the international interacted. Fur-
thermore, the state had much less control in these cities than it did in the major
administrative centers of the empire. By the mid–nineteenth century the five
port cities had taken different trajectories. Izmir was transformed into a proto-
colonial port town, Acre declined as an independent port, Algiers was colonized,
Tunis became the center of an autonomous modernizing state, and Basra was to
be incorporated into the administrative structures of the reforming state. How-
ever, beyond providing the narrative of the different paths these cities took, one
needs to ask why these port cities presented such different scenarios. Relying
for a clarification on the obvious external determinants such as distance from
Istanbul or integration into the world market does not provide us with a satis-
factory explanation. For instance, why did Algiers and Tunis take such radically
divergent routes despite similar positions vis-à-vis Europe and Istanbul? The
same question could be asked for Izmir and Acre. For a more satisfactory expla-
nation one needs to look more systematically at the nature of power structures
within these port towns and place them in the imperial and regional context.

Conclusion

There is evidently much to be done in the historiography of cities in this crucial

transitional period in Middle East history. Th is brief incursion into the politi-
cal relations between city and state in the years that spanned the long eigh-
teenth century has brought into focus the need for a more analytical approach
to three interconnected issues.
First, there is a need to question such monoliths as the Ottoman Empire.
Although historians of the Ottoman state have tended to take a normative
stance toward relations between state and urban society, focusing on the
workings of central state institutions within a limited geographical area and
generalizing to other areas, historians of the Arab provinces have often gone
102 | DI N A R I Z K K HOU R Y

to the other extreme, giving preference to the study of urban history without
making sufficient efforts to link such history to the wider imperial context.
Although recent scholarship is moving away from this polarization, we still
lack a general typology of the determinants of the differentiated experiences
of state and urban society relations. Focusing on regional or urban history,
as some scholars have recently done, presents us with a viable alternative to
state-centered analyses and will certainly help in the deconstruction of the
Ottoman monolith. However, such studies need to be undertaken with two
important caveats: they must avoid the nationalist/national state paradigms,
and they must move away from the essentialist manner of viewing urban cen-
ters as extensions of classical “Islamic” cities with different sets of actors (jan-
issaries, guilds, notables).
Second, there is a need for a closer examination of the intricate ways in
which state and urban society interacted over space and time. Tilly’s statement
about the determining role that alliances between urban social groups and the
state played in shaping the nature of the state is something of a truism. Beyond
stating the obvious, however, we need to explore how the patterns of interac-
tion between state and society shaped the power of the state at the local level
and limited the options of its elites at the center. If we keep in mind that the
relationship between the state and the societies it governed was at all times
limited by the strength of the alliances it could contract, it becomes easier to
move on from the orientalist and neo-orientalist debates about the autono-
mous nature of the Middle Eastern state and the legacy of dependent urban
elites in the “undemocratic” nature of Middle Eastern societies (Sadowski
1997). Although the term “negotiations” has become the mantra of anthro-
pologists and political scientists who use it to describe state and urban society
relations in areas marked by the absence of autonomous judicial and municipal
bodies, it is nevertheless a useful term to employ in describing such relations in
the Middle Eastern context. The years between 1750 and 1850 were marked by
intense negotiations between a wide sector of urban society and the state over
issues of administrative control, entitlements, and exemptions. However, the
results of such negotiations different widely in the various cities of the empire
and were dependent on the political economy of particular cities, the nature of
their power elites, the degree of resistance on the part of their populations, and
the centrality of the city to the maintenance of the empire.
 Relations Between City and State in the Middle East | 103

Finally, we need a more satisfactory explanation of the relations between

cities and the state in the transition to the reform period. The modernizing
reforms of the second half of the nineteenth century put an official end to the
“premodern” system of relations, bringing rationality and principles of man-
agement to government. Yet most studies of urban societies in the second half
of the nineteenth century demonstrate how a new and more diverse urban elite
continued to view the state as an arena of negotiation for office despite the
emergence of a rationalized bureaucracy. In addition, the transformations in
the prerogatives of the provincial judicial establishment, the marginalization
of the janissaries as an effective military force, and the creation of a larger pool
of claimants to the state’s resources furnished the bases for the reforms of the
nineteenth century. The Tanzimat reforms of the nineteenth century added a
new dimension to changes already at work in the late eighteenth century by
investing the state with wide powers to pass new laws and create new insti-
tutions. However, it is important to keep in mind that these laws remained
normative well into the second half of the century, their implementation
remaining dependent on the success of the alliances struck with provincial
urban populations.
Recent studies of Middle Eastern societies have demonstrated that the
modern Middle Eastern state remains a hybrid, combining a system of entitle-
ments and exemptions with rationalized bureaucracy. Suad Joseph has located
such hybridity in the persistent importance of family and communal net-
works, used as protection against autocratic state structures, and political sci-
entist Diane Singerman has found that urban populations have discovered in
entitlements and exemptions, in other words, what is often defi ned in the old
parlance as venality, “avenues of participation” in the national state (Joseph
1997, 64–71; Singerman 1995). Such studies of late twentieth-century Middle
Eastern urban societies provide us with new paradigms that allow us to look at
our data more creatively, and they point to the continuities with the past. They
make it possible for us to root the modernization project of the nineteenth-
century state not simply in European models of development but in the local-
ization of such models by urban populations.
 4
The Economic Organization
of Cities in Ottoman Syria
A BDU L-K A R I M R A FEQ

• I N A V A R I E T Y O F W A Y S , the contemporary economic organization of

Middle Eastern cities still bears the imprint of centuries of interaction between
Islamic, customary, Ottoman, and European legal and economic institutions.
In Syria, this interaction was characterized by alternating confl ict and accom-
modation over time, and the result was a high degree of sophistication and
adaptability in business practices. Very often Islamic law confl icted with Otto-
man law in these matters, but pragmatic solutions were devised, in line with
custom and tradition, to accommodate local practice. In Anatolia and the Bal-
kans, for example, business practices were adapted to conform to pre-Islamic
Turkic or pre-Ottoman Byzantine practices. Th is is evident in the application
of interest in matters of credit and loans in the sharia courts in Anatolia and
the Balkans. Islamic law does not permit the taking of interest, but interest had
been a feature of Byzantine and pre-Islamic Turkic fi nancial dealings. Sultanic
orders approving interest were thus communicated to the courts and imple-
mented by the strength of Ottoman law. Judges in the Syrian Islamic courts
were initially reluctant to apply interest to credit transactions, but they were
eventually prevailed upon to do so by Ottoman decree.1
European influences also played a role in shaping the economic organiza-
tion of Middle Eastern cities, particularly after the mid–nineteenth century.

1. See the quotation from Masters 1988 in chapter 1, note 50.

104
 Economic Organization of Cities | 105

Prior to the Industrial and French Revolutions, mercantilist Europe coex-

isted alongside the traditional economy and society of the Middle East and
protected its interests in the Ottoman Empire largely through commercial
treaties known as the capitulations. In time, the capitulations became extrater-
ritorial rights granted to European merchants and their local protégés. In the
nineteenth century, industrial, capitalist Europe destabilized the traditional
economy and society of the Middle East and brought new institutions and new
social classes into existence, with different business practices and political
platforms influenced by Europe. Thus the guilds, introduced under the Otto-
mans, underwent deep changes under the impact of industrial Europe. Many
of the traditional institutions were abolished and new institutions emerged,
such as the commercial courts established in Damascus and Aleppo in the
early 1850s.

The Guilds in the Syrian Cities

The backbone of the traditional economy and society of Syrian cities under the
Ottomans was formed by the guilds, referred to in the court records as ta’ifas,
groups. These were autonomous groups of craft smen engaged in production,
marketing, and services. The major sources of information about the guilds
are the Ottoman court records, which are available for some Syrian cities from
the 1530s.
The controversy over the existence of guilds in Arab-Islamic cities before
the Ottoman period has not been entirely resolved (Cahen 1970). Despite
the fact that there were crafts and craftsmen at the time, there were no craft
organizations with corporate bodies, apparently because the Islamic sharia
and its associated institutions were considered the only authoritative sources
for organizing every aspect of life. When disputes arose among the crafts, the
qadi (judge) and the mufti (jurist) looked into the matter. The market-inspec-
tor (muhtasib) then played a major role in checking weights, prices, quality of
work, and the ethics of the profession at large.
The creation of guilds in the Syrian cities under Ottoman rule was an
extension of similar institutions in Anatolia and the Balkans, which were no
doubt influenced by earlier Byzantine and European guilds. Their flourishing
in Syria under the Ottomans is reflected in the growing commercial activity
of the cities locally, regionally, and internationally, a fact well attested by the
106 | A BDU L -K A R I M R A F E Q

creation of a large number of caravanserais (khans) in the Syrian cities, which

profited tremendously from trade in and beyond the vast Ottoman Empire
(Raymond 1979–80, 1984, 1985). The shift in commercial importance in the
nineteenth century from the internal caravan cities to seaports such as Beirut,
which could accommodate steamships carrying European goods, although
damaging to local manufactures, did not affect the overall commercial activity
of the cities. While handling a diminishing quantity of local products, those
cities became engaged in marketing European products as well.
The guilds were autonomous or voluntary bodies of craftsmen and mer-
chants, organized both for protection and for the maintenance of standards of
excellence in work. In the course of time, they developed sophisticated orga-
nizations of their own. Members of the same craft established themselves as a
guild, chose their own head (shaykh), laid down the rules of their profession,
fi xed the price of their commodities, merged with, or separated from, other
guilds, or dissolved themselves as guilds according to their own interests.
Their appearance before the judge in the Islamic court was largely intended
to legalize their decisions and seek endorsement of their actions. The Otto-
man government did not control the guilds and only occasionally interfered
in the appointment of some of their heads or senior administrators. The role
of the traditional muhtasib, who had been dominant in the Islamic cities prior
to the establishment of the guilds, was considerably diminished after the
consolidation of the guilds, which usurped much of his functions. However,
certain guilds of importance to the government, such as the guild of butchers
(qassabin), which supplied the people and the army with meat, and the guild of
builders (mi‘mariyya), which supervised the safety of public and private build-
ings, were under government control. The butchers’ guild had its head (shaykh
al-qassabin) who was elected by the members of the guild, and beside him
there was the qassab bashi who apparently represented government interests.
The builders seem to have been more controlled than the butchers; their head
was directly appointed by the government and given the title of bashi, hence
mi‘mar bashi.
The number of guilds varied from one city to another and from one period to
another. At the peak of guild activity in the Syrian cities in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, there were between 160 and 180 guilds in Damascus and
Aleppo and slightly fewer in Hama. In the late nineteenth century, the Qamus
 Economic Organization of Cities | 107

al-sina‘at al-Shamiyya (directory of Damascene crafts), co-authored by Qasimi

and ‘Azm, lists 435 occupations, including many modern ones, such as lawyer
(muhami) and engineer (muhandis) (al-Qasimi 1960). But there is no proof that
each one of these 435 crafts or occupations was organized into a guild.
Some guilds died away because their products could not keep up with the
changing fashions, such as makers of old-fashioned headgear.2 Other guilds
lost their importance and their sales diminished because the social classes for
whom they had catered had become poorer, as in the case of the furriers (al-
farrayin). New guilds also emerged occasionally to satisfy new demands and
changing lifestyles. For example, after much controversy among the ulama
over its merits, coffee drinking was fi nally legalized in the latter part of the
sixteenth century. According to the Damascene biographer Najm al-Din al-
Ghazzi, the Yemeni scholar Abu Bakr al-Shadhili al-‘Aydarusi, who was the fi rst
to legalize coffee-drinking, pointed out its advantages in relieving the mind,
keeping a person awake, and enabling him to perform his night prayers. Sufis
were among the fi rst to drink coffee (al-Ghazzi 1979, 1:113–14, 2:126). Con-
sequently, guilds for coffee sellers (ba’i‘yin al-bunn), coffee roasters (muham-
missiyin al-bunn), and coffeehouse owners (qahwiyya or qahwatiyya) emerged. 3
Coffee from Yemen, most of which was imported on the return journey of the
Damascus pilgrim caravan, generated much activity in the Syrian cities and
came to constitute a major component of the trade accompanying the pilgrim-
age. Similarly, when tobacco smoking was legalized by the jurists in the fi rst
quarter of the eighteenth century in Damascus, Cairo, and Istanbul, among
other places, a number of guilds engaged in various aspects of the tobacco
business emerged. The Damascene Shaykh ‘Abd al-Ghani al-Nabulsi, a Hanafi
jurist and prolific author, authorized tobacco smoking in a treatise entitled al-
Sulh bayna al-ikhwan fi hukm ibahat al-dukhkhan (Peace among friends con-
cerning the legalization of smoking (al-Nabulsi 1924). Nabulsi considers that
smoking is like food: if it hurts you, avoid it, if it does not, why not indulge?

2. Directorate of Historical Archives, Damascus, Law Court Registers (henceforth LCR),

Damascus, 45:58, 28 Sha‘ban 1132 (5 July 1720).
3. LCR, Aleppo 15:493, 4 Ramadan 1039 (17 Apr. 1730) 15:639, 14 Rabi‘ I 1042 (29 Sept.
1632); 25:298, 25 Muharram 1079 (5 July 1668); Damascus, 101:2, 2 Jumada II 1151 (17 Sept.
1738); see also Rafeq 2001.
108 | A BDU L -K A R I M R A F E Q

The chief administrator of the guild was the shaykh, who was elected by
a majority of the senior members from among the master craftsmen in their
ranks. After his election he would be officially endorsed by the qadi. Piety,
correctness, and an upright character were more important than professional
expertise for the choice of shaykh. If the shaykh worked against the interests
of the craft members or breached their code of ethics, he would be deposed by
majority vote and the judge would respect the decision. In the larger guilds like
the butchers, whose activities were spread throughout the city, district shaykhs
in the various quarters were answerable to the chief shaykh of the whole guild.
Th is was also the case for the Jewish butchers who had a shaykh of their own.4
Since promotion from one professional rank to another in the guild was an
occasion for celebrations mixed with Sufi practices, whose nature and scope
has yet to be studied, a shaykh al-mashayikh (head of the shaykhs), who appar-
ently had Sufi, rather than professional, precedence, seems to have officiated at
these ceremonies (Qudsi 1885, 15–30).
The guild shaykh was aided by a number of officers whose numbers, titles,
and positions changed over time. The important officers included the naqib, who
deputized for the shaykh, and the yikit bashi (rendered in Turkish yigit bashi)
who acted as assistant to the shaykh. Like the naqib, the yikit bashi was cho-
sen by the shaykh and occasionally deputized for him. Another officer was the
mu‘arrif (the identifier) who helped the shaykh in collecting the taxes imposed
on the guild as a whole, by identifying each guild member and imposing on him
the relevant tax in accordance with his work and income (Rafeq 1991).
Like its medieval European counterpart, each guild had three professional
ranks: the apprentice (al-ajir or al-mubtadi‘) at the beginning level, the jour-
neyman (al-sani‘), and the master (al-ustadh in Persian, shortened into usta,
or al-mu‘allim in Arabic). There was no time limit for remaining in each rank.
Excellence, good character, and, more importantly, gradation within the ranks
were the main criteria for promotion. Outsiders were not allowed to practice
the craft. Journeymen, however, tended to stay in their rank for long periods
because the masters sometimes delayed their promotion on purpose to avoid
competition, and also because there might be no openings at the masters’

4. LCR, Aleppo, 15:709, 25 Muharram 1044 (21 July 1634); 15:805, 26 Dhu’l-Hijja 1045
(1 June 1636).
 Economic Organization of Cities | 109

level. The master, who was entitled to have an independent workshop, had to
acquire gedik (equipment) and khilu (the right to use vacant premises), which
amounted to licenses. These were costly, owned in part or as a whole by indi-
viduals who were not necessarily craft smen, and were not always available. The
price of the gedik and the khilu varied according to the type of the craft and the
geographical location of the workshop (Rafeq 1991, 503).
The guilds were involved in three major activities: production, services,
and marketing, and there was a clear division of labor within each category.
There were dyers of red and dyers of blue, dyers of silk and dyers of cotton, and
dyers of all colors. In one example, it was agreed before the judge in Aleppo
in 1588 in the presence of the shaykh of the dyers (shaykh al-sabbaghin) that
the dyers who specialized in dark blue were not to be interfered with by the
dyers of other colors. 5 Specialization in dark blue dyeing seems to have contin-
ued over the centuries; thus in 1761 a dye shop in Damascus was mentioned
as specializing in dying dark blue.6 There were also separate guilds for dyers
according to the material and the color they dyed. In Aleppo in 1626–27, a
shaykh was nominated head of the guild that specialized in the red dyeing of
linen from Malatya (ta’ifat al-sabbaghin li’l-sabgh al-ahmar li’l-kham al-Malti
bi-Halab).7 There was also specialization in the guilds offering services. There
was a guild of porters who carried the goods of European merchants (ta’ifat al-
‘attalin al-ladhin yahmilun ahmal ta’ifat al-Afranj bi-Halab) and another guild
of these who carried the goods of local merchants (ta’ifat al-hammalin). There
was also a guild of auctioneers (dallalin) specializing in gallnuts (dallalin al-
‘afs), a guild of auctioneers brokering Malatya linen, and a guild of auctioneers
at large. Specialization in marketing is equally evident in the creation of sep-
arate merchant guilds and the existence of specialized markets. Craft guilds
were usually separate from the merchant guilds that marketed commodities
produced by the former.
Work was done in independent workshops, which were encouraged by the
legal authorities. Partnerships were discouraged. In one case a judge stated

5. LCR, Aleppo, 6:307, awakhir Rabi‘ Awwal 996 (late Feb. 1588).
6. LCR, Damascus, 169:140, 26 Rajab 1174 (3 Mar. 1761).
7. LCR, Aleppo, 15:112, 24 Muharram 1036 (15 Oct. 1626); 15:212, 21 Dhu’l-Qa‘da 1036
(3 Aug. 1627); 15:238, 25 Muharram 1037 (6 Oct. 1627).
110 | A BDU L -K A R I M R A F E Q

that each craft master should work in an independent workshop and should
not resort to partnership because it is harmful to the Muslims (yashtaghil
kullu wahid minhum fi dukkan mustaqill wa-la yashtarikun fi’l-‘amal li-anna fihi
dararan li’l-Muslimin).8 Partnership was apparently discouraged for fear of the
monopolization of commodities, price rises, and the consequent accumula-
tion of wealth by a few persons, which would endanger equal opportunities for
individual workers. The guilds succeeded in ensuring a balanced income for
their members with a minimum of competition and eventually brought about
a degree of social stability. Th is situation continued until the mid–nineteenth
century, when the traditional economic system broke down under the impact
of goods from industrial Europe, and competition with European goods made
it imperative for local industrialists to engage in partnerships.
To offset the limitations imposed by traditional work regulations and to
meet the demands of an expanding market, the guilds resorted to advanced
economic practices that illustrate their dominant economic role at the time.
Mergers occurred among related guilds: for example, the separate guilds of
makers of swords, knives, daggers, bows, and shields merged in Aleppo in
1629 under the headship of a single shaykh. Similarly, the guilds of cooks
(tabbakhin), of meat-roasters (shawwayyin), and of makers of meat pies (san-
buskiyya) merged under one shaykh.9 Such mergers were necessitated by the
challenge of the market. They were usually initiated by the most influential of
the merging guilds in order to maintain better control over the distribution
of raw materials, to stabilize and maintain prices, and eventually to eliminate
competition among members and provide equal opportunities for them.
As the role of the guilds became consolidated in the urban economy of
Syria in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the constraints laid upon
them by increasingly outdated traditions and practices became onerous and
limited their ability to expand their activity. Thus the makers of leather shoes
(ta’ifat al-qawwafin) in Damascus protested to the judge in the early eigh-
teenth century against the dyers of cow hide (ta’ifat al-baqqarin) for refusing

8. LCR, Aleppo, 22:248, 14 Ramadan 1049 (8 Jan. 1640); for the egalitarian aspect of the
guilds, see Rafeq 2002b.
9. LCR, Aleppo, 15:380, 22 Jumada I 1038 (17 Jan. 1629); 15:761, 17 Rabi‘ II 1045 (30
Sept. 1635).
 Economic Organization of Cities | 111

to increase their daily quota of hide to meet the increasing demand for their
products. The dyers of cow hide responded by saying that they had to satisfy
the needs of other guilds that used hide. The matter was referred to the official
Hanafi jurist (muft i) who ruled that the makers of leather shoes should not
force the dyers of cow hide to increase their quota. In his decision to maintain
the status quo, the jurist was evidently oblivious of the dynamics of a free mar-
ket economy.
To counter these legal impediments, and in order to diversify their
investments, some of the larger individual guilds would att ach minor guilds
to themselves through a system of yamak relationships. The Turkish term
yamak (Arabic yamaq), which literally means companion, or assistant,
occurs in the Syrian court records either on its own, or in its Arabic equiva-
lent taba‘, or jointly with the latter term. Th rough this relationship, which fell
short of a merger, the major guild would control the products of the minor
guild and occasionally make the latter process and market its by-products. It
also involved the sharing of taxes between the two guilds. Each guild in the
yamak relationship would normally retain its shaykh, although the att ached
guild sometimes did not have one. The guild of slaughterers (masalkhiyya)
was yamak to the guild of butchers (qassabin). The latter’s role was crucial in
marketing the products of the slaughterers. The guild of tanners (dabbaghin)
competed with the butchers in controlling the slaughterers because the latter
provided them with hide. The guild of ice makers (buzjiyya) was yamak (also
mentioned as taba‘ in the same document) to the guild of ice-cream mak-
ers (aqsamawiyya) and shared with the latter the same shaykh.10 Likewise,
two guilds making different types of caps (al-‘iriqjiyya or ‘irqyaniyya and al-
tawaqiyya) were yamak to the guild of tailors (al-khayyatin). They reworked
the by-products of the tailors into caps and also shared the payment of taxes
with them.11
Disputes over claims of yamak relationship between the guilds were
referred to the judge. On one occasion, the shaykh of the guild of owners of
coffeehouses (al-qahwiyya) was obliged to make monetary contributions to

10. LCR, Aleppo, 15:805, 26 Dhu’l-Hijja 1045 (1 June 1636).

11. LCR, Aleppo, 4:135, 6 Rabi‘ II 1052 (4 July 1642); Damascus, 45:58, case dated 28
Sha‘ban 1132 (5 July 1720).
112 | A BDU L -K A R I M R A F E Q

the army. He asked the guild of coffee sellers (ba’i‘yin bunn al-qahwa) to par-
ticipate in the contributions because they were yamak to the owners of cof-
feehouses. The coffee sellers declined to pay, denying that they had ever paid
contributions in the past or had ever been yamak to the owners of coffeehouses.
The judge called on a group of trustworthy witnesses who affi rmed that the
sellers of coffee were not yamak to the owners of coffeehouses and that at no
time in the past had they made any contribution to them. The judge therefore
prevented the owners of coffeehouses from molesting the sellers of coffee. The
multiplication and the diversity of the guilds in Ottoman Syria and the control
which the major guilds exercised over the affi liated guilds attest to the devel-
opment of capitalistic patterns of a sort.
As autonomous bodies, the guilds had important economic, fiscal, and
social roles. They distributed raw materials among their members, supervised
the quality of production, fi xed the prices of their products and regularized
their marketing, and assigned the amount of taxes each member had to pay. Of
no less importance was the social role that the guilds played in integrating the
religious communities within their ranks.
The shaykh of the guild controlled the distribution of raw materials
among the members of his guild to ensure equal opportunities for all. The
dyers in red of Malatya linen in Aleppo, for example, deposed their shaykh
in 1626 because he wanted to have more than his usual share of linen for dye-
ing. They installed a new shaykh and agreed with him that the linen should be
distributed equally among them and that no member should seek more than
his share.12 The shaykh of the guild of carpenters (al-najjarin) was responsible
for distributing imported timber among the members of his guild, to each in
accordance with his capacity and his ability to work. The shaykh was also to
set the price of timber.13 Members of the guild of khurdajiyya (sellers of miscel-
laneous wares) in Aleppo agreed among themselves that imported wares, like
combs and cutlery, should be distributed equally among them by the shaykh
of their guild. Any member who violated this agreement would be liable for
punishment.14 Likewise, the members of the guild of sellers of pottery (ta’ifat

12. LCR, Aleppo, 15:112, 24 Muharram 1036 (15 Oct. 1626).

13. LCR, Aleppo, 11:76, 22 Muharram 1027 (19 Jan. 1618).
14. LCR, Aleppo, 15:804, awa’il Muharram 1046 (early June 1636).
 Economic Organization of Cities | 113

ba’i‘yin al-fakhur or al-fukhkhar) agreed that their shaykh would distribute the
locally made pottery and the imported pottery among them.15
The shaykh of the market was also responsible for the good behavior and
correctness of the merchants under his jurisdiction. Mischievous merchants
were ousted from the market by the consensus of fellow merchants and the
approval of the judge.16 The shaykh himself could also be held accountable for
his own behavior. If a shaykh requested money illegally from the members of
a related guild, the latter could dispute his claim in court. The shaykh of the
druggists (al‘altarin) in Damascus, for instance, requested that the auctioneers
of perfumes and drugs (al-badayi‘ al-‘itriyya) in the market of Bzuriyya should
pay one-third of their earnings to him. The latter refused to pay and testified
before the judge that there was no precedent for their paying any money to the
shaykh of the druggists. The judge concurred with their deposition.17
The quality of production was also maintained by guild regulations,
which explains why nonmembers were not allowed to practice a guild’s profes-
sion and why no products could be sold outside the specialized market where
a specific commodity was sold, thus enabling the head of the market (shaykh
al-suq) to monitor the provenance, quality, and price of the product. By exer-
cising a monopoly over a particular craft , the guild provided the consumer
with protection against poor workmanship and fraud. The guilds involved in
textile production, for example, laid down the type of material to be used in
each manufacture, assigned the proportion of cotton to silk in both the warp
and the weft, specified the number of threads to be incorporated in each type
of cloth, and set forth the measurements of cloth produced in pieces. The guild
even went to the extent of specifying the weight and measurements of a silk
piece before and after dyeing. Members of the Aleppine ta’ifat al-haririyya,
also known as ta’ifat al-‘anatiyya, who made silk robes, referred to in Aleppo
as ‘anatiyya, agreed among themselves in 1608 that the robes they produced
should be of two types: the fi rst was to be made of ten thousand threads and
was to measure ten dhira‘s in length and one dhira‘ in breadth, and the second

15. LCR, Aleppo, 15:446, 8 Rabi‘ II 1039 (25 Nov. 1629).

16. LCR, Aleppo, 25:124, 19 Sha‘ban 1058 (8 Sept. 1648); Damascus, 51:119, 8 Rajab
1135 (14 Apr. 1723).
17. LCR, Damascus, 107:16, khitam Rabi‘ II 1154 (14 July 1741).
114 | A BDU L -K A R I M R A F E Q

was to consist of thirteen to fourteen thousand threads and have the same mea-
surements as the fi rst. Any deviation from these specifications would expose
the maker to punishment by the shaykh of the guild. The craftsmen also agreed
that the muhtasib (market inspector) should not have any say in their affairs.
The reelers of thread (ta’ifat al-mulaffifin) appeared in court alongside the
haririyya and pledged to provide silk spools containing no less than ten thou-
sand threads.18
By producing silk cloth made of thirteen to fourteen thousand threads,
Aleppo led the Ottoman Empire in producing fi ne silk cloth in the early sev-
enteenth century (İnalcik 1979). By keeping the muhtasib out of their affairs,
the guild of the haririyya was upholding a pattern while also indicating the
loss of authority of this traditional official over the internal organization of
the guilds. The ban on the muhtasib meddling in the affairs of the guild of the
haririyya/‘anatiyya was reasserted again in 1628 when the guild agreed to pro-
duce three brands of silk cloth: a superior type made up of twelve thousand
threads that should not fall below ten thousand threads, a medium type consist-
ing of eight thousand threads, and an inferior type of five thousand threads.19
A commodity that had wide demand could be retailed in more than one
market. A case in point were the woolen cloaks (‘abat, colloquial plural ‘ubi)
which were sold in Suq al-‘Atiq and in Suq Khayr Bek in Aleppo. Members of
the guild of cloak sellers (ta’ifat ba’i‘yi al-‘ubi) agreed before their shaykh and
the judge to sell their cloaks in either market. 20
The guilds also fi xed the prices of their products, taking into consider-
ation the devaluation of the currency and the need to prevent inflation. Any
breach of the fi xed prices was severely punished, morally and materially, by
the shaykh of the guild, who had the support of the judge in these matters.
The creation of specialized markets made it easy for the shaykh of the market
to control the price of merchandise as well as its quality. It also enabled the
buyer to purchase the commodities he needed with ease and satisfaction.
Bulk goods sold in gross were available in a specialized caravanserai (khan)
located either in the market (suq) retailing the same commodity or close by.

18. LCR, Aleppo, 10:870, awakhir Dhu’l-Hijja 1016 (mid-Apr. 1608).

19. LCR, Aleppo, 15:288, 4 Jumada II 1037 (10 Feb. 1628).
20. LCR, Aleppo, 10:605, awakhir Rajab 1017 (early Nov. 1608).
 Economic Organization of Cities | 115

The person in charge of the khan was known as the shaykh or mutakallim (lit-
erally spokesman) and it was his responsibility to lease space in the facility.21
Guilds of specialized auctioneers were responsible for selling bulk goods to
retailers.22 The auctioneers of gallnuts, for example, were located in Khan al-
Sabun (soap) in Aleppo. In 1615, at the request of the head of the merchants in
Aleppo (shahbandar madinat Halab), of several merchants, and of the shaykh
of the guild of brokers (samasira), the judge ordered the auctioneers of gall-
nuts to leave Khan al-Sabun because of their mischief, which had damaged the
interests of the merchants.23
The nature of the office of the shahbandar and of that of bazar bashi (chief
merchant) is not known with certainty from the sources. In cases involving
disputes among merchant guilds or among groups of merchants, both officials
appear to have used their moral, and, one would assume, expert, authority to
bring disputes to a satisfactory conclusion. From the context of several cases,
there seems to have been one shahbandar in each city, although there was more
than one bazar bashi.24 The shaykh of the suq, on the other hand, had direct
authority over the merchants of his suq. He was chosen by them and autho-
rized by the judge. In one case, the merchants of Suq al-Dahsha in Aleppo,
who were Muslims and Christians selling textiles, agreed to the conditions set
by their shaykh after he threatened to resign. His conditions were to establish
three categories of taxes among them (high, medium, and low), that he should
be the sole distributor of textiles to them, that he should have a share of textiles
equal to theirs when distribution occurred, and that each merchant should
work independently of the other merchants and confer with the shaykh on
matters of mutual interest. When the merchants accepted these conditions in
front of the judge, the shaykh withdrew his resignation and agreed to resume
his functions.
To sell their goods beyond the city, the merchants usually sold on credit
to retail merchants in smaller towns. The latter exhibited their goods in their

21. LCR, Aleppo, 15:661, 8 Sha‘ban 1042 (18 Feb. 1633).

22. See, for example, LCR, Aleppo, 15:204, 9 Shawwal 1036 (23 June 1627).
23. LCR, Aleppo, 15:735, 23 Jumada II 1024 (20 July 1615).
24. See, for example, LCR, Aleppo, 15:758, 7 Dhu’l-Hijja 1044 (24 May 1635); Damas-
cus, 17:10, 11 Rabi‘ I 1101 (23 Dec. 1689); 17:82, 3 Rabi‘ II 1101 (14 Jan. 1690).
116 | A BDU L -K A R I M R A F E Q

shops and also traveled to nearby villages where markets were held on specific
days. There were also fortnightly fairs and seasonal fairs that att racted nomads
selling their products and buying what city products they needed. Europeans
frequented these seasonal fairs mainly to buy horses, which were exported to
Europe in large quantities in the nineteenth century to satisfy the need of the
newly established courts in central Europe, mostly the kings and princes of the
House of Hohenzollern.
The taxes imposed on the guilds were farmed out by the government to
the highest bidder. With the help of the identifier (mu‘arrif), the shaykh of the
guild assigned the amount of taxes each member had to pay in accordance
with his work and his fi nancial situation. Working members had to pay for
nonworking members because taxes were collectively imposed on the guild.
When extra taxes were imposed on the guilds to defray the expenses of war
or other necessities, the amount of money each guild was to contribute was
agreed upon by all the shaykhs of the contributing guilds.25 Also, when the
governor of the province or other top officials bought commodities on credit
from the merchants, the shaykhs of the merchants usually acted as guarantors
for the officials. Occasionally, the bazarbashi also acted as guarantor.26
A major aspect of the functioning of the guilds was their integration of
members of the various religious communities within their ranks through a
work ethic that emphasized expertise over religious affi liation. Because the
majority of the population was Muslim, the majority of the guild members were
normally Muslim. But in matters of expertise in which one community had
come to monopolize a certain craft , the guild as a whole was limited to mem-
bers of that community. Jews, for instance, monopolized the guild of smelters
of silver and gold (ta’ifat murawbissi al-fidda wa-al-dhahab) in Aleppo in 1590.
The judge of Aleppo confi rmed a Jew, Shamwil al-Yahudi (Samuel the Jew), as
shaykh of this guild.27 The guild of sculptors (nahhatin) in Damascus whose
membership in 1689 amounted to twenty-seven, was predominantly Chris-
tian, and the guild of builders (mi‘mariyyin) was almost entirely monopolized

25. LCR, Aleppo, 15:820, 26 Shawwal 1046 (23 Mar. 1637).

26. See, for example, LCR, Damascus, 17:10, 11 Rabi‘ I 1101 (23 Dec. 1689); 17:82, sev-
eral cases dated 22 Rabi‘ II 1101 (2 Feb. 1690); 17:86, 24 Rabi‘ II 1101 (4 Feb. 1690).
27. LCR, Aleppo, 7:4, 29 Rajab 998 (3 June 1590).
 Economic Organization of Cities | 117

by Christians. The majority of the members of the guild of silk-spinners in

Aleppo in 1626 were Christians, and a Christian was endorsed by the Muslim
judge as shaykh of this guild with the concurrence of the Muslim members. 28
Christians seem also to have monopolized the guild producing woolen caps
(al-‘iraqi al-jukh) in Aleppo in 1632.29
In the mixed guilds with members from two or three religious commu-
nities, the members worked smoothly with each other. The guild of butchers
(qassabin) was and still is limited to Muslims and Jews, both of whom insisted
on the lawful slaughter of animals according to their religious practices. The
guild of druggists (‘attarin) was also composed of Muslims and Jews, both of
whom were experts in making and selling perfumes and in preparing herbal
medicines. In Aleppo, for instance, the delegations of druggists appearing in
the Muslim court as representatives of their guild included almost equal num-
bers of Muslims and Jews. In February 1660, a delegation of druggists appear-
ing before the court in Aleppo to discuss matters of interest to their guild
included nine Muslims and eight Jews. A majority of Jews and a sprinkling
of Muslims and Christians made up the guild of money changers (sarrafin) in
Aleppo in 1618. 30
Christians figured alongside Muslims in the guilds of bleachers (qassarin),
saddlers (barad‘iyya and samarjiyya), weavers (hiyyak), and dyers in red (sab-
baghi al-ahmar) among other guilds. Muslims, Jews, and Christians figured in
a number of guilds such as dyers (sabbaghin), blacksmiths (haddadin), tailors
(khayyatin), bakers (khabbazin), surgeons (jarrahin), and a host of other pro-
fessions as indicated by the professional surnames carried by members of all
three communities (Rafeq 1993b, 2004).
Only a few guilds were restricted to members of particular ethnic groups.
The makers of light shoes (khaffafin) in Aleppo in 1588, for example, had two
guilds, one for the Rumi (Turkish) members (ta’ifat al-khaffafin al-Arwam) and
one for the Arabs of Aleppo (ta’ifat al-khaffafin min abna’ al-‘Arab bi-Halab).31
Th is example clearly indicates the closure of the local guilds to ethnic aliens.

28. LCR, Aleppo, 15:83, 9 Dhu’l-Qa‘da 1035 (2 Aug. 1626).

29. LCR, Aleppo, 15:619, 26 Dhu’l-Qa‘da 1041 (14 June 1632).
30. LCR, Aleppp, 11:76, 22 Muharram 1027 (19 Jan. 1618).
31. LCR, Aleppo, 6:165, early Safar 996 (early Jan. 1588).
118 | A BDU L -K A R I M R A F E Q

Egyptians figured in the guild of water carriers (saqqayyin) and constituted half
the eight members of this guild in Aleppo around the middle of the eighteenth
century.32 Algerians figured as messengers (su‘at) and watchmen (hurras). In the
eighteenth century, they were employed in large numbers as mercenary troops.
Religion played an important role in business practices and ceremonies.
Much respect was accorded to the members of the religious minorities in the
guilds. The Jewish butchers in Aleppo, for example, were allowed to sell meat
at a price slightly higher than that allowed to the Muslim butchers so as to
provide for the poor within the Jewish community. 33 The fact that non-Muslim
members in the mixed guilds were included in the delegations representing
the guilds before the court is a clear indication of their importance as active
members in the profession. In the ceremonies marking the promotion of a
guild member from one professional rank to a higher one, the appropriate reli-
gious rituals were performed. For a Muslim, the Fatiha (opening sura of the
Qur’an) was uttered; for a Christian, the Lord’s Prayer; and for a Jew, the Ten
Commandments. 34 The Islamic courts also recognized the oath of a Christian
on the gospel and the oath made by a Jew on the Torah. 35
The orderly relations that existed in the mixed guilds between members
belonging to different religious communities reflect the degree of tolerance
and of professional respect that non-Muslims enjoyed in a Muslim-dominated
society. Mixing in the workplace was also reflected in mixing in the residential
quarters where families from the various religious communities lived next to
each other and generally maintained good neighborly relations. 36 No wonder,
therefore, that no sectarian confl icts of the type that flared up in the Syrian cit-
ies around the middle of the nineteenth century had taken place in the three
preceding centuries.

32. LCR, Aleppo, 4:(no pagination), ghurrat Rabi‘ II 1052 (29 June 1642); 5:196, 22
Shawwal 1058 (9 Nov. 1648).
33. LCR, Aleppo, 6:265, end Safar 996 (29 Jan. 1588).
34. Qudsi 1885, 15–30.
35. LCR, Aleppo, 2:48, 7 Dhu’l-Hijja 1001 (4 Sept. 1593).
36. See, for example, Rafeq 1988b; on the generally peaceful coexistence between the
religious communities in Ottoman Syria, see Rafeq 2003a, 2004, 2005. For a detailed statisti-
cal survey, see the summaries of the quarter populations of Aleppo in 1900 assembled (from
Kamil al-Ghazzi 1926) in the tables in Gaube and Wirth 1984, 427–34.
 Economic Organization of Cities | 119

Among the Muslim craft smen, religious precedence and descent from the
Prophet (sharif) were valued. One alim (scholar), who belonged to the guild
of sawyers (nashsharin), was exempted from the payment of irregular taxes
because he was a leader in prayer (imam) and a preacher in the Friday prayer. 37
The influential guild of tanners (dabbaghin) in Aleppo was reported in 1593
to have had two shaykhs: one for the tanners who were ashraf (descendants
of the Prophet) and another for those who were not. The two shaykhs agreed
that hide delivered to them for processing should be divided into four parts:
one part for the ashraf tanners, of whom there were fewer, and three parts for
the rest. It was also agreed that bachelor tanners should have half the share
of married tanners. 38 Thus, social and economic considerations as well as the
religious status of members were also taken into account by the guild. It is not
known how long the division of the tanners into ashraf and non-ashraf lasted,
but this division is significant in the history of Aleppo, where the ashraf played
an important political and military role in the life of the city.
Women are not mentioned in the court records as guild members despite
the well-known fact that they provided cheap labor in the privacy of their
homes. They were engaged mainly in cotton spinning, mat making, embroi-
dery, and sewing, and sometimes acted as auctioneers of secondhand clothing.
In one case, a woman was assigned by the judge in Aleppo in 1627 a half share
of the fat from which wax was made to be given to her daily by the shaykh of
the guild of wax makers (shamma‘in) in the slaughterhouse alongside the male
members, each one of whom was to receive a whole share.39 It is not known
whether the woman was a full member of this guild and was given half a share
because of her gender or whether she was deputizing for her handicapped
husband. On a lighter note, the court in Damascus reported a case in 1710 in
which a female who stole money from another woman declared in the court
that she was a member of the guild of thieves (ta’ifat al-sarraqin).40 Peasant

37. LCR, Damascus, 21:275–76, 1 Jumada II 1101 (5 Mar. 1593).

38. LCR, Aleppo, 2:152, 17 Dhu’l-Hijja 1001 (14 Sept. 1593).
39. LCR, Aleppo, 15:237, 5 Safar 1037 (16 Oct. 1627); cf. 25 Muharram 1037 (6 Oct.
1627).
40. LCR, Damascus, 33:91, 24 Ramadan 1119 (19 Dec. 1707); for women’s labor and
their absence from the guilds in Hama, see Reilly 2002, 83–84.
120 | A BDU L -K A R I M R A F E Q

women played a major role in agricultural work and very often outdid their
lazy husbands, but there is no mention of their constituting guilds on their
own or with the men.
Information on child labor in the cities is difficult to ascertain. Most of
those employed in the guilds at the beginning level as apprentices (ajir or
mubtadi‘) seem to have been youths who had reached the age of adolescence.
In one case from Damascus in 1722, a master cloth printer (tabba‘) made a
legal contract before the Shafi‘i judge employing his adult nephew for two
‘aqds, each of three years’ duration. The nephew’s daily pay was six misriyyas
(one piaster equalled 40 misriyyas), four of which were to be retained by the
employer for the daily food, drink, and other needs of the employee and two
misriyyas were to be paid to him.41 The contract does not mention whether the
employer would offer lodging to the apprentice.
The guilds performed many of the regulating duties now undertaken by
a modern urban municipality. In addition to their economic functions, they
also cared, among other things, about public health and cleanliness. The tan-
ners, for example, were directed to establish their tanneries outside the popu-
lated areas to ensure that the bad odors emanating from animal skins and the
fl ies and insects gathering around them would not cause discomfort to the
inhabitants. No tanner was allowed to practice his profession in his own resi-
dence, not only because this breached the general rules of the guild that work
had to be done in specially assigned places, but also because it constituted
a health hazard. In Damascus between the sixteenth and nineteenth centu-
ries the tannery remained outside the quarter of Bab al-Salam and the walls
of the city, where water to clean the skins, space to dry them, and a degree
of isolation from residential areas were all available.42 In Aleppo in 1635, in
the presence of the shaykh of the tanners, the butchers were urged by the
judge not to sell animal skins outside the tannery. The tanners were likewise
requested not to buy any skins outside the tannery, otherwise both parties
would risk punishment. The tannery of Aleppo was reported at the time to be
outside Aleppo (zahir Halab), that is, outside the city walls, more specifically
in the qaysariyya of Muhammad Pasha, the Vizir, outside Bab Antakya (Gate

41. LCR, Damascus, 50:28, 25 Dhu’l-Hijja 1134 (6 Oct. 1722).

42. LCR, Damascus, 28:220, 11 Muharram 1114 (7 June 1702).
 Economic Organization of Cities | 121

of Antioch).43 The relocation of the tanneries away from the walls of the city
is also indicative of the expansion of the city (Raymond 1977b).
Guilds involved in public services were urged to adhere to the instructions
issued to them. Members of the guild of earth removers (tarrabin) entrusted
with removing the accumulated earth within the city were instructed by their
shaykh not to deposit the soil in cemeteries, on roads, or on the hills in the
vicinity of the city but to take it to specially designated pits or caves.44 In mat-
ters where members of a guild breached the moral code of their craft, they
were held accountable for their actions. When members of the Aleppo guild of
goldsmiths objected in the court to the misdeeds of fellow members who were
cheating the customers and tarnishing the good image of their craft , the judge
granted their request by ordering the expulsion of the mischievous members
from the goldsmiths’ market.45 In another example, members of the guild of
silk spinners were held accountable for any decrease in the weight of spun silk
after its being dyed blue. The silk spinners were offered two piasters in wages
for every one hundred dirhams of silk spun. After the spun silk was dyed blue,
the one hundred dirhams of silk were supposed to weigh sixty-seven dirhams.
If they weighed less, then the silk at the time of spinning had probably been
treated with oil, which would cause its weight to decline below the officially
prescribed weight after dyeing. The spinner then had to make up the differ-
ence in weight and would be administered the punishment he deserved.46
Such self-imposed rules observed by the guild members had a powerful moral
and social authority that transcended any laws the government might impose.
Even today, when labor courts fail to reach a satisfactory solution between the
parties in a labor dispute, an experienced master craft sman, who is respected
by all for his integrity, can often achieve better results. Piety and correctness
were more important than professional skill in the election of the shaykh and
the senior officers because these officers were charged to watch over the morals
of the guild members. The degree of discipline, morality, religious tolerance,

43. LCR, Aleppo, 15:767, 15 Safar 1045 (31 July 1635). cf. 12:67, 5 Rabi‘ II 1032 (6 Feb.
1623); 13:294, 4 Safar 1034 (16 Nov. 1624); 22:88, 22 Sha‘ban 1050 (7 Dec. 1640).
44. LCR, Aleppo, 23:184, 19 Jumada II 1052 (14 Sept. 1642).
45. LCR, Aleppo, 25:124, 19 Sha‘ban 1058 (8 Sept. 1648).
46. LCR, Aleppo, 22:89, 25 Sha‘ban 1050 (10 Dec. 1640).
122 | A BDU L -K A R I M R A F E Q

and the high standards of work that characterized the guilds reflected, and in
turn promoted, these same qualities in traditional society as a whole.
At times of insecurity, such as during the eighteenth century when the
authority of the central administration declined and power groups in the Syr-
ian cities fought each other, the guild members defended their interests. In
Damascus, for instance, members of the guilds paraded in the streets in 1760
carrying arms, tools, and magnificent shields. However, the increasing corrup-
tion of the state administration and the deteriorating economic conditions of
the majority of the people, particularly the peasantry, tended to compromise
the positive effects of the guilds.47

Business Practice in Ottoman Syria

Business practice in Ottoman Syria was a reflection of a combination of the disci-

pline and ethics of the guilds, the corruption of the administration, and the pov-
erty of the people. Financial dealings between individuals are well documented
in the court records. In the early period of Ottoman rule in Syria, according to
the court records of Hama from the mid-1530s, four categories of credit were
common among the local population. In order of frequency, these were selling
on credit, that is, delayed payment for commodities sold (bay‘ bi’l-dayn), loan
(qard), debt (dayn), and prepayment for future delivery (salam). Out of 1,090
legible cases in the first register of the Hama court, which covers a period of 279
days spread over two years, A.H. 942-43/A.D. 1535–36), 429 cases (39 percent
of the total) deal with credit transactions. These transactions were recorded in
the sharia court to make them legal. The court accordingly issued hujjas (docu-
ments) to the contracting parties sett ing out the terms of the transaction. Table 1
classifies these transactions according to their category, number, and value.
Selling on credit topped the list with a total of 63.4 percent of all transac-
tions and 71.11 percent of the total money invested in these transactions. Th is

47. Studies of guilds in various cities and provinces make it possible to compare practices
in the Empire as a whole: see, for example, Raymond 1973 on Cairo; Shkodra 1973, 1975, on
Albania; Baer 1982 on Egypt; Akarlı 1985–86 on Istanbul; Yi 2004 on Istanbul; and Faroqhi
and Deguilhem 2005 on the Muslim Mediterranean. For a survey of the social history of labor
in the Empire in the nineteenth century, see Quataert 1996; for late nineteenth-century Egypt,
see Chalcraft 2004.
 Economic Organization of Cities | 123

TA BL E 1

Credit Transactions in Hama, 1535–36

Number of Total value in
Credit category transactions Percentage Aleppo dinars Percentage

Selling on credit (bay bi-al-dayn) 272 63.40 1,155,550 71.11

Loan (qard) 96 22.38 246,287 15.15

Debt (dayn) 43 10.02 121,219 7.46

Prepayment for future delivery (salam) 18 4.20 102,070 6.28

total 429 100.00 1,625,126 100.00

category of credit, which involved delayed payment for commodities sold, was
widespread and constituted the core of the subsistence economy at the time. A
limited number of creditors, mostly of urban origin, extended credit to buyers
by selling them the commodities they needed, very often at inflated prices. The
social groups involved in this type of credit, whether creditors or debtors, and
the value of the commodities sold on credit are examined in Table 2.
The group with the highest number of creditors (59.56 percent) was com-
posed of the untitled, that is, ordinary people with no social, religious, or eth-
nic title that might enable us to identify their, status, sect, or ethnicity. Despite
their large number, however, the value of the commodities they sold on credit
constituted 26.94 percent of the total, that is, less than half the percentage of
their number, which indicates the large number of ordinary people involved in
the credit market. Th is is further confi rmed by their large percentage (46.91
percent) among the debtors, and also by the large amount of debt (41.2 per-
cent) they owed to others.
The three other groups that topped the list of creditors after the untitled
with regard to the large amount of credit they advanced despite their small
numbers were the hajjis/merchants (that is, those who could afford to go
on the costly pilgrimage and were mostly merchants), the military, and the
ulama. Although the military were fewer in number (3.68 percent), com-
pared to the ulama (8.45 percent) and the hajjis (20.59 percent), the amount
of the credit they offered (16.57 percent) was proportionally greater than the
amount offered by the ulama (15.57 percent) and the hajjis (31.23 percent) in
 124 | A BDU L -K A R I M R A F E Q

TA BL E 2

Creditors, Debtors, and Value of Credit in Hama, 1535–36

Creditors Debtors
Credit in Credit in
Social group No. % Halabi dirhams % No. % Halabi dirhams %

Officials 1 0.37 12,500 1.08

Treasury 2 0.74 50,000 4.32

Military 10 3.68 191,473 16.57 1 0.31 1,000 0.08

Ulama 23 8.45 180,027 15.57 3 0.93 48,000 4.15

Hajjis/
merchants 56 20.59 360,875 31.23 37 11.42 179,582 15.54

Untitled 162 59.56 311,310 26.94 152 46.91 476,055 41.2

Peasants 7 2.57 12,880 1.14 103 31.79 389,773 33.73

Women 7 2.57 27,190 2.35 4 1.23 2,155 0.19

Christians 4 1.47 9,295 0.8 23 7.1 41,485 3.59

Jews 1 0.31 17,500 1.52

total 272 100.00 1,155,550 100.00 324 100.00 1,155,550 100.00

percentage terms. The high investment by the military in the credit market was
indeed the beginning of a trend that they maintained throughout Ottoman
rule in Syria, indicating the major role they were to play in the economic life
of the country. Women, Christians, and Jews played relatively minor roles as
creditors and debtors; this continued to be the case until the nineteenth cen-
tury when the two latter groups began to accumulate wealth as middlemen and
agents for European merchants and also as entrepreneurs in their own right.
Among the debtors, the peasants ranked after the untitled both in number
(31.79 percent) and in the amount of credit offered to them (33.73 percent).
Th is also set a pattern for the future, because of the deteriorating economic
condition of the peasantry and their exploitation by the military as creditors
and holders of agricultural land grants and also as tax farmers. Most of the
commodities the peasants bought on credit consisted of the grain, cotton, and
animals that they produced and worked with but were obliged to sell to pay off
 Economic Organization of Cities | 125

their debts. By quantifying the types of commodities sold on credit and their
value according to the various social groups that dealt in them, important con-
clusions can be drawn, as Table 3 indicates.
The military headed the list of providers of grain (44.4 percent), which
indicates their heavy involvement with the peasants as holders of land grants
or as tax farmers. The peasants ranked after women and Christians as credi-
tors of grain (1.77 percent). The untitled ranked fi rst (50.45 percent)among
the groups offering cotton on credit. The ulama, the hajjis/merchants, and the
untitled together accounted for about 96 percent of the textiles given out in
credit. The hajjis/merchants and the untitled together accounted for about 64
percent of the animals sold on credit, which indicates the involvement of both
groups in agricultural dealings with the peasants.
By examining the receiving groups, that is, the debtors, the peasants
again figure as the most indebted social group. The types of commodities they
bought on credit are very indicative, as illustrated in Table 4. Credit extended
to the peasants to buy grain was 72.46 percent of the total, to buy cotton 45.23
percent, and to buy animals 29.22 percent. The peasants’ meager purchases
of textiles and woolen cloth (7.57 percent and 5.12 percent respectively) can
presumably be explained by their modest means. The absence of spices and
perfumes from their credit likewise attests to the harshness of their way of life.
The military barely figure as debtors.
Two basic facts emerge from sales on credit in the liwa’ of Hama in
1535–36: the major role of the military in extending credit, mostly to peas-
ants, and the profound indebtedness of the peasants, mainly to urban credi-
tors. In time, the military grew richer by investing heavily in the countryside
and by using illegal means of making money while the condition of the peas-
antry deteriorated.
As holders of land grants (timariots or sipahis) and tax farmers (multaz-
ims), the military found the peasantry an easy prey. The timariots lived mostly
in the towns, rather than on their fiefs, but they abused the peasants who lived
and worked on their fiefs. They burdened them with excessive taxation, beat
them, and even put them in chains in their private prisons,48 especially during

48. LCR, Hama, 24:471, awa’il 992 (beginning 1585); 25:554, awakhir Muharram 994
(mid-Jan. 1586).
 TA BL E 3

Creditors: Commodities, and Credit in Hama, 1535–36

Woolen Spices and
Social groups No. Grain Cotton Textiles cloth perfumes Animals Miscellaneous

Officials 1 12,500

(18.78)

Treasury 2 2,500 25,000

(6.37) (25.52)

Military 10 174,150 1,535 5,288 10,500

(44.40) (2.31) (5.40) (7.03)

Ulama 3 42,290 12,150 90,140 1,210 1,200 33,037

(10.78) (18.26) (32.18) (1.31) (1.22) (22.11)

Hajjis/
merchants 56 59,875 4,900 92,840 69,700 65,600 28,840 39,120

(15.26) (7.36) (33.15) (75.70) (84.95) (29.44) (26.19)

Untitled 162 79,904 33,573 85,355 19,020 11,620 33,840 47,998

(20.37) (50.45) (30.48) (20.66) (15.05) (34.54) (32.13)

Peasants 7 6,930 1,650 500 3,800

(1.77) (2.48) (0.18) (3.88)

Women 7 2,500 8,300 14,240

(0.64) (2.96) (9.53)

Christians 4 1,600 245 2,950 4,500

(0.41) (0.36) (1.05) (3.01)

Jews — — — — — — — —

total 272 392,249 66,553 280,085 92,080 77,220 97,968 149,395

Percentage
of total value
(1,155,550) (33.94) (5.76) (24.24) (7.97) (6.68) (8.48) (12.93)

Note: Values are in Halabi dirhams with percentage of total values in parentheses.
 Economic Organization of Cities | 127

TA BL E 4

Debtors: Commodities and Credit in Hama, 1535–36

Social Woolen Spices and
Groups No. Grain Cotton Textiles cloth perfumes Animals Miscellaneous

Military 1 100

(0.03)

Ulama 3 12,500 25,000 10,500

(18.78) (25.52) (7.03)

hajjis/
merchants 37 21,770 11,100 58,087 7,350 44,000 4,645 32,630

(5.55) (16.68) (20.74) (7.98) (56.98) (4.74) (21.84)

Untitled 152 54,964 12,607 193,818 61,120 33,220 39,693 80,633

(14.01) (18.94) (69.20) (66.38) (43.02) (40.52) (53.97)

Peasants 103 284,240 30,101 21,200 4,710 28,630 20,892

(72.46) (45.23) (7.57) (5.12) (29.22) (13.99)

Women 4 1,475 680

(0.38) (0.24)

Christians 23 29,800 245 5,300 1,400 4,740

(7.60) (0.37) (1.89) (1.52) (3.17)

Jews 1 17, 500

(19.00)

total 324 392,249 66,553 280,085 92,080 77,220 97,968 149,395

Note: Values in Halabi dirhams with percentage of total values in parentheses.

the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries, when the timariots were at the
peak of their power. The peasants reacted to their plight in two ways, either by
taking to banditry on the highways or by seeking safety in fl ight. Many villag-
ers fled their villages, both to the detriment of their lords (who were deprived
of their labor) and to the displeasure of their remaining fellow peasants, who
had to pay their share of the collective taxes. The timariots used force and also
appealed to the judges to bring back fugitive peasants in accordance with the
128 | A BDU L -K A R I M R A F E Q

laws promulgated by the state. The judges did not always concur with the
requests of the timariots, especially when the peasants could prove that they
had been sett led in their new villages for not less than fi fteen years, had fam-
ily, and paid taxes there (al-Faradi n.d.) According to Halil İnalcik, Ottoman
law “forbade the reaya to leave their sett lement and go elsewhere” because
“the Sipahi whose reaya fled lost his income. . . . The Sipahi had fi fteen years
in which to compel a fugitive peasant to return to his land but to do this he
needed a kadi’s decree” (1973b, 111–12). Such abuses of authority on the part
of the timariots were common in the Ottoman Empire at the time.
The Syrian ulama came to the defense of the fugitive peasants by con-
demning the Sultan’s orders and the feudal laws that allowed the maltreatment
of the peasants. They approved of the peasants’ fl ight because of the injustice
they suffered and quoted the example of the Prophet Muhammad who fled
Mecca to Medina to avoid persecution by the Meccans. The ulama went to the
extent of encouraging the peasants to rise against their oppressors and even
to kill them. Ottoman law, the ulama maintained, could be implemented only
when it conformed to the sharia (al-Nabulsi 1987–88, 18–20, 28–37).
Th roughout Ottoman rule in Syria, the military, more than any other
group, both timariots and local janissaries (yerliyya), maintained their hold
over most of the agricultural land as holders of land grants, tax farmers, and as
lessees of waqf agricultural land. A sample from the court records of Damascus
from the period between 20 September 1583 and 8 September 1584 indicates
that the military rented property during this period for 158,240 silver qit‘as
(probably aqche, the fi rst Ottoman silver coin), which constituted 61 percent
of the total rent paid to all social groups during the same period. The military
do not figure at all as lessors of property, only as buyers. They bought property
to the amount of 9,760 qit‘as, 13.53 percent of the total. Agricultural property
accounted for 57.78 percent of what they bought, 36.89 percent commercial
and 5.33 percent residential. The military sold agricultural property valued at
32,000 qit‘as, or 44.37 percent of all property sold in that year. Th is clearly
shows the heavy involvement of the military in dealings in land, especially
agricultural land (Rafeq 1987b, 158–59).
Outside the urban centers, agricultural land was mostly either miri (state)
land or waqf (charitable or family foundations) land. Neither type of land
could be sold and owned as freehold (milk). Plantations and buildings on these
 Economic Organization of Cities | 129

lands, however, could be owned according to Islamic law. Thus, buying agri-
cultural property generally meant buying plantations. In another sample from
the court records of Damascus, about 115 years later, in 1700–1, the military
again headed the list as lessees of agricultural land. They also ranked second,
after the ashraf, as buyers of property. They bought 28.08 percent of the land
on sale in the countryside of Damascus while the ashraf bought 52.94 percent.
The military sold less land (26.92 percent) than they had bought. In a second
sample from Damascus in 1724–25, the military bought about half the land
(50.08 percent) on sale; the remaining percentage was bought by six other
social groups. The military sold only 27.99 percent of the land they had bought.
The military leased 50.10 percent of all charitable (khayri) and family (ahli)
waqf agricultural land that was put out for rent in the 1700–1 sample. They
leased about the same per centage (49.53 percent) of waqf land in the sample
of 1724–25 (Rafeq 1992a, 297–99, 318–20).
Waqf agricultural land leased by the military in the sample of 1700–1
consisted of 57.13 percent of charitable waqf land and 23.08 percent of fam-
ily waqf land. In the 1724–25 sample, they leased 50 percent and 20 percent
respectively. Most of the leases of waqf land contracted by the military in both
samples broke the three-year limit stipulated by the official Hanafi school of
law. To ensure the legitimacy of the longer leases, the military referred them
mostly to the Shafi‘i judge who, in accordance with his school of law, legalized
the leases which were then endorsed by the official Hanafi judge, a procedure
which brought the lessees much profit. Th is is because in the lease contract of
waqf land, a clause referred to as the right of muzara‘a or munasaba, that is, the
right of plantation, allowed the lessee to plant on waqf land during the lease
period. One-third to three-quarters of these plantations would be the prop-
erty of the lessee, the remaining portion belonging to the waqf. Th is portion
would then be entrusted to the lessee by virtue of another clause in the con-
tract known as musaqat (from the Arabic root meaning to irrigate), for which
he would be offered an almost standard compensation amounting to 999 out
of 1,000 shares of the revenue of the plantations belonging to the waqf. The
remaining one share went to the waqf (Rafeq 1992b, 2006).
Such legal tricks and the substitution of the more accommodating Shafi‘i
law for the more rigid Hanafi law in the leasing of waqf land played especially
into the hands of the influential military lessees who took advantage of them to
130 | A BDU L -K A R I M R A F E Q

consolidate their economic standing at the expense of the waqf and its benefi-
ciaries. Th is explains why a number of mosques, schools, hospices, and water
fountains within and outside the cities were neglected or destroyed in the
course of time, because the waqf revenues that should have accrued to them
were usurped by influential persons including the military and the urban nota-
bles. The twentieth-century Damascene alim ‘Abd al-Qadir Badran criticized
the greed of these persons and lamented the disappearance of many charitable
establishments because they had lost their waqf revenue (Badran 1960). Th is
situation was not limited to the main cities. Thus, many streets in Gaza in the
late 1850s still carried the names of mosques that had once existed but were no
longer there or left only traces of their remains (Rafeq 1980).
Fortunes were also made in the cities by offering credit at usurious rates.
In the fi rst Hama court register from 1535 to 1536, loans outnumbered debts.
There were 96 loans (qard) against 43 debts (dayn). The fact that there were
more than twice as many loans as debts is of great significance in the early
years of Ottoman rule in Syria. Th is occurred before Ottoman laws and regu-
lations were fully implemented and before administrative corruption trans-
formed fi nancial practices for the worse. Traditionally loans were interest-free,
had no time limit, needed no security, were offered in kind or in cash, and were
intended to help the needy. Hence they were known as qard hasan, meaning a
fair, meritorious loan. The 96 loans were offered by the same number of credi-
tors to 124 persons, indicating that a larger number of persons benefited from
them. The ulama ranked fi rst among the lenders (43.79 percent) followed by
untitled people (43.33 percent). The least involved in loans were the military
(1.04 percent), who had the same percentage as the peasants and the Chris-
tians. The majority of the persons who sought loans were peasants (59.67 per-
cent). The total value of the 96 loans amounted to 246,287 Aleppo dirhams, or
an average of 2,565 dirhams per loan.
In comparison to loans, debts had a time limit, required security, were
offered in kind or in cash, and were referred to as shar‘i, meaning they were
legal and in conformity with the rules of the sharia. They also required two
types of guarantors: a fi nancial guarantor (kafil bi’l-mal) and a personal guar-
antor (kafil bi’l-nafs), who was responsible for keeping the debtor available. No
interest was explicitly mentioned in the debt transaction. The Islamic court
allowed the investment of money for profit, under the rubric of murabaha, in
 Economic Organization of Cities | 131

only two cases: when money belonged to minor orphans or to waqfs. Mura-
baha was intended to benefit both beneficiaries.
In the same court register from Hama, 43 creditors gave out debts to 64
debtors. The total amount of debt was 121,219 dirhams, an average of 2,819
dirhams per creditor, which was slightly higher than the average loan. The mili-
tary ranked third as creditors (16.57 percent) after the hajjis/merchants (31.23
percent), and the untitled (26.57 percent). The peasants as creditors totaled a
low 2.57 percent, but they ranked high among the debtors (33.73 percent) and
were only surpassed by the untitled (41.20 percent).
According to Ronald Jennings, loans and debts in the records of the Islamic
courts in Anatolia explicitly carried interest (1973). Apparently, compelling
economic causes must have necessitated the application of interest to these
transactions in Anatolia. Interest seems to have been deeply embedded in the
culture of Anatolia from Byzantine times, and it was also part of the fi nancial
practices of the Turks in central Asia before they converted to Islam. Interest
was applied in the Ottoman Empire by the orders of the sultan and the concur-
rence of the Shaykh al-Islam (Grand jurist of Istanbul and of the empire) who
periodically issued orders fi xing its rate. In a case dated 24 December 1585
from the sharia court in Aleppo, there is mention of a debt contracted by a vil-
lager from an Alepppine creditor at the rate of 11½ for every 10, according to
the orders of the Sultan (bi-mujib al-amr al-Sharif al-Sultani). The judge appar-
ently tried to avoid the use of the term fa’ida (interest) in the transaction, but
the rate given equals 15 percent. He also laid its responsibility squarely with
the sultan, thus absolving his court and the Islamic sharia from any blame.49
The debasement of the currency, fi rst reported in the Syrian chronicles in
1585, and its subsequent continuation caused many fi nancial strains, including
a high rate of inflation that affected the poorer classes. When corruption came
to permeate all sectors of the administration, especially in the eighteenth cen-
tury, the amount and volume of debts increased and interest became a common
practice even though it was not mentioned by name in the court records. In
comparison, loans decreased in number and amount, indicating a less humane
fi nancial relationship between individuals and an unrestrained avidity on the

49. LCR, Aleppo, 6:107, 2 Muharram 994 (24 Dec. 1585). For other cases, see 3:850 and
10:814.
132 | A BDU L -K A R I M R A F E Q

part of creditors to accumulate wealth by any means. The disparity in wealth

among social classes thus widened, and class antagonisms began to develop,
which had grave consequences in the nineteenth century.
Despite the sultan’s orders legalizing interest and the growing need of the
impoverished rural and urban poor to contract debts, the overt application
of interest was opposed in the Syrian courts because it was contrary to the
sharia. Creditors and debtors therefore had recourse to legal tricks to camou-
flage interest. Fictitious sales, mainly of soap, appeared in the debt contract as
a cover-up for interest. In one case a group of villagers collectively borrowed
800 piasters from a creditor in Damascus in 1738 for a period of ten months.
One hundred and fi ft y piasters of this amount were allocated for the purchase
of soap from the lender; the balance of the debt was then paid in cash to the
villagers. 50 Judging from the many examples from about that period, the value
of soap amounted to about one-sixth of the debt, which gives a rate of inter-
est ranging between 15 and 20 percent. Th is is about the same rate of interest
approved by the sultan in the last quarter of the sixteenth century. In another
case of soap interest in 1780 in a debt contracted collectively by villagers to
a Damascene creditor, the value of soap amounted to 358 piasters for a debt
of 2,200 piasters that was due to be paid in six months. Here the interest was
about 16.5 percent. A French report from Damascus in 1852 confi rms the use
of soap as a cover-up for interest: “Vous seriez étonné, Monsieur le Ministre, si
vous voyiez l’usure en action dans ce pays. (Le savon joue un grand rôle dans
ces sortes de transaction).”51 According to this report, interest often amounted
to 25 percent.
The transfer of money from urban creditors to rural debtors at high interest
benefited an increasing number of creditors composed mostly of military, tax-
farmers, and hajjis/merchants. In the eighteenth century, many ulama among
the urban notables, such as the Muradi family, which produced many official
Hanafi jurists, acquired tax farms for life (malikane) of villages in the vicinity

50. LCR, Damascus, 100:17–18, 12 Ramadan 1150 (3 Jan. 1738); see also Rafeq 1981b,
674–75; see also Rafeq 2002b, 108–18.
51. Ministère des Affaires Etrangères (MAE), Correspondance Commerciale (CC),
Damas 3, 12 Janvier 1852. For a more complete version of the text, see Rafeq 1983, 431 n.100,
and 1994a, 21.
 Economic Organization of Cities | 133

of Damascus, and this brought the notables added wealth. In time the gap
between the rich and the poor widened, with serious social consequences.
When the fi rst devaluation of the currency occurred in Syria in 1585, the
contemporary Damascene chronicler al-Ansari reported a rise in food prices
in the city. Merchants and notables hoarded foodstuffs with the complicity
of Ottoman officials. Thefts were rampant and many suicides were reported,
largely due to the deteriorating economic situation (al-Ansari 1991; Rafeq
1974/1993, 143). To express their disapproval of the situation, which deterio-
rated further over time, the urban poor in Damascus supported any movement
against the establishment. The poor included many displaced villagers who had
fled from the injustice of the timariots in the countryside and sought refuge
in the urban suburbs. Early in the seventeenth century the poor of Damascus
accepted the reportedly un-Islamic religious teachings of Yahya ibn ‘Isa al-
Karaki who was opposed by the city’s ulama who declared him a zindiq (free-
thinker, unbeliever). A large following gathered around him. In 1610, fearing
his growing popularity, the ulama prevailed on the governor of the city to have
him executed, 52 but this had no effect on the troubled economic and social
situation. Hoarding, monopolization of products, rising prices, theft s, and
murders became the order of the day. Th is was also the case in the eighteenth
century when Ottoman authority declined. The contemporary Damascene
chronicler al-Budayri reports a schism in Damascene society in the eighteenth
century between the poor and the rich to the extent that the poor threw stones
at the rich notables standing in procession waiting to receive the new governor,
and denounced the notables as hypocrites who aided the rulers in oppressing
them (al-Budayri 1959, 12–15, 41, 50–51, 76–77).
Because of widespread and endemic exploitation and injustice on the part
of the notables and the government officials, the people eventually lost their
sense of justice. Budayri states that on one occasion the Damascenes became
restless because the judge did not accept bribes and faithfully administered
the law (al-Budayri 1959). Similarly, Mikha’il al-Dimashqi, a later Damascene
chronicler, commented on the tyrannical rule of the governor ‘Abd al-Ra’uf
Pasha (1827–31), saying that because of his excessive sense of justice the people

52. For Yahya al-Karaki, see al-Muhibbi 1869, 4, 478–80; Najm al-Din al-Ghazzi 1981–
82, 2, 698–706.
134 | A BDU L -K A R I M R A F E Q

were emboldened to stand against him because they had become accustomed
to injustice (al-Dimashqi 1912, 49).

The Impact of Industrial Europe

Radical changes were to occur in Syria’s traditional economy and society in

the nineteenth century in the wake of the French and the Industrial Revolu-
tions in Europe and the growing dominance of capitalism. Under Muhammad
‘Ali’s rule in Syria (1831–40), the country became open to European influence,
including the establishment of consulates in Damascus, where there had been
none before, the opening of Protestant and Catholic missionary schools, and,
more importantly, the influx of European industrial goods, notably textiles,
mostly through the port of Beirut. Goods carried by steamer to Beirut found
their way into the interior of Syria and beyond, profiting from the building of
the carriage road between Beirut and Damascus in 1863 and later from the
extension of railways linking the coastal towns with the interior (Fawaz 1983;
Rafeq 1984b).
The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 dealt a heavy blow to Syria’s caravan
cities and to the economy of the country in general. Pilgrims who used to join
the pilgrimage at Damascus in their thousands from Anatolia and the Balkans,
and even from Persia, now took the sea route to the Hijaz, which was cheaper
and safer. Two major shipping companies, the Messageries Impériales and the
Compagnie Russe, now transported the pilgrims by sea to the Hijaz through
the Suez Canal. With the Damascene pilgrimage down to a mere few hundred
pilgrims from the fi fteen to twenty thousand that used to assemble there with
their trade, the city lost much of its revenue. The contemporary Damascene
Qasatli commented on the consequences of this shift of route by saying that
Damascus had lost the stream of gold that poured into it with the pilgrims
(Qasatli 1879, 124–25; Rafeq 2002a). Many Damascene guilds offering ser-
vices to the pilgrims, such as the makers of the wooden boxes (maha’iriyya)
that seated the pilgrims on the camels’ backs, travel agents (muqawwimin),
guides and caravan conductors, and makers of dried bread cubes (buqsmat)
purchased by the pilgrims, saw their business diminish to a trickle. No less
affected were the Bedouin tribes in the nearby Hawran villages who had
rented thousands of camels each year to transport the pilgrims and the troops
 Economic Organization of Cities | 135

accompanying them to the Hijaz (Rafeq 1987a). To add to the losses sustained
by the tribes, the Ottoman government adopted a fi rm policy of disciplining
the tribes and strengthening its own hold over the provinces.
Under the impact of industrial Europe, Syria was drained of its raw materi-
als, notably cotton and wool, which were exported to Europe at cheap prices
and then partly reexported to Syria as yarn at high prices, but the greatest effect
was on the guilds that produced local textiles. Many consumers also believed
that European textiles were cheaper and better than local textiles. They
appealed to local taste, suited the climate, and satisfied the spread of fashions
imported from Europe. Traditional looms were put on sale more frequently
than at any time before because they were no longer a commercially going
concern. Their prices gradually fell as did the prices of the gedik (equipment)
and the khilu (the right to use the premises) of the workshops manufacturing
them and the shops retailing them. Many textile producers went bankrupt and
journeymen were increasingly laid off or had their wages reduced. Friction and
even clashes developed within the guilds between journeymen and masters.
The nineteenth-century Damascene Ilyas Qudsi characterized these clashes as
revolts within the guilds between impoverished journeymen and hard-pressed
masters (Qudsi 1885, 15).
Out of this chaos, a new class of nouveaux riches began to take shape,
composed of middlemen and agents marketing European products. Chris-
tians, Jews, and Muslims marketed these products. According to Bowring’s
Report on the Commercial Statistics of Syria on the state of affairs in Syria under
Muhammad ‘Ali’s rule in the 1830s, which was presented to Lord Palmerston
in 1839, 107 shops in Damascus sold British textiles with a total capital of
1,600,000 to 2,100,000 piasters. Sixty-six Muslim commercial establishments
traded with Europe with capital estimated at between 20 and 25 million pias-
ters, or between £200,000 and £250,000. Bowring went on to say that twenty-
nine Christian merchants at Damascus were engaged in foreign trade with a
capital estimated at between 4.5 and 5.5 million piastres. Twenty-four Jewish
houses in Damascus were likewise engaged in foreign trade with a capital of
between 16 and 18 million piasters (Bowring 1840, 94). It is thus evident that
the Muslims were in the forefront of the merchants dealing with Europe. How-
ever, given the smaller number of both Christians and Jews among the popula-
136 | A BDU L -K A R I M R A F E Q

tion, the proportion of their number working as merchants was actually much
higher than that of the Muslims. 53
The commercial courts introduced into Syria under Egyptian rule were
formally institutionalized after the Ottoman “restoration.” A commercial
court was established in Aleppo in 1850 and in Damascus in 1855. The compo-
sition of the commercial court summarizes the degree of participation of the
communities in commerce at the time. In Damascus, for example, the court
was composed of fourteen members, half of whom were appointed by the for-
eign consuls, either their own nationals or their local protégés, while the other
half was appointed by the Ottoman government. Of the latter, there were four
Muslims, two Christians, and one Jew. 54 Th is ratio reflects the extent of the
commercial relations of each community with Europe in terms of capital and
number of houses.
A clash of interest was soon to develop between the impoverished popu-
lation and the new class of entrepreneurs, of whom only the Christians were
targeted in both Aleppo and Damascus. Other factors, both local and foreign,
were at play and transformed socioeconomic riots into sectarian warfare. Ever
since Muhammad ‘Ali had opened Syria to Western influences and advocated
a policy of religious tolerance, the Christians had become more visible and
assertive, both socially and economically. Th is not only brought them more
wealth but also the hatred of the underprivileged masses. The exemption by
the Ottomans of non-Muslims from conscription into the army (which they
imposed forcibly upon the Muslims) increased the latter’s hatred of the newly
emancipated and privileged Christians. The riots in Aleppo in 1850, which
were instigated by individuals from the poorer quarters and were exploited by
interested individuals and powers, were directed against the rich Christians
residing in the Judayda quarter, the majority of whom were Catholics who
had benefited from dealing with the Europeans (Masters 1990; Masters 2001,
156–65). Ten years later, under the impact of the same factors but with a spill-
over from the communal feuding in Mount Lebanon, Damascus witnessed
similar socioeconomic riots that were exploited religiously as in Aleppo (Harel

53. For a study of merchants and traders in Aleppo in the early twentieth century based
on a contemporary directory, see Sluglett 2002.
54. MAE, CC, Damas 3, 28 mai 1850; see also Rafeq 1983, 426.
 Economic Organization of Cities | 137

1998; Masters 1990; Rafeq 1988a; Rogan 2004). Even Jidda in the Hijaz was
the scene of clashes over commerce in 1858 between local Hijazi merchants
and European merchants and their protégés that turned sectarian (Ochsen-
wald 1984, 141–51).
In Syria, as in Lebanon, religious fanaticism was used as a catalyst to whip
up the emotions of the masses against the Christians. The complicity of Otto-
man officials in these events is attested by the subsequent condemnation to
death of many of them, including the governor of Damascus, by the tribunal
headed by the Ottoman Foreign Minister Fu’ad Pasha. The European powers
whose interests were threatened were soon involved, as was shown by the dis-
patch of French troops to Lebanon. Napoleon III was anxious at the time to
placate Catholic public opinion in his country and in Rome, divert attention
from his internal troubles and foreign failures, and assert France’s interests in
the Levant vis-à-vis British interests.
What began in Lebanon as a peasant movement among the Maronites of
Kisrawan seeking emancipation from the control and exploitation of Maronite
feudal nobles (which could not be exploited religiously, since both parties were
Maronites) turned into sectarian war in the Shuf and beyond. Here the peas-
ants were both Druze and Maronite and rose in rebellion against oppressive
Druze feudal chieftains. The mixture of communities in the Shuf lent itself
to exploitation, and soon a movement for peasant emancipation turned into a
sectarian war (Makdisi 2000).
In Syria, as in Lebanon, the riots were not primarily motivated by reli-
gion. For example, the poor Christians in the Maydan quarter of Damascus
were not molested during the riots because they shared common rural origins,
neighborliness, coexistence, and also poverty with their Muslim neighbors
(Rafeq 1988b). In fact the riots were directed by interested parties against the
quarter of Bab Tuma where the rich Christians lived. Furthermore, the Jews
were not molested, neither in Aleppo nor in Damascus, despite the immense
wealth of a few individuals among them. Traditionally, the rich Jews kept a low
profi le and did not show their wealth in public, but of course the majority of
Jews were poor. It is significant that Syria had not experienced anything simi-
lar in the three centuries that preceded the riots. Indeed, the various religious
communities had coexisted for centuries and were already integrated under
Ottoman rule in the guild system through their work ethic.
138 | A BDU L -K A R I M R A F E Q

Before the nineteenth century, mercantilist Europe had coexisted with

the traditional economy and society, but this relationship was to change
drastically. The disparity of wealth that had come into being in the Syrian
cities under the impact of capitalist Europe lay at the root of the riots. Thus
Mustafa Bey Hawasili, the head of the irregular troops, the zabtiyya, who
wrought havoc in the Christian quarter of Bab Tuma, was heavily indebted
to Christian creditors. The likelihood of his participation in their massacre
makes his execution by the Ottoman disciplinary court more meaningful
(Rafeq 1988a).
The people of Aleppo and Damascus soon put these events behind them.
As they had cooperated in the past in the mixed guilds on the basis of merit
and expertise, they now again cooperated on an even wider economic basis
by introducing partnerships (shirka or sharaka) in business, cutt ing across
religious barriers. 55 They imported European machines, such as the Jacquard
loom, which produced figured weave patterns. Much wealth was accumu-
lated by the emerging class of neo-bourgeois entrepreneurs in the Syrian cit-
ies. Th is was reflected in the building of spacious, sumptuous, even palatial
family mansions. According to the contemporary historian Qasatli, a great
deal of money was spent on building these mansions in Damascus. Rich
members of the various communities participated in their construction, for
example, the Muslims ‘Abdallah Pasha al-‘Azm, Sa‘id Efendi Quwwatli and
his brother Murad Efendi, and Hasan Agha al-Barudi, the Christians Habib
Efendi Sabbagh and Antun Efendi Shami, and the Jews Yusuf Efendi ‘Anbar
(who expended the most money on his still surviving palatial residence),
Sham‘aya Efendi, Khawaja Islambuli, and Khawaja Lazbuna (al-Qasatli
1879, 96–97).
Some members of this neo-bourgeoisie, composed of a cross-section
of Muslims, Christians, and Jews, would promote the new ideology of Arab
national consciousness. Secular in essence, invoking the common Arab cultural
contributions of the various religious communities in the past, and anxious to
distance itself from fanaticism, Arabism gave all the communities a sense of
purpose and of common action for the betterment of the Arab people.

55. For Muslim/Jewish partnerships in late Ottoman Haifa, see Yazbak 1994.
 Economic Organization of Cities | 139

While these developments were occurring in the urban centers, the peas-
antry were still suffering from the depredations of feudal lords, tax farmers,
and Bedouin tribes. Forced labor (sukhra), additional taxes to fi nance the
army (i’ane) (Rafeq 1999), protection money (khuwwa), and indebtedness
devastated the countryside. With the enactment of the 1858 Land Law, the
Ottoman government made a bid to regularize the practices of land tenure that
had dominated the countryside for centuries. It was not immediately imple-
mented, and when it was, it only affected the areas under the control of the
government and mostly played into the hands of the influential notables. The
right of usufruct of land, which these notables had enjoyed, soon changed into
a de facto right of ownership, thus turning them into large landowners. Many
of them were absentee landowners to whom the land was a mere commodity to
be exploited together with its peasantry. Many peasants at the time were reluc-
tant to become owners of land for fear of further molestation by the state. The
landowners allied themselves with the Ottomans, and later on with the French
mandatory authorities, to safeguard their interests (Hanna 2004).
When Ottoman rule came to an end in Syria in 1918, a nascent bour-
geoisie was still in the making and an entrenched landowning class was in
the process of consolidating its privileges. Faysal’s government in Damascus
(1918–20) tried to build up a balanced infrastructure. It introduced many
economic, educational, and cultural projects and also encouraged the private
sector to do the same. But it confronted major difficulties and in the process
alienated a large sector of the population because of deteriorating economic
conditions. The change in the currency and its subsequent devaluation and
the loss of markets in Anatolia and the rest of the Ottoman Empire, which
particularly affected Aleppo, weakened Syria’s economy, despite the Arab
government’s effort to abolish the heavy taxes that had been imposed by the
Ottomans (Rafeq 1993a, 2003a).
The demise of Faysal’s government in 1920 put a hold on the projects it
had attempted to introduce. Under French rule, the large landowners maxi-
mized their gain by engaging in industrial projects, thus becoming a bourgeois
landowning class. Their politics, however, although self-serving, was still dom-
inant when Syria achieved its independence. Later, ideological parties came
to the fore with socioeconomic programs that reached out to the masses of
140 | A BDU L -K A R I M R A F E Q

the population. Of all these parties (Communist, Muslim Brotherhood, Syr-

ian Nationalist, Ba‘thist), the Ba‘th party was destined to be at the forefront.
Upon assuming power, it applied a command (state-controlled) economy and
implemented major programs of nationalization. Later, however, mixed proj-
ects between the public and the private sectors began to take shape. Privatiza-
tion was welcomed as long as it was subject to state supervision and aimed at
promoting national welfare.
 5
Political Relations Between City
and State in the Colonial Period
L E I L A FAWA Z A N D ROBE R T I L BE RT

• F R O M T H E V E R Y B E G I N N I N G S of Islam, the great cities have played

pivotal political roles. By the nineteenth century, cities had developed into
new instruments of control as government attempts to modernize required
a greater degree of centralization on the part of the state. At the same time,
the city was also the place where powers competing with the state were likely
to emerge, especially through the new commerce with the West, which was
largely administered by the European consular authorities. Processes of
urbanization and state control expanded through the twentieth century, fi rst
under the French and British mandates and then even more intensively after
the midcentury. In Syria and Iraq, men from mostly rural backgrounds took
over the state in the last quarter of the twentieth century and gained control of
key positions in the cities, which, more than ever, became instruments of the
highly centralized state (Batatu 1978, 1999). Large-scale migration from the
countryside to the towns also brought rural life into the city. Modernization
continues on the material level, and urban ideologies—including nationalism
and Islamism—remain the slogans of choice. Leadership in much of the Arab
world is now in the hands of people of rural origin, and they will need to con-
tinue to control the cities if they are to remain able to impose their will.

We would like to thank Charles Davidson, Ph.D. candidate, and Craig Cohen, alumnus,
the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, for their bibliographical research.
141
142 | L E I L A FAWA Z A N D ROBE R T I L BE R T

The nature of the role played by the Ottomans in the urban history of their
Arab provinces between the sixteenth century, when they dominated most of
the Arab lands, and the fall of the empire in 1918, is portrayed variously by dif-
ferent authors, and here historiography has been both cruel and kind. André
Raymond notes that, on the whole, the long period of Ottoman rule over the
Arab provinces has been presented negatively or sometimes not even com-
mented upon at all (Raymond 1985, ch. 1). Earlier French and Arab historians
tended to contrast the Ottoman centuries in the Arab lands with the glorious
achievements of the Umayyads and ‘Abbasids, presenting the Ottoman cen-
turies as periods of urban decline, deterioration, and social segregation (Ray-
mond 1994b).1
Th is negative view derives from two quite different historiographical tra-
ditions, the fi rst that of French colonialists concerned to present French rule
in the eastern Mediterranean and North Africa as a major improvement on
Ottoman rule, and the second, that of Arab historians who experienced, or
wrote about, the struggle for Arab independence from Ottoman, French, or
British rule, often with scant regard for the historical record. Arab national-
ists, substantially influenced by the writings of Sati‘ al-Husri, have tended to
portray the Ottomans as colonialists less interested in their Arab territories
than in their European and Anatolian provinces, and whose “real” commit-
ment to Islam was quite superficial. The reality, as less ideologically driven
historians have shown, was rather different: there is litt le evidence to suggest
that Arabs in the late Ottoman Empire regarded themselves as a “colonized
people.” 2 Over the past two or three decades, the Ottoman legacy in the Arab
world has been looked upon more objectively by Western and Turkish histo-
rians, as well as by some Arab historians, often scholars of Arab origin trained
in the United States who know both Arabic and Ottoman Turkish and have
worked in the Ottoman archives. The new approaches arrived at by this group

1. See also Barbir 1996b; Hourani 1991.

2. See Bruce Masters’s appraisal of the prevailing views of the Arab population of the
Ottoman Empire at the end of the nineteenth century: “The empire, for most Muslims and
even some Christians, was simply seen as the only remaining political force capable of fore-
stalling European colonial ambitions” (2001, 176).
 Relations Between City and State, Colonial Period | 143

generally reflect a more accurate appreciation of the role played by the Otto-
man government in the Arab lands. 3
All Middle Eastern cities underwent tremendous upheavals in the nine-
teenth and twentieth centuries. Political, social, and economic change in the
nineteenth century forced Ottoman leaders and Muslim thinkers to accept the
social transformations dictated by the Tanzimat reforms, and mass printing
and publishing had significant effects upon the cities. The expansion of trade
with Europe (made possible largely by the development of steamships) largely
transformed the economy of the Middle East (Pamuk 1987; Kasaba 1988).
Before the nineteenth century, trade within the Ottoman Empire was more
important than trade between the empire and Europe (Walz 1978). In the
nineteenth century, the position changed dramatically as the economy became
more Western-oriented. Roger Owen and others have written extensively about
the expanding world economy and its impact on the Middle East, and Smilian-
skaya has given a vivid description of the effect of the flood of European goods
on such traditional artisan and commercial centers as Damascus and Aleppo.
While local industry and crafts suffered, those involved in organizing the cul-
tivation and export of raw materials, especially cotton from Egypt and silk
and cotton from Greater Syria, often made spectacular fortunes. An economic
revolution was taking place, and the accompanying prosperity even reached
smaller market towns such as Zahleh and Dayr al-Qamar in Mount Lebanon,
which now became centers of local inter-regional trade.4
The principal urban beneficiaries of the new trade were the ports on the
eastern Mediterranean, which became the centers of the trade with Europe,

3. Halil İnalcik best represents the historians who did superb work on Ottoman institu-
tions but essentially ignored the Arab provinces. Notable for their exceptional interest in Arab
history and for their knowledge and use of Arabic sources among historians who are Turkish
or of Turkish origin are Engin Akarlı (1993), Hasan Kayalı (1997), and Ekmeleddin Ihsanoğlu
(2001). Among historians who are Arab, or of Arab origin, working on Ottoman historiogra-
phy are Abdeljelil Temimi (1994), Abdul-Rahim Abu-Husayn (1985), ‘Adnan Bakhit (1992),
Karl Barbir (1980), and Dina Khoury (1997a).
4. For a brilliant overview of the subject in global perspective, see Bayly 2004, chs. 3–6.
See also Raymond 1985, 43–46; Issawi 1988; Owen 1981a; Smilianskaya 1972; Fawaz 1983;
Labaki 1984.
144 | L E I L A FAWA Z A N D ROBE R T I L BE R T

especially Alexandria, Izmir, and Beirut. 5 Their prosperity produced entre-

preneurs who acted as middlemen for the new trade with Europe. The most
successful among them interacted both with the Ottoman representatives and
with the European consuls, who made many of them consular protégés, thus
exempting them from most local taxes and regulations. In some cities, par-
ticularly Alexandria, foreigners benefited particularly from the new economic
opportunities, but in others, particularly Beirut, local entrepreneurs gained
the upper hand. To a very great extent, the Christian minorities and the Jews
dominated trade with Europe, although some Muslim merchants survived the
reorientation of the market and continued to prosper under the new condi-
tions.6 Those who were unable to adjust suffered the most.
The growth of the new trading centers att racted people to the cities from
the adjacent rural regions in search of work. Not enough has been written about
the population drawn to the city from smaller urban centers and from the
countryside; sources are scarce for the poor and illiterate, especially in times
of peace. It is easier to fi nd information on the merchant elites who bought
and sold lands and registered them in the mahakim shar‘iyya, the law-courts,
and fi led complaints and petitions, and thus left behind a record of their con-
tacts with both Ottomans and Europeans. Some even kept chronicles or wrote
memoirs that are invaluable for historians. Some very good research has been
done on the working classes, but there are few studies on the way in which vil-
lage and rural life was affected by the growth of the major centers of European
trade in the Middle East.7 The desire of many country folk to come to the cities
is clear from the growth of the larger cities in the late nineteenth and twentieth

5. Issawi 1969; Kasaba, Keyder and Tabak 1986. For Alexandria, see Ilbert 1996; for Bei-
rut, see Fawaz 1983, and Hanssen 2005. See also Keyder, Özveren and Quataert 1993.
6. See the lists of commercial establishments in various eastern Mediterranean cities in
Dalil Suriyya wa Misr al-tujjari 1908 and the discussions in Labaki 1994 and Sluglett 2002.
7. For working class movements, see Botman 1988; Beinin 1988; Lockman 1994; E.
Goldberg 1996. For premodern and modern Cairo, see Abu-Lughod 1971; Raymond 1993.
For nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Alexandria, see Ilbert 1996; Reimer 1997. For
mandatory Damascus, see P. Khoury 1987; Thompson 2000; Provence 2005. For Aleppo,
see Gaube and Wirth 1984; David 1998; Watenpaugh 2006. For Beirut, see Chevallier 1971;
Labaki 1984; Davie 1996; Hanssen 2005. For Haifa, see Seikaly 1995. See also the wide-rang-
ing coverage of late Ottoman provincial cities in Hanssen, Philipp, and Weber 2002.
 Relations Between City and State, Colonial Period | 145

centuries. Population figures are notoriously inexact for premodern times, but
some breakthroughs have been made in research on the cities of North Africa,
the central Arab lands, and Anatolia. 8
The arrival of peasants and, more recently, nomadic peoples, in cities, gen-
erated a number of problems whose effects on Cairo have been described by
Janet Abu-Lughod (1971) and on Beirut by the anthropologist Fuad I. Khuri
(1975). Does the migration of rural groups to an urban milieu result in their
urbanization? Or does it do the opposite, transform urban ways of life into
rural ones, especially in the poorer quarters where the migrants are con-
centrated? Or does the city end up with a mixture of rural and urban ways
as people move from one milieu to the other? Certainly, where immigration
approaches or surpasses natural increase as a source of growth, this evidently
produces a mix of urban and nonurban ways and values (Raymond 1973; Abu-
Lughod 1971; Khuri 1975).9
In some cases, bringing the values of the countryside into the city meant
a loss of flexibility and social harmony. Whereas religious communities in
the centers of trade on the eastern Mediterranean had always had both com-
mercial, and to some extent social, dealings with each other, communities
in the countryside were more isolated. In his classic study of the Mediter-
ranean, Braudel drew attention to the role of geography in social formations
and in the differentiation of social and political traditions. For example, when
communications were difficult in Mount Lebanon in premodern times, the
religious communities of the mountain were more self-reliant than those on
the coast. One result was that when a civil war engulfed large parts of Mount
Lebanon in the mid–nineteenth century, the rural population that fled came
to Beirut, the politically safest and economically most secure port. However,
they brought with them their fears and prejudices about the other communi-
ties with whom they had clashed with in their home villages (Makdisi 2000).
As a result, while their migration to some extent eased the sectarian tensions
in the areas they came from, it brought those tensions with them into the city,
and, some fi ft y years later, Beirut began to experience its own sectarian inci-
dents. Thus, one result of rural to urban migration in the nineteenth century

8. See Bernard Hourcade’s chapter in this volume (chapter 6).

9. See also Debbas 2001, and Bryan Roberts’s classic study Cities of Peasants (1978).
146 | L E I L A FAWA Z A N D ROBE R T I L BE R T

was that, while defusing economic or social pressures in their areas of origin,
it often simply shifted them to new areas of sett lement (Braudel 1975; Khuri
1975; Fawaz 1994).
Urban groups continued to dominate local politics throughout the nine-
teenth and early twentieth centuries. The city played a major role in center-
provincial relations during the Ottoman centuries, and studies of the urban
notables have contributed to the understanding of the nature and workings of
these relations. In the nineteenth century, as in earlier Ottoman centuries, the
Ottoman government used these local notables, or a‘yan, as mediators of their
will and as barometers of the provincial mood. In 1968 Albert Hourani coined
the phrase “the politics of notables” to describe their place in the scheme of
Ottoman politics as indispensable mediators who were both instruments of
government and checks on its power. Other scholars have shown that there
were variations in the behavior of notables in different centers and regions and
that internal rivalries among the local elites did much to weaken, or factional-
ize, the privileged classes.10
Although such fi ndings alert us to some of the nuances that need to be
taken into account, there is litt le sense in pretending that the notables were not
pivotal in urban life. Even in American politics certain families have gained a
degree of “notability,” and the public is eager to have its uncrowned royalty to
talk and read about. If that notion is projected back to the Middle East, where
history weighs more heavily and the fi rst questions posed to any newcomer will
inevitably focus on which family he belongs to, where he comes from, whom he
knows, and who knows him, one can see, in many ways, how litt le things have
changed. Economic change, social mobility, rapid communications, and other
aspects of modern life may have permitted new social classes to emerge, and
may have brought about a degree of diversification among the elites, but the
same questions are being asked of the new ones.
The new elites also operate in ways that ensure the continuation of family
networks at the beginning of the twenty-fi rst century. Where one comes from
may matter as much as who one is. The notables may belong to old elites or be
nouveaux riches; they may be urban, rural, or tribal in origin or practice, but

10. For insights into the role of the notables, see, for example, Rafeq 1977; Schatkowski
Schilcher 1985; P. Khoury 1983; Seikaly 1995; Marcus 1989; Masters 1988; D. Khoury 1997a.
 Relations Between City and State, Colonial Period | 147

the role of personal connections and personal politics remains. As in many

other places, connections help people get jobs and get things done. In fact,
the role of the elites has been amplified, not diminished, by the growth of
modern bureaucracies. In modern times, new names and new families have
been brought into the political game and have joined the economic and social
elites, but the principle that a group of go-betweens facilitate social mobility
and protect the unconnected continues to be relevant. Modern highways and
airports have not made family background and family standing redundant.
The medieval biographical dictionaries detailing religious, political, and/or
social clout and connections have disappeared, but they have been replaced
by Western-type directories like Who’s Who. Connections are still needed to
get things done,11 an important difference being that social mobility is greater
now, partly because of expanding economies and the large-scale movement of
populations. Despite this, there is a great deal of continuity in urban and other
social networks.
For a while, European colonial rule prolonged the political importance
of local elites, since the Europeans often relied on them, or on factions among
them, to maintain order in various ways and, in doing so, prepared them to
take over the “independent” governments. The nature and intensity of the
colonial presence varied in different parts of the Middle East, depending on
how important (economically, politically, strategically) the European pow-
ers believed continued control of a particular area to be. The rise of national-
ism and other events also influenced outcomes. World War II, for example,
exhausted the Europeans and helped speed the departure of France from Syria
and Lebanon and of Britain from Jordan and Palestine, and eventually from
Egypt, Iraq, and Sudan. In the states of the Levant, French and British colonial
rule, in the form of mandates granted by the League of Nations at the end of
World War I (in theory to prepare the countries under their rule for indepen-
dence), lasted only for the two decades between the world wars, with different
timetables for the departure of the powers from the individual countries after
World War II.12

11. Personal connections are especially vital in totalitarian states where individuals are
not equally protected by the law —if, indeed, they are protected at all.
12. Iraq had become formally independent of Britain as early as 1932.
148 | L E I L A FAWA Z A N D ROBE R T I L BE R T

Although the colonial powers deeply affected the histories of the states
that they created and ruled, they did not greatly affect the physical layout of
the main cities, in comparison with the situation in North Africa, where the
French and the Italians built spacious “European” cities some distance away
from the local population. Hence, there is not much lasting physical evidence
of Western occupation in the cities of Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Palestine, or
Iraq.13 In Egypt and the Sudan, where the British came earlier and left later
(1880s–1950s), more of a mark was left on urban development.14
The mandate period in Syria was marked by strikes and uprisings against
the French, but it was also a time of rapid population growth, inflation, agrar-
ian commercialization, and urban development (P. Khoury 1987; Thompson
2000). In 1926, Damascus began a period of growth as the areas between al-
Salihiyya and the Old City were rapidly built up. Several modern garden dis-
tricts (such as al-Jisr, ‘Arnus, and al-Shuhada’) with large villas were built for
French functionaries and other Europeans as well as for wealthy Syrians. In
1929, the urban planner René Danger drew up a master plan for the future
development of the city, with Michel Écochard in charge of its implementa-
tion. The focus of political activity moved from the Old City to the headquar-
ters of the French High Commission, though the Old City continued to be the
locus of social and political organization, each of its quarters having its own
hierarchy of shaykhs, ulama, and other a‘yan. It was in the city’s quarters that
nationalism flourished, although physical and social barriers gradually eroded
toward the end of the mandate.15
On the other hand, the impact of the mandatory powers on particular insti-
tutions and political structures was profound. In Lebanon, separated from the
rest of Syria in part to give the Maronites an enclave and in part to implement

13. A possible exception here is the work of the architect and “urbaniste”/town planner
Michel Écochard (1905–1985) in Damascus and Beirut (and later in Morocco). See Abdulac
1982 and de Mazières 1985.
14. See Debbas 1986; Abu-Lughod 1971. For Cairo, see Raymond 1993, ch. 15 and 16;
Volait 2005; for colonial North Africa, see von Henneberg 1996; Çelik 1997; and more gener-
ally Wright 1991.
15. For more information on the layout of the city at various periods, see Elisséeff 1965,
1970; Barbir 1980; Raymond 1979, 1979–80; Dett mann 1969; Abdulac 1982; Bianquis 1980;
P. Khoury 1984.
 Relations Between City and State, Colonial Period | 149

a more general policy of dividing the religious communities so as to rule them

better, Christian notables could now aspire to rule. During the Ottoman cen-
turies, minorities had to be content with acquiring riches and influence; they
could not hope for tangible political power. Under the mandate, however, like
the other notables in Lebanon, the minorities played politics with a vengeance
(Traboulsi 2007, 88–127). Their national political struggles were concentrated
in the capitals where the colonial powers were centered and prepared them for
the intense political rivalries of the postindependence period.
In Egypt, the colonial power, Britain, left more of a mark on urban devel-
opment. In Cairo, substantial growth began in the 1830s, but it was only dur-
ing the reign of Khedive Isma‘il (1863–79) that the city was fundamentally
transformed. Influenced by Haussmann’s reorganization of Paris, Isma‘il
ordered the construction of a European-style city to the west of the medieval
center, and French city planning principles dominated the design of these dis-
tricts (‘Azbakiyya, ‘Abdin, Isma‘iliyya). By the end of the nineteenth century,
all were well developed, and after the British took control in 1882 they func-
tioned as a colonial enclave. André Raymond remarks that at this point Cairo
became two cities, “an indigenous city and a ‘European’ city.” These “two cit-
ies” differed from each other in almost every respect, from street layout to the
social class of the inhabitants. The streets of the old city were dilapidated, and
those who remained there were mostly poor and often unemployed. The west-
ern city, in contrast, was the center of tourism, politics, and banking; its pop-
ulation was predominantly European and elite.16 In 1906, the Belgian Baron
Empain founded the new suburb of Heliopolis; by 1947, it had some 50,000
inhabitants (Ilbert 1981; Raymond 1993; Volait 2005).
Alexandria was also transformed. Here, too, Khedive Isma‘il was instru-
mental in building new districts, roads, the fi rst sewage system in Egypt, and
the railway station; the harbor acquired new lighthouses and other facilities.
Europeans continued to be drawn to the city and to dominate its economy dur-
ing the cotton boom under British rule. They organized themselves into com-
munities based on national and ethnic backgrounds, each community having
its own church or synagogue, clergy, schools, hospitals, cemeteries, journals,
and fi nancial institutions. In 1934, a twenty-kilometer corniche was built along

16. Abu-Lughod 1971; Raymond 1993; Zaki 1964; Reimer 1997.

150 | L E I L A FAWA Z A N D ROBE R T I L BE R T

the Mediterranean coast, and the city became a major tourist resort with the
construction of numerous hotels, swimming pools, and restaurants.17

However, the adoption of technology and other outward signs of modernity

did litt le to disrupt traditional ties of family, clan, region, and religion, partly,
as has been noted, because of the arbitrariness inherent in the new politi-
cal structures. Sometimes, as in Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria, the sheer
numbers of migrants brought the values of the countryside to the cities.18 As a
result, skyscrapers and modern dress have gone hand in hand with traditional
commitments to the extended family and to long-established social traditions.
Intermarriage between religions (and between sects) continues to be relatively
rare19 and civil marriage has never been instituted. 20
Not all migration has been voluntary. Refugees have become a familiar
part of the landscape of most Middle Eastern states, where inter-Arab, inter-
Muslim, and especially since 1948, Arab-Israeli, tensions have caused popu-
lations to move, usually against their will. Refugees have brought with them
their memories and their oral histories, and these have shaped their percep-
tions of the groups that forced their migration. Sometimes, refugees have
moved across continents and oceans, and physical distance has tempered their
commitment to their original cause or at least transformed the forms of its
expression. Often, however, and certainly in the case of the Palestinians in the
neighboring lands, the proximity of the land to which they cannot return has
fueled their nationalism and brought it into the areas where they have sett led.

17. See “Alexandrie entre deux mondes,” special issue of Revue de l’Occident musulman et
de la Méditerranée 46 (1988); Ilbert 1981; Saad El-Din 1993; Reimer 1997.
18. Th is was particularly true of Iraq. In the census of 1977, 64 percent of the population
of Iraq lived in cities and only 36 percent in the countryside, representing an almost direct
reversal of the proportions in the 1947 census. See Farouk-Sluglett and Sluglett 2001, 246–49;
al-Ansari 1979.
19. Except perhaps in Iraq, where, at least according to anecdotal evidence, there were
numerous cross-sectarian marriages between middle-class Sunnis and middle-class Shi‘is in
the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. See Al-Ali 2007, 107.
20. Civil marriage was proposed by the French administration in Syria in the 1930s in a
manner almost calculated to offend religious sensibilities; see Thompson 1999, 152–53.
 Relations Between City and State, Colonial Period | 151

Partly as a result, the cities have become centers of ideological formulations,

intellectual exchanges, and power.
Advances in communications have also meant that it has become more
difficult to remain aloof from the politics of neighboring states. Th is is partly
because pan-Arabism, at least in theory, does not recognize the national bor-
ders drawn up after World War I. Those who espouse the cause consider that
they have the right to be involved in the affairs of their neighbors. Cities that
have received large numbers of political refugees have absorbed some of the
att itudes which successive waves of refugees have brought with them.21 Mod-
ern technology has served national sentiment and contributed to the per-
sistence or deepening of cultural or national differences affected by wars or
forced migration.
One of the ways in which the city has served political agendas has been
the role it plays as the home of the media. Newspapers, journals, and books are
published in cities; television broadcasts the views of the states that control
it in and from the cities, and television broadcasts reach into homes all over
the Middle East. There is no need to dwell on the power of the media for a
Western readership; here, as elsewhere, it is put to the service of those who
control it. When the telegraph was used to relay messages during the Crimean
War (1856–58), this was considered a major event. A century and a half later,
the role of the media in the Gulf War and in the invasion of Iraq in 2003 and
its long aftermath has brought home the extent of the media revolution and
the intertwining of so many parts of the contemporary world. The city is at
the heart of traditional and novel forms of cultural expression and, as a result,
plays a key role in giving governments (particularly dictatorial ones) and oth-
ers a powerful means of expression.
In the twentieth century, no entity has benefited more from the oppor-
tunities provided by the media than the national state. At the end of the eigh-
teenth century, Napoleon well understood the power of propaganda, as may
be deduced from his statement to the astonished Egyptians when he arrived
in Egypt in 1798: “O shaykhs, judges and imams, officers and notables of the

21. Among them, perhaps quintessentially, Amman; see Hannoyer and Chami 1996.
More recently, Amman has also received substantial numbers of Iraqi refugees.
152 | L E I L A FAWA Z A N D ROBE R T I L BE R T

land, tell your people that the French are also sincere Muslims.”22 Every group
brought to power by elections or by force has used every means at its disposal to
propagate its message. In 1923 Mustafa Kemal, the founder of modern Turkey,
led a national rebellion from Ankara, not from Istanbul, the former Ottoman
capital, that freed his homeland from foreign occupation and created a repub-
lic. Ever since, leaders in the Middle East have used the resources of their capi-
tal city to propagate their messages. No leader in the Arab world has been as
popular as Colonel Nasser, brought to power by the Free Officers’ coup d’état
in 1952, who broadcast his speeches from Cairo supporting pan-Arabism and
denouncing imperialism and Zionism over Cairo radio, Sawt al-‘Arab, and on
television to tens of millions all over the Arab world and beyond.
Eventually, as technology has spread and become cheaper, even dictatorial
governments have gradually become unable to exert total control over the media.
In the nineteenth century, the revolution in publishing allowed the circulation
of antigovernment tracts, and the Ottoman government had trouble controlling
them and keeping them out of the empire. In the second half of the twentieth
century, opposition groups used tapes and fi lms as well as the printed word, and
more recently the Internet, to undermine the viewpoints that they opposed. The
most famous case is perhaps that of the revolution in Iran, where the Shah had
brought television to the villages only to have it used against him as it broadcast
Ayatollah Khumayni’s messages from France to his followers in Iran.
Although the spread of technology has diminished the role of the city
in politics, as messages can be relayed to wherever the audience is, it has also
increased dependence on the state for the provision of social services. In his
seminal research on Iraq and Syria, Hanna Batatu has shown that after the
coups d’état and revolutions of the late 1940s and early 1950s, the primary
employer in Syria, Iraq, and Egypt has been the state, with Damascus, Bagh-
dad, and Cairo as the main poles of att raction for the population.23 He argues

22. The full text (together with the contemporary chronicler al-Jabarti’s commentary) is
available in Moreh 1993, 24–33.
23. It is also often the case that the capital city, and perhaps one or two others, are very
much larger than those in the second or third tier. Thus Damascus and Aleppo both have about
4 million inhabitants, while the next largest city in Syria is Homs, with 1.6 million. See chapter
6, Table 7.
 Relations Between City and State, Colonial Period | 153

convincingly that, taken together, the cumulative impact of the social trans-
formations of these regimes has been revolutionary, even though each coup
d’état or proclaimed revolution on its own may not have been revolutionary. It
also accounts for the qualitative changes in the social transformations of the
second half of the twentieth century (Batatu 1978, 1984, 1999).
When political power was seized by the populist dictatorships of the 1950s
and 1960s, the leadership of the urban notables, which had continued through
the fi rst decades of independence, was replaced by the rule of new leaders
drawn mostly from the lower classes or from the army, since earlier reforms
had opened the ranks of the officer corps to those without private means. By
the end of World War II, the young officers were well placed to seize power,
particularly after the national humiliations of the interwar period and later of
the fi rst Arab-Israeli war of 1948. The urban elites who had dominated politics
had failed to free their countries from colonial rule, and in many cases the for-
mer colonial powers still retained important privileges. Then came the shock
of the 1948 war and the devastating defeat that culminated in the creation of
Israel. The traditional a‘yan thus lost much of their legitimacy, and a new era of
(at least initially) popular dictatorships began.
The mix of urban and rural political and social culture brought a new ele-
ment into politics after the 1950s, the domination of the countryside over the
city. However, the passage of time has shown that the city and its elites might
well have the last word. The new leaders still need the city to legitimize their
rule and to control and influence their citizens. To some extent, they have
“ruralized” the city, but that process is as old as migration and the interde-
pendence of city and countryside. They have seized power in many parts of
the Middle East, but in doing so have resorted to networks and personal poli-
tics, just as the a‘yan once did. The urban notables may be out of politics in
some parts of the Middle East, but their ways of doing business continue; to
that extent, the continuity between the past, the present, and the future seems
likely to endure.
 6
The Demography of Cities
and the Expansion of Urban Space
BER NA R D HOU RCA DE

• I N T H E C E N T U R Y and a half between Napoleon’s expedition to Egypt

in 1798 and the end of World War II, the urban population of the Middle East,
that is, the area between Morocco and Afghanistan, increased almost tenfold,
from 2.8 million to 26 million inhabitants. Th is very considerable rate of quan-
titative growth was not peculiar to the Middle East; the whole world, includ-
ing Europe in the full flush of the Industrial Revolution, experienced similar
demographic upheavals during this period, which led to the emergence of a
new society dominated by cities.
However, demographic change and the evolution of urban space in the
Middle East does exhibit a number of distinct features, influenced by three
special factors: the dominant role of the two great megalopolises, Istanbul
and Cairo; the diversity of the heterogeneous cultural contexts and regional
politics; and the existence of several kinds of cities, differentiated both by their
antiquity and the variations in their dominant activity. Hence Isfahan, Casa-
blanca, and Riyadh cannot easily be compared with one another, since each
city has an entirely different demographic and urban history.
Istanbul was the fourth largest city in the world in 1800 and Cairo the
eighth; both cities ranked ahead of Paris or Peking, but the urban population
of the Middle East was less than 10 percent of the total population of the area.
In contrast, the level of urbanization in the Middle East had reached 23.8 per-
cent by 1950, relatively close to the world average, and had actually overtaken
154
 Demography of Cities and Expansion of Urban Space | 155

it by 1970, reaching 39 percent in comparison with the world average of 36

percent.1 Until the 1930s, most Middle Eastern cities had experienced steady
growth in proportion to that of the total population in the states in which they
were located, except for those that were directly affected by government activ-
ity as capitals (Tehran, Ankara, Damascus, Algiers, Rabat) or those directly
linked with the economic activities of the more industrialized states, such as
Casablanca, or oil towns such as Ahwaz, Abadan, and Kuwait. Thus, the urban
history of the Middle East takes its place within a spectrum comparable to
that of other regions of the world, occupying an intermediate position between
the industrialized states (Europe, 52.7 percent urban in 1950; North America,
55.8 percent) and the great rural continents (China, 11.1 percent; West Africa,
9.7 percent) although less urbanized than Central Asia or Latin America,
(respectively, 30.1 percent and 32.2 percent in 1950).
The point of departure of this particular urban history is the “oriental city,”
whose model corresponds globally to the traditional city at the beginning of
the nineteenth century, with its architecture, spatial organization, and “ori-
ental” social organization.2 These analytical categories provide an extremely
useful frame of reference, giving an overview of the different kinds of demo-
graphic and urban transformations taking place in cities in the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries. The Ottoman Empire also forms a frame of reference for
the urban history of the states involved in its dissolution, whereas other states
such as Iran or Morocco remained on the periphery. Finally, the cities were
affected to a greater or lesser extent by the consequences of the Industrial Rev-
olution, which were causing major disruptions in Western Europe, together
with the opening of the Suez Canal, direct colonization, the discovery of oil,
and new cultural influences on the elites. The great cities became the bridge-
heads for European industrial society and were transformed accordingly.
By the end of the 1930s, cities had become more heterogeneous. The
model of the “oriental city” had been complemented by that of the “dual city,”

1. In 1950, 28.4 percent of the population of the Maghrib, 24.7 percent of the population
of the rest of the Arab world, and 19.1 percent of the population of Afghanistan, Iran, and
Turkey lived in cities.
2. On this controversial topic, to which we will return later, see Abu-Lughod 1987, E.
Goldberg 1991, and Raymond 1994b.
156 | BE R N A R D HOU RC A DE

created by the juxtaposition of a new city, inhabited by Europeans or new local

elites, with the ancient city, peopled almost entirely by Muslims. Th is model
of the dual city is an approach that has some utility for the analysis of urban
space, but it has the disadvantage of being subject to numerous exceptions and
deficiencies and cannot be reduced to a simple binary opposition between tra-
dition and modernity.

The Demographic Emergence of “Dual Cities”: Sources and Methodology

Studies of the political, and to some extent the social, history of cities abound,
but precise demographic data are rare and approximate as well as often being
inconsistent between one source and another. The fi rst “modern” censuses,
generally in the Ottoman Empire, date from the second half of the nineteenth
century (Karpat 1978, 1985; McCarthy 1981), and reliable statistics for all the
cities of the region do not generally antedate the 1930s. 3 Hence this study is
based on a selection of fi ft y cities, comprising, it goes without saying, the most
populous but also the most important cities in each of the subregions, so that
towns in the less urbanized areas can be integrated into the analysis.
The notion of the “great city,” which has been used to construct the sample
of fi ft y cities, is of course relative, since the number of inhabitants must be
related to that of the total population of the country at any given date. Thus,
if the population of the Middle East multiplied four times between 1800 and
1950 (from about 27 million to about 111 million) a town of 100,000 in 1950
is equivalent to one of 25,000 in 1800. In addition, in certain areas, such as the
Maghrib or Iran, towns with small populations (when measured against Cairo
or Istanbul) have been kept in the sample, because they play an important
political or commercial role, such as Marrakesh, Tangier, Shiraz, and Yazd. In
the same way, “mushroom cities,” often created in the course of the fi rst half

3. Although earlier Ottoman censuses had been fairly reliable; for Anatolia between 1450
and 1600, see Cook 1972. Most of these figures come from monographs on various cities and
states in the region. See the references in more general works: Mantran 1989; Ganiage 1994;
Avery et al. 1991; Raymond 1984, 1985; de Planhol 1993. For more specific studies of particu-
lar areas or cities in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, see Gerber 1979 (Syria and
Palestine); McCarthy 1983 (Syria and Iraq); Panzac 1987 (Egypt); McCarthy 1989 (Pales-
tine); Schmelz 1994 (Jerusalem); and Riis 1999 (Aleppo).
 Demography of Cities and Expansion of Urban Space | 157

of the twentieth century, either as capitals (Riyadh, Kuwait, Tel Aviv), as com-
mercial capitals (Casablanca), or for a specific economic purpose (Port Said
for the Suez Canal, Ahwaz for oil) have developed into heavily populated cen-
ters and constitute a new and original urban type that needs to be integrated
into the sample.
In concentrating only on cities with significant populations and regional
functions in the nineteenth century and those that became of prime impor-
tance at the beginning of the twentieth, the litt le towns and urban centers of
between 3,000 and 10,000 inhabitants have been neglected in spite of the
fact that they occupied a position of prime importance in the organization
of space and in urban culture, and that they were also closely linked to the
rural milieu. In Iran this was true of numerous litt le towns on the edge of
the central desert, with a bazaar, a great mosque often constructed under the
Seljuks, towns which might be famous for a special type of carpet. Kashan,
Ardestan, Na’in, Nishapur, and Qum played a vital local role as regional cen-
ters, but during the period that interests us these towns did not experience
the major changes that affected the largest cities. Th is is also true of the small
towns of Anatolia or Morocco that nevertheless have long histories and con-
siderable reputations.
Because many of the figures in the sources are unreliable and often do not
relate to the same years, the statistics have been simplified and the populations
have been estimated at a number of key moments, the beginning, middle, and
end of the nineteenth century, and 1930, 1950, and 1970, in order to arrive at
manageable generalizations (Table 5).

The Influence of the Great Urban Centers

In the eighteenth century the eight largest cities in the Arab world accounted
for 5.6 percent of the total population, compared to 4.4 percent of the popula-
tion of France for the eight largest French cities (Raymond 1985, 66), a fact
that tends to confi rm the overwhelming and long-standing importance of
the urban phenomenon in the Middle East and its decline relative to Europe,
which has experienced major urban and industrial revolutions over the past
two centuries.
Over the past one and a half centuries the list of the largest cities has under-
gone a series of changes, and their demographic evolution, though conforming
158 | BE R N A R D HOU RC A DE

TA BL E 5

Demographic Growth of Middle Eastern Cities, 1800–1970

1800 1850 1900 1930 1950 1970

Total urban population

in 100,000s 2,865 3,696 7,799 12,556 26,494 72,203

(Growth percent per year) 0.5 1.5 1.6 3.8 5.1

Sample of 50 cities 1,993 2,535 4,871 7,300 14,624 37,729

(Growth percent per year) 0.5 1.3 1.4 3.5 4.9

Other cities 887 1,181 2,938 5,294 11,911 34,252

(Growth percent per year) 0.6 1.8 2 4.1 5.4

Percentage of the sample of

total urban population 69 68 62 58 55 53

Note: Population and annual rate of growth.

to a global matrix, has been strongly affected by the history of each city and
of each regional subsystem. Only three cities (Cairo, Istanbul, and Damascus)
have featured consistently in the list of the ten largest cities in the region between
1800 and 1970. Many of the traditional great cities, with opulent histories, have
undergone relative decline in the face of the cities that came into being as a result
of political changes in the new states, such as Algiers, Casablanca, Tel Aviv, and
even Baghdad, which was still among the largest cities at the very beginning
of the nineteenth century but went into decline during the last decades of the
Ottoman Empire, only to be reborn as the capital of Iraq (Table 6).
The population geography of the region has been profoundly affected by
the sheer weight of the population of the largest cities, particularly Istanbul and
Cairo, which accounted for 31 percent of the population of the fi ft y cities in the
sample in 1800 and 22 percent of the total urban population. Moreover, these
two international metropolises have kept their dominant position. In 1900,
Istanbul was the fi fteenth largest urban agglomeration in the world and Cairo
the thirty-second. In 1990, Cairo took sixteenth place and Istanbul twenty-
sixth, just behind Tehran (Moriconi-Ebrard 1993a, 1993b, 328ff ). Although
Cairo and Istanbul have remained dominant, it is also the case that the great
cities of the Middle East underwent a relative decline over this period, at least
 Demography of Cities and Expansion of Urban Space | 159

TA BL E 6

The Ten Largest Cities in the Middle East, 1800–1970

1800 1850 1900 1930 1950 1970

Istanbul Istanbul Istanbul Cairo Cairo Cairo

Cairo Cairo Cairo Istanbul Tehran Tehran

Aleppo Tabriz Alexandria Alexandria Istanbul Istanbul

Damascus Izmir Izmir Tehran Alexandria Alexandria

Baghdad Alexandria Tabriz Algiers Casablanca Baghdad

Tabriz Aleppo Tehran Tabriz Tel Aviv Casablanca

Izmir Tehran Tunis Baghdad Damascus Algiers

Fez Damascus Damascus Tunis Tunis Ankara

Tunis Tunis Algiers Damascus Algiers Tel Aviv

Mosul Fez Beirut Oran Baghdad Damascus

in comparison with other cities of the world. In 1950, the four cities with more
than a million inhabitants (Cairo, Tehran, Istanbul, and Alexandria) accounted
for 22 percent of the urban population of the Middle East, compared to 31 per-
cent for the world as a whole. The relative fall in the combined population of
the fi ft y major cities in the sample, from 69 percent to 53 percent of the total
urban population between 1800 and 1970, or that of the ten largest towns in the
region, confirms this general tendency and also points to the more rapid growth
of small and medium-sized cities, especially after 1900. However, this gener-
alization still gives overwhelming importance to the very largest cities. In cer-
tain cases their hegemony is underscored, especially since the 1950s, as in Syria,
where the combined population of Damascus and Aleppo has increased from 23
percent of the population in 1870 to 48 percent in 1981 (Table 7).
The ranking and the rhythm of evolution of the five largest cities of the
Middle East at the beginning of the twentieth century (Istanbul, Cairo, Alex-
andria, Izmir, and Tehran4) (see Table 8) serves not only to confi rm their

4. In fact Tabriz had a higher population than Tehran but was rapidly overtaken by the
capital in the fi rst years of the century.
160 | BE R N A R D HOU RC A DE

TA BL E 7

The Dominant Position of the Major Cities

Rank 1800 1850 1900 1930 1950 1970

Two largest cities 22 19 19 15 14 13

1 to 5 32 28 30 25 24 23

6 to 10 11 11 10 9 10 9

Top ten largest cities 43 33 32 29 29 27

Note: Cumulated population of cities by size at various dates in percentage of the total population
of the sample of fi ft y cities.

relative status as regression cities but also the permanence of their lead posi-
tion in spite of the vagaries of history. The great cities of Anatolia kept their
rank order in spite of the stagnation in their population in the wake of the exo-
dus of the Greeks after World War I, but other cities would emerge.
Table 9 confi rms that the very large cities have undergone a markedly
less dynamic demographic growth during our study period than many of
the second rank cities that came to encompass very large populations within
a few decades, whether as new capitals, oil cities, or cities of colonization.
The enormous size of Cairo and Istanbul during the last century, followed
by Tehran or Baghdad, should not conceal the size and diversity of urban
realities in the Middle East, punctuated by the stagnation of some old “ori-
ental” cities and the creation or rebirth of a number of others, following the
example of Alexandria.

TA BL E 8

The Global Demographic Growth of Cairo, Istanbul,

Tehran, Alexandria, and Izmir, 1800–1970
1800 1850 1900 1930 1950 1970

Cumulative population (1,000s) 738 996 2,315 2,992 6,056 15,417

Percentage of total urban population 26 27 30 24 23 21

Rate of growth (% per annum) 0.6 1.7 0.9 3.6 4.8

 Demography of Cities and Expansion of Urban Space | 161

TA BL E 9

Differential Demographic Growth According to City Size

Rank 1800–1900 1900–1950 1800–1950

1 to 5 1 0.7 0.9

6 to 10 0.9 2.7 1.5

11 to 20 1 2.8 1.6

21 to 50 0.9 2.4 1.4

total sample 0.9 2.2 1.3

Note: Annual demographic growth in percentage, size of cities sorted in the earlier year.

Urban Stagnation at the Beginning of the Nineteenth Century

Between the end of the eighteenth century and the late 1940s, the demographic
evolution of cities went through three stages: a period of very slow growth, less
than 1 percent per year, for most of the nineteenth century, followed by a mod-
erate increase, of the order of 1.5 percent, between 1870 and 1930, and fi nally a
spurt of very rapid growth that continued to accelerate through the 1970s.
For much of the nineteenth century the urban population increased only
slowly, at much the same rate as the population as a whole, which remained
overwhelmingly rural. In spite of the antiquity of the urban history of the
region, and the pride of place of both Istanbul and Cairo, the urban system
in the nineteenth century was thoroughly integrated into the rural world. In
Iran, Hans Bobek (1974) and Eckart Ehlers (1992) have described the system
of “rent capitalism” (Rent Kapitalismus) that enabled small towns and rural
markets to live off “rents” from agriculture and carpet weaving without rein-
vesting in these activities. Th is kind of relationship, which can be found in
most cities well integrated into their hinterlands, such as Aleppo, Marrakesh,
or Fez, did not generally encourage migration to the cities, since the eco-
nomic system was stable, dominated by the rural economy, property rents,
and a largely rural population.
The rhythms of growth of the urban population were determined primar-
ily by the general evolution of the population as a whole, which was itself still
substantially rural. Th roughout the nineteenth century the demography of the
162 | BE R N A R D HOU RC A DE

Middle East exhibited high fertility rates and high mortality rates, resulting in
very slow growth. Large-scale epidemics of plague and cholera, together with
periodic famines, were part of the social history of the region until the end
of the century: to cite a few examples, there was a cholera epidemic in Cairo
in 1831, a plague in the city in 1835 resulting in 500,000 deaths, a plague in
Aleppo in 1837 from which the city took three years to recover (Raymond
1993, 298; Gaube and Wirth 1984, 248, 252), famines in the Maghrib in 1866
and 1868, and cholera in Tehran in 1870–71. With improvements in sanitary
conditions and medical treatment and with better communications, mortality
rates declined rapidly, ushering in a period of “demographic transition” during
the 1930s. The 1950s marked the beginning of a new phase often described as
the “demographic explosion,” which was accompanied by an accelerated ten-
dency on the part of rural people to migrate toward the cities (Table 10).
During the years of stagnation in the nineteenth century, the urban geog-
raphy of the Middle East was marked by the uncontested domination of Istan-
bul and Cairo. One townsman out of five lived in these two great metropolises,
which had 360,000 and 263,000 inhabitants respectively. Aleppo, the third
largest city, had 120,000 inhabitants and Damascus, 90,000. Th is rank order
changed litt le throughout the century as each of these cities continued to
function as a regional capital and developed accordingly, sometimes affected
by the irruption of European influence, but primarily by the domination of
their rural hinterlands. In the fi rst half of the century, economic regression
struck the whole region and affected prestigious cities such as Mosul, and par-
ticularly Damascus, whose populations decreased, as well as cities directly
dependent on declining activities, such as Algiers, which was affected by the
end of piracy in the Mediterranean and the departure of the Turkish garri-
sons, and not yet benefiting—unlike Oran—from the effects of French colo-
nization (after 1830).
In contrast, other cities, such as Tabriz, were developing. The Turkish-
speaking capital of Persian Azerbaijan was in close contact with Istanbul and
with the Tsarist empire, which was already a presence in the Caucasus. Numer-
ous Tabrizi merchants had branch houses in Istanbul, which also served as a
refuge for the Persian political opposition. Th is Persian community in Istanbul
was influential in making Tabriz the port of entry for modernization into Iran
and thus the real international and intellectual capital of the country, whereas
 Demography of Cities and Expansion of Urban Space | 163

TA BL E 10

Demographic Growth Between 1800 and 1970 of the Ten Largest Cities in 1900
City 1800 1850 1900 1930 1950 1970

Istanbul 360 391 950 691 1035 2835

0.8 1.8 -1.1 2 5.2

Cairo 363 305 570 1139 2426 5950

0.3 1.3 2.3 3.9 4.6

Alexandria 10 105 370 608 1025 2130

4.8 2.6 1.7 2.6 3.7

Izmir 60 110 225 154 270 758

1 1.4 -1.3 2.8 5.3

Tabriz 80 110 200 250 289 450

0.6 1.2 0.7 0.7 2.2

Tehran 45 85 200 400 1300 3744

1.3 1.7 2.3 6.1 5.4

Tunis 60 80 177 234 489 761

0.6 1.6 0.9 3.8 2.2

Damascus 90 80 154 216 563 970

-0.2 1.3 1.1 4.9 2.8

Algiers 40 30 140 336 480 1393

-0.6 3.1 3 1.8 5.5

Beirut 6 40 120 150 350 939

3.9 2.2 0.7 4.3 5.1

Note: Totals in thousands and annual rate of growth.

Tehran, the official capital since 1786, remained an unimpressive city where
the rulers resided only in winter and which had no public buildings other than
the Ark, or “Kremlin,” surrounding the Gulistan palace (Adle and Hourcade
1992; Zarcone 1993).
In Anatolia, the rapid development of Izmir was due to its coastal location,
which facilitated its function as an interface with European countries, partly
164 | BE R N A R D HOU RC A DE

because of its large Armenian, Greek, and Jewish population, but also because
of the presence of a large number of Europeans, who were able to buy houses
and land in the city under the terms of the Land Law of 1867. In the course
of the nineteenth century, which was marked by a series of crises within the
Ottoman Empire and by the stagnation of Qajar Iran, as well as by the reforms
of Muhammad ‘Ali in Egypt, Alexandria developed into a new metropolis of
international standing. The insignificant “outer harbor” of Cairo became a city
of 105,000 inhabitants in 1848, of whom 5,000 were foreigners, and 232,000
inhabitants in 1882, of whom 49,000 were foreigners. Similarly Beirut, a small
town of 6,000 inhabitants in 1800, had grown to 140,000 by the beginning of
the twentieth century, benefiting from its position on the coast and its relative
distance from both Cairo and Istanbul.

The Effects of Colonization and Modernization

After this long period of stagnation, the second phase of the demographic evo-
lution of Middle Eastern cities was marked by an acceleration of the rate of
growth (about 1.5 percent per annum) and by the effects of modernization
policies between 1870 and 1930. The fi rst large-scale efforts at urbanization
took place under the aegis either of colonization (Algiers, Casablanca) or of
the modernizing royal house of Egypt, where the upheaval and turmoil ini-
tiated by Muhammad ‘Ali (1805–48) came to some completion under Khe-
dive Isma‘il (1863–79), during whose reign the Suez Canal was inaugurated in
1869. The population of Cairo rose from 315,000 in 1863 to 374,000 in 1882,
reaching 1.3 million in 1937. Cairo accounted for 60 percent of the urban pop-
ulation of Egypt in 1907 (21 percent of the total); in 1927, half the population
of Cairo had not been born in the city.
The Universal Exhibition of 1867 and the transformation of Paris car-
ried out by Baron Haussmann that had so impressed Khedive Isma‘il had also
impressed Nasreddin Shah, who began to tear down the old Safavid city walls
of Tehran after his return from Europe and sketched out the rudiments of an
urban policy. The Persian capital nevertheless remained a somewhat inferior
city; electricity was not introduced until 1906, and the fi rst motor vehicles
(apart from those belonging to the Shah) did not arrive until 1912. However,
the Constitutional Revolution of 1906 and the discovery of oil in 1907 facili-
tated the strengthening of central authority and the development of the capital,
 Demography of Cities and Expansion of Urban Space | 165

while other cities, such as Isfahan, Shiraz, and Yazd remained on the periphery
of the political and economic storms that were engulfi ng the countries of the
Mediterranean basin at the time. During these years Damascus and Aleppo
also remained on the margins and only underwent modest development, while
Baghdad, also under foreign domination, began to recover from a long period
of decline and counted some 250,000 inhabitants in 1930.
In Turkey, the cities of the interior, with the exception of Eskişehir, were
also bypassed by industrialization and modernization. In 1900, a town as bus-
tling and prestigious as Bursa could count only seventy-five silk-weaving estab-
lishments. In contrast, Istanbul and Izmir attained their apogee. At the end of
the nineteenth century Istanbul began to experience some early warnings of
the decline that would set in during the 1920s. The population of both cities
grew very quickly (2.6 percent per annum for Izmir, 1.8 percent for Istanbul).
In 1886, Istanbul had 873,000 inhabitants and remained substantially cosmo-
politan, since the Muslim population only formed 44 percent of the whole;
17.7 percent were Greeks, 17.1 percent Armenians, 5.1 percent Jews and 15.3
percent foreigners, many of whom were non-Ottoman Muslims (Mantran
1996, 299). In the fi rst years of the twentieth century, Istanbul’s population
was more than a million, but this rapid increase was due mostly to an influx of
muhajirs, refugees from the Balkans, the Caucasus, Crete, or the Crimea.
Under the direct influence of colonization or the various imperial con-
quests, a second type of city developed during the years between 1870 and
1930, particularly in the Maghrib. Unlike the cities of Egypt and Anatolia,
which had historic connections with European countries, the cities of North
Africa had remained largely cut off from foreign influence. The only nonindig-
enous inhabitants in Algeria were the soldiers of the Turkish garrisons; there
were only 130 foreigners living in Morocco in 1830. Urban development was
sudden and rapid, directly linked to the influx of colons whose presence was
supported by military operations, rather than the result of internal migration.
Th is was especially true of Tunis and the coastal cities of Algeria. Algiers itself
had barely 30,000 inhabitants at the time of the French conquest, but had
136,000 in the census of 1901 (336,000 in 1930), while Oran had a population
of 89,000 (172,000 in 1930). Morocco underwent a similar experience half a
century later, because Lyautey’s urban policy was not fully executed until after
World War I. In spite of the long history of urbanization in Sharifian Morocco,
166 | BE R N A R D HOU RC A DE

Casablanca, which barely existed at the end of the nineteenth century, grew to
163,000 inhabitants in 1931 (and almost 700,000 in the 1950s), whereas Mar-
rakesh, which remained the largest city in Morocco for several years (195,000),
developed slowly because of its location in the interior, although more rapidly
than Fez. The old imperial capital, which had a population of some 90,000 at
the beginning of the century, fell victim to its opposition to colonization and
only had 112,000 inhabitants in the census of 1931.
The discovery of oil and the creation of ports or industrial cities linked
directly to foreign enterprises brought a number of cities of a novel kind into
being, often built up from nothing. Th is was the case of Port Said, which housed
the builders of the Suez Canal, of Abadan, which did not exist when the fi rst
cargo of Iranian oil was loaded on to a merchant ship in 1912, and of Ahwaz,
which became the headquarters of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company.
World War I and the fall of the Ottoman Empire marked the end of this
period of urban history, characterized partly by the establishment of new
urban structures, but also by the dominant influence of the heritage of the past
and of traditional society. Urban renewal had remained largely confi ned to the
great cities, particularly the coastal cities in direct contact with the European
world, but it also owed much to the initiatives of individuals or local elites
whose role was innovative although often limited to an empirical adaptation
of the old cities to new techniques and ways of life. At the end of World War II,
the nation-states of the Middle East were still heavily influenced by the rural
world that dominated the population, economy, culture, and society. The mod-
ernization of the cities by the elites and the creation of “European” quarters did
not encourage the migration of peasants toward the cities, but a new dynamic
had begun to emerge.

The Beginnings of the Urban Revolution

The period after World Wars I and II was marked particularly by extremely
rapid urban growth stemming from four principal causes: the acceleration
of world demographic growth due to the decline in mortality rates, rural to
urban migration, processes of state formation, and most significantly, the
more thoroughgoing entry of the Middle East into the international econ-
omy, both industrial and urban. Th is new dynamic was at its height between
1945 and the 1980s. In this context, the decline of Istanbul and the cities of
 Demography of Cities and Expansion of Urban Space | 167

the Anatolian littoral seemed to symbolize a fundamental break with the old
urban system.
Some 300,000 Greeks, Armenians, Jews, and foreigners left Istanbul
within a few years, with the result that in 1923 the former Ottoman metropolis
had no more than 720,000 inhabitants, almost all Turks. The town lost the
cosmopolitan, multiconfessional, and international character that had been a
vital part of its identity over the centuries, and it also lost its political func-
tion to Ankara, the new capital, which had only 74,000 inhabitants in 1930. It
would take several decades for the great metropolitan city on the Bosphorus to
construct a new identity and once more discover a new rhythm of rapid devel-
opment. Izmir, and to a lesser extent Alexandria, underwent a similar trajec-
tory. During these years of decline, and in spite of the continuing prestige of
the former Constantinople, Cairo became the new leading city of the region,
with a population of 1.2 million in 1930 and 2.5 million in 1950, more than
twice that of Istanbul.
In the fi rst half of this century the capitals of the new states developed
extremely rapidly. Many of them had previously been small towns without
much of a past but now benefited from the activist policies and the capital
investments of the new governments. Most of these cities had been built on
virgin sites, or at least on sites largely devoid of major symbolic significance. In
1930 all these soulless new cities had populations of fewer than 30,000 inhabit-
ants, except Ankara, which had a previous existence as a small industrial town,
with 74,000. After World War II a new stage in the demographic evolution
of these cities began, in which they experienced extremely rapid growth, but
they remained fairly modest capital cities: Ankara had 290,000 inhabitants;
Amman, barely 100,000; Riyadh, 83,000; Rabat, 189,000; Kuwait, 115,000;
and Beirut, 350,000.
During the interwar period the older capitals, often casualties of industri-
alization but benefiting from a prestigious architectural, social, and cultural
heritage, discovered a new dynamic, sometimes at the expense of the other
great cities of the past, which had not had the chance of becoming national
capitals. Th is was true of Baghdad with regard to Mosul and of Tunis, Algiers,
and especially Damascus, which inexorably overtook Aleppo to reach a popu-
lation of 563,000 in 1950. Tel Aviv was a special case because the capital of the
new state of Israel, which had only 30,000 inhabitants in 1930, mushroomed to
168 | BE R N A R D HOU RC A DE

567,000 in 1950 because of the massive influx of immigrants, while Jerusalem

remained a medium-sized city of only 123,000. A new stage of demographic
evolution began in the beginning of the 1950s, when all cities, great and small,
were exposed to modernity and took part in the “urban revolution” as part of
the new processes of state formation.

Regional Variations in Demographic Growth

In spite of important differences in the demographic evolution of each of these

cities, as a function of their antiquity, size, or economic purpose, there is litt le
variation between the evolution of the various regions, which tends to confi rm
the general homogeneity of the “cultural zone” extending between Morocco
and Iran (Table 11). Th is homogeneity was particularly evident in the nine-
teenth century, when growth rates were low everywhere. At that time the
“Islamic city” was the common model for most cities, none of which had yet
been profoundly affected by modernization and close relations with Europe.
In the second part of the century, the cities of Anatolia and Egypt grew more
rapidly (1.6 percent per annum) than those of the Fertile Crescent (Damas-
cus, Aleppo, Baghdad, Jerusalem, Beirut, 1.1 percent per annum) or of the
Arabian peninsula (San‘a’, Medina, Mecca), which remained large towns, of
the Maghrib (1.3 percent), still not greatly affected by colonization and Iran (1
percent), still on the periphery of the industrial world.

TA BL E 11

Comparative Regional Evolution of Middle Eastern Cities,

1800–1970 (annual growth rate)
1850 1900 1930 1950 1970

Middle East 0.05 1.3 1.3 3.5 4.9

Anatolia 0.4 1.6 -0.8 2.9 5.7

Egypt 0.8 1.7 2.1 3.5 4.4

Fertile Crescent -0.1 1.1 1.8 4.9 (3.8) 4.8

Arabian Peninsula 0.9 1.3 1.5 3 9

Maghrib 0.5 1.3 2.3 3.2 4.1

Iran 0.8 1 1.2 3.4 4.6

 Demography of Cities and Expansion of Urban Space | 169

At the beginning of the twentieth century, these minor variations became

more marked, a consequence of two trends with contrary effects. These were,
on one hand, the end of the Ottoman Empire, which brought about a decline
in the urban population of Anatolia, and on the other, the heyday of French
colonization in the Maghrib, which resulted in an average annual increase of
2.3 percent in the population of North African cities between 1900 and 1930.
In the same period the cities of Egypt and the Fertile Crescent benefited from
the crisis in Anatolia, but Iran and the Arabian peninsula were still not greatly
affected by urbanization, their cities developing at the same pace as that of the
largely rural population as a whole.
Between the 1920s and the late 1940s Middle Eastern cities again grew as
a unified whole, much as they had done in the fi rst half of the nineteenth cen-
tury, but in a very different context. First, the urban population throughout the
area grew faster (although still less than 3 percent per annum) than the popu-
lation of the country in general, and second, the modernization of the political
systems and the international integration of the local economies imposed a
common development model, dominated by the cities. Here the only excep-
tion was the Fertile Crescent, with an average rate of growth of 4.9 percent per
annum between 1930 and 1950, but this was almost entirely due to the atypi-
cal case of Tel Aviv (15.8 percent), without which the annual rate would have
been 3.8 percent.
The beginning of the second half of the twentieth century saw the eventual
acceleration of the urban growth of Iran and especially of the Arabian Penin-
sula (9 percent between 1959 and 1970), whose cities had shown some signs
of development before World War II but now reached unparalleled growth
rates with the more thoroughgoing exploitation of the region’s oil. Even the
cities of Egypt and Anatolia rediscovered a dynamism that to some extent
recalled their glorious days at the beginning of the nineteenth century. But
later this urban development became more homogeneous, taking in the rural
world and being characterized by the development of a large number of small
and medium-sized cities but also by the emergence of great metropolises with
several million inhabitants throughout the Middle East and North Africa—
including Tehran, Baghdad, Ankara, Riyadh, Casablanca, and Algiers.
Thus, between 1800 and 1950 three kinds of demographic growth can be
found in the various regions:
170 | BE R N A R D HOU RC A DE

• Iran and the Arabian Peninsula, which share some common character-
istics in spite of their very different cultural and demographic contexts, since
their cities only developed relatively late as a consequence of the oil economy.
• The Maghrib and the Fertile Crescent, which were on the margins of
Europe and the Istanbul/Cairo tandem. Their marginalized cities stagnated
until the beginning of the twentieth century when they experienced a spec-
tacular renewal as a result either of colonization or of the creation of the vari-
ous new states.
• Egypt and Turkey, whose urban population had been growing since the
end of the nineteenth century because of the hegemonic role of their two great
metropolises that had long had continuous relations with industrial Europe.
The decline of Istanbul during the fi rst half of the twentieth century lasted
only three decades, and the former capital soon began to compete again on the
same level as Cairo.

The Transformations of Urban Space: The Oriental City

and the Role of Pious Endowments in Urbanization

At the beginning of the nineteenth century almost all of the cities of the
Middle East, with the exception of Istanbul, corresponded in their entirety
to the often described model of the “oriental city.” The principal cities were
all surrounded by ancient walls (Cairo, Aleppo, Damascus, Marrakesh, and
Jerusalem)—even if they were sometimes almost in ruins, as in the case of
the walls surrounding Tehran, Isfahan, and Baghdad. In some cases even
the new quarters or the gardens were surrounded by walls, as in Fez Jadid or
San‘a’. Closing the gates every evening, as took place in Jerusalem until 1880,
was carried out partly for security reasons but also to underline the authority
of the political powers and to stress the identity of the city in contrast to the
rural world beyond it.
In these “traditional” cities, the royal palace, or the governor’s palace, and
the great mosque were often the only significant buildings, together with the
suq or bazaar whose entrance was often built in the grand style. Urban space was
usually divided according to various activities whether economic—the orga-
nization of artisans by specialty—political, or religious. Even the residential
quarters sometimes had areas given over to religious minorities, whether Jew-
ish (mellahs) or Christian. These minorities were often quite widely dispersed
 Demography of Cities and Expansion of Urban Space | 171

within the city, as in Istanbul, Aleppo, and Damascus, at least before clustering
in one or two quarters became more or less the rule in the nineteenth cen-
tury, 5 again sometimes spontaneously, but often by decree, as in Rabat, with
the creation of a Jewish mellah on habus land. These Christian or Jewish quar-
ters were often under the protection of the prince and thus situated near the
palace walls, as in Cairo, Fez, Marrakesh, and Shiraz. No spatial extension was
possible for these quarters within the medinas, and their population densities
became excessive in the course of the nineteenth century, making living con-
ditions very difficult. For their part, the Muslims were able to establish them-
selves in gardens intra muros and later outside the walls when the population
began to increase significantly.6
The plan and organization of the network of streets in the medina was
not very different from that of contemporary European cities: narrow wind-
ing streets, indifferent sanitation, and the obstacles created by the presence of
numerous pack animals.7 Only a few roads leading to the Palace were widened
for reasons of security or prestige. The suqs and bazaars surrounded the great
mosques in cities such as Damascus, Mashhad, Aleppo, and Cairo, and great
urban undertakings resulting in wide avenues or great piazzas like those of
Isfahan or Istanbul were quite exceptional.
Although urban life was not administered by a sole central authority, as
was the case in Europe, it was by no means anarchic. The traditional cities were
administered locally by a combination of different local powers and of the soli-
darity that existed in the quarters, the guilds of artisans and merchants (hirfa),

5. de Planhol 1997, 284. See also chapter 7 in this volume by Gudrun Krämer.
6. However, the population of the “new suburbs” of Aleppo (al-Jamaliya, al-Niyal, al-
Hamidiya, al-Sulaymaniya, al-Saliba al-Saghir, and al-‘Aziziya, which were constructed
between 1868 and 1895) was 8 percent Muslim, 8 percent “other,” 11 percent Jewish, and 73
percent Christian in 1900. See Gaube and Wirth 1984, 434.
7. One of the key tasks of the municipalities founded (often by European residents) in the
wake of the Ottoman Law of Municipalities in 1877 (Lewis 1979, 399) was the organization of
sewage systems and the means of providing clean drinking water; for Alexandria, see Reimer
1997, 118; for Jerusalem, Kark 1980; for Istanbul, Rosenthal 1980a. The Galata Municipality
and the Commissione di Ornato (in Alexandria; see Reimer 1993) were both founded before
1877, but, for a number of reasons, their scope and effectiveness was limited. For a useful study
of several late Ottoman municipalities, see Lafi 2005.
172 | BE R N A R D HOU RC A DE

ethnic groups, and religious authorities.8 Each guild had police, judicial, and
fiscal powers; each quarter (hara) of the traditional cities had a strong individ-
ual identity and was “run” by a respected shaykh who acted as mediator with
the authorities. These various communities (ta’ifa) long remained capable of
managing most of the medinas, even the largest ones. Thus, in Cairo there
were 100 quarters and 250 guilds, with 350 shaykhs both elected and recog-
nized by the state authorities (Raymond 1994b). They were used particularly
by Bonaparte to calm down the disturbances that broke out all over the city.
The shaykh al-balad in Algiers and the night-watchman of the suq in San‘a’ had
sole charge of these places; in San‘a’ this official was called the “shaykh of the
night” (Mermier 1996).
Waqf or habus also played a particular role in the organization and admin-
istration of cities. At the heart of urban space, waqf properties, with their invio-
lable character, guaranteed the occupants of buildings with this status a form of
security and permanence that partly served to protect them from the dramas of
history. Thus fountains, public baths, schools, libraries, shops, mosques, cara-
vanserais, and even dwelling houses that had been made waqf were assured of
being maintained and kept in order, in so far, at least, as the foundation remained
in existence and the mutawalli performed his duties honestly. It also enabled the
rent from rural waqf lands to be diverted to various urban functions. Hence
awqaf were a significant component of the “rent capitalism” that was a feature of
the economy of the whole of the region (Ehlers 1992).
The institution of waqf was also used by poor or minority populations
to protect themselves from hardship. In Tunis, where the growing influx of
Europeans after 1815 gave rise to a wave of speculation in urban property, the
poorer homeowners founded habus to protect themselves from the specula-
tors. In 1840, 14 percent of property transactions were of habus properties,
compared with only 4.2 percent in 1800 (Hénia 1995). Similarly, the Chris-
tians made use of this Muslim institution to protect their churches, schools,
and houses, especially in Aleppo, where there was in any case a considerable
overlap between Muslim and Christian waqf (David 1997).
However, the capacity of waqf to “immobilize” urban real estate often
functioned as an obstacle to the development of cities and to urbanization in

8. Raymond 1980. See also chapter 4 in this volume by Abdul-Karim Rafeq.

 Demography of Cities and Expansion of Urban Space | 173

general, and as such affected most of the larger cities of the region after the
mid–nineteenth century. It is certain that the institution of waqf was vital in
keeping up the traditional inner cities (medinas) and had the effect of making
urban developers prefer to construct new quarters outside the old walls or to
build new cities, where the juridical, political, and cultural problems associ-
ated with waqf were less acute. Th is was especially true of areas exposed to
European colonization, such as Morocco.
In spite of its efficaciousness within the confi nes of the traditional oriental
city, the traditional methods of managing urban space had difficulty in adapting
to rapid urban growth. For example, by obstructing certain property transac-
tions, the waqf status of many buildings often hindered the renovation of the
medinas (David and Hreitani 1984). In Iran the town of Mashhad was an excep-
tion, because most of the surface area of the city—some 58 percent of its 7,000
hectares in 1974—belonged to the Astan-i Quds Razavi, the waqf that admin-
istered the shrine of the Imam Reza. The administrators of this waqf, probably
the largest of its kind in the world, were able to develop an active and modern-
izing urban policy, which has been continued to this day (Hourcade 1989).

Early Modernization

The second part of the nineteenth century was conspicuous for the beginning
of several large-scale urbanization projects. The renovations carried out by
enlightened monarchs, keen to modernize their capitals on European lines,
gradually transformed the great cities. The fi rst stage often took the form of the
destruction of the ancient walls that enclosed the old cities, where the growth in
population density was making living conditions increasingly uncomfortable.
In Tehran, the old Safavid walls, some nine kilometers in length, were
destroyed on the orders of Nasreddin Shah in 1870–71 and replaced with a
new perimeter wall with a circumference of 19.2 kilometers, along the lines of
the one around Paris, with twelve richly decorated monumental gates. Within
the city however, urban renewal was limited to the construction of a number of
broad avenues to the north of the palace, although this did endow Tehran with
the fi rst elements of urbanization indispensable for a modern capital city.
In Cairo, the projects planned under Napoleon were quite limited and
only actually carried out under Muhammad ‘Ali. These included the removal
of the mastaba, or stone seats, in front of the shops, the law on the width of
174 | BE R N A R D HOU RC A DE

streets, enacted in 1845, the opening of the “new street” (al-sikka al-jadida,
later the Boulevard Muhammad ‘Ali), the construction of the Great Mosque,
and so forth. However, the khedive preferred to develop Alexandria, the new
city, and the Egyptian capital was transformed under Isma‘il. Within a few
years, under the direction of ‘Ali Mubarak, a Western-style city was laid out to
the west of the old town, toward the Nile. The surface area of the city, which
had barely increased in half a century, doubled between 1863 and 1882, when
it covered 1,260 hectares.
In Istanbul, which had expanded extensively beyond the perimeters of its
ancient walls, there was a comparable burst of development during the Tan-
zimat period (1839–78), which was remarkable both for its modern features
and its original architecture. In 1836, Mustafa Reşid Pasha had set out the
general principles of urban planning that would be developed in more detail
in the fi rst urban ordinance issued by Helmut von Moltke in 1848. Th is was
only very partially applied to the outer quarters of the city, and not at all to
the city center, whose reconstruction was less the result of planning than of a
number of fi res that destroyed several quarters and enabled them to be rebuilt
according to modern styles and norms. In 1856, 650 houses were burnt down
in Aksaray and 3,000 in Beyoğlu in 1870; there were more fi res in 1910 and
1917. Th is endowed the “Frankish quarter” with the modern architecture that
gave it international prestige. Since 1856 several streets had been lit with gas
lamps; there was a tramway in Pera in 1869, and the Galatasaray lycée opened
its doors in 1868.
However, in spite of these various attempts to modernize the urban space
of Middle Eastern cities, most of them still retained their traditional character-
istics at the end of the nineteenth century. Midhat Pasha, governor of Baghdad
between 1869 and 1872, had the city walls razed to the ground, but the city
continued to stagnate. In contrast, Jerusalem began to be modernized after
the occupation of Palestine and Syria by Ibrahim Pasha in 1831, although the
city walls remained intact. In fact modernization was generally fairly limited
in all these cities, with no overall plan; most of them were like Fez, San‘a’, and
Marrakesh, where the city walls remained intact and there was litt le in the way
of urban development.
Population growth brought about intense crowding within the walls, and
sometimes occasioned the construction of wretched popular quarters just
 Demography of Cities and Expansion of Urban Space | 175

outside the city walls, together with bourgeois or aristocratic quarters and
secondary residences at some distance from the city centers. In Tehran, the
extension of the city northward began most notably after 1860, when the lit-
tle canal diverting the river Karaj was completed, making it possible to plant
orchards and pleasure gardens near the dusty city. The same happened in Fez
with the development of large houses in the new city (Fez Jadid), and in the
western part of San‘a’ where the gardens were surrounded by walls.

Dual Cities and New Cities

The great urban transformations took place after 1870, with the acceleration
of colonization in Algeria, the construction of the Suez Canal, the conquest of
Morocco, the British presence in Egypt and the Middle East in general in the
early twentieth century, and the various grants of independence and autonomy
after 1930. In the context of accelerated urban growth, these changes brought
about the division of some cities into two parts, with the construction of a
“European city” alongside the “native city” or medina. Th is model was par-
ticularly prevalent in the Maghrib; good examples are Algiers, Meknès, Mar-
rakesh, and Rabat.
As well as the “extensions” that have just been mentioned, the construc-
tion of entirely new cities such as Casablanca, Ahwaz, and Ankara, on much
the same lines as Alexandria, was carried out in the context of a full-fledged
urban program, under the aegis of determined and ambitious politicians, often
with the assistance of European engineers and architects. In 1937, Mustafa
Kemal commissioned the French architect Henri Prost to redesign the historic
center of Istanbul, although his plans were not to be implemented for a further
twenty years.
In Cairo, between 1882 and “independence” in 1936, a second, colonial
city was constructed between the old city (the citadel, Old Cairo, Khan al-
Khalili) and the Nile. Lord Cromer, the British Agent and Consul-General
between 1883 and 1907, played a leading role in putt ing the fi nishing touches
to the projects begun under Isma‘il. However, this modern city, so very differ-
ent from the old city, was not entirely cut off from it. It was highly cosmopoli-
tan (150,000 foreigners in 1927, compared to 69,000 in 1870), and frequented
especially by the new Egyptian bourgeoisie. Th ings changed in the early
twentieth century, with the construction by Baron Empain of the new city of
176 | BE R N A R D HOU RC A DE

Heliopolis, to the north of Cairo, which began in 1906. The building of this
garden city with hotels, clubs, and luxury houses proceeded very slowly over
the fi rst few years (there were fewer than 30,000 inhabitants in 1930), but it
marked an important cultural and geographic departure.
Similarly, the modern residential quarters at Zamalek, on the left bank
of the Nile toward Giza, were more clearly cut off from the city and virtually
reserved for the British. The Egyptian capital thus became fragmented into a
number of different cultural and urban entities, but this segmentation was a
long way from the much more absolute segregation so distinctive of the colo-
nial cities of the Maghrib. In fact, there was no medina in Cairo, as was also
true of Istanbul and Alexandria; the old cities were not homogeneous, and
perhaps more importantly, there was a significant local modern bourgeoisie.
These cities were the fi rst to integrate modernization, and as such developed
an urban landscape less sharply contrasted or potentially confl icting than in
countries where Europeanization was more recent or closely linked to a direct
colonial presence.
Although they retained their old walls, Aleppo and even Damascus were
not really “partitioned” because the modern quarters constructed during the
mandate remained closely linked to the old city. In Aleppo, the fi rst construc-
tions outside the walls appeared around 1870; during the French mandate the
urban architect René Danger proposed an overall plan whose main purpose
was to respect the old city, while constructing two broad avenues to separate
the administrative quarters from the area at the foot of the citadel, a project
only completed after World War II. The very slow development of the city,
even the construction of the railway station, did not result in the creation of
a separate modern town. In Hama and Beirut, however, urban development
was essentially bipolar, while in Jerusalem, whose population was declining
at the beginning of the twentieth century, the new Jewish quarters built after
1860 outside the western walls of the city remained relatively litt le developed
before 1933.
The cities of Iran altered very litt le before the 1930s; Western influence
remained limited, and the British presence was largely confi ned to the oil-rich
province of Khuzistan. It was not until the reign of Reza Shah Pahlavi, between
1933 and 1940, that Tehran began to be thoroughly redesigned, with the con-
struction of wide avenues cut through the city walls, piercing to the heart of
 Demography of Cities and Expansion of Urban Space | 177

the traditional city. The erection of modern buildings for ministries and pub-
lic services, and the fi rst hotels, fi nally turned the city into a modern capital.
The construction of wide straight boulevards in the style of Haussmann was
planned for other cities, but was not implemented. Hence, the cities of Iran had
no double-track development, and there was no antagonism between old and
new parts of the city. The social segregation that now exists in Tehran between
the old quarters around the bazaar and the Ark and the summer quarters of
Shemiran toward the north only developed gradually after World War II.
In the Maghrib, on the other hand, French colonization created a very
distinct urban form, of two adjacent cities, one containing the “European”
city, built according to a plan, with broad streets to facilitate the circulation
of motor vehicles and low housing density, and the other of an unmodernized
medina, where very litt le had changed, still surrounded by its old city walls.
Taken to its extreme, the logic of these garden cities, often influenced by the
social and modernist ideas of the Saint-Simonians, resulted in the construc-
tion of completely new cities far away from any “native” city—as in Casablanca
or Kenitra (Port Lyautey)—or some litt le distance away, as in Meknès, Mar-
rakesh, and Rabat.
Th is was particularly true of Morocco, under the policy directed by Mar-
shal Lyautey, who became resident-general in 1912. Initiated before World
War I, this colonial urban policy aimed to maintain the architecture, urban
structure, and “indigenous” culture and society in general, without much overt
interference, while facilitating the rapid development of European-style cities
that would reflect and respond to economic imperatives and encourage the
immigration of colons (Wright 1991). Th is was why the cities of the interior,
Marrakesh and especially Fez, were underdeveloped in comparison with the
coastal cities where the colons lived in large numbers. It was the same in Alge-
ria, where the coastal cities, linked by the railways, and the cities in the zones
where colonial agriculture was practiced, were often inhabited by a majority of
non-Muslims (see Table 12).
Between 1900 and 1930 the urban population of the Maghrib doubled,
largely because of the development of the Europeanized cities, but also because
these cities required workers and local laborers employed in construction and
other new activities. Th is poor population could not live in the European city
and took up residence in the medinas, where population densities quickly rose
 TA BL E 12

The Population of Cities in the Maghrib in 1930

1930 1901
Population Population
(1,000s) Muslims (%) (1,000s) Muslims (%)

Algiers 337 33.5 135 22.2

Oran 172 21.2 89 14.8

Constantine 105 51.2 49 48.6

Bône 69 44.6 39 48.6

Phillippeville 48 50.2 21 33.4

Tlemcen 46 73.6 35 69.5

Sidi bel-Abbes 46 33.5 26 24.7

Blida 39 70.1 29 66.1

Tunis 234 43.9

Sfax 40 71.9

Sousse 25 52.5

Bizerta 23 60.2

Kairouan 21 95.2

Marrakesh 195 84.5

Casablanca 163 52.5

Fez 112 80.7

Tangier 60 58.3

Meknès 57 64.5

Rabat 55 51.1

Salé 26 81.2

Note: Based on Ganiage 1994, 460. The indigenous non-Muslim population consisted largely of
Jews, who outnumbered the Europeans in Marrakesh (22,000 as against 8,500) and formed 7 per-
cent of the non-Muslim population of Algiers, 11 percent of Oran, and 15 percent of Tunis.
 Demography of Cities and Expansion of Urban Space | 179

to unacceptable levels (500 inhabitants per hectare), and living conditions

were made even worse because of the lack of modern facilities. The traditional
methods of managing urban space were no longer able to function, and some
of the notables began to leave the old city quarters, often abandoning their tra-
ditional residences. The 1930s were also marked by the beginnings of a crisis
in the medinas, which became more obvious in the 1960s with the creation of
bidonvilles, packed with those who could no longer live in the overpopulated
and chaotic old city centers.
In the new industrial cities, which had no medinas, this dual urbanism
was not so obvious. Half of the population of the industrial and port city of
Casablanca was Moroccan in 1930. In other cases, such as the phosphate min-
ing town of Khouribga, the local population was actually forbidden to take
up residence in the city. In addition, miners were recruited by force from the
rural areas and were sett led in worker cities. The new petroleum cities that
were constructed in the fi rst half of the twentieth century were also subject to
town planning; Abadan was the fi rst city of this kind, built from nothing by the
Anglo-Persian Oil Company next to the refi nery and the port. A virtual British
city was built by the company, with the red bricks for the concert hall actually
imported from Britain for the purpose. The city and the architecture of the vil-
las and public buildings were designed on the basis of the professional, social,
and ethnic status of the various employees: accommodation for the families
of those of high rank; accommodation for bachelors, British technicians; and
accommodation for non-British technicians and workers, most of whom were
Indians until the signing of the petroleum agreement in 1933. Social, cultural,
and sporting facilities, the most modern in Iran, were also segregated, for the
British and for the “others.” The development of Ahwaz in the interior was
more complex, since the city was not only the capital of the Iranian oil industry
but the administrative center of the province of Khuzistan. It had large num-
bers of British residents but also a significant Iranian population, particularly
of migrants from the Iranian plateau (Arak, Isfahan, Kashan). The homoge-
neity of the population, all concentrated around a single industrial activity,
explains why the city as a whole, and the center in particular, was constructed
in a colonial style, and always retained that character. Although the oil cities
were probably the fi rst in Iran to be electrified, the traditional cities of the area,
180 | BE R N A R D HOU RC A DE

such as Dizful and Shushtar, developed much more slowly and have kept much
of their elaborate traditional architecture down to the present time.
From the 1930s onward, the creation of capitals for the new states in the
region produced cities whose structures often resembled that of the industrial
cities just described. Riyadh, located on a site that had been occupied inter-
mittently by the Sa‘ud family since the 1820s, became the starting point of the
conquest of Najd in 1902 and later Ibn Sa‘ud’s de facto capital. The growth
of the city took place at the behest of the ruling family and thus in a highly
centralized fashion. It was still a small city of fewer than 100,000 inhabitants
when it was officially declared the capital in 1953, but grew at an impressive
rate with the construction of suburbs and clusters of new buildings as well as a
city center with administrative and public service facilities. The plan of Riyadh
was thus that of a modern, almost European city, since influential local bour-
geoisies continued to live in the cities of Mecca, Medina, and Jidda, which had
virtually no modern quarters before the 1950s. The “dual city” phenomenon
did exist in the Arabian Peninsula, but on a scale comparable to that of most of
the rest of the region, with the coexistence of long-established cities with new
cities that owed their construction to oil or to the emergence of the new states
after World War I. In the same way, Amman, Kuwait, Tel Aviv, and certainly
Ankara were built and designed on modern functional lines, whereas the vil-
lages or litt le towns that had originally occupied the sites either disappeared
completely or occupied an insignificant place in the spatial development of
the new capitals, whose urban character had only the most distant connection
with that of the “Islamic city.”
The demographic development of the cities of the Middle East since
the early nineteenth century is unique on the level both of demography and
urbanization. On a global level, the growth of the population was roughly
comparable with that of other regions outside Europe. The specificity of the
great antiquity of an urban network of “oriental cities” and the preponderant
role played by Istanbul and Cairo did not produce a particular kind of urban
growth, since the development of cities at this time was largely a function of
European influence or domination, followed by independence and the for-
mation of new states. The mass of the rural population generally remained on
the margins of the cities, and the massive waves of rural to urban migration
did not appear until rather later in the “urban revolution.” In contrast, the
 Demography of Cities and Expansion of Urban Space | 181

existence of the historic cities, the European presence in a colonial, imperial,

or economic context, together with the actions of local political leaders or a
modernizing bourgeoisie produced a unique form of urbanization, associat-
ing tradition and modernity, so typical of the Middle East, but differing from
one region to another.
In a remarkable work of synthesis on the history of the urban morphology
of the Middle East, Eckart Ehlers shows how the “Islamic city,” so character-
istic of the region, became transformed after 1900 in different ways according
to geographical region (Ehlers 1992). He distinguishes five different types for
the Islamic world as a whole:
• In North Africa, what was left of the medina became separate from the
new European city in the 1900s, and this situation continued almost unchanged
until the 1950s, apart from the extension of the modern city toward the Mus-
lim city and the appearance of the fi rst bidonvilles.
• In the Turco-Iranian world the old cities were modernized in the 1930s
(breaching of the city walls, the construction of wide avenues) and hardly
changed until recent times with the planned development of a new city around
the ancient center.
• In the Arabian Peninsula, apart from San‘a’ and the towns of the Hijaz,
there were no “Islamic cities,” with the result that the planned modern city
appeared “immediately” in the 1950s.
• In Central Asia the ancient cities were left in place but linked to the new
Russian cities, which engulfed them completely during the 1950s.
• In Muslim India, as in the Maghrib, the historic city and the British-built
city were separated, before the whole entity was restructured and reconstituted
as a more homogeneous whole.
Hence, between 1800 and 1950 the identity and development of Middle East-
ern cities was reconstituted and reformulated as a function of a series of com-
plex interrelations between long-established Islamic cities and modern cities.
The demographic weight and the spatial extent of the two types of living space
were at roughly the same level at the beginning of the twentieth century, which
tended to encourage political and cultural antagonism, but which also pro-
duced oversimplistic analyses stressing confl ict rather than the dynamic func-
tion of intermediate areas and social strata, the transitional entities that would
come to dominate urban society.
 7
Moving Out of Place
Minorities in Middle Eastern Urban Societies,
1800–1914
GU DRU N K R Ä M ER

• M I N O R I T I E S H A V E P L A Y E D a prominent role in the history of Middle

Eastern societies, urban as well as rural, and the minority question continues
to be highly relevant in contemporary politics. If minorities have mostly been
studied in the context of modern nation-building processes, they are of equal
interest with regard to the profound changes in urban society that were caused
by, or related to, the transformations of socioeconomic, political, and cultural
thought, practice, and organization that in spite of much criticism continue to
be described as “modernization.”
These transformations, which in some cases date back to the eighteenth
century and in others only began to make themselves felt toward the end of
the nineteenth, slowly accumulating in certain areas, and causing rapid if

I would like to thank Thomas Berchtold (formerly of the Freie Universität Berlin) who as
my research assistant and the critical reader of earlier draft s of this paper made it possible for
me to reach further beyond my own field, and to enjoy doing so. Since work on the manuscript
was completed several years ago, new studies have been published that I have not been able to
systematically consult and integrate in my paper. Th is applies in particular to Revue des mondes
musulmans et de la Méditerranée 2006, 107–8, 109–110, Identités confessionelles et espace urbain
en terres d’islam.
182
 Moving Out of Place | 183

not traumatic ruptures in others, affected the lives of the entire population,
whether majority or minority, Muslim or non-Muslim. Yet it was the role of
the non-Muslims, whose part in the newly evolving spheres of commerce and
culture was becoming quite conspicuous and whose share in the population
of the major Middle Eastern cities was rising sharply at the same time, that
caught the eye of observers, local as well as foreign. The assumption that non-
Muslims acted as “agents of change” and “channels of modernization”,1 roles
ascribed to ethnic minorities in all kinds of societies, and in addition, that they
derived extra benefits from integration into a world market dominated by the
Europeans not only because they were minorities but also because they were
non-Muslim, merits special attention.
Th ree sets of questions will be central to what follows: fi rst, the question
of boundaries, social as well as physical, so deeply relevant to the structuring
of urban space and social interaction in Middle Eastern as in any other society.
To what extent were these boundaries modified or possibly entirely redrawn in
the course of modernization, and who were the “agents of change” here? More
specifically: was the very concept of minorities an “invented” one, similar to
other “imagined communities,” such as tribes and nations, that were emerging
at the same time to be quickly transformed into highly effective social actors?
Second, to what extent did the effects of modernization on local urban societ-
ies constitute a break with established patterns of interaction between Mus-
lims and non-Muslims? Th ird, how general was the phenomenon, and to what
extent was it characteristic of Middle Eastern urban society in the nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries as a whole?
The subject is in many ways a difficult one. Not only are we looking at diverse
physical settings ranging from old inland cities of commerce, learning, pilgrim-
age, or production to port cities, some of them old but newly expanding, others
entirely new, situated in different political contexts and developing according
to specific parameters, but we are also looking at a wide range of individuals,
groups, and communities distinguished by origin, creed, language, and status
who lived as minorities among a majority population that, outside Iran, was in
most cases either Arab or Turkish Sunni Muslim: Albanians, Berbers, Kurds,

1. Although Davison 1982 refers to the non-Muslim minorities as “agents of change,” he

does not share the entire set of assumptions outlined above.
184 | G U DRU N K R Ä M E R

and Nubians; Christians, Jews, and Zoroastrians; Druzes, Alawis, and Alevis
who might or might not be included in the Muslim community depending on
convenience and political circumstance; Ahmadis, Babis, and Baha’is who were
widely regarded as heretics by the local majority, no matter whether Sunni or
Shi‘i. Following established patterns of perception and representation concern-
ing the very concept of “minorities” in the period under review, this paper will
focus on non-Muslim communities, more particularly Christians and Jews.
Two biases marking the present study ought to be mentioned at the outset:
one is the emphasis on large cities at the expense of many of the smaller ones
that has characterized Middle Eastern urban historiography in general until
recently, although this seems to be rapidly changing (Blake 1980). 2 The other
is the striking imbalance in the treatment of the various non-Muslim com-
munities. 3 Thus the documentation on Jews and Jewish life in Middle Eastern
cities, ranging from broad overviews to individual case studies, and covering
anything from community organization to costume, culture, and cuisine,4 is
considerably richer than on any other ethnic or religious minority, including
the much more numerous Christians. Research on Middle Eastern Christian-
ity still tends to privilege politics, church matters, and missionary activities
over broader concerns inspired by, say, historical anthropology. 5 Overall syn-
theses of Middle Eastern urban development in the eighteenth and nineteenth

2. Several interesting studies of smaller towns are presented in Villes au Levant (Revue du
monde musulman et de la Méditerranée 55–56 [1990]); Panzac 1991; Dumont and Georgeon
1992; Hanssen, Philipp, and Weber 2002. See also the annotated bibliography by Bonine et
al. 1994. For relevant case studies, see Grangaud 2002 and Lafi 2002; Abu’ l-Sha‘r 1995; Reilly
2002; Hanssen 2005.
3. For overviews, see Courbage and Fargues 1997, Masters 2001, Braude and Lewis 1992,
and Hourani 1947.
4. For overviews, see Deshen and Zenner 1982, 1996; H. Goldberg 1996; A. Cohen 1973.
Bernard Lewis (1984) pays less attention to the modern age. Subregional studies include Still-
man 1991, Abitbol 1980, Levy 1994, Weiker 1992, Rodrigue 1992, Shaw 1991, and Sarshar
2002. For case studies focusing on Jewish urban society, see, e.g., Karmi 1994, Deshen 1989,
1994, and Gott reich 2007.
5. Heyberger 1994, 2003; Atiya 1968. For case studies, most of which do not focus on
urban society, see Hajjar 1962; Sanjian 1965; Haddad 1970; al-Bishri 1980; Joseph 1961, 1983;
Philipp 1985. For Iran, see Sanasarian 2000; Stümpel-Hatami 1996; Schwartz 1985; Hart-
mann 1980; Gabriel 1971.
 Moving Out of Place | 185

centuries are rare.6 The focus will therefore be on those cities and communities
that are better covered than others, and apart from the Ottoman capital, Istan-
bul, they mostly happen to be in the Mediterranean and the Ottoman Arab
East. Hence major cities like Nablus, Jidda, Tabriz, or Shiraz will figure much
less prominently in the narrative, not necessarily for lack of material and criti-
cal study (of which there are several excellent ones), but because non-Muslims
played only a minor role in their urban economy and society. High diversity
combined with considerable gaps in knowledge make it all the more hazard-
ous to generalize, and the following will therefore often resemble a patchwork
rather than a tightly woven analysis of the role of non-Muslim minorities in
modern Middle Eastern urban societies.

Starting Points

The Legal Tradition and Social Practice

The old and somewhat stale debate over whether non-Muslims were generally
oppressed under Muslim rule, “second-class citizens” suffering from unrelent-
ing Muslim fanaticism and oriental despotism, or whether tolerance was the
distinguishing mark of Islam and non-Muslims its most favored beneficiaries,
need not detain us long. In fact, neither the “black myth” nor the “white” one,
referring as they do to different times and places, to “dark ages” and to “golden”
ones, do justice to the complexities of the historical experience, which rather
unsurprisingly was characterized by various shades of gray.7 More to the point
are a number of other issues: the relevance of religion to social cohesion, strati-
fication, and interaction in Middle Eastern urban society, the impact of legal
norms on social practice, and the link between socioreligious distinctiveness
and sociopolitical tension.

6. Apart from Raymond 1985, Eldem, Goff man, and Masters 1999, and Wirth 2000, sev-
eral articles discussing the notion of the “Islamic,” “Arab,” or “oriental” city are particularly
helpful: Raymond 1994b, Panerai 1989, and Abu-Lughod 1987.
7. For the “black myth,” see notably Bat Ye’or 1985 or Gilbert 1976; for the “white myth,”
referring in particular to the “golden ages” of peaceful coexistence in Umayyad Spain, Fatimid
Cairo, or the heyday of Ottoman power in the sixteenth century, see, e.g., Qasim 1987; for
more judicious judgement, see M. Cohen 1994; Masters 2001; and several works on Ottoman
Jewry, especially Levy, Shaw, and Weiker (above, note 4).
186 | G U DRU N K R Ä M E R

In contradistinction to earlier, more rigid, notions of ethnicity, anthro-

pologists, sociologists, and historians have come to the realization that eth-
nic identities are not meta-historical “givens” but the outcome of specific
contexts, often consciously created or “constructed.” Ethnic boundaries are
consequently seen as contingent and changeable, if not fluid.8 That still leaves
the question of who has the power of defi nition and what the parameters of
changeability are. All the evidence indicates that until the beginning of the
twentieth century (and beyond), religious affi liation served as one of the most
important markers of group identity in Middle Eastern as well as in many other
societies. It was not the only marker, and it was not necessarily always decisive,
but it did matter in the context of urban life and space.
As in any other culture and society, legal norms and social practices
reflected power relations, and in this equation local non-Muslims most often
formed the weaker party. Although many outward signs of distinctiveness
were adopted by other groups and strata of society, including fi rst and fore-
most the elite, some were imposed on, or denied to, its weakest elements only,
non-Muslims as well as subject Muslim groups,9 not to mention women of all
communities (D. Khoury 1997b). Finally, distinctiveness is not identical to
tension. Indeed, it has been argued that the very fact that religious distinctions
were so clearly marked, and so much taken for granted, made it possible for
people to mingle freely in the public sphere (Marcus 1989, 39–48), provided
they kept their place.
The status and treatment of non-Muslims in Muslim societies has varied
greatly over time and space. Islamic legal concepts and popular att itudes were
partly based on Qur’anic references that are often ambiguous and inconsis-
tent, reflecting changing relations between the early and still highly vulner-
able community of Muslims and their non-Muslim environment, allowing
later commentators to select those passages that suited their own argument
(Friedmann 2003; McAuliffe 1991; Humphreys 1991, 255–73; A. Khoury

8. Barth 1969; Anderson 1991. For a lucid discussion of the issue and its relevance to
Middle Eastern urban history, see Reilly 1996, or, from an anthropological approach, Valensi
1986.
9. The latter point has been made by a number of authors, including Khuri 1990, 86–93,
and M. Cohen 1994, ch. 6. In this context, see also Stillman 2003.
 Moving Out of Place | 187

1994). During the early Muslim conquests (futuh), actual practice responded
to local conditions and accordingly varied considerably from one place to
another. One primary concern seems to have been to draw a clear and vis-
ible boundary between Muslims and non-Muslims, which could be done
through dress codes, headgear, or hair styles, marking the person (Muslim as
well as non-Muslim) rather than space. Islamic jurisprudence ( fiqh), which
was elaborated well after the Muslims had established themselves as masters
on former Christian, Zoroastrian, and pagan territory, attempted to impose
stricter limits on current practices.10 Following essentially theological criteria,
Muslim jurists distinguished between two categories of infidels (kuffar, sing.
kafir): fi rst, the pagans or polytheists (mushrikun), who worshiped more than
one godhead and had not received a book of revelation, with whom there was
to be no social intercourse, ranging from shared food to intermarriage, and
who were to be fought until they either converted or were killed or enslaved;
second, the “people of the book” (ahl al-kitab), more precisely the Christians,
the Jews, the Sabaeans, and the Zoroastrians, whose faith was founded on a
book of revelation and with whom social intercourse was licit. In practice, and
largely irrespective of these distinctions, the vast majority of non-Muslims
living in the lands of Islam (dar al-islam) were granted protected status that
in certain respects assimilated them to the status of “people of the book” so
that not just the Zoroastrians, whose religious status continued to be debated,
but also (in time) Buddhists and Hindus no longer stood in danger of being
expelled, killed, enslaved, or converted to Islam, though (licit) social inter-
course with Muslims continued to be severely restricted.
In accordance with the Qur’anic injunction, “(There shall be) no compul-
sion in religion” (Sura 2:256), the status of these non-Muslims was secured
by a contract of protection (dhimma), which guaranteed their life, body, prop-
erty, and, with certain restrictions, also guaranteed their cult. The “Pact of
‘Umar” (whose att ribution to the second caliph ‘Umar b. al-Khattab is con-
tested) laid down a number of restrictions on the conduct and movement of

10. For the Sunni legal tradition, see Fatt al 1958 and Zaydan 1988. The most liberal of
the Sunni schools was the Hanafi one, which dominated in the Ottoman Empire and which
granted non-Muslims equal rights with regard to property and parts of criminal law (notably
diya, blood money), but not in the fields of testimony or inheritance.
188 | G U DRU N K R Ä M E R

non-Muslims, especially regarding dress and hair styles, the use of arms and
horses, worship, the height of houses as well as the construction, extension,
and repair of churches, synagogues, and temples (the latter especially relevant
to urban development), which served not only to identify the dhimmis physi-
cally like any other group of society, but to mark them as social inferiors (M.
Cohen 1999, ch. 4; Noth 1987). Protection was granted against the payment
of tribute, dues, and taxes of various kinds. Only gradually did two main cat-
egories evolve without, however, ever being consistently defi ned: a land tax
(kharaj), which soon came to be imposed on all owners of lands that at a cer-
tain moment had been registered under that category, regardless of their reli-
gious affi liation, and a poll or capitation tax (jizya, based on Qur’an 9:29) to be
paid in cash, kind or services that was to be levied on all able-bodied free adult
dhimmi males of sufficient means.11
The various schools of Islamic law (madhhab, pl. madhahib) varied consid-
erably in their defi nition of dhimmi rights and obligations. (Imami) Shi‘i jurists
differed from their Sunni counterparts in that they generally declared non-
Muslims (if not all non-Shi‘is) to be ritually unclean (najis), rendering social
contact more difficult than in Sunni lands, a position that became particularly
relevant in Iran after the Safavid conquest in 1501–02. It is important to remem-
ber that this concern with purity and impurity was shared by other major non-
Muslim groups in Iranian society, fi rst and foremost the Jews and Zoroastrians,
who were just as intent on defending their own communal boundaries as were
the Shi‘i jurists.12 Theory, therefore, was by no means uniform.

11. One the whole, monks and clerics were not taxed. However, the poor were not always
exempted, so that the tax burden could cause great hardship to them or their community,
respectively. For the technicalities of taxation in the Ottoman Empire, especially the jizya
(Turkish cizye) until its abolition in 1855–56, see Shaw 1975; Weiker 1992, 53–57; and Karmi
1984, 87–97. Kuroki 1998 offers fascinating insights into taxation practices, as does Klein-
Franke 1997.
12. (Sunni) Muslim conceptions of purity have received recent scholarly attention; see
Gauvain 2005 and Maghen 1999. For Zorostrian notions, see Choksy 1989 and Boyce 1991. In
modern Iran, reference was generally made to the work of Baha’ al-Din al-‘Amili (1547–1621),
a leading Shi‘i scholar under Shah ‘Abbas I (r. 1587–1629). The relevant writings of Muham-
mad Taqi al-Majlisi (1594–1659, also known as Majlisi-yi Awwal) and his son Muhammad
Baqir (1627/8–1698/9, al-‘Allama al-Majlisi), must have made a significant impact: for the
 Moving Out of Place | 189

What is more, practice frequently did not conform to normative prescrip-

tions and popular attentions—it could be more lenient at times, but it could
also be harsher. Given the localized nature of power and politics, government
rulings were not necessarily applied in the provinces, and one ruler did not
necessarily follow his predecessor’s policies. The actual situation of the dhim-
mis was more closely conditioned by a number of economic and political fac-
tors: the utility of non-Muslims to a given society or more particularly to its
rulers, whether of the community as a whole or of some of its members (for
example, artisans, merchants, bankers, or physicians); the economic and
political circumstances prevailing within the individual Muslim territory or
locality, and its relationship with the major non-Muslim powers of the day. To
some extent, these correlations remained valid until the modern age. At the
same time, basic legal notions retained their normative force, affecting popular
att itudes until well into the twentieth century, and if at any given time non-
Muslims overstepped the limits, this could be condemned as a breach of the
established code by Muslim scholars and their followers. Condemnation was
usually coached in moral terms, accusing non-Muslims of “ostentation,” “arro-
gance,” and “overbearing manners.” These charges were to be heard over the
centuries, and figure prominently in accounts of eighteenth- and nineteenth-
century intercommunal confl ict.
By the Middle Ages, non-Muslims had become minorities in virtually
all areas of the Middle East.13 Economic and ecological changes, migration,
political pressure, or conversion to Islam, which tended to be more widespread
among certain Christian denominations and the Zoroastrians than among
the Jews, all contributed to a considerable reduction in their numbers. As

latter, see Moreen 1992. However, neither Moreen 1981, Gregorian 1974, nor McCabe 1999
refer to a specific legal code as relevant to their period of investigation. For eighteenth- and
nineteenth-century Shi‘i scholarship, see Tsadik 2003. The precise impact of these norms on
urban life, notably the organization of space, remains to be examined. One known effect was
the interdiction against non-Muslims living close to mosques or even gett ing close to them.
13. See Courbage and Fargues 1997, chs. 4–6, who register considerable demographic
growth among Christians and Jews under Ottoman rule. For conversion to Islam, see espe-
cially Valensi 1997; also Humphreys 1991, 273–83; Gervers and Bikhazi 1990. García-Arenal
2002 also covers the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
190 | G U DRU N K R Ä M E R

communities formed and reformed, certain features remained essentially the

same: in return for submission to Muslim rule, non-Muslims enjoyed consid-
erable autonomy in the spheres of personal status and family law (marriage,
divorce, adoption, legacies, and wills), worship and education, constituting
largely self-contained units with their own religious, legal, social, educational,
and charitable institutions. Communal autonomy amounting to relative free-
dom from government intervention appeared most clearly in the Ottoman
millet system (derived from the Turkish term for ethnic-religious groups or
communities, millet, Arabic milla) as it had evolved by the nineteenth century.14
By 1914, the Ottoman authorities had recognized more than ten different mil-
lets (all of them non-Muslim: neither the Shi‘is and Druzes nor the ‘Alawis
and Alevis were legally recognized as distinct communities, though they actu-
ally functioned as such) that were headed by their religious and lay leadership.
The most numerous and heterogeneous were the Rum (often referred to as
“Greek”) Orthodox, followed by the Armenian millet (which at times repre-
sented not just the members of the Armenian Apostolic Church but also other
Middle Eastern Christian communities, mostly Monophysites) and the Rab-
banite (as opposed to the Karaite) Jewish millet, which was considerably more
homogeneous in religious terms (though not necessarily in broader cultural
terms) than its Christian counterparts.
Several points need to be emphasized when speaking about communal
autonomy. First, communal ties were not necessarily exclusive and communal
boundaries were not watertight: like their Muslim contemporaries, non-Mus-
lims could be members of various cross-cutt ing units and associations, notably
urban neighborhoods, corporations, or guilds, also offering services, orienta-
tion, and a certain measure of social cohesion.15 In spite of strict interdictions
on the part of their religious authorities, non-Muslims seem to have resorted

14. Masters 2001, chs. 1 and 2, especially 61–67. For origins and defi nitions, see also Braude
in Braude and Cohen 1982, 1:69–88, and Davison 1982, 320. For a list of the millets, see Sousa
1933, 89n2; for the competences of the communal leadership of the Rum Orthodox, Armenian,
and Rabbanite millets as defi ned by imperial decree in the 1830s and modified by new Organic
Laws in 1862, 1863, and 1865, respectively, see Davison 1963, ch. 4. In Safavid and Qajar, Iran,
Christian, Jewish, and Zoroastrian communities equally enjoyed a large measure of communal
autonomy, although this was not institutionalized; Hartmann 1980, 35–37; Afary 2002.
15. See chapter 4 in this volume by Abdul-Karim Rafeq.
 Moving Out of Place | 191

to Muslim courts and mediators rather more freely even on matters of mar-
riage, divorce, and inheritance than is generally assumed.16 Therefore the indi-
vidual was not completely submerged in the group, and communal leadership
was not the only channel of communication with the authorities. Although
taxes were in most cases levied on the community as a whole, to be collected
either by its head, a government agent or a tax-farmer, requests for tax exemp-
tion were made and granted on an individual basis, bringing the individual
taxpayer into direct contact with the authorities. Second, the millet system in
its institutionalized form served purposes of taxation and administration and
was more relevant to dealings at government level than to the cohesion and
actual functioning of local congregations. The millet of the Rum Orthodox, for
instance, included millions of people of different origins and languages spread
over extensive territories, ranging from ethnic Greeks, Albanians, Bulgars,
Rumanians, Russians, and Serbs to Arabs, for whom the Ecumenical Patriarch
of Constantinople served formally as their spiritual head and representative,
but who looked primarily to their local leadership to maintain their local insti-
tutions on a day-by-day basis. Hence the continued relevance of the local con-
text to an understanding of Middle Eastern urban society, particularly with
regard to Jewish communities and congregations, among whom hierarchies
were less pronounced than among the Christian churches.

Occupation: The “Ethno-Religious Division of Labor”

The boundaries defi ned by Muslim jurists on the basis of religious affi liation
could easily translate into prescriptions for segregation, pertaining not only
to dress and norms of social interaction, but also to occupation and space.
Although in most parts of the Middle East there was no forced segregation,
professional specialization and the residential concentration of ethnic groups
and communities were very common. The former has been described as an

16. For the complexities of the situation, see Hacker 1994; for case studies from Otto-
man Arab cities, see Marcus 1989; Al-Qatt an 1992, 1999; Masters 2001, 31–37; and A. Cohen
1984, ch. 6; for courts, taxation, and tax exemption, see also Karmi 1984, 14f, 30, 89f. Much the
same phenomena could be observed with regard to the Jewish mellah communities in Sharifian
Morocco, whose social boundaries as Deshen (1996) has specifically emphasized, were perme-
able. See also Gott reich 2007.
192 | G U DRU N K R Ä M E R

“ethnic division of labor,” in which non-Muslims specialized in certain eco-

nomic roles and functions, some of which were regarded as undesirable, lowly,
or ritually unclean by Muslims.17 The paradigm has since been thoroughly
revised, for there was, as a rule, no rigid division of roles and functions, and
though specialization existed, its patterns varied greatly from one location and
one period to the other. The one major area of exclusion concerned the mili-
tary: according to the so-called Pact of ‘Umar, dhimmis were not allowed to
carry arms (although practice frequently diverted from that rule, particularly
in rural areas that were difficult to control), and thus were generally not able
to join the military elite. Outside the military sphere, however, it was by no
means rare to fi nd Muslims and non-Muslims working together in trades and
crafts, including guilds (ta’ifa, sinf, hirfa) when and where they existed.18 In
some instances, Christian or Jewish guilds were affi liated to the local organi-
zation representing all members of a particular craft or trade, but in others they
seem to have functioned independently. Crafts and the trade with gold, sil-
ver, precious stones, or textiles, such as gold and silver smithing, tailoring, and
silk weaving, money changing, money lending, usury, or pawnbroking, which
Muslim scholars disapproved of for religious reasons, were often in the hands
of Christians and Jews, as was the production and sale of alcohol. In Egypt,

17. Interestingly, the relevant literature mostly dates from the 1950s and 1960s: Suss-
nitzki 1966, Gibb and Bowen 1969, Brunschvig 1962, and Coon 1958, 162. But see also Khuri
1990, 91–93.
18. In several places, lists of craft s and professions have been preserved, whose problem-
atic nature is discussed in Philipp 1984a and 1984b, who looks specifically at two examples
from Isfahan and Damascus: Mirza Husayn Khan Tahvildar, Jughrafiya-yi Iran, ed. Manuchehr
Setudeh (Tehran 1342/1963) and al-Qasimi’s Qamus al-sina‘at al-Shamiyya (1960). For the
Ottoman Empire, see Quataert 1993a, 1996; or İnalcik and Quataert 1994, 586–604, 695–709,
890–98. Berchtold’s (2001) comprehensive study has not yet been published. For case studies
including data on non-Muslims, see Raymond 1973–74; Ghazaleh 1999; Rafeq 1991; Masters
1988, 53, 82–88; Reilly 1996, 2002; A. Cohen 2001; Goff man 1990, 85–90; Gerber 1976; Ser-
jeant and Lewcock 1983, 167–69, 394f; K. Brown 1976, 140–54. For Iran, where conditions
varied greatly over time and from one location to the other, see Floor 1975, 2003; Keyvani
(1982, 176–84, 195–217, 296–311) states that although non-Muslims played a considerable
role in urban craft s and trade in the seventeenth century, they did not formally participate in
guilds. For a detailed description of Iranian craft s and craft smen, including their techniques,
locations, and origins, see Wulff 1966.
 Moving Out of Place | 193

Copts dominated public administration and the collection of taxes (to a large
extent as a function of their literacy and experience); also in Egypt, garbage
collection (unclean work associated with the feeding of pigs) was handled by
lower class Copts, in San‘a’ by lower class Jews.
Like minorities in many other parts of the world, the Christians and Jews
were well represented in international trade and commerce. In the absence of
institutionalized safeguards, long-distance trade was based essentially on per-
sonal trust, which was more easily established and maintained on the basis
of kinship and family ties. Thus like the Hadhrami merchants and traders in
Southeast Asia, Indians in Africa, or Jews in Europe, Middle Eastern Arme-
nians, Greeks, and Jews engaged in trading networks, often in cooperation
with Muslim partners or under royal patronage. The link between prosper-
ity and patronage merits attention: the Armenian merchants of New Julfa, a
suburb of Isfahan, flourished as long as the Safavid Shahs actively used and
protected them in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries and lost their
wealth and status when the latter were no longer willing or able to do so. The
royal merchants of Mogador (al-Sawira/Essaouira), who were established,
fi nanced, and closely supervised by the Moroccan Sultans, saw their fortunes
decline when the central government (makhzan) lost the will and capacity to
support them toward the end of the nineteenth century, and trading patterns
shifted to their detriment.19
In the Ottoman Empire and the Maghreb, individual Christians and Jews,
often in fierce competition with one another, held some of the most lucrative
tax farms or served as money lenders (sarraf), brokers, or bankers (simsar,
dallal) to the local governors. That placed them among the richest segments
of society, but it also rendered them vulnerable: wealthy but powerless, they
played a role similar to the European court Jews. Favors could be withdrawn,
fortunes confiscated, and lives taken. The dhimmis knew it, perhaps better than
other subjects, and they took care to act accordingly: they kept their place,
maintained low profi le, avoided ostentation, and cultivated good relations

19. On the Julfa merchants, see McCabe 1999, 122–98, 257f; for Mogador, see Schroe-
ter 1988, chs. 2 and 5, 34–50; for the Algerian Bacri and Busnach families, see Kortepeter
1994; for eighteenth-century Aleppo and Damascus, see Masters 1992; Philipp 1984a; and
Bouchain 1996.
194 | G U DRU N K R Ä M E R

with the political elite, which they were unable to join, short of conversion. To
the rulers, dhimmis could prove most useful as long as they remained what they
were supposed to be: “productive, loyal, and silent.”20

Urban Space: Quarters, Neighborhoods, and Ghettoes

If the concept of an ethnic-religious division of labor has recently come under

attack, the same is true for the notion of spatial segregation. Th ree issues have
been central to the debate: the social and functional unity of the city, the
homogeneity of urban quarters and neighborhoods, and the distinctiveness
of non-Muslim neighborhoods. In the light of new research and evidence, the
traditional notion of the Middle Eastern city as rigidly divided into quarters
sealed by solid gates and inhabited, over long periods of time, by homogeneous
groups of people bound together by common origin, religion, or occupation
(Gibb and Bowen 1969, 1:276f) has had to be considerably modified, to be
replaced by concepts emphasizing, once again, the permeability of boundaries
and their changeability over time.
There is no doubt that, as in the rest of the preindustrial world, Middle
Eastern cities were characterized by a certain degree of spatial and residen-
tial segregation based on ethnicity, religion, or occupation rather than the
“horizontal” element of class—although craft and occupation do, of course,
as a rule correlate with class and status, and ethnicity and religion could be
related to class and status, too.21 However, empirical study reveals a great vari-
ety of spatial patterns even within individual countries or regions and constant
demographic flux and reflux over time. In some cities, the various quarters
(mahalla, hayy, hara, huma) do not seem to have been clearly marked at all.22

20. Weiker 1992, 3. Boyce 1991, 162, speaks of “protective obscurity.”

21. For a superb case study of nineteenth-century Cairo, see Alleaume and Fargues 1998.
For Damascus in 1700, Establet and Pascual 1994 show greater social heterogeneity within
individual living areas. For eighteenth-century Hama, see Reilly 2002, app. 1 and 2. For
Aleppo in 1900, see Gaube and Wirth 1984, 427–34.
22. Towns in Yemen and Algeria provide interesting examples: According to Serjeant
and Lewcock 1983, 144–47, quarters in nineteenth-century San‘a’ were not clearly defi ned and
not known to the “man in the street.” Kopp and Wirth 1990, who provide interesting data on
urban development under Ottoman rule (1872–1917), do not deal with the issue systemati-
cally. In twentieth-century Sa‘da, the second largest town of northern Yemen, quarters seem
 Moving Out of Place | 195

In many others, quarters were known and neighborhoods relatively homoge-

neous ethnically, but neither was sealed with gates, let alone walls. In others,
all quarters or neighborhoods were enclosed by gates, and when this was the
case over extended periods of time, it was usually indicative of general insecu-
rity or intercommunal tension. All over the Middle East, Jewish quarters or
neighborhoods were most likely to be set apart from surrounding living areas
or enclosed by gates or even walls, not necessarily for security reasons but for
practical ones, fi rst and foremost to reduce the distance to the closest syna-
gogue, bath, or kosher butcher to a minimum (Schroeter 1994). 23
The traditional view that ethnic quarters form a characteristic, and essen-
tially static, feature of Islamic urban organization was critically examined by
Greenshields (1980). He suggested taking what he called “ethnic clusters”
rather than ethnic quarters, which were all too often vaguely defi ned, as the
basic reference, defi ning them as “spatial clusters of members of particular eth-
nic groups within a city greater than those expected from a random distribu-
tion of all people within the city” (121), without making any prior assumptions
concerning social ties within the various clusters or their distinctiveness, seg-
regation, or isolation, whether social or physical. Greenshields argued that eth-
nic clusters must originate and grow through population redistribution, either

to have been well defi ned albeit (no longer) sealed with gates; Niewöhner-Eberhard 1985. In
eighteenth-century Constantine, “quarters” were not a relevant unit; Grangaud 2002, 90–104;
the same was true of nineteenth-century Sétif; Bahloul 1996.
23. In nineteenth-century Aleppo, only the Jewish quarter seems to have been sealed off
by a gate; Gaube and Wirth 1984; in late eighteenth-century Damascus, all Jews lived in the
mahallat al-yahud, yet it was not exclusively Jewish; Al-Qatt an 1992. For the Maghreb, see
Deshen 1989; Gott reich 2007; Schroeter 1988; K. Brown 1976, 34–39; Le Tourneau 1949,
217f; and Udovitch and Valensi 1984. For Yemen, see Serjeant and Lewcock 1983, 391–431,
and Lingenau 1994. In Iran, the situation varied from place to place and even where clustering
was very dense, it was as a rule voluntary, not enforced; see Sarshar 2002, 104f. In nineteenth-
century Kerman, Jews and Zoroastrians as the major non-Muslim minorities in town lived in
segregated quarters inside and outside of the city walls, respectively, with heavily protected
houses testifying to their deep sense of insecurity; English 1966. In nineteenth-century Shi-
raz, Jews were allegedly forbidden to live outside their quarter (mahalle), to share food and
drink with Muslims and to move outside their quarter in the rainy seasons for fear of pollution;
Loeb 1996. Loeb described Iranian Jews as “outcastes”; but see also Afary 2002.
196 | G U DRU N K R Ä M E R

collective or individual, which may follow different motives and patterns.

Th is could involve the immigration of homogeneous groups (military units,
members of the ruling class, transferred populations, or refugees); collective
regroupings within cities (for example, the establishment of ethnic quarters in
the towns of North Africa, Yemen, and Iran); or individual movements based
on kinship ties, the presence of holy sites, changed socioeconomic status, or
mutual distrust. Clustering could be government-planned, forced (caused by
natural disasters, epidemics, famine, war, political instability, or persecution),
or voluntary (caused by demographic pressure or the individual motives men-
tioned above).
For obvious reasons, collective transfer and relocation are generally bet-
ter documented than individual migration. They include most notably forced
transfer and resett lement as it was practiced for centuries in the Persian as
well as the Ottoman Empires (sürgün), although it should be emphasized that
deportations took place for economic as well as political or security-related
reasons and were not restricted to non-Muslims (Hacker 1992; McCabe 1999,
ch. 2; Perry 1975). It was still reflected in the mass deportation of Armenians in
1914–15 (a substantial number of Armenian refugees found refuge in Aleppo
and Beirut after 1920) or what has been euphemistically called the popula-
tion exchange between Christian Greeks and Muslim Turks after World War
I. Government-planned regrouping of ethnic groups that had previously lived
intermingled with the rest of the population or voluntarily chosen to live
together is exemplified in the creation of the closed Jewish quarter (mellah)
of Fez in the early fourteenth century, followed by the foundation of similar
quarters in other Moroccan towns such as Meknès and Marrakesh, the Yemeni
capital San‘a’ or the Iranian city of Kerman, which had strongly protected Jew-
ish and Zoroastrian quarters in the nineteenth century. Nothing similar seems
to have existed in the Ottoman Arab East. The chief reasons for the creation of
closed quarters, which were often established near the citadel or royal palace,
appear not only to have been to reduce intercommunal tension (whose rise, of
course, needs to be explained in each case) and to better protect the dhimmis,
but also to prevent their spreading over town (for socioeconomic as well as
religious reasons, including notions of ritual purity and pollution).
Regroupings within the city could also be based on security considerations,
but organized by members of the community or communities concerned
 Moving Out of Place | 197

rather than the authorities. Ottoman Damascus provides a good example

(Sack 1989, 21, 61–67; Sauvaget 1934, 459–53; Sauvaget 1941, 1:150f). In
medieval times, shops and workshops owned by Muslims were situated inside
the Christian and Jewish neighborhoods and many mosques were built inside
the (predominantly) Christian quarters. In the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, intense intercommunal tensions brought about a greater search for
security and ethnic homogeneity. Although intermingling continued in some
areas and urban property was still co-owned by Muslims and non-Muslims, in
others self-protection was carried so far as to cut off all connections between
individual streets and quarters. Yet, insecurity and the search for protection
just exemplified and stressed so strongly by Sauvaget in his studies of Aleppo
and Damascus were not the only factors involved in ethnic regrouping and
clustering. Like the Jewish quarter of San‘a’, the Jewish mellahs in Sharifian
Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia were not always close to the citadel or royal
palace and hence to the government. Frequently, economic rather than politi-
cal or security-related considerations, notably the availability of vacant land,
dictated the selection of a new location.
The key notions concerning urban space, then, are “neighborhoods,” which
as a rule formed around particular streets or even parts of streets, rather than
well-defi ned and physically closed off “quarters,” and the voluntary clustering
rather than the forced segregation, let alone the ghettoization, of specific eth-
nic or religious groups. Like others, non-Muslims tended to concentrate in spe-
cific areas or neighborhoods.24 Th is was particularly true of the Jews, among
whom this tendency appears to have been more marked than among either

24. Abu-Lughod (1987, 166) speaks about a process of “long-term voluntary sift ing and
sorting”; Schatkowski Schilcher (1985, 21–26) emphasizes that in Damascus, ethnic groups
were spatially only rarely isolated from the dominant group. See also Degeorge 1994, 52f, and
Al-Qatt an 1992. Similar results emerge from Hama (Reilly 1996, 221, and 2002). For Aleppo
we have a number of highly sophisticated analyses, mainly distinguished by the emphasis they
put on persistent ethnic segregation (Raymond 1992, 153–56) or the changing patterns of
mixing and segregation (David 1990, 1997); see also Gaube and Wirth 1984, 64–66, 113–19,
191–200, 427–34. For in-depth studies of Jerusalem, documenting the changing patterns of
intermingling and segregation from the Middle Ages to the present, see Arnon 1992 and Ben-
Arieh 1984. For Beirut, see Khalaf and Khoury 1993, ch. 2; for Istanbul, see Mantran 1962,
48–66; Çelik 1993, chs. 1 and 2; and Karmi 1984, 131ff .
198 | G U DRU N K R Ä M E R

Christians or Muslims. The crucial question always remains that of exactly

how migration and clustering were initiated, and to what extent the decision
was related to religion, and more specifically to notions of ritual purity and
pollution. In this regard, two spheres were especially sensitive: mosques and
baths. It seems that in Iran, non-Muslims, being regarded as ritually unclean
(najis), were not allowed to live close to mosques or even to be in the vicinity
of mosques. The same applied to certain sites and cities in Morocco, although
non-Muslims were not generally considered impure in Sunni legal thought
(Maghen 1999, 364).25 Significantly, many shrines or saints’ tombs were often
visited by Muslims, Jews, and Christians alike, who all believed in the special
power (baraka) attached to them. As for baths, which at least in Sunni lands,
non-Muslims were entitled to use alongside Muslims, physical contact was
either avoided or carefully structured, for instance, by obliging non-Muslim
men to wear colored string, amulets, or even bells so as to signal their pres-
ence; non-Muslim women used separate days or times of day for their visits (M.
Cohen 1994, 131ff; A. Cohen 1984, 76–86; Marcus 1989, 42; Masters 2001, 6).
Apart from mosques and “sacred space” more generally, physical boundaries
were not always clearly defi ned, and there was ethnic intermingling in most
Middle Eastern cities. Most of all, physical boundaries were not static. Relo-
cation and regrouping was often the result of demographic growth (presup-
posing sociopolitical conditions that allowed for expansion), and social and
economic motives rather than insecurity and politics narrowly defi ned.
It remained the case that while non-Muslims generally shared the same
material culture, social values, and important religious practices with their
Muslim neighbors, they generally saw themselves as parts of different “imag-
ined communities,” and were seen as such by others.26 It would be especially
interesting to explore exactly what these “imagined communities” consisted

25. See above, note 12.

26. On the spaces, opportunities, and limits of urban conviviality, see Georgeon and
Dumont 1997 and Masters 2001, ch. 1. Izmir/Smyrna provides an interesting case study; see
Georgelin 2005. Although the city lies beyond the boundaries of the Middle East as commonly
understood, studies of Ottoman Salonica offer fascinating insights into urban conviviality; see
notably Anastassiadou 1997 and Mazower 2004.
 Moving Out of Place | 199

of, and how far they reached: the neighborhood, the city, the Armenian Apos-
tolic Church, Christianity, the Sephardi congregation in Salonica, Sephardi
Jewry, world Jewry. In any case, non-Muslims were generally not included in
the urban political elites, and they had no responsibility for urban life or public
order outside their own community or neighborhood.

The Nineteenth Century: Reform, Differentiation, and Complication

Traditional notions of how non-Muslims ought to live and behave in a Muslim

society were still largely in force when the combined effects of socioeconomic,
legal, and cultural change began to transform their role and status, particu-
larly in the Ottoman Empire and the territories more or less controlled by it
from the mid–nineteenth century onward; although Qajar Iran also witnessed
socioeconomic, cultural, and legal change, there have been few studies of its
impact on local non-Muslim urban communities. The growth of European
trade and influence, internal migration, political, legal, educational, and cul-
tural change, which led to increased social differentiation, profoundly altered
the profi le and internal structure of local non-Muslim communities as well as
their status and role within urban society. Change was not uniform: it affected
the various minorities in a highly uneven manner, depending, inter alia, on cri-
teria of origin (indigenous or immigrant), geographical distribution (local or
transnational), and denomination or sect, which in their turn were partly cor-
related with language, cultural orientation, ties to specific European powers,
and nationality or legal status more generally. A community was hardly ever
transformed as a whole. As a rule, individual Christians and Jews, or individual
Christian and Jewish families, managed to benefit from increased educational
and economic opportunities, gaining access to the legal protection and privi-
leges now offered by the European powers. Their successes and failures were
then projected back on the communities they belonged to and were thought
to represent.

Legal Change: The Tanzimat, the Capitulations, and European Protection

In the Ottoman Empire, the legal innovations of the Tanzimat period (1839–
76) revised or at least modified certain provisions of Islamic law, culminating
in the formal abolition of the poll tax (jizya) and the proclamation of legal
200 | G U DRU N K R Ä M E R

equality between Muslims and non-Muslims. 27 Th is element of the broader

reform movement reflected European pressure to move beyond traditional
notions of tolerance and protection and to grant non-Muslims full rights of
citizenship, itself a novel concept in Ottoman political thought (and, it should
be added, a fairly recent one in Europe as well). For the Ottoman Empire to
cede to this pressure was one way to prove itself “civilized” and worthy of
inclusion in the European concert of powers (which indeed it was at the Con-
gress of Paris in 1856)—a fact that could not but compromise the reforms in
the eyes of many Muslims who resented any change in their relationship with
local non-Muslims, let alone change brought about by European demands
and expectations. 28
The so-called Noble Rescript of the Rose Chamber (hatt-ı şerif of Gül-
hane) of 1839 professed to confi rm Islamic law by guaranteeing all Ottoman
subjects, Muslims as well as non-Muslims, “perfect security of life, honor and
property” (according to the sharia). The Imperial Rescript (hatt-ı hümayun)
of 1856 went considerably further, proclaiming legal equality of all Ottoman
subjects (who continued to be labeled as such rather than as citizens; in the
nationality law of 1869, the term tebaa was used for the former military and
administrative elite, askeri, as well as for the tax-paying population, more spe-
cifically the non-Muslims, reaya). The jizya was replaced by a military exemp-
tion tax (bedel-i askeri). Though it was abolished by the Young Turks in 1909,
non-Muslims were not drafted into the Ottoman army until shortly before the

27. See Mardin’s article on the Tanzimat (1995, 183–86). The term is best translated as
“regulations.” In the same period, the Iranian government improved the legal protection of
local non-Muslims without offering them legal emancipation; see Floor 1983. It seems that
Zoroastrians benefited from contacts with their coreligionists in India: restrictions on reli-
gious buildings were lifted in the second half of the nineteenth century, and the jizya levied on
them was abolished in 1882; Boyce 1991, 209–12, 218ff . Though the constitution of 1906–7
declared all Iranian citizens to be equal, Jews appear to have remained subject to some dis-
criminatory legislation until 1926, when it was fi nally abolished under Reza Shah. See Loeb
1996, 249; Afary 2002, 162–74; and Tsadik 2003, 405–8.
28. It should be emphasized that at least until 1856, the Ottoman reforms were not so
much inspired by European precedent and pressure as by domestic concerns; see Mardin 1995
and Abu-Manneh 1994.
 Moving Out of Place | 201

outbreak of Word War I.29 Particularly important in an urban context, legal

emancipation also implied that many of the restrictions on the construction,
repair, and extension of churches, synagogues, schools, baths, hospitals, or
cemeteries that had been part of the Pact of ‘Umar were lifted. Significantly
enough, government approval was still required for new construction in areas
inhabited exclusively by the respective (non-Muslim) community and any
kind of repair or construction activity in mixed areas. Practice did not always
follow the law. 30
The Tanzimat reforms did not abolish religious personal status law, nor
did they eliminate all outward signs of difference such as dress, hairstyle, and
so forth, which continued to be observed in certain parts of the Empire (Davi-
son 1982; Quataert 1997; Stillman 2003). At the same time that legal equal-
ity was declared and non-Muslims in growing numbers came to be included in
municipal, provincial, and national assemblies that were either newly created
or endowed with wider authority, the millet system was preserved. Hence, sev-
eral powerful markers of religious distinctiveness remained in force until the
dissolution of the Ottoman Empire.31 Legal emancipation did not necessarily
pave the way for the political and cultural integration of non-Muslims, either
individually or collectively, whether into the Empire where the new concept of
“Ottomanism” was propagated from the 1860s, or into the new entities, nations-
in-being, that succeeded it after World War I (Khalidi et al. 1991; Kayalı 1997).
European influence went considerably further than merely pressing
for equal rights for all Ottoman subjects. In the nineteenth century, two

29. Zürcher (1999) provides an important introduction into an underresearched field;

see also Kunt 1982. For case studies illustrating negotiations on the ground, see Karmi 1984,
99–104, and H. Goldberg 1990, 47–51.
30. Paragraphs 6 and 7 of the Hatt -ı hümayun, quoted from the French translation in
Young 1905–6, 2:5. For the effects on Istanbul and several other Ottoman cities, see Karmi
1984, 21–24.
31. Kunt 1982; Levy 1994, chs. 16–18; Ma’oz 1968; and Lafi 2005 provide overviews. For
Istanbul, see Karmi 1984, ch. 6; for Haifa, Yazbak 1998. Jerusalem, Tripoli (Lebanon), and
Beirut provide markedly different sett ings; see Gerber 1985; Sulayman 2001; and Hanssen
2005. For the impact of the reforms on a peripheral Ottoman province, see H. Goldberg 1990
and Simon 1994.
202 | G U DRU N K R Ä M E R

instruments were used that had existed before, but which now acquired a
force they had hitherto lacked: the capitulations and European protection
of local subjects. Continuing earlier Islamic as well as non-Islamic practices,
the capitulations (ahdname-s, imtiyazat) were originally (reciprocal) treaties
of commerce and protection between Muslim rulers and Christian princes or
republics, guaranteeing the lives and property of their subjects, most of them
diplomatic envoys, merchants, pilgrims, or travelers, while in the territory of
the contracting parties (van den Boogert 2005). 32 On Muslim territory, the
treaties exempted the foreign subjects from Islamic criminal jurisdiction and
local taxation, notably the jizya imposed on the local dhimmis, placing them
under a separate jurisdiction which, as early as the thirteenth century, was
exerted by local foreign consuls. (It must be emphasized, though, that as soon
as litigation involved more than one “nation,” and more particularly subjects
of the sultan, they entered into the jurisdiction of the Ottoman qadis and law
courts. Privilege and autonomy were thus not identical with exterritorial sta-
tus.) By the mid–nineteenth century, the system of capitulations, based partly
on written treaties and partly on custom, had moved far beyond its original
parameters. Initially voluntary and reciprocal, the capitulations had assumed
the binding character of international treaties. At the same time, their scope
had greatly expanded, involving privileges of autonomous jurisdiction as well
as important trading facilities, fiscal exemptions, and special rights of control
over customs duties exerted by the capitulatory powers which by that time
included most European states as well as the United States of America and Bra-
zil. The capitulations were unilaterally abrogated by the Ottoman government
in 1914, but it was only in 1923 that the Treaty of Lausanne fi nally decreed
their abolition; in Iran, they were abolished in 1928, and in Egypt under the
Treaty of Montreux in 1936.
Intimately linked to this development, foreign protection that had
originally been granted only to consular agents and employees (notably the
so-called dragomans, from the Arabic turjuman, interpreter), assumed unprece-
dented dimensions when hundreds, if not thousands, of local subjects acquired

32. For the evolution, functions, and abuses of the system, see also Sousa 1933, Darling
1995, and Ahmad 2000. For their Moroccan equivalents, whose effects never reached Otto-
man proportions, see Schroeter 1988, 165–78, 201, and Bowie 1976.
 Moving Out of Place | 203

certificates of foreign protection (berat-s, hence the Ottoman Turkish term,

beratlı, protégé) in the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which,
until new and rather more restrictive regulations were agreed upon in 1863,
were hereditary. On the whole, Muslims hesitated to seek protection from a for-
eign power, whereas non-Muslims were quick to see the advantages of being
exempted from the jizya when and where it was still imposed, as well as being
offered quite substantial legal, fiscal, and economic privileges (van den Boogert
2005). 33 It was not only individuals that came to enjoy foreign protection, but
entire non-Muslim communities. Strictly speaking, protection only applied to
their clergy, monks, and religious institutions, including churches, monaster-
ies, pious foundations, and holy sites, but European protection and patronage,
vaguely defi ned and resting mostly on custom, gradually extended much further
to include the body of the faithful as well. And we are speaking of large num-
bers: thus in 1774, the Ottoman-Russian Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca, followed
by more extensive concessions in 1830, placed the Orthodox Church, with its
several million ethnic Greek, Albanian, Bulgarian, Serbian, and Arab mem-
bers, under Russian protection. In the nineteenth century, Russia protected the
Rum Orthodox and Armenian communities throughout the Ottoman Empire,
with independent Greece increasingly seeking to exert its influence over ethnic
Greeks. France claimed the exclusive right (although contested and increas-
ingly challenged by the Austrians, the Vatican, Spain, Sardinia, and later Italy)
to protect the Roman Catholics and the Uniate churches including Armenian,
Syrian, and Coptic Catholics and the Maronites, and here again, considerable
numbers were involved. Lacking long-time religious or historical bonds with
local minorities, Britain protected what was left: the Protestants, the Druzes,
and the Jews in Palestine. Only French and Russian rights were, with important
reservations, recognized by the Porte, whereas Austrian or British claims rested
merely on custom, although they were no less effective.
Several points have to be made when discussing the impact of foreign
protection on Middle Eastern non-Muslims. First, while certain communities

33. For individual countries and communities, see Homsy 1956, Hopwood 1969, Schlicht
1981, Frazee 1983, Farah 1986, and Friedman 1986. For Aleppo, see Masters 1992, 2001, ch. 3,
and (with caution) Shalit 1996; for Damascus, Schatkowski Schilcher 1985; for Beirut, Fawaz
1983, 85ff .
204 | G U DRU N K R Ä M E R

such as the Rum Orthodox and the Catholics came to enjoy foreign protec-
tion, others, like the Egyptian (Orthodox) Copts or Karaite Jews did not. Even
when a community was collectively placed under foreign protection, this did
not imply that the lives and fortunes of all its members were transformed, for
as a rule, it was only the educated and well-to-do middle and upper strata that
were able to obtain foreign status and to benefit from the privileges att ached to
it. 34 Regardless, however, of whether local non-Muslims were in fact affi liated
to a foreign power, they were increasingly perceived as “local foreign minori-
ties.”35 Second, in most cases, foreign protection or even nationality did not
involve foreign origin. Many of the individuals enjoying foreign status of some
kind (and this itself was often ill-defi ned) had not actually immigrated from
France, Britain, Russia, or Italy, or even from areas controlled or occupied by
them, but were members of the local population. Th ird, no political loyalties
needed to be involved in the relationship between the protégés and their pro-
tecting power. The choice of a particular European nation was usually based
on convenience and could be changed if that seemed advantageous; members
of the same family (for example, the Poche family in Aleppo) could have differ-
ent protecting powers, remain local subjects, or become stateless. Choice also
depended on opportunity: though many local consuls (who were themselves
often of local origin and were sometimes consuls for several different powers)
were quite ready to sell certificates and increase the number of their protégés,
thereby augmenting their income as well as their standing and influence, some
of their governments were not.
As a matter of fact, European racism and snobbery could be directed against
local non-Muslims just as much as against Muslims: Greeks, Armenians, Syr-
ian Christians, and Jews were frequently grouped together as “Levantines,”
and the connotations of the term—greed, pushiness, dishonesty, and shallow-
ness—were not positive. Not all European powers were intent on acquiring
protégés among local minorities that until recently had enjoyed low status and
in many cases continued to do so, particularly when this threatened to create

34. The case of Egyptian Jewry illustrates this point rather well; see Krämer 1989, 29–36,
and with different figures, Shamir 1987, 33–67.
35. For an excellent illustration of the ambiguities of legal status and identity, see Ilbert
1996, vol. 1, chs. 3 and 7.
 Moving Out of Place | 205

difficulties with the Muslim authorities. 36 The Décret Crémieux of 1870 that
extended French citizenship to some 30,000 Algerian Jews was thus an excep-
tional effort to co-opt an entire non-Muslim community, although it did not in
fact extend to the Jewish congregations in the south of the country, notably in
the M’zab (Ansky 1950; Kateb 2001, 190–93).
The capitulations left their imprint on urban society. Istanbul, Izmir,
Cairo, or Alexandria all provide examples of their negative effect. 37 Foreigners
found it relatively easy to evade paying taxes and rents, and to avoid arrest or
confiscation, suspects merely had to claim foreign protected status, for with-
out the consent of the consul in charge police could not arrest them or take
them to court. The vexing complexity of codes, courts, and procedures was
only reduced when the capitulations and the Mixed Courts dealing with cases
involving foreign protégés and local/Ottoman subjects were abolished in the
course of the twentieth century (Cannon 1988; N. Brown 1993).

Demographic Growth and Change

Legal emancipation and growing ties to Europe coincided with considerable

demographic growth among local non-Muslims that reached its climax in
the early 1880s. Better hygiene in the face of the epidemics that continued to
plague Middle Eastern cities until well into the nineteenth century played a
role in this process, 38 as did high birth rates among local Christians and Jews. 39
As their numbers augmented, their share in the urban population increased.

36. Lord Cromer’s disparaging comments on local Copts and Armenians bear out the
point rather forcefully: Cromer 1908. For a neutral defi nition of the term “Levantine,” the
intermediary par excellence, see Eldem 1991, n. 3.
37. For Istanbul, see Rosenthal 1980a, chs. 6, 7, and 11, and Scheben 1991, 174–77, 198, 234.
For Egypt, see, for example, the memoirs of Sir Thomas Russell Pasha (1949), former commander
of the Egyptian police; Krämer 1989, 19, 29–31; Ilbert 1996, vol. 1; and Reimer 1997, 127ff.
38. Panzac 1985, 64ff, supplemented by case studies; see, notably, Dumont 1992; Kuhnke
1990, ch. 4.
39. See the basic data in Courbage and Fargues 1997, 58, 64f, 105f, 124f; Karpat 1985, and
McCarthy 1983, 1989; also Levy 1994, chs. 10, 11. Algeria under French colonial rule provides
a special case; see the excellent study by Kateb 2001. For Iran, Gilbar (1976) includes data on
foreign residents, whose number rose from 150 in 1850 to some 1,200 in 1904 (154), but he
does not mention local non-Muslims.
206 | G U DRU N K R Ä M E R

Population pressure in its turn led to increased density within existing neigh-
borhoods or quarters as well as dispersal over the city as a whole. In addition
to demographic growth there was considerable migration from rural areas and
from abroad, demonstrating the attractiveness of certain cities and territories
within the Ottoman Empire, Egypt, and the Maghreb, which was, of course, not
restricted to non-Muslims. Reflecting the shift of trading patterns, economic
growth, and activity from inland to port cities, population growth was par-
ticularly marked in Beirut, where the number of Christian residents rose from
about 50 to 66 percent of the urban population between 1860 and 1920.40 In
Alexandria, cosmopolitan port city par excellence, non-Muslims made a sig-
nificant contribution to the general atmosphere, even though they were never
more than one-third of the population, and foreigners (Muslims as well as non-
Muslims) accounted for about one-fi fth. In late nineteenth-century Istanbul,
non-Muslims made up some 40 percent of the population, and even in inland
Aleppo, they accounted for 28 percent. Baghdad witnessed a spectacular growth
of its Jewish population, from about 3.3 percent in 1794 to nearly 35 percent in
1893. Immigration could not but change the composition and internal organi-
zation of the existing non-Muslim communities, and local community leaders,
anticipating the fi nancial burdens and potential social problems linked to this
massive influx, did not always welcome the newcomers.41 While it is true that
most migrants were young and poor, they were also achievement oriented and
generally hard working. Many brought special skills, experience, new ideas, and
in some cases capital, giving a new impetus to the local economy and commu-
nity. Some could also rely on international networks of family and kinship ties,
which were particularly useful in the fields of commerce and fi nance.

40. On what follows, see Courbage and Fargues 1997, 76, 99. For Beirut, see Fawaz 1983,
28–43, 60; for Alexandria, Ilbert 1996, 1:91–98, 361–76; for Istanbul, Çelik 1993, 38; Karmi
1984, ch. 1, is not entirely consistent; for Aleppo, Gaube and Wirth 1984, 196; for Baghdad,
Deshen 1994, 684. For migration among Middle Eastern Jewish communities in general, see
Stillman 1991, 38–41.
41. In Cairo and Alexandria, they made several attempts to have the authorities impose
some limits on the immigration of Jews without the necessary means of subsistence; Krämer
1989, 11f. For similar problems in Ottoman cities, see Karmi 1984, 24f, and Nahum 1997, 93f.
Deshen (1994, 685f) refers to unrest within the Jewish community of Baghdad.
 Moving Out of Place | 207

Egypt provides a striking example of the multiplication, growth, and

diversification of local non-Muslim communities (Krämer 1989, 8–10, 59ff ).42
From the 1860s to the 1920s, Egypt was a country of immigration. If some
of the immigrants came to escape from political instability or persecution at
home (Syrian Christians, Eastern European Jews), most were att racted by
the hope of a better life, social advancement, or rapid enrichment. Laissez-
faire economics and the capitulations created highly favorable conditions
for enterprising individuals, which were further guaranteed by the political,
economic and, if necessary, military pressure of the European powers headed
by Britain. After the British occupation in 1882, immigration began to soar,
reaching its peak in the decade 1897–1907. Foreign colonies were formed
and existing communities transformed, including Greeks, Italians, Syrians,
Armenians, and Jews from all parts of the Middle East, the Mediterranean,
and Europe. Large-scale immigration continued well into the 1920s, bring-
ing the number of foreigners living in Egypt up from about 15,000 in the
1850s to 100,000 in the 1880s and over 200,000 in the years after World
War I (and again it should be remembered that foreign nationals could very
well be of indigenous origin and that most non-Muslims did not have foreign
status). Immigration from abroad was accompanied by migration within the
country. In the 1880s, the center of commerce, industry, and administration
shifted defi nitively to Cairo and Alexandria. The non-Muslim provincial
middle and upper-middle classes joined the general trend of migration to the
big cities, which offered better communal and educational services, better
protection against att acks both on individuals and on entire communities
(such as, for instance, ritual murder accusations leveled by Christians against
local Jews) and much more entertainment. With the exception of the Copts
and many Greeks, it was only the poorer, less educated, or less enterprising
who stayed behind, and many Christians and Jews who lived in provincial
towns actually commuted on a daily or weekly basis to Alexandria, Cairo, or
the larger cities in the Delta.

42. See further Collins 1984 and Shalabi 1993, Philipp 1985, and Kitroeff 1989. The
Copts, being entirely indigenous, have to be analyzed separately; see notably al-Bishri 1980
and Motzki 1979.
208 | G U DRU N K R Ä M E R

Socioeconomic and Educational Change

The overall impact of European economic penetration and competition on

local crafts, manufacturing, trade, and industry remains controversial. Diver-
gence of opinion is due not only to regional variations depending on the loca-
tion of specific towns and areas (coast or inland, trade routes old and new,
security, accessibility, etc.), but to differences in interpreting their effects on
the local economies and their various sectors, notably textiles.43 There is, how-
ever, no controversy concerning the prominent role played by non-Muslims
in the newly expanding, and often highly profitable, trade with Europe, which
in the case of the Ottoman Empire assumed new dimensions after the Anglo-
Ottoman commercial treaty of 1838 (Treaty of Balta Liman), followed by
the Franco-Ottoman Treaty of 1839, both of which had profound effects on
the local economy. With certain local variations, a pattern evolved which in
many instances had begun to form well before:44 trade and commerce with
neighboring Muslim territories, often classified as “internal,” was largely in
the hands of Muslims; trade with Europe was dominated, but by no means
monopolized, by local Christians, Jews, and foreign residents (as a rule Euro-
peans or Americans),45 while both Muslims and local non-Muslims had a share

43. For a general overview, see Owen 1993. Once again, the discussion has largely focused
on the Ottoman Empire; see Pamuk 1987; İslamoğlu-İnan 1987; Kasaba 1988; and Quataert
1983, 1993a. For Morocco, see Schroeter 1988, ch. 1. For Iran, see Floor 2003, and for an
interesting case study illustrating the capacity of “traditional” industries to adapt to changing
demands, Helfgott 1994. See also note 44 below.
44. For Ottoman trade and commerce 1600–1914, see Faroqhi in İnalcik and Quataert
1994. For non-Muslims, see especially Issawi 1982; Bağiş 1983; Eldem 1991; Masters 1992;
Fawaz 1983, chs. 6 and 7; Philipp 1985; and Bitt ar 1992. In Morocco, local Jews had played
a prominent role in trade well before the Anglo-Moroccan commercial treaty of 1856 that
ushered in the era of free trade; Schroeter 1988, chs. 3, 5, and 6. To the extent, however, that
non-Muslims became associated with European influence and protection, they tended to be
replaced by Muslims: Cigar 1981. For Jewish peddlers, see Deshen 1989 or Simon 1993. In
contrast, local non-Muslims in nineteenth-century Iran do not seem to have played a promi-
nent role in money lending, banking, or international trade even with Europe; see Migeod
1990, 179–94; Floor 1979, 1976; and Nashat 1981.
45. Rafeq 1988a, 429–30, specifically emphasizes the fact that in nineteenth-century
Damascus, Muslims were very much part of the local fi nancial elite, holding an important
 Moving Out of Place | 209

in trade between the cities and their hinterlands, which often took the form of
pett y trade or peddling. Put differently, Muslims continued to control trade
and commerce in inland cities such as Damascus, Aleppo, Homs, or Nablus,
which was primarily local or internal, whereas local non-Muslims and resident
foreigners played a conspicuous role in the commercial activity of port cities
(Istanbul, Salonica, Izmir, Alexandretta [İskenderun], Beirut, Tunis, or Alex-
andria), which was largely long distance and international. In the same way,
small-scale fi nance generally remained in the hands of local Muslims, whereas
local non-Muslims and foreigners figured prominently in large-scale and high-
profit banking and fi nance.
Two factors may help to explain the extraordinary role of non-Muslims,
both local and foreign, in European trade and commerce as well as in the econ-
omy more generally, one cultural, the other social and occupational (and again,
both are to a certain extent connected). When and where they existed, reli-
gious sympathies and cultural affi nities tended to facilitate contacts between
local non-Muslims (Christians for obvious reasons more so than Jews) and
European merchants, diplomats, and missionaries. As a rule, European con-
suls and commercial agents preferred non-Muslims, more specifically Chris-
tians, to Muslims as their partners, agents, and employees.46 Muslims, in their
turn, were generally more reluctant to enter into close business relationships
with Europeans (although not with local non-Muslims) or to be employed
by their consulates or embassies. The decisive matter was not so much that
Maronites, Armenians, or the “Greek” Orthodox felt att racted to France, Brit-
ain, or Russia or that the French, British, or Russians acted out of sympathy
with their fellow Christians in the East—they rarely did. Mutual dislike and
negative stereotypes were in fact quite pronounced. But local non-Muslims

share of the trade with Europe. The same applies not only to Homs, Hama (Reilly 1996 and
2002), and Aleppo (Sluglett 2002), but also to Fez, whose Muslim merchants in the late nine-
teenth century controlled much of Moroccan international trade (Cigar 1981), and to the
cities of Qajar Iran.
46. Philipp (1994) indicates that, to the extent that it existed between Catholic French-
men and Oriental Christians, religious sympathy did not necessarily influence commercial
and diplomatic relations. As Al-Qatt an puts it so well, the business of money tends to be “blind
to the color of religious affi liation” (1992, 207).
210 | G U DRU N K R Ä M E R

had a great deal to gain from association with an outside power that offered
them important legal and fiscal privileges, providing them with “escape routes
from dhimmi status” (Marcus 1989, 45). To the Europeans, local non-Mus-
lims could be eminently useful: they knew the local markets, they spoke the
languages required, and they had the necessary contacts at both ends of the
exchange (Halliday 1992).
Languages and managerial skills were of utmost importance in this con-
text, and they grew with the expansion and modernization of education that was
so characteristic of nineteenth-century reform in the Ottoman Empire, Egypt,
North Africa, and, albeit to a lesser extent, in Iran. As far as non-Muslims were
concerned, expanded education was closely related to European, and later also
American, missionary and educational efforts, which were marked by intense
competition among the various churches, governments, and nations.47 Catho-
lic (mostly French and Italian) missions dated back to the Middle Ages and
took renewed force during the Reformation; the Maronite college in Rome had
been founded in 1584. Muslims, who were not only restrained by cultural sen-
timents and political loyalties, but also by the severe sanctions placed on con-
version from Islam, offered litt le hope of success to the missionaries.48 Hence,
their efforts were mostly directed at local Christians and Jews, leading to the
formation of new Catholic and Protestant churches, greatly to the dismay of
the older communities from whom they had split; some of these churches were
later recognized as separate millets by the Sublime Porte (Masters 2001).
From the early eighteenth century, missionary influence gradually
expanded, spreading from local Catholics and Uniate churches in Lebanon
and Syria to other Christian denominations as well as to the Jews. American
Protestants opened their fi rst missionary school in Lebanon in 1834 and in
Egypt in 1854. Institutions of higher learning followed suit: Robert College

47. In addition to Somel 2001, Fortna 2002, and Courbage and Fargues 1997, see the case
studies by Deguilhem 1998, Tibawi 1966, Labaki 1988, and Georgelin 2005. For religious and
educational renewal among Egyptian Copts, see Reiss 1998. For Iran, see Stümpel-Hatami
1996, 67–80; and Sanasarian 2000, ch. 1. Waterfield 1973 offers a church perspective.
48. See Peters and de Vries 1976–77; for practical applications, see Gervers and Bikhazi
1990 and García-Arenal 2002. In the Ottoman Empire, capital punishment for apostasy was
abolished as part of the Tanzimat reforms, but there still remained disabilities in civil law, con-
cerning notably legacies, testaments, and inheritance from which apostates were excluded.
 Moving Out of Place | 211

was founded in 1863, the Syrian Protestant College (later the American Uni-
versity of Beirut) in 1866, and the Catholic Université Saint-Joseph in 1875.
Education on modern lines was by no means restricted to foreign missionary
schools (which frequently held the additional att raction of giving free tuition),
but was offered by foreign secular institutions, communal notables and, last
but not least, the Ottoman state.
Although for some time Jews lagged behind, educational change became
increasingly noticeable among them as well.49 In the fi rst half of the century,
most local Jews had had litt le formal education. From the 1860s on, Jewish
education in the Maghreb, Egypt, the Levant, and Iraq was gradually trans-
formed from traditional methods of religious instruction (local equivalents of
the Ashkenazi heder, talmud torah, yeshiva) into a modern system adapted to
European, notably French, standards, which was specifically designed for ori-
ental Jews. An important role was played by the Alliance Israélite Universelle,
founded in 1860, which propagated a secular outlook inspired by French cul-
ture and therefore met with some resistance on the part of Jewish religious cir-
cles and the general public. 50 After World War I, only the poor or the observant
still sent their children to inexpensive community schools. The middle and
upper classes (and this holds true not only for Jews and Christians, but also for
many Muslims) preferred to send their children, including a growing number
of girls, to foreign private schools, many of them actually run by Catholic or
Protestant missionaries. Nevertheless, it is important to bear in mind that the
large majority of local non-Muslims remained illiterate.
The combined weight of religion, education, and language played an
important part in the rise of the non-Muslims in the changing regional econ-
omy of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Great importance came
to be attached to appropriate skills, experience, and networks: local Chris-
tians and Jews had been traditionally involved (often in sharp competition
with one another) in those trades and occupations that were most needed in

49. For modernized Jewish education and its sociocultural effects, see H. Cohen 1973, ch.
4; Stillman 1991; Levy 1994; and H. Goldberg 1996. For Iran, see Nikbakht 2002.
50. On the Alliance Israélite Universelle, see Chouraqui 1965, Marmorstein 1969, Laskier
1983, and Rodrigue 1990; also Karmi 1984, ch. 5.
212 | G U DRU N K R Ä M E R

the expansion of fi nance, commerce, and industry: money changing, money

lending, usury, pawnbroking, and so on, which blended into modern forms of
banking, administrative and clerical work both in the expanding state bureau-
cracies and in private business as well as some of the liberal professions (Find-
ley 1982; Krikorian 1977).
All over the Middle East, Armenians, Greeks, and Jews had acted as money
changers, money lenders, brokers, and bankers on a local and regional level,
not necessarily involving transactions with European partners. The case of the
Syrian Jewish Farhi family serves to illustrate the ups and downs of their sta-
tus and fortune as well as the transition from premodern to modern forms of
credit and fi nance (Philipp 1984a; Bouchain 1996). 51 In the Ottoman capital,
Armenians and Jews emerged as powerful fi nanciers (known as “Galata bank-
ers” after the residential quarter where they lived) increasingly trying to shape
urban structures and politics as well. There were families such as Sassoon and
Kadoorie (Kedourie) in Baghdad (and Shanghai and Hong Kong), Farhi in
Damascus or Busnach and Bacri in Algiers who had acquired wealth and status
as traders, money lenders and bankers in the eighteenth century and who were
able to secure their position in the course of the nineteenth. Others such as Sur-
suq (Sursock) and Bustros in Beirut and Alexandria, or Cattaoui, Mosseri, and
de Menasce in Cairo gradually moved from fairly humble beginnings in trade
or money changing to more profitable and prestigious positions in commerce
and banking, ultimately leading to positions of great wealth, status, and influ-
ence within their respective communities, if not local society as a whole. There
were also the “rags-to-riches” stories described by Reid (1970). Toward the end
of the nineteenth century, family businesses became increasingly diversified.
Investment in land and real estate, infrastructure, construction, and, although
to a lesser extent, industry were added to banking and trading. The web of busi-
ness contacts tying together individuals and families from various ethnic and

51. A study of the Armenian Dadian family illustrates the social and cultural aspects
of nineteenth-century reform and change; Ter Minassian 1995. For the Galata bankers, see
Rosenthal 1980a and Seni 1994; for the Sassoon family, Deshen 1994; for Bacri and Busnach,
Kortepeter 1994; for Sursuq and Bustros, Fawaz 1983, 89–95; for Catt aoui, Mosseri, and de
Menasce, Krämer 1989, ch. 2; and Ilbert 1996, vol. 1, ch. 5; for the Jewish merchant families of
Morocco, Schroeter 1988, 34–50.
 Moving Out of Place | 213

religious backgrounds was reinforced by intermarriage, creating strong links

within the individual ethnic and religious groups and, to a certain extent, even
among them (Collins 1984, 44–57, 128–31; Tignor 1980).

Internal Differentiation

Even before the nineteenth century, Christian and Jewish communities in the
Middle East had been stratified, hierarchical, and decidedly status-conscious:
culturally, however, they had been relatively homogeneous, if one leaves aside
the fine distinctions of rite and language characteristic of Ottoman Jewry and
the Rum Orthodox Church. Socioeconomic and cultural change, reinforced by
large-scale migration to the urban centers, deepened existing cleavages and cre-
ated new status groups. Social differentiation was reflected in a growing diversity
of lifestyles, education, language, culture, nationality, and, as a result, identity.
Socioeconomic change and demographic growth also modified power relations
within the various communities, as a new commercial and professional middle
class began to challenge the dominance of the clergy and the local notables.52
After 1856, communal councils (meclis-i milli, majlis milli) were estab-
lished in most cities of the Ottoman Empire and began to work, with greater
energy, for social and educational reform, better housing, the rehabilitation of
decaying living areas, and better care of the poor in general. The urban poor
are frequently ignored in the literature, as attention remains focused on the
cosmopolitan notables and the polyglot middle class whose economic interest
and cultural outlook connected them to and identified them with the modern
sectors of the economy and to Europe. But alongside them there remained this
lower class, more or less assimilated to local custom, speaking a local dialect
that did not necessarily identify them as non-Muslims, sharing the same mate-
rial culture, eating the same food, celebrating the same festivals, and adhering,
by and large, to the same social and cultural values as their Muslim neighbors
and compatriots. Not surprisingly, we know litt le about the quality and inten-
sity of daily contacts and relations between Muslims and non-Muslims out-
side the spheres of economics and religion. What we do know is that poverty,

52. See the contributions by Barsoumian on the Armenians (1982) and Clogg on the
Rum/Greek Orthodox (1982); for Egyptian Copts, see Atiya 1968, 104ff; for Egyptian Jews,
see Krämer 1989; for Istanbul Jews, Levy 1994 and Karmi 1984.
214 | G U DRU N K R Ä M E R

illiteracy, and bad health often made the poor dependent on the charity of the
community or their wealthy coreligionists, reinforcing vertical loyalties, and
tying them to their richer coreligionists rather than to their Muslim (or Chris-
tian, Jewish, and Zoroastrian) neighbors.
Although it is difficult to obtain precise figures on the social composition
of Middle Eastern non-Muslim minorities, particularly the Christians, there
are some features characterizing Jewish communities from San‘a’ to Istanbul
and Izmir, and from Baghdad to Damascus and Cairo. 53 Detailed data from
Egypt after 1918 yield similar results (Krämer 1989, 14f, 52ff ): In Cairo and
Alexandria, the lower class may have constituted up to 25 percent of some
75,000 Jews living there. As a rule, they had litt le formal education and were
mostly engaged in small-scale trade and various crafts; a significant part was
without regular income or openly unemployed, and quite a few lived off beg-
ging. The lower and upper middle classes together amounted to some 65 per-
cent of Egyptian Jewry, comprising an estimated 15 percent employees, 15
percent craft smen, at least 30 percent merchants and commercial agents, and
about 5 percent professionals. At the top there stood a small but very wealthy
upper class of bankers, import-export merchants, landowners, entrepreneurs,
and managers, comprising between 5 and 10 percent of the community, among
whom a limited, and almost closed, circle of Sephardi families acted as a kind of
Jewish aristocracy. It was this affluent, educated, and cosmopolitan middle and
upper class, which exerted considerable influence on the local economy, that
shaped the image of Egyptian Jewry as a whole. Wealth, which in most cases
was accumulated and invested locally, constituted the single most important
factor of upward social mobility. Technical, managerial, and language skills in
some cases offered alternative routes of advancement, and both were to a cer-
tain extent correlated with regional or ethnic origin and cultural orientation.

Urban Residence

The domain where growing social differentiation was most visibly expressed
was residence. From the mid–nineteenth century, migration within cities

53. For Istanbul and Ottoman Turkey in general, see Weiker 1992, Karmi 1984, and
Dumont 1982; for Baghdad, Deshen 1994 and Dumont 1992; for Damascus, Frankel 1997,
especially ch. 3; for San‘a’, Serjeant and Lewcock 1983, 394ff .
 Moving Out of Place | 215

was as a rule voluntary, following individual choice and preference, rather

than being caused by political pressure or general insecurity. Of course, it was
not that security ceased to matter or that dispersal was irreversible. Twenti-
eth-century Beirut provides striking proof that even at an advanced stage of
modernization, and indeed very much as a result of it, ethnic groups could
choose to relocate in segregated areas, or be forced to do so. What Khalaf and
Khoury (1993, ch. 2) called the “territorialization of identity” and what could
equally be described as a “confessionalization of space” in fact continued well
established patterns of expansion and contraction, or flux and reflux. Demo-
graphic growth and socioeconomic advancement, with the greater affluence
that resulted from it, led fi rst and foremost to structural change and greater
population density within existing quarters and neighborhoods, which, as has
been repeatedly stressed, need not date back very long. (To make matters more
complicated, place names tend to linger, and the fact that a quarter was called
“Armenian” or “Greek” or “Jewish” did not necessarily imply that Armenians,
Greeks, or Jews were still in a majority there.)
In the Jewish and Christian quarters of Damascus, a number of large
houses were built in the second half of the nineteenth century, especially in the
Christian quarter of Bab Tuma (Sack 1989, 37, 41ff, 72–80). Some of this con-
struction documented intensified missionary and religious activity that surged
after the Ottoman reform edict of 1839. Almost all churches and related build-
ings, such as monasteries, seminaries, and schools, seem to date from the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when the previous restrictions had
been abolished and when, under the special protection of the Ottoman gover-
nor, Christians were able to acquire extensive urban property. In Baghdad, the
Jewish quarter expanded vastly in the course of the nineteenth century, chiefly
as a result of large-scale migration of Jews from rural Kurdish areas as well as
from Iran and Syria (Deshen 1994; Golany 1994). High density and expansion
were accompanied by migration toward districts that were either more modern,
having only been established in the nineteenth century (this usually involved
the wealthier strata), or adjacent to the previous living area or quarter (mostly
caused by demographic pressure and involving the middle and lower strata as
well). For obvious reasons, the two cannot always be readily distinguished.
Migration within the city removed large sections of the middle and
upper classes physically and culturally from their poorer coreligionists, who
216 | G U DRU N K R Ä M E R

continued to live in predominantly Christian or Jewish neighborhoods,

grouped around their respective churches, monasteries, or synagogues. While
clustering along ethnic and religious lines often persisted in the new residen-
tial areas, even if only in individual buildings, the composition of neighbor-
hoods tended to reflect social stratification rather than ethnic or religious
origin. Most writers have emphasized the break-up of ethnic quarters as part
of a “movement towards a new social organisation based on socio-economic
class status” (Greenshields 1980, 130), 54 weakening the link between kinship
and residence particularly among the elites.
New towns or quarters created by the European colonial powers in the
late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries for their own nationals and parts
of the local “foreign” minorities provide a special case. Examples include the
“dual cities” of Morocco (for example, Fez, Marrakesh, or Rabat) that were
specifically created not only in order to preserve the historical “Arab” or
“Muslim” cities intact, but also to separate the colonizers from the colonized.
Janet Abu-Lughod (1980) went so far as to describe the guiding principle as
“urban apartheid”. 55 In other places such as Cairo, Alexandria, Tunis, or Teh-
ran, the boundary between the historic city (madina, kasba) and the modern
quarters heavily influenced by European tastes and inhabited predominantly
by Europeans and local foreign minorities was less obvious. In a number of
cases, the modern city cut deeply into the historical core (Algiers, Bagh-
dad, or Istanbul), whereas in Beirut or Kuwait the old city was completely
destroyed. Modern European concepts of urban planning and architectural
style were not restricted to the new towns and urban quarters largely built by
and for Europeans or those parts of the local population most closely tied to
them. They were also reflected in the ultimate goals of the Tanzimat reform-
ers, soon to be followed by the rulers of Iran, who aimed at replacing what

54. Baer 1969, 216–18, and Zubaida 1989, 69, support this view. Yazbak’s study of nine-
teenth-century Haifa (1998) shows (especially chs. 4 and 6) that the trend was by no means uni-
versal and that at least in this Palestinian coastal town, “sectarian” clustering remained strong.
55. The following is based on Blake and Lawless 1980, 178ff, and Revue du monde musul-
man et de la Méditerranée 73–74 (1994). For Fez, see Escher and Wirth 1992, 41–56, 80f; for
Tunis, Santelli 1995. For Cairo, where this process can be observed in great detail, see Ray-
mond 1993 and Scharabi 1989, 50ff .
 Moving Out of Place | 217

they saw as urban chaos and anarchy by order, hygiene, and beauty, eventu-
ally leading to dramatic changes in urban planning, architecture, and build-
ing techniques. 56
Sociocultural differentiation, migration, and the weakening of ethnic
clustering can be illustrated particularly well by looking at Cairo, and once
again, the process is best documented with regard to local Jews. 57 Until the
mid–nineteenth century, most Jews had lived in the “Jewish quarter” of Cairo,
the harat al-yahud, situated in the Bab al- Sha‘riyya quarter that was part of the
historical core of the city. The more prosperous families lived in large courtyard
houses (hawsh), which combined living and work areas, the poorer families in
crowded rented apartments. Only a few families remained in Old Cairo (misr
al-qadima), where the Jewish cemetery was located. The Jewish quarter was no
ghetto, for residential concentration was entirely voluntary, but it offered its
inhabitants protection and allowed them to lead a traditional Jewish life. In the
late 1860s, individual members of the old Sephardi families began to leave the
hara to sett le in areas to the west and north of the old city, where Muhammad
‘Ali and his successors had encouraged the elite to build and sett le. 58
In the years preceding World War I, some of these residential areas
such as ‘Abbasiyya or Isma‘iliyya lost their exclusive character and became

56. The best example is the Ottoman capital itself; see Rosenthal 1980a, Çelik 1993, and
Barillari and Godoli 1996; also Panzac 1991, 1:97–120, and Dumont and Georgeon 1992. For
the Ottoman Arab provinces, see Hanssen, Philipp, and Weber 2002. Inspired by the examples
of Paris and Istanbul, Nasir al-Din Shah ordered extensive construction and development on
“modern” lines in Tehran in 1867. See Adle and Hourcade 1992.
57. For what follows, see Krämer 1989, 62–67. For ethnic quarters in the medieval period,
see Goitein 1971, 2:289–99; Behrens-Abouseif 1986, Denoix 1992, 81–91; and Sayyid 1998,
178–90. For the harat in Ottoman Cairo, see N. Hanna 1991, 160–66. Under the French, most
hara gates were destroyed in order to be able to better control the quarters and their inhab-
itants, and the city was divided into new administrative units (aqsam, sing. qism). However,
neighborhoods dominated by certain ethnic or religious groups continued to exist, and some
of the gates were restored in later periods. For the Muhammad ‘Ali period, see Alleaume and
Fargues 1998 and Ibrahim 1992.
58. See Scharabi 1989, 51f, 56; for a map of the residential distribution of ethnic minori-
ties in 1877, see 75; for a ranking of quarters according to the social status, income, nationality,
and religion of their inhabitants, see Collins 1984, 128 and appendices, using data from 1882
and 1894.
218 | G U DRU N K R Ä M E R

middle-class neighborhoods; the upper class then moved into newly devel-
oped quarters along the Nile, notably Zamalik, Garden City, Roda (al-
Rawda), Giza, Ma‘adi or Heliopolis, where they constructed spacious
villas in Ottoman revival style (Raafat 1994; Ilbert 1981, ch. 5). From the
late nineteenth century, the wealthy families were followed by the middle
class. Upward social mobility among the lower and lower-middle classes was
generally reflected in a move from the hara to lower-middle class areas that
were inhabited by large numbers of non-Muslims such as Sakakini (includ-
ing Daher), Bulaq, Bab al-Luq, and ‘Abidin. Those who rose even further in
status moved on to more prestigious areas such as ‘Abbasiyya, Azbakiyya,
Isma‘iliyya, and Heliopolis, where other minorities and foreigners lived.
Needless to say their move was part of a wider phenomenon, involving Mus-
lims as well as non-Muslims. In his study of the Egyptian elite under Cromer
(1893–1907), where he also analyzed urban property, Collins (1984, 87, 115)
registered a massive flow of wealth and power from Muslims to foreigners,
foreign protégés, and minorities, which he considered to be one of the most
profound changes in Egyptian urban society during this period.

Confl ict and Cooperation

Within the Ottoman Empire and Egypt, the abolition of the jizya and the dec-
laration of legal equality between Muslims and non-Muslims signaled an end
to traditional notions of superiority, submission, and protection (dhimma),
which for centuries had ruled their relations. Non-Muslims were free to leave
their traditional enclaves where they had previously existed and to enter
spheres from which they had formerly been excluded. Physical boundaries were
largely removed, and social space opened up. Improved legal status and eco-
nomic success fi lled non-Muslims with a new sense of confidence and security,
expressed in all kinds of ways. Most non-Muslims abandoned the distinctive
garb they had previously worn, or been obliged to wear, and dressed according
to modern Ottoman or European fashion; they no longer stepped down from
the pavement when a Muslim came along; the rich built sumptuous houses
for themselves like other members of their class, flaunting their wealth rather
than hiding it. In short: non-Muslims moved out of place, and many Muslims
resented it, particularly since this move was so obviously related to European
influence and intervention.
 Moving Out of Place | 219

Of course, the social boundaries rooted in traditional legal and reli-

gious notions that were, by and large, recognized by all Middle Eastern-
ers, did not fade away easily. As a rule, people remained perfectly aware of
where “the other” was to be “placed” and which religious or ethnic group he
or she belonged to, and ethnic affi liation continued to matter to urban life.
The Tanzimat preserved the millets as frameworks of reference, identity and,
from time to time, also of collective action, offering solidarity and services
and thereby creating and demanding loyalties. Even among the cosmopolitan
elites, who were less dependent on communal institutions than their poorer
coreligionists, the “vertical” element of religious and ethnic identification was
never fully supplanted by the “horizontal” element of class. Case studies from
various places, no matter how cosmopolitan, point to the underlying sense of
ambivalence and the subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) interplay of coop-
eration and confl ict that characterized intercommunal relations throughout
the period—and beyond. On one hand, physical and social spaces where Mus-
lims and non-Muslims could meet, mix, and associate were greatly expanded
beyond the realm of economics where they had always interacted and often
cooperated. For the middle and upper classes, European-style clubs, coffee
houses, and restaurants offered new forms and venues of sociability; theaters,
opera houses, music halls, and cabarets provided new kinds of entertainment;
literary, musical, and cultural circles brought together men (and even some
women) from different walks of life; the press created a new media of expres-
sion and information. Like Muslims, non-Muslims took an active interest in
the revival of the Arabic language and literature which became known as the
Arab renaissance or awakening (nahda). 59
On the other hand, closer contact also exposed deep-seated anxieties and
animosities among all parties concerned. Th is was not merely a matter of “false

59. For the debate on the contribution of Arab Christians to the nahda, which earlier
research had rated very highly, and which now seems to have been somewhat exaggerated, see,
e.g., Khalidi et al. 1991. For various facets of urban conviviality, see notably Georgeon and
Dumont 1997. Case studies serve as a reminder that the mega-trend of socioeconomic change
and legal emancipation affected different localities, groups and individuals in a highly uneven
manner and that social status was extremely important in providing opportunities for interac-
tion, and in the formation of self-views and perceptions; see, e.g., Sulayman 2001.
220 | G U DRU N K R Ä M E R

consciousness,” to use a vulgarized Marxist concept, masking the real issues:

class struggle or competition over status and socioeconomic resources more
generally, though competition over resources did, of course, play a role in this
context. Anxiety and animosity mostly remained latent or confi ned to an inter-
personal level, but they could also flare up in collective violence. It is significant
that several of the worst incidents occurred in mid-nineteenth-century Aleppo
(1850) and Damascus (1860), which at that time were becoming integrated into
the new economic circuit dominated by Europe. Since local foreign-protected
non-Muslims were highly conspicuous in supplying credit at rates of interest that
were often ruinous to both urban dwellers and farmers, they were widely held
responsible for rural indebtedness. But what the protesters resented just as much
was an unprecedented Christian presence in the public sphere: they resented the
renovated churches, the ringing of bells, and all kinds of manifestations of newly
acquired wealth and status: non-Muslims, particularly Christians, were visibly
overstepping the limits set by custom and religion.60 The most dramatic incident
with the widest impact was the Damascus massacre of July 1860 that, among an
estimated population of 10,000–12,000 Christians, left several thousand dead
(realistic figures are in the range of 2,000–5,000), causing massive destruction
in the Christian quarter of Bab Tuma.61 The violence fed on present grievances
and age-old religious stereotypes; it expressed the worn-out charges of “osten-
tation” and “arrogance,” and it followed established patterns. Tension and dis-
satisfaction with the existing state of affairs had previously been deflected onto
local non-Muslims, and in a recurring pattern, fear of foreign invasion, anger
over rising prices, or resentment of government injustice had been vented on
Christians or Jews living among the Muslim population. But it must be empha-
sized that this was not a religious war against local non-Muslims (the Jews and

60. In spite of intensive study, the nature and assessment of these events still remain dis-
puted; see notably Reilly 1996, 219–21; Masters 1990 and 2001, ch. 5; Harel 1998; Yazbak
1998, ch. 6, and note 61 below.
61. The narrative is based on Fawaz 1994, chs. 4 and 6; Schatkowski Schilcher 1985,
87–100; and ‘A. Hanna 1985, 235–75. Ghazzal 1993, 54f, 162f, stresses the strong hostility felt
by local Muslims toward local Christians in the 1840s. In this context, Burke (1989, 48) has
spoken of acts of “ritual violence”; for a specific incident, see Olson 1977, 198–210. In his study
of rural Lebanon, Makdisi (2000), questions the existence of sectarianism before the impact
of colonialism and the advent of the modern state.
 Moving Out of Place | 221

poorer Christians living in the Maidan quarter were left unmolested and quite
a few of their Druze and Muslim neighbors, including prominent notables,
offered the victims protection). The same is true of the Alexandria riots of June
1882, which served as the pretext for British military intervention (Ilbert 1992,
1:211–32; Reimer 1997, 171–82; Schölch 1972; Cole 1993).
Mistrust, competition, and religious prejudice not only marked relations
between Muslims and non-Muslims but also among the various Christian
denominations, and between Christians and Jews. Indeed, it is much more use-
ful to think of intercommunal relations (at least outside the Maghreb and the
Arabian Peninsula, where the number of local Christians was insignificant)
not in terms of a binary Muslim/non-Muslim relationship but of multiple rela-
tionships among (various groups of) Muslims, Christians, Jews, or Zoroastri-
ans allowing for considerable variation over time and place.62 Intra-Christian
friction in itself was by no means new. It was exacerbated by the activities of
Catholic and Protestant missionaries that led to the establishment and socio-
political rise of new churches, weakening the older, mostly orthodox Christian
communities of the Middle East. Christian-Jewish animosity, deeply rooted
in religious prejudice, was intensified by Christian resentment of the eman-
cipation of the Jews who previously had been considered socially inferior to
them, and it was aggravated by economic competition. It is interesting to note
that while the dislike was indeed mutual, in virtually all instances of overt
tension the Christians appear as the active party, with local Jews trying to
maintain their low profi le or at the most to stage defensive action. The series of
ritual murder or “blood libel” accusations launched by local Christians (often
actively supported by European consuls, teachers, and missionaries) against
local Jews, of which the so-called Damascus Affair of 1840 was only the most
notorious, illustrate this point.63 Intercommunal tensions and apprehensions

62. The point is very well illustrated with regard to the Christian communities in eigh-
teenth- and nineteenth-century Aleppo; see Masters 2001, chs. 4–6. Students of Ottoman Jewry
have emphasized the loyalty of Ottoman Jews to the state, especially in the face of Christian
abuse and aggression; see Levy 1994, 108–12, 121–23; and Karmi 1984, 48–56. For Ottoman
loyalty and tensions between local Greeks and Jews in Izmir, see Nahum 1997, chs. 4 and 5.
63. For ritual murder accusations in the Ottoman Empire, see Karmi 1984, 16–18, on
Istanbul; Frankel 1997 on Damascus; and Dumont 1992 on Baghdad. For Egypt, see Landau
222 | G U DRU N K R Ä M E R

made people resort to or reactivate well-established strategies of communal

mobilization for self-defense.
The social rise of local non-Muslims, or rather of their recomposed middle
and upper classes, was possible because the precolonial “ethnic division of
labor” had never been rigid, because legal emancipation freed them of previous
disabilities, and because the European powers granted them protection. Their
role as intermediaries in the economic as well as the cultural and linguistic
spheres, and their function as channels, buffers, or fi lters of change, made it
easier for non-Muslims to attain status and wealth (Davison 1982). But this
process was accompanied by a process of marginalization that assimilated all
non-Muslims, no matter whether indigenous or immigrant, to foreign inter-
ests. Seen in historical perspective, the link between confessional and political
affi liation, real or presumed, was by no means new, nor was it confi ned to rela-
tions between Muslims and non-Muslims: the treatment of Shi‘i Muslims in
the Ottoman Empire and of Sunnis in the Safavid domains had followed the
same logic. Egyptian Copts certainly did not all benefit from European rule,
and among the “local foreign minorities” there were many individuals who
were neither of foreign origin nor had access to foreign protection. Nor could
the non-Muslim commercial and fi nancial elites in their entirety be classified
as a “comprador bourgeoisie,” as much of their wealth was not only accumu-
lated locally, but also invested in the local or the regional economy (Kasaba
1988, 114f).
Still, as in other societies at other times, perceptions often mattered more
than facts: local non-Muslims were widely seen as protégés of the European
powers and the main beneficiaries of an economic restructuring that cost
the Ottoman (Egyptian, Moroccan, Iranian) state its control over national
resources and many craftsmen and traders their jobs and income. Their socio-
economic role exposed the minorities as dependents—no longer of the Mus-
lim rulers or notables but of the colonial powers and the colonial system as a
whole. One form of vulnerability was thus exchanged for another. After World
War I, non-Muslims lost much of their previous utility. Mediation in economic

1973 and Krämer 1989, 60, 62, 113, 225, and 228f. For a sophisticated analysis of another inci-
dent in Alexandria, see Ilbert 1987, 1992.
 Moving Out of Place | 223

and cultural terms was either discredited because of its close link to the colo-
nial system or contested by a rising Muslim middle class aspiring to the same
place and functions that had been assumed by non-Muslims in the course of
the nineteenth century. The dangers of marginalization became fully apparent
after the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the gradual formation of separate
states on its former territory, and they were profoundly impressed on the fabric
of urban history.64

64. Tempting as it is, the larger issues of modernity and the rise of an indigenous (trans-
communal and nonsectarian) middle class in the early twentieth century cannot be addressed
here; for valuable recent additions to the debate, see Hanssen 2005 and Watenpaugh 2006.
 8
Urban Social Movements,
1750–1950
S A M I ZU BA I DA

• I N B R O A D O U T L I N E , a pattern of urban politics can be discerned in the

major cities of the Ottoman Empire in the eighteenth century, with continu-
ities into the nineteenth in most of them. Popular movements, protests, riots,
and rebellions are best considered in the context of the urban politics of that
period. Toward the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twenti-
eth centuries, a gradual transformation in the forms and frameworks of urban
(and now “national”) politics took place, which also transformed the forms of
popular organization and mobilization. We witness the emergence of modern
politics, a concept that will be elaborated further below. Th is chapter is orga-
nized around this emergence of modernity, fi rst examining the old patterns of
urban politics and popular movements and then defi ning political modernity
in terms of the newly emerging patterns.

“Traditional” Urban Politics

Who are the main actors on the urban political scene? What are their sources
of power and what are the stakes and issues of contention? The rulers of the
Ottoman city were the military classes, askaris. At the top of the hierarchy
was the pasha, the centrally appointed governor, with his personal retinue of
soldiers and functionaries. Usually appointed for one year (though a number
of individuals held office for both shorter and longer periods), his primary con-
cern was to try to extract as much revenue as possible (partly to recoup the
224
 Urban Social Movements | 225

investment he had made to acquire the office and to make a profit and partly
to remit revenues to the central treasury in Istanbul) and to maintain order
and allegiance to his lord, the sultan. The janissary regiments were another
regular military power in most Ottoman cities, known in Egypt as ocaks, with
their commanders, usually called aghas. These forces played different roles in
different cities at various times. They became particularly important at times
of crises and instability, when they assumed greater control and almost arbi-
trary powers, as we shall see in the case of Aleppo in the 1780s and 1790s. In
Istanbul and many other cities, the janissaries had particularly intimate con-
nections with the urban population, especially the craft guilds.1 A janissary
regiment would often attach itself to a particular guild as partner and protec-
tor, and some of the men would actually enroll as practitioners of the craft,
which did not leave much time or inclination for soldiering. In some cities,
such as Aleppo and Cairo, the ocaks were divided between those who were
long established and almost native to the city and those who were stationed
there on a tour of duty. The former, naturally, tended to form long-term attach-
ments to the guilds, though, at times, many other soldiers attempted to impose
their “partnership” on tradesmen (al-Jabarti n.d., 1:633–34).
Mamluks were another category in the military power elites of Ottoman
cities, most notably in Egypt during our period, but also in Iraq and Syria.
In eighteenth-century Cairo the Mamluk amirs (with the title of beg or bey)
were the virtual rulers, deploying large numbers of well trained and disci-
plined men, and benefiting from wide networks of influence and alliances
with local notables and urban strata. There were rivalries, however, between
Mamluk households, each around an amir and his slaves and freedmen, con-
trolling vast sources of revenue from rural tax farms, taxes on urban trade,
and sundry exactions. They also traded and often established monopolies in
various commodities. 2
The nonmilitary components of the urban elites consisted of the local
urban notables, in varying patterns of affi liation to the politico-military

1. For the organization of Ottoman provincial government in the “classical age,” see
Kunt 1983.
2. On Mamluk organization and politics in Egypt, see Hathaway 1997, especially ch. 3.
For Syria, see Grehan 2003; for Iraq, see Lier 2004.
226 | S A M I Z U B A I DA

rulers. The elite ulama (that is, not the general run of ulama), the mashayikh,
heads of Sufi turuq (orders), the ashraf (descendants of the Prophet) all derived
their status from their religious rank, fortified with personal wealth, endow-
ments, tax farms, and networks of kinship and patronage. Positions of leader-
ship were often kept and passed on within notable families, for example, the
office of naqib al-ashraf, or of mufti (Marcus 1989, 56–63; Th ieck 1985, 117–
68). Similarly, the shaykhs of Sufi turuq were often either the real or epony-
mous descendants of the founder saint, making their offices also hereditary.
Hence notability, wealth, endowments, and power tended to be concentrated
in particular families. Merchant and ulama families overlapped, and the control
exercised by the ulama over sectors of the urban economy forged links with
merchants and landlords. Thus both religious and merchant elites participated
in Hourani’s “politics of notables.” Formally, these notables were subservient to
the imperial politicomilitary elites, but in practice, the latter, being for the most
part alien to the city, and in the case of the pashas only enjoying short terms of
office, became dependent on the local notables for effective rule. In many Iraqi
and Syrian cities, some notable families were instrumental in the provisioning
of the city with food from the surrounding rural hinterland.3 As such they con-
trolled vital levers of power, and the military elite had to work through them.
In Cairo, Mamluk households acted as the focus for political affi liations
and factions, described by Hourani as “élites created by men possessing politi-
cal or military power, composed of freedmen trained in the service of the cur-
rent heads of the household, and held together by solidarity which would last
a lifetime” (Hourani 1968). The various rival households formed a core sur-
rounded by religious leaders, commanders of regiments, popular guilds, and
the inhabitants of particular urban quarters. The Mamluk households were
enmeshed within the urban fabric through their economic as well as politico-
military power. They controlled tax farms, which were major sources of rev-
enue, some of it in the form of agricultural goods in which they traded, often
using their military powers to create monopolies in certain goods, to corner
markets, and sometimes to coerce merchants to buy.4

3. See Hourani 1968, 41–68. On Iraqi cities, see Fatt ah 1997 and D. Khoury 1997a.
4. Hathaway 1997 deals extensively with the household of ‘Ali Bey and his
contemporaries.
 Urban Social Movements | 227

Below these power elites there were various segments of the urban popu-
lation, ra‘aya, subject to political rule and fiscal exactions. Many were orga-
nized into corporate bodies, each a tax-paying unit. The craft guilds were so
organized, under a craft master, and the guilds determined conditions of work,
remuneration, supplies of raw materials, standards of work, and prices. These
elements were also subject to regulation by the judicial authorities (the qadi and
the muhtasib). Urban quarters, which were often separated from each other by
high, gated walls, had chiefs, shaykh al-hara, and occasionally organized gangs
of young men, futuwwa, constituted another corporate tax-paying unit. Orga-
nized quarters and neighborhoods were also units of collective responsibility
before the qadi for legal or moral infractions in their locality (Marcus 1989,
326–28). Christian and Jewish communities were also constituted as corpo-
rate tax-paying units, and as such were often the subject of the most severe
exactions, as we shall see. 5
Having identified the main social components of the city, let us turn to
the dynamics that stimulated urban politics. These were primarily “mate-
rial” considerations, to do with taxes and food. Pashas might pay consider-
able sums for their office (in the early nineteenth century, estimated at about
200,000 piasters, which they tried to recoup at a profit, often an enormous
one: thus ‘Ali Pasha, expelled as governor of Aleppo in 1775 after only four
months in office, departed with 700,000 piasters, and some of his contempo-
raries did even better (Marcus 1989, 95–96). At the same time, lesser func-
tionaries, officers, and soldiers were also trying to enrich themselves. In the
eighteenth century, the imperial treasury in Istanbul levied various regular
taxes, which were occasionally supplemented by extraordinary levies decreed
by the sultan. Governors and other officials imposed additional taxes and
exactions, sometimes for particular projects such as military campaigns to
subdue tribes. They also imposed fi nes and penalties on various groups for
real or fabricated infractions.
Religious minorities were often subjected to demands for money, usually
in the form of ‘awn or avania. Particularly outrageous impositions would be
made on Christians and Jews, such as restrictive dress codes, or, as in Cairo

5. Abdul-Karim Rafeq has emphasized the multiconfessional nature of many of the craft
guilds. See chapter 4 in this volume, and Rafeq 1991.
228 | S A M I Z U B A I DA

in the late eighteenth century, the obligation for all those named after bibli-
cal figures (prophets to Muslims) such as Abraham or Joseph, to change their
names (al-Jabarti n.d., 1:639). The order would be rescinded on the payment of
a negotiated (hard bargaining) sum to the governor and appropriate officials.
Lower officials and soldiers engaged in various extortions from vulnerable
individuals or from guilds and quarters. These exactions fell on all sectors of
the urban population, including the a‘yan, notables, but the latter were better
placed to bargain and exert pressure. The mass of poorer urban dwellers suf-
fered disproportionately, and under particularly rapacious pashas, such as ‘Ali
Pasha in Aleppo, people could hardly earn enough to discharge all their ordi-
nary and extraordinary tax burdens.
Food provisioning of the cities was another source of enrichment for the
official class. During times of scarcity of basic foods, governors, officials, and
janissaries manipulated prices by hoarding and controlling supplies to make
maximum profits while the urban population went hungry. Local merchants,
and even local ulama, were often complicit in these operations.6
These confl icts over revenues and provisions formed the basic framework
of urban politics: intraelite confl ict over shares of the spoils, and confl icts
between elite and population over the volume of fiscal exactions and the price
of basic foods. Under normal circumstances intraelite confl ict was managed
through bargaining, threats, and the balance of power between the parties.
The urban populations had few avenues of effective action, and under con-
ditions of excessive fiscal oppression were for the most part quiescent: “But
only infrequently did the resentment break out in open political protest, and
then mostly in the form of small outbursts of despair rather than massive and
organized action” (Marcus 1989, 100). Marcus cites examples of these actions
in eighteenth-century Aleppo. Women occupied the minaret of the Great
Mosque in 1751, interrupting prayers and abusing the governor for inaction
on the famine. In 1778, crowds dragged the qadi to the governor’s palace with
demands that the governor be executed for not alleviating food shortages. In
1787, women gathered in the courthouse and cursed the notables while the
qadi took refuge in the citadel. We shall presently consider further examples
from Cairo.

6. For the provisioning of Iraqi cities, see Fatt ah 1997.

 Urban Social Movements | 229

There is a common view in the literature on Muslim cities that the notables,
and particularly the ulama, acted as the leaders of public opinion, represent-
ing the grievances of the populace to the rulers, and under extreme conditions
leading demonstrations and even riots in support of them.7 Th is view has been
convincingly challenged by Marcus and Baer for eighteenth-century Aleppo
and Cairo. Marcus wrote that the local leaders “represented certain groups
and clienteles, not the public in general. In exercising their influence they
also exploited various segments of the population. They practiced the politics
of hierarchy and subordination, not of consensus” (Marcus 1989, 101). Th is
theme will be further elaborated in the discussion of Cairo politics.
There were occasions, however, when notables, ulama, and even janissar-
ies did put themselves at the head of popular forces, although only when they
were the main protagonists in the struggle, pursuing their own interests, and
mobilizing popular discontent against the authorities as part of that process.
Marcus (1989) and Th ieck (1985) illustrate this very well in the context of the
widespread disturbances in Aleppo in the last quarter of the eighteenth cen-
tury. As mentioned earlier, a particularly extortionate governor, ‘Ali Pasha,
was expelled from the city in 1775. His exactions were directed against all sec-
tors of the population, including the rich and powerful. His downfall, however,
came only when he ordered the janissaries to march under his command on a
campaign into the countryside to subdue the tribes. Their officers challenged
his right to command them, and ‘Ali Pasha backed down. They subsequently
took advantage of his weakness to demand his departure, which they eventu-
ally forced with the support of a jubilant population: “As the expelled pasha
rode to the outskirts thousands of triumphant residents, including many
women, stood in the streets, jeering and spitt ing in contempt” (Marcus 1989,
88). Their joy did not last, however. The janissaries, at times in league with the
ashraf (also armed), and at times in open confl ict with them, made it impos-
sible for any governor to rule effectively till the early nineteenth century. If

7. For instance, Ernest Gellner’s model of “Muslim society” portrays urban communities
led by the ulama with the rule of the sharia, separate from the rulers and skeptical about their
legitimacy; see Gellner 1983, 54–56, 79–81. See also Zubaida 1995. Th is view is commonly
held by Islamist and nationalist historians and sociologists; see, for instance, Sayf al-Din ‘Abd
al-Fatt ah Isma‘il 1992.
230 | S A M I Z U B A I DA

anything, the rule of the janissaries was worse than that of the pashas, since
they imposed on the population, rich and poor, ever more innovative exac-
tions, fi nes, extortions, and manipulations of the food supply and prices. In
the fights between the janissaries, their ashraf rivals and successive pashas, the
urban population suffered increasing misery and insecurity, though sectors
of the townsfolk were occasionally mobilized on one side or the other. Their
force, however, was marginal to determining outcomes: it was the size of the
armed groups that mattered.
Hence, in the case of eighteenth-century Aleppo, popular movements
were limited to rare, sporadic, and short-lived riots. Some of the common peo-
ple occasionally participated in fights between elite factions and governors.
They never initiated these fights and were ultimately almost always the losers
when the triumphant faction turned on them for further exactions. Let us now
examine a number of interesting parallels and differences in the case of Cairo
in the same epoch.

Cairo

The picture of Cairo in the late eighteenth century emerging from studies such
as those of Raymond (1968) and Baer (1977) reveals a high level of active pop-
ular dissent. The last quarter of the century saw disturbances and crises result-
ing from struggles between the main Mamluk factions, led by Murad and
Ibrahim, and successive Ottoman pashas. The military formations of Mam-
luks, ocaks (janissaries), the pasha’s forces, and sundry other groupings took
different and sometimes shift ing sides. In the process the urban population
suffered arbitrary exactions and harassment and pillage by the soldiery. Th is
period culminated in the invasion and occupation of Egypt by Napoleon in
1798, which lasted until 1800. Various acts of resistance and two revolts char-
acterized this period, in which the urban population participated prominently.
The factional strife between Mamluks, pashas, and different military forma-
tions continued after the departure of the French and culminated in 1805 in
the investiture of Muhammad ‘Ali as governor in preference to the incumbent
pasha, which was ultimately ratified by the sultan. Sectors of the popular urban
classes also participated in the struggles leading to this event. What do these
episodes tell us about urban social movements at that time?
 Urban Social Movements | 231

André Raymond (1968, 1973–74) gives a vivid picture of the popular

quarters of Cairo in the eighteenth century, identifying the quarters inhabited
by the popular classes in terms of their economic activity. They were often cen-
tered around trades related to food: abattoirs, butchers’ markets, fruit and veg-
etable trades, tanneries, oil presses, and charcoal works. The neighborhoods of
many of these trades were disdained by the bourgeoisie, whose living quarters
were separate from them. The chronicler al-Jabarti expressed the bourgeoi-
sie’s prejudices and fears regarding these neighborhoods in the terms used to
designate their inhabitants: ahl al-hiraf al-safila, al-amma, al-nas al-dun, and
in their threatening aspects: al-usab (gangs), al-shuttar (louts), al-ghawgha’
(the populace), al-awbash (criminals), al-harafish (the rabble). These quarters
included al-Husayniyya, al-Rumayla, al-Hattaba, and al-Utuf, all outlying
suburbs of the city, and as such were perceived as marginal or external, in al-
Jabarti’s terms al-ahya’ al-barraniyya (Raymond 1968, 111). Like all city quar-
ters, these were corporate entities, some with their own gates separating them
from the outside and their own chief, the shaykh al-hara, with policing and
leadership functions. The locational identity of these quarters was reinforced
by their association with particular trades and corporations and particular
Sufi turuq. Thus al-Husayniyya was dominated by the butchers’ guild, which
was associated with the Bayumiyya order. The greengrocers’ corporation and
the Rifa‘iyya order were similarly associated with Rumayla. Gangs of young
men defended the quarter against external threats, sometimes enforced the
shaykh’s orders within, and engaged in real or ceremonial fights with youths
from other quarters.8 It was these gangs that were feared in the disturbances
and disorders which overtook the city in the late eighteenth and early nine-
teenth centuries.
In addition to these popular quarters, another element contributed to the
popular manifestations of Cairene politics. Th is was the university/mosque of
al-Azhar, and in particular its students. While the higher ulama, some of whom
were professors at Azhar, generally avoided involvement in popular manifes-
tations, the teachers at kuttabs, the imams and khatibs of small mosques, the

8. Najib Mahfuz’s novel Malhamat al-Harafi sh (1977) presents a vivid picture of life and
politics in the old urban quarters.
232 | S A M I Z U B A I DA

clerks of sharia courts, and sectors of the student body were often prominent
participants in protests and revolts. Th is is the class described by al-Jabarti as
al-muta‘ammimin, the turbaned.
Raymond (1968, 119) distinguishes two periods of intense popular activ-
ity: 1675–1735, followed by a period of calm till about 1780 when agitation
returned, continuing till 1805 when Muhammad ‘Ali established fi rm con-
trol and ushered in a long period of effective repression. Raymond relates this
periodization to economic fluctuations and fiscal oppression. The fi rst period
was one of food shortages, with prices fluctuating upward, accompanied by a
progressive debasement of the currency. Typically, the crowds would gather
at the foot of the citadel calling for measures to ameliorate shortages. Some
would get out of control and attack and pillage grain stores and the surround-
ing shops. The authorities reacted sometimes with severe repression and some-
times with edicts regulating supplies and prices. al-Rumayla, near the citadel
and grain stores, was often the center of these activities. In 1722, crowds riot-
ing because of food shortages stoned the beys on their way to the diwan. A pro-
tracted series of protests and riots occurred in 1715 as a reaction to the pasha’s
attempt to introduce a new debased para and forbid the use of earlier coinage.
Th is resulted in the closure of all the markets (often part of the disturbances,
if not as a protest by the traders, then out of fear of popular anger). Despite
retreats by the authorities, the situation did not return to normal for a month.
Raymond argues that popular activity in this early period resulted primar-
ily from economic conjunctures, and it ceased during the subsequent decades
of relative stability in food supply and prices. The second period of activity,
later in the century, started with similar economic grievances but took on an
increasingly political form, culminating in the revolts against the French occu-
pation in 1798–1800, and in popular participation in the struggles leading to
the installation of Muhammad ‘Ali in 1805.
The context of this politicization was the system of despoilment/exaction/
pillage set in motion by the Mamluk beys Ibrahim and Murad in the 1780s and
the Ottoman attempt to remove these beys with popular support. The beys’
exactions and open theft s affected many members of the bourgeoisie, includ-
ing wealthy ulama, and a number of awqaf provisioning various categories of
Azhar students (notably the blind). It followed that certain members of the
bourgeoisie and ulama, their interests directly harmed by the pillage, put
 Urban Social Movements | 233

themselves at the head of popular movements against the beys. In 1786, the
violent attack by one of Murad’s Mamluks on a butcher, Ahmad Salim, who
was also a shaykh of the Bayumiyya, occasioned a revolt in al-Husayniyya. The
beys were obliged to negotiate with Shaykh al-Dardir, a prominent alim and
patron of this order. The Cairenes were ultimately disappointed by the failure
of the Ottoman attempt to subdue the beys, who resumed their pillage, and
protest activity intensified. In 1787 merchants and craft guilds rebelled against
a Mamluk attempt to raise a forced loan. Many similar incidents followed, in
which the solidarities of guild/tariqa/quarter were instrumental. al-Azhar stu-
dents rioted in 1777 and 1785 against attempts by Mamluk beys to deprive
them of their waqf allocations (Baer 1977).
Hence the revolts of the latter decades of the eighteenth century were
clearly linked to economic factors. However, the revolts became political to
the extent that the grievances resulted from the oppressive exactions on the
urban population carried out by Mamluk amirs. Inter-elite confl icts, between
Mamluks, Ottoman pashas, and prominent bourgeois notables involved the
popular classes in their struggles. In the revolts against the French, a further
dimension, the religious, was superimposed on these two.
The revolts against the French, especially the one in 1800, saw a consid-
erable degree of organization on the part of the popular classes. One feature
was the building of barricades, with large numbers of insurgents sheltering
behind them. The 1800 revolt was led by Ottoman units, which organized
and directed popular militias. Each quarter contributed its own militia, and a
gun factory was established in which local artisans were employed. Rich mer-
chants contributed supplies (Baer 1977, 226–27). The struggle had the aspect
of a Muslim or “native” war against the Christian invader (an aspect that will
be elaborated below). Popular participation, reflecting, as it did, the solidarity
of quarter, guild, and tariqa, was ultimately organized and directed by profes-
sional soldiers, but the events of 1805 can, perhaps, be seen to have thrown up
a more autonomous popular leadership.
The context of the 1805 events was the struggle for power between the
Ottoman pasha Ahmad Khurshid and Muhammad ‘Ali, the leader of the Alba-
nian Ottoman troops originally sent to fight the French, in which Mamluks,
janissaries, and various military units participated. The inhabitants of Cairo
had their own grievances against fiscal excesses as well as arbitrary oppression
234 | S A M I Z U B A I DA

and pillage by soldiers. The pasha’s edicts restraining the soldiers (issued after
the mediation of al-Azhar ulama over the demands of popular demonstrations)
were ignored. Subsequent popular agitations were increasingly well organized,
involving, at one stage, a siege of the Citadel that prevented provisions from
reaching it. Popular leaders emerged at the head of these agitations, such as
Hajjaj al-Khudari, head of the greengrocers’ guild in al-Rumayla, and Ibn
Sham‘a, the shaykh of the butchers (Raymond 1968, 116; Baer 1977, 241–42).
Ultimately, the Porte acquiesced in Muhammad ‘Ali’s military superiority and
sent a messenger nominating him as pasha. The messenger was welcomed by
an enormous demonstration consisting mainly of popular masses and janis-
saries and headed by the two leaders. The same quarters and suburbs feature
as the sources of popular movements: al-Husayniyya, al-Rumayla, al-Utuf,
and so on. However, the triumph of Muhammad ‘Ali and his consolidation of
power saw a rapid return to calm and normality; the popular movements sub-
sided, and their leaders were forgotten (Raymond 1968, 116).

The Question of Political Modernity

The forms of politics described so far can be distinguished as “premodern.” The

question then arises as to the nature of political modernity. Michael Walzer
characterized it in the following terms:

A politics of confl ict and competition for power, of faction, intrigue and
open war is probably universal in human history. Not so a politics of party
organisation and methodical activity, opposition and reform, radical ide-
ology and revolution. . . . The detached appraisal of a going system, the
programmatic expression of discontent and aspiration, the organisation of
zealous men for sustained political activity: it is surely fair to say that these
three together are aspects of the modern, that is, the post-medieval politi-
cal world. (Walzer 1966, 1)

In The Revolution of the Saints, Walzer goes on to argue that the Calvinists of
the English Civil War were the fi rst to develop this form of politics. He goes on
to specify the general conditions that make this form of politics possible: the
separation of politics from the household, the appearance of free men (without
masters), the rational and pragmatic consideration of political methods (as in
Machiavelli), and, crucially, the rise of large-scale and inclusive political units,
 Urban Social Movements | 235

as in the modern state, beginning with the absolutist destruction of feudal seg-
mentarity in Europe (Walzer 1966, 1).
In these terms, the forms of politics described so far are decidedly pre-
modern. Interelite politics is clearly one of “confl ict and competition for
power, of faction, intrigue and open war.” Solidarities are based on personal
loyalties and patronage (as in Mamluk households), kinship, and, in the case
of the popular classes, neighborhood, guilds, and turuq. Crucial to all these
is a strong “materialism,” an orientation toward economic interests. The ulti-
mate stakes in practically all political struggles were revenues, and for the city
population, food prices, fiscal oppression, and other arbitrary exactions. Popu-
lar movements were generally spontaneous and short-lived, revolving around
immediate grievances. As such, they were far from “sustained political activ-
ity.” The issues had nothing to do with reform or revolution of “the system”;
such a concept would have been quite alien. Popular aspirations were always
for the appearance of a just prince who would bring stability and security. It
can be argued, then, that premodern politics was materialist and nonideologi-
cal. Yet how can such an argument be sustained for a milieu that was evidently
imbued with religious precepts?
Having traced the pattern of urban movements in several Arab cities in the
nineteenth century, Burke concludes that riots did not consist of acts of aim-
less violence, but were indeed directed against particular targets that were the
locus of their grievances: “The burden of the foregoing,” he states, “is that there
was indeed a popular ideology of social protest in the Middle Eastern societies
which centered upon the application of the sharia by a vigilant Muslim ruler”
(Burke 1989, 47–48; cf. Grehan 2003). He goes on to enumerate the various
economic provisions of the sharia whose application was demanded by the
protesters, including restrictions on taxation and debasements of the coinage
and the prohibition of usury.
There is no doubt that the demand for justice and for a just prince was
at the center of popular protest. Notions of justice are inevitably religious
and customary (the two not being always distinct in the popular, or even the
learned, mind). Indeed, even in interelite confl icts one party would denounce
the other as traitors or deviants from religious prescriptions (al-Jabarti n.d.,
1:621–22). The language of righteousness and justice was intimately tied
to religion, although this is not to say that there was a precise notion in the
236 | S A M I Z U B A I DA

sharia of what actually constituted legal and illegal taxes and coinages. From
the earliest times, Muslim rulers had levied taxes and other dues dictated by
administrative fiat rather than canonical sanction, and the ulama and fuqaha’
for the most part abstained from raising legal objections. The exceptions were
situations of confl ict, disorder, and crisis in which the weight of fiscal oppres-
sion, food prices, and plain pillage were regular features, and in which pro-
tests whether by ulama, rival princes, or the populace always laid their claim
to justice in religious, that is, shar‘i, terms. Religion and legality provided a
vocabulary of demands and contests rather than a determinate notion of alter-
native political or legal orders. Burke and others have described these forms
of contestation and opposition as “moral economy.” The argument here is that
it is best to regard this economy as a language of contestation rather than as a
precise description of an existing or desired system.
Within this ideological sphere of contest, the existing system of rule is
taken as given: the object is to make the prince just or to exchange him for a
more just ruler. The only form of radical transformation envisaged is that of
the end of time. Although messianic notions thrived in both Sunni and Shi‘i
Islam, they did not engender significant urban movements in the period under
discussion, though they did in the rural and tribal hinterlands, as exemplified
most notably by the Sudanese Mahdiyya.
Another religious element in urban social movements was the role of the
ulama and the mosque. The mosque was the point of assembly and the locus
of the expression of grievances for most demonstrations and protests, and the
minarets the loci of public calls to action. The crowds almost always took their
grievances fi rst to prominent ulama and attempted to enlist them as leaders
and spokesmen to convey their grievances to the princes. Naturally, this led
many observers to suppose that the ulama were the leaders of the urban popu-
lace and their representatives before the authorities. As we have already inti-
mated, this view has been strongly challenged by some writers on the subject,
most notably for Egypt by Gabriel Baer.
Baer distinguishes between the high ulama, the teachers at al-Azhar, the
holders of high office, and supervisors of large foundations and the lower ulama,
clerks, maktab teachers, muezzins and imams at small mosques, and above all
the students of al-Azhar (Baer 1977, 228–42). The lower ulama played a promi-
nent part in popular movements and frequently led them. They were, however,
 Urban Social Movements | 237

regarded by the rulers and the bourgeoisie as part of the lower orders and not as
intermediaries and representatives who had access to the ears of authority. These,
and in particular the students, notably the blind students and their leaders, were
prominent in many of the popular movements and events in the late eighteenth
and early nineteenth centuries, including the risings against the French.
As for the high ulama, it is true that the populace, faced with fiscal oppres-
sion and famine, often resorted to them, particularly to the Shaykh al-Azhar.
The responses of the ulama, however, with few exceptions, were seldom favor-
able. They were sometimes coerced by potentially violent crowds into leading
processions to the Citadel and airing their grievances. Raymond (1999, 432–
33) draws a typical scenario: the crowd proceeds to the Grand Mosque, occu-
pies the minarets and calls for resistance, the calls accompanied by the beat
of drums. They close the markets and the shops. They assemble in the fore-
courts and at the gates of the mosque and demand the presence of the shaykhs
and their intervention with the authorities regarding their grievances. They
proceed in a procession with the ulama at its head “more dead than alive.” If
a favorable response is obtained from the Citadel, then the ulama are nomi-
nated guarantors of its implementation. The people suspect that the ulama
are in league with the authorities, and the authorities suspect them of stirring
up the people. Naturally, the ulama tried, whenever they could, to distance
themselves from this role. Their response was always to try and calm down
any potential agitation, and if they failed, to avoid involvement. They natu-
rally shared the att itudes of the authorities and the bourgeoisie, of fear and
contempt of the lowly crowds. In addition, many of the higher ulama had close
political and economic ties with the princes. When Hasan Pasha arrived in
Cairo from Istanbul in 1786 with orders from the Porte to remove the rapa-
cious Mamluks, the att itude of the ulama toward him was reserved, and when
the Mamluk beys in question fled to Upper Egypt and Hasan proceeded to
sequester their properties and harems, the leading ulama pleaded on their
behalf. In these and other ways, it is clear that the interests of the ulama were
far removed from the interests or demands of the popular masses. Even in the
revolts against the French, in which lower ulama were prominent, the higher
ulama largely avoided involvement and tried to calm the situation. Some of
the most prominent cooperated with the French, subsequently incurring the
wrath of the crowds (Baer 1977, 230–231).
238 | S A M I Z U B A I DA

Baer gives many examples of the ulama evading the calls of the masses
in situations of intense confl ict. For example, in 1805, they cancelled their
classes at al-Azhar and retired to their homes until a clear winner emerged in
the struggle, at which point they came out to support him. The extensive popu-
lar participation in these events, as we have seen, was led by figures from the
quarters and the guilds, but also in the early stages by Sayyid ‘Umar Makram,
whose name is fi rmly associated with Muhammad ‘Ali, as a leader of the
crowds. Baer argues that Makram was not an alim, in the sense of a religious
rank or any special learning, but a sayyid (1977, 236–41). He was a notable,
involved in political alliances with Mamluk beys. The popular masses soon
lost confidence in him and followed their local leaders. Baer gives examples of
two other prominent ulama associated with the popular leadership and argues
that they were representing constituencies in which they had material and
political interests (1977, 229–30). For example, Shaykh al-Dardir, mentioned
above as the defender of al-Husayniyya quarter, was closely associated with
the Bayumiyya order centered in that quarter and was in that instance cham-
pioning a political constituency.
One of the most important religious sentiments that emerged in the course
of these events was what was later called “communalism,” the sense of solidar-
ity of Muslims against Christians, which came most prominently to the fore
during the French occupation. It is exemplified in the sermon preached to the
crowds by an al-Azhar student: “O Muslims, the jihad is incumbent upon you.
How can you free men agree to pay the poll tax (jizya) to the unbelievers? Have
you no pride? Has the call not reached you?” (Baer 1977, 231).
As has been mentioned, Christian and Jewish communities were some-
times targets of popular unrest. In the fi rst revolt against the French in 1798,
the crowds started stealing and looting from the markets, and then turned to
the residential quarters of Syrian Christians, not sparing Muslim houses in the
vicinity. Women and girls were raped. The second revolt against the French in
1800 started with the looting of the stores of the French army and continued
with the plunder of Christian houses. Th is second revolt “turned into a general
massacre of Christians and other minorities” (Baer 1977, 224–26). On that
occasion Ottoman representatives rewarded the crowds for capturing Chris-
tians and Jews.
 Urban Social Movements | 239

It may be argued, as Raymond does (1999, 455), that this hostility to

minorities was not “traditional” but a product of their cooperation with the
occupiers, and that is largely correct. However, on other occasions of disorder
before the French invasion, though looting and pillage were largely indiscrimi-
nate, the Christians also tended to be targeted particularly. There were other
occasions on which Christians angered the crowds by public religious displays
that were felt to breach their inferior status. Th is occurred in 1749, when a
Coptic pilgrimage to Jerusalem, though authorized by a fatwa, was judged to
be too ostentatious. The pilgrim camp was attacked by al-Azhar students lead-
ing a crowd who looted and stoned the camp and a neighboring church, caus-
ing many casualties (Baer 1977, 225–26).
As European penetration and domination spread in the region in the
course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the religious minorities
became more closely associated with the foreigners. Though modern national-
ist ideologies generally emphasize national unity across religious and sectarian
boundaries, popular sentiment in the nineteenth century sometimes caused
hostility to be directed against religious minorities. The communal clashes in
Aleppo in 1850, followed by the intercommunal massacres in Syria and Leba-
non in 1860, were among the most notable instances in the nineteenth century
(Masters 1990; Fawaz 1994; Rafeq 1988a; Rogan 2004).

Conditions of Political Modernity in Middle East Cities

Over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries Walzer’s conditions
of political modernity developed at a different pace in different parts of the
region. They naturally took their various forms following the peculiarities of
history and society. Let us briefly review some of these conditions.
Larger and more inclusive political units developed with increasing
state centralization, breaking down local isolation, autonomy, and centers of
power. In Egypt, Muhammad ‘Ali’s gradual assumption of rule, perhaps the
earliest and most thorough in this regard, was greatly facilitated by the topog-
raphy and economy of the country. The Mamluk amirs were liquidated at a
famous massacre in 1811, early in Muhammad ‘Ali’s reign, and their followers
absorbed into his entourage. Extensive controls were established over the rural
areas and a strict regime of crop allocation and state monopolies established
240 | S A M I Z U B A I DA

(Marsot 1984a; Cuno 1988). A conscript army of peasants was established,

the fi rst of its kind in the region and indeed in most of the world at that time.
The regime incorporated technical methods and imported skilled person-
nel from Europe to work in a variety of military and economic enterprises.
Although unintentionally, Muhammad ‘Ali was laying the foundations of what
was later to become a nation-state. In other parts of the Ottoman Empire, the
local powers of notables, warlords, and tribal aristocracies were very evidently
under attack by the middle of the nineteenth century and were slowly whitt led
down in favor of varying degrees of state centralization; in Iran, this was only
achieved in the early decades of the twentieth century by Reza Shah. Modern
military technology, transport, and communications were essential condi-
tions for this centralization. However, these same conditions facilitated the
organization and mobilization of modern political movements of opposition
and rebellion on a national scale.
These processes of centralization proceeded in the general context of
increasing European penetration, leading, in some cases, as in Egypt, to direct
foreign military and political control. Th is shaped the structure of modern pol-
itics, predominantly urban, in the direction of forms of anticolonial struggle.
The models of liberation and of independence were derived from European
ideas and ideologies, fi rst liberal and nationalist, and later fascist and socialist.
National liberation and nationalism remained a central component of all these
ideologies and political movements.
On the social level, processes of economic development and political cen-
tralization contributed to the breakdown of primary social units and solidari-
ties, of tribe, village, and urban quarter, although this proceeded unevenly in
different places. Egyptian guilds were weakened as they lost their monopoly
over labor in their particular crafts and had mostly become redundant by the
1920s (Baer 1968, 142–47; Chalcraft 2004), but their Iranian counterparts
retained many of their social and political functions in the bazaars until much
later in the century (Floor 1975, 1983). Rural to urban migration, a crucial
factor for the shaping of the urban economy, society, and politics, proceeded
apace in early-twentieth-century Egypt. The quarters of central Cairo were
transformed, the rural influx leading to the departure of the rich and middle
classes to the more salubrious suburbs, and the old quarters became slums for
 Urban Social Movements | 241

the poor. Th is process also weakened the organization and solidarity of the
quarters and their function as corporate units.
The expansion of a modernized state and its associated public sectors,
most notably education, spawned a new, largely secular, intelligentsia. Th is
became the ideological class par excellence that absorbed and adapted the new
reformist, nationalist, and revolutionary ideas whose goal was the achievement
of national independence and strength and the transformation of state and
society in accordance with particular ideological blueprints. From these ranks
came Walzer’s “zealous men” organized for “sustained political activity.”
A new political element emerging in the early decades of the twentieth
century in Cairo and elsewhere was the modern working class.9 Industrializa-
tion in Egypt was limited to particular sectors, such as textiles, food process-
ing, tobacco, and sugar. In addition, transport and utilities, notably railways
and tramways, were significant employers, and the Iranian oil industry became
an important employer in the 1930s and 1940s. Workers in these industries
were numerically few but politically significant when organized and led by
cadres from rival modern political parties and in the context of nationalist
struggles. There remained, however, the large majority of the urban popular
classes who were not part of this class and did not share its organization. The
majority of the urban poor were (and still remain) engaged in the “informal
economy,” employed in small businesses and workshops, pett y trade, casual
work in construction, and numerous pett y services (Santos 1979). These sec-
tors had, for the most part, lost the traditional organizational forms of villages,
guilds, tariqas, or quarters and had not acquired new forms of working class
organization. The flood of rural migrants into cities persisting to the present
day has ensured that these groups are an ever-increasing proportion of the
urban poor in most cities. Politically, these groups oscillate between apathy
or quietism and militancy in relation to particular grievances. Governments
and organized parties and movements have tried to control and mobilize some
of these groups with varying degrees of success. There is a prevalent view that
they only respond ideologically to Islamic appeals, and it is certainly the case

9. For studies of labor, see the various essays in Lockman 1994 and E. Goldberg 1996. For
Iraq, see Farouk-Sluglett and Sluglett 1983b.
242 | S A M I Z U B A I DA

that at various points, notably in the Iranian Revolution, Islamic appeals were
successful in addressing their grievances and mobilizing them. However, as we
shall show, communist and nationalist parties also enjoyed great favor with the
urban masses, specially the communists in Iraq and Iran in the middle decades
of the twentieth century, and the Nasserists in Egypt. I shall now elaborate on
some of these themes in relation to examples drawn from Egypt and Iran.

Urban Politics in the Modern Period: Egypt

Egyptian agriculture was transformed during the nineteenth century.

Increased food and cotton production facilitated population growth, but
also created increasing numbers of landless peasants. Rapid industrialization
and construction in Cairo in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centu-
ries att racted waves of rural migrants into the city. The British military pres-
ence, especially during the two world wars, spawned demands for goods and
labor. Successive economic booms in Egypt attracted migration from outside,
mainly of Europeans and “Levantines,” entrepreneurs, bankers, and traders,
but also of craftsmen and skilled workers. The largest communities were Greek
and Italian, the richest French and British (Reimer 1991, 1993, 1997).
In the decade after 1917, Cairo absorbed more than 200,000 newcomers,
an increase in population from fewer than 800,000 in 1917 to over one million
in 1927 and over two million in 1947 (Abu-Lughod 1971, 173–74). Beginning
in the nineteenth century the waves of rural migrants were mostly accommo-
dated in the old quarters of medieval Cairo. Population density increased to
very high levels in these areas, raising the incidence and frequency of epidem-
ics. The middle class inhabitants of these quarters moved out, and the quarters
became increasingly dilapidated. Land speculation and building developments
enveloped the city, but had the effect of segregating and isolating classes and
ethnic groups. Ilbert characterizes these divisions as a hierarchical division of
urban space between the bourgeoisie (of various nationalities) and the work-
ers and employees (Ilbert 1989, 278). These popular classes were divided and
ranked by nationality and place of origin: non-Egyptians on top, followed by
urban Egyptians, and the rural migrants at the bottom of the pile, each group
with its particular neighborhoods and levels of housing.
How did this situation feed into political sentiments, organization, and
action? Opposition to foreign domination constituted the overall framework
 Urban Social Movements | 243

of Egyptian politics. It was the raison d’être for the most important political
party, the Wafd, formed in 1919 to press for Egyptian representation at the
Paris Peace Conference, which developed into a national liberation rally led
by Sa‘d Zaghlul. The Muslim Brotherhood, formed in 1928, had national inde-
pendence, combined with Islamic self-assertion, at the core of its advocacy.
The communist movement, which included prominent European and Jew-
ish elements, was often divided, but exercised considerable influence, and the
trade unions articulated their ideas of class struggle in the quest for national
liberation (Botman 1988). Though experiencing periodic waves of relative
prosperity in the interwar period and after World War II, the poorer classes
were also exposed to high inflation, great employment insecurity, and poor liv-
ing conditions. The European elements, both bourgeoisie and workers, occu-
pied a special position in society, and their privileges over the natives were
highly visible at an everyday level. Many elements of the urban classes were
engaged in servile jobs for the foreign communities. Hence a colonial situation
was superimposed on class confl ict.
During the fi rst half of the twentieth century, labor organization and
activism constituted an important element of Egyptian politics.10 Textile
manufacture was the single largest sector of Egyptian industry, and the largest
employer: in 1945 it employed 37 percent of officially enumerated industrial
workers in Egypt, mostly in large enterprises employing between 2,000 and
20,000 workers (Beinin 1988, 208). The factories were concentrated in two
industrial suburbs of Cairo, Shubra al-Khayma and al-Mahalla al-Kubra. The
majority of enterprises in the fi rst were owned by non-Egyptians, Europeans
and Levantines, and those in the second were entirely owned by Misr Company,
a national Egyptian enterprise. The population of Shubra al-Khayma grew rap-
idly from several tens of thousands in the early 1930s to 250,000 by the end of
that decade (Beinin 1988, 209). Trade union organization started in the early
1930s, fi rst under the patronage of the Wafd Party, which viewed organized
labor as part of the national movement, denying the existence of separate class
interests. Some members of the leadership of the new unions, however, insisted
on the formation of independent unions run by their members that would not

10. Th is section on the Egyptian labor movement draws on E. Goldberg 1986, Beinin and
Lockman 1987, and Beinin 1988. See also Burke 1986.
244 | S A M I Z U B A I DA

be dependent on the patronage of notables. Th is view was to prevail over the

following decades, and these unions, forming part of a national federation of
trade unions, were to become one of the most militant elements of the national
movement and to engage in prolonged and effective strikes.
The communist movement became closely involved in the organization
and propaganda of trade unionism and played an important part in establish-
ing the idea of working class interests and of independent unions. The Soci-
ety of Muslim Brothers, which was also involved in popular organization and
mobilization, moved into this area in an attempt to establish its hegemony over
workers’ organizations. Its outlook, however, was far removed from notions of
class struggle, unless the bosses were non-Muslims. Otherwise, like the Wafd,
it espoused an organicist view of national (and for the Muslim Brothers, Mus-
lim) solidarity undisturbed by class divisions. Within such ideologies, workers’
aspirations were to be guided by principles of overriding national interest, and
the idea of autonomous organization and struggle was not favored. Until 1952,
Shubra al-Khayma remained a center of militancy backed by strike actions and
of much bitter strife. The Misr Company, regarded as a national institution,
escaped industrial struggles until 1947 by dealing harshly with any manifesta-
tions of militancy (Beinin 1988, 209).
Hence, there was a struggle for the control of the workers’ movement
between the Wafd, the communists, and the Muslim Brothers. These move-
ments represented different styles of politics with regard to the formation
of constituencies of support. We may distinguish two such styles. The fi rst
proceeded through networks of patronage and influence as well as straight
bargaining for favors, and the second depended on ideological conversion,
organization, and a disciplined membership and following. The Wafd, the
dominant party in Egyptian political life, followed both styles in different con-
texts. It maintained an important constituency of support among the intelli-
gentsia and workers, especially in the 1920s and 1930s (although with neither
membership nor branch structure) (Owen 1992, 227). At the same time, its
electoral success depended on the patronage and influence of its notable lead-
ers and deputies. Landlords were assured of the votes of their peasants and the
villages under their patronage. Similarly, urban deputies utilized networks of
influence of leading personalities in government offices, urban districts, and
business sectors.
 Urban Social Movements | 245

The Muslim Brothers relied primarily on ideological conversion and the

disciplined and systematic work of members and branch (at one time called
“families”) organizers. In this respect they were typically “modern” and thus
distinct from the Islamic movements of earlier periods. At the same time, how-
ever, they tended to fi nd their constituencies in communities where they orga-
nized social services, mutual help associations, and businesses which provided
employment (including a Muslim Brothers’ textile mill in Shubra al-Khayma,
founded with the intention of absorbing the unemployed) (Beinin 1988,
224). Such communal foundations of constituencies are to be found in other
instances of the politics of the poor, including the Italian Communist Party in
more recent times. Numerically weak and fragmented, the communist move-
ment played an important part in the organization of workers, students, and
intellectuals. It followed an ideological political style, but its achievements
were limited. Neither the Muslim Brothers nor the communists were permit-
ted to participate directly in elections, and were often banned, persecuted, and
forced into clandestinity.
The main actors in all these opposition political movements and events were
students and members of the modern intelligentsia: teachers, functionaries,
professionals, low-ranking army officers, and organized workers. In addition,
the Muslim Brothers included some businessmen and members of the urban
lower middle classes. There is litt le evidence of the systematic involvement of
the urban poor from the popular quarters in organized politics, although they
may have been the object of political agitation and attempts at mobilization.
The communists devoted their energies to organized workers. The Wafd and
other government parties may have included sectors of these classes in elector-
ally oriented favors, but the Muslim Brothers were the most consistently active
at the popular level. However, the poor did not constitute part of their orga-
nization, but were rather objects of preaching and propaganda. In the 1940s,
the Muslim Brothers held regular political rallies in urban centers, including a
series of meetings after the end of World War II that it called a “People’s Con-
gress” (Mitchell 1969, 192–93). Some of these gatherings culminated in dem-
onstrations with nationalist, anti-British and anti-Zionist slogans. The social
composition of these meetings and demonstrations can only be guessed at, but
they were most likely composed of the same elements noted earlier, but per-
haps with some participation of the poorer classes.
246 | S A M I Z U B A I DA

Descriptions of the riots and uprisings that erupted in Cairo in January

1952 suggest somewhat wider participation, including members of the poor
urban classes, whose frustrations and discontents coincided with a period of
nationalist ferment against the dominant British and foreign presence. The
years 1945–52 were marked by ever more intensive political agitation and
struggle, with the object of ending British military occupation of the Canal
Zone, but also directed against Egyptian governments, politicians, and the
king, all of whom were regarded as pursuing their own, as well as Britain’s
interests. In 1948–49 the crushing defeat of the Arab forces, including the
Egyptian army, in the fi rst Arab-Israeli war, added to the profound sense of
national grievance and humiliation. All the political parties were involved in
these agitations, jockeying for popular leadership, and guerrilla fighters were
dispatched to the Canal Zone to harass the British military. In January 1952,
the British military command ordered a detachment of Egyptian auxiliary
police to leave their barracks in Isma‘iliyya, suspecting them of participation
in armed activity. When they refused to go they were attacked with tanks and
artillery leading to many deaths and injuries. Th is caused great national out-
rage, and the following day there were demonstrations in Cairo led by members
of the police force, but with the organized participation of all the opposition
parties. Many others joined the demonstrations, which became a violent riot.
At the royal palace the king came out to the balcony to acknowledge shouts
of “Long live the King,” only to be insulted and jeered at by the crowd. It was
reported that he then ordered his guards to machine-gun the crowd. (Mostyn
1989, 168). The angry mob proceeded to attack and burn British, European, or
Jewish establishments in the city, including the Opera House, the Turf Club,
large (Jewish-owned) department stores, various cabarets, and Shepheard’s
Hotel, a monument of British domination. By the end of that day, much of
European Cairo had been destroyed and burned. A few months later, the Free
Officers’ coup brought about the end of the monarchy, and ultimately the end
of pluralist party politics, inaugurating the single party military nationalist
state and a very different style of government.

Transitions to Political Modernity in Iranian Cities

Iran presents patterns of urban sociology and of transitions to modernity very

different from those in Egypt, reflecting its very different social and political
 Urban Social Movements | 247

structure. During the nineteenth century, Iranian cities were controlled by

more or less autonomous power elites on whom the Qajar authorities depended
for effective rule, in marked contrast to the powerful centralization and control
under Muhammad ‘Ali and his successors. The urban power elites in Iran con-
sisted of landowners, tribal chiefs, merchants, and ulama. Senior ulama were
often themselves landowners or merchants, or at least members of landowning
and merchant families. In each city, the bazaar, its guilds and powerful mer-
chants, with close links to the ulama and to the land, dominated the urban
economy and the sociopolitical organization of the city. A large sector of the
urban popular classes (though not all) were included in the bazaar economy
and society through ties of work, guild, religious allegiance, dependence, and
charity. Like those in Cairo, the Iranian guilds comprised religious associa-
tions (not Sufi orders), hierarchical structures, and had an esprit de corps—
some in Isfahan even had their own secret dialects (Abrahamian 1968, 192).
Iranian cities had their own toughs, lutis, who trained in gymnasia with strong
religious affi liations known as zurkhane (house of strength). They engaged in
interquarter hostilities, but also took sides in factional and political fights fol-
lowing allegiances and rewards.
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Iranian cities wit-
nessed a number of protracted disturbances, with demonstrations, strikes,
and riots directed against the government. For the most part these events were
organized and orchestrated by elements of the urban elite whose interests
were threatened by the ruler’s involvements with European interests. Unlike
Egypt and other parts of the Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth century, the
foreign presence in Iran was less pronounced or direct. Nevertheless, the trad-
ing privileges and concessions ceded by cash-hungry shahs to British and Rus-
sian interests had an adverse effect on the bazaar economy. Goods imported
from the various European empires threatened traditional Iranian markets,
and the low tariffs enjoyed by foreign merchants gave them a great advantage
over their Iranian counterparts.
The two most important episodes were the Tobacco Protest of 1891–92,
followed by the Constitutional Revolution of 1905–11.11 The fi rst was in

11. For an analysis of the tobacco episode, see Keddie 1966; on the Constitutional Revo-
lution, see Martin 1989 and Abrahamian 1982. The discussion of popular participation in
248 | S A M I Z U B A I DA

response to the grant of a monopoly for the production and trade of tobacco by
the Shah to a British company. Protests culminated in a fatwa proclaiming a
boycott of all tobacco products, which resulted in the deal being reversed. On
one level, the Constitutional Revolution was fi red by modern political objec-
tives, specifically a constitution to limit the absolute rule of the Qajar monarch,
and these demands were put forward by the small group of European-influ-
enced intellectuals. These intellectuals were also backed, however, by impor-
tant groups of ulama and bazaaris, including sectors of the urban population.
The decisive participation of these groups was motivated not so much by their
commitment to litt le-understood modern political concepts as by an increas-
ing sense of frustration and alarm at the direction in which the country and
the economy seemed to be heading under a shah allied to the very foreigners
who were threatening their interests. Th is movement, then, presents a fasci-
nating combination of traditional organization and allegiances with modern
politics and would as such make a good case study of the transition between
the two.12
The movement started in 1905 with a protest by merchants and money
lenders against official tariffs, taxes, and impositions which harmed them, in
which they were supported by other guilds and prominent ulama. The protests
took the form of bazaar strikes, then marching in a procession to some notable
location of sanctuary (bast), a favorite being ‘Abd al-‘Azim, a mosque on the
outskirts of Tehran. The protracted crisis led in 1906 to a general strike orga-
nized by the Society of Guilds (recently formed to coordinate action), which
then led a massive demonstration of some 14,000 people, who took sanctuary
in the gardens of the British Legation for a period of three weeks. Th is was
certainly a novel location for bast, which usually took place at a religious site.
The protesters were mostly craftsmen and traders with their apprentices, but
also included “modern” elements in the form of students from the newly estab-
lished technical colleges.

this section draws extensively on Abrahamian’s seminal article, “The Crowd in Iranian Politics
1905–1953” (1968). For the “Syrian crowd,” see Grehan 2003.
12. “The Constitutional Revolution was a movement of the bazaar. Its rank-and-fi le came
from the guilds, its fi nancial backing from the merchants, its moral support from religious
authorities, and its theorizing from a few westernized intellectuals.” Abrahamian 1968, 192.
 Urban Social Movements | 249

By 1906 the movement had succeeded in forcing the shah to accept a con-
stitution and a parliament, and the fi rst elections were held. However, this
was the beginning of protracted struggles leading toward a civil war between
the royalists and the constitutionalists that was to continue sporadically till
Reza Khan’s coup d’état against the Qajar monarchy in 1924, which eventu-
ally established his own dynasty. Foreign powers intervened, including a Rus-
sian invasion in 1911 which laid siege to parliament. The royalist backlash was
supported by many ulama who were tied to the court by their own material
interests, but also by some who feared the spread of modern ideas of constitu-
tionalism and its implications for religious legal authority. What is of special
interest for this discussion is that the royalist ranks also included large sec-
tors of the urban poor who were mobilized against the predominantly bazaari
constitutionalists. The latter were dominated by moneyed and commercial
interests, and were not interested in securing cheap bread for the poor. On the
contrary, the free market advocacy by these groups in parliament turned the
poor against them, and made them receptive to the preaching of the royalist
ulama against the new heresies. During this period the poor also staged spon-
taneous bread riots along traditional lines. In Isfahan, a peaceful procession of
women presented a petition for cheaper bread to the governor, which turned
into a riot when he gave them an obscene answer. They chased him through the
streets and killed him, and then sacked government offices. Another element
in the poor royalist crowd was the large numbers of servants, retainers, and
dependents of the court. Parliament’s newfound control of the royal budget
led to many of these people not being paid or losing their jobs. Hence specific
material interests played a major role in determining individual allegiances
(Abrahamian 1968, 196–98).
During the civil war, Tabriz was geographically divided on class lines
between the constitutionalists who were centered in the rich quarters, and the
royalists who occupied the slum area (Abrahamian 1968, 199). However, class
only determined political stance at a superficial and partial level. The poor of
the bazaar, those who were members of guilds and dependent on bazaar per-
sonages and associations, followed those allegiances. In both cases the poor,
though following their immediate interests and constraints, did so not out
of any ideological questioning of the system, but in allegiance to one set or
another of traditional patrons and superiors, the court and royalist ulama in
250 | S A M I Z U B A I DA

the one case, and the bazaar magnates and associations in the other. In Abra-
hamian’s analysis, it was only later in the twentieth century that class began to
crystallize more clearly as a basis for political action, when it was also shaped
by the ideologies of socialism and nationalism.

The Period of Political Modernity in Iran

Abrahamian analyzed the transformations in crowd behavior from the events

of the Constitutional Revolution to the political struggles surrounding the
Mossadegh government in the early 1950s (1968, 201–207). Modern politi-
cal organizations, both nationalist and socialist, developed and grew during
the 1920s. In particular the Tudeh (Communist) Party became an important
political force which played a crucial role in subsequent events. As could have
been expected, the leadership of the various political parties consisted of edu-
cated middle-class professionals, particularly students and teachers, but the
parties also att racted elements of the new working classes in the oil refi neries,
railways, and the few modern factories, as well as some traditional artisans and
bazaar workers. The Tudeh Party became dominant in trade union organiza-
tion and militancy. Until Reza Shah’s removal in September 1941 these activi-
ties took place clandestinely and were subjected to violent repression. Reza
Shah’s forced abdication by the Allies (including the Soviet Union) inaugu-
rated a more tolerant though by no means liberal regime, which allowed more
open political activity and organization and during which fi rst the Tudeh Party
and then the National Front came to prominence. Th is episode ultimately cul-
minated in the premiership of Mosaddeq, his nationalization of Iranian oil,
and his struggle against the monarchy and its allies. Mosaddeq’s stormy rule
was ended in 1953 by a United States–instigated military coup which returned
Mohammad Reza Shah to absolute power and brought back the kind of politi-
cal repression familiar from the 1930s (Abrahamian 2001).
The Tudeh Party and the trade unions associated with it assumed command-
ing positions in popular organization and mobilization. In 1945 the Central
Council of United Trade Unions had a total membership of 400,000 (Abra-
hamian 1968, 202). In addition to workers in modern industries, it included
the syndicates of teachers, lawyers, engineers, and doctors. One public meeting
in 1946 was attended by 15,000 people; on May Day 1946, the union parade
in Abadan brought out 81,000 demonstrators. The union pursued militant
 Urban Social Movements | 251

demands in the oil industry, and the company’s attempt to break a strike led to
violent riots in Abadan and Ahwaz (Abrahamian 1968, 203).
Mosaddeq had come to national prominence as a radical leader in 1945
and immediately att racted mass support, particularly from the bazaar and the
students. The National Front, a coalition of nationalist parties, organized this
support, and the Tudeh Party joined in, though the alliance was often uneasy
because of serious differences within the Front over communism and the Soviet
Union. The ulama were notable for the minor role they played in these events,
apart from one prominent cleric, Ayatollah Kashani, who supported Mosad-
deq. Although the mullahs may well have continued to have the allegiance of
some popular sectors, they were not politically significant at this point. New
sectors of the urban population were affi liated to the new politics and set loose
from the earlier hegemony and affi liations of bazaar and ulama.
In July 1952, a revolt broke out in Tehran as soon as the news reached the
bazaar that Mosaddeq had been forced to resign. Bazaar traders and craftsmen
fought the security forces to make their way to parliament. The National Front
deputies called for a general strike, and the Tudeh joined in. The bazaar closed
down entirely and there were strikes in all the sectors controlled by the Tudeh
and the unions. After attempts at violent suppression, the government capitu-
lated. The heaviest fighting took place in the bazaar, in the working class indus-
trial districts and the railway repair shops, on the route between the university
and parliament and in Parliament Square. Students, of course, were prominent
in these events. The worst slum districts of southern Tehran were quiet. The
centers of popular activism had shifted.
There were marked differences between Cairo and the Iranian cities in
the fi rst half of the twentieth century. Cairo underwent a basic dislocation of
its old structures of quarter organization, guild, and tariqa, caused both by
mass migration to the city from the countryside and by a significant level of
industrialization. In contrast, through bazaar associations and their coordi-
nation Iranian cities were able to maintain important sectors of autonomous
urban organization. Modern politics and ideologies of nationalism, liberalism,
and communism developed and thrived for the most part in the new social
spaces of university, school, workshop, and coffeehouse. At the same time they
were only effective in urban mass mobilization through articulation with the
structures and interests of the bazaar. These, in turn, were transformed by the
252 | S A M I Z U B A I DA

forces and processes of modernity, but were never entirely displaced as centers
of urban autonomy. The bazaar was to be the hub of organization, fi nance, and
coordination in all the political upheavals of the century, perhaps most cru-
cially, for the Islamic Revolution of 1978–79.
Iraqi cities, like their Iranian counterparts, maintained strong elements of
quarter identity and solidarity. In the fi rst half of the twentieth century migra-
tion to Baghdad was confi ned to specific areas adjacent to the city. Urban
identities in Baghdad were reinforced by its religious and ethnic divisions. The
suburb of al-Kadhimayn, for instance, housed the holy shrine and pilgrim-
age center of the Shi‘i Imam al-Kadhim. Across the river was al-‘Adhamiyya,
named after the shrine of Abu Hanifa (known as al-Imam al-‘Adham) which
was located there, and as such a Sunni center. Other districts were predomi-
nantly Jewish or Kurdish. In the political and ideological struggles of this cen-
tury, these quarters did not function according to their sectarian identities,
but mostly as centers of the various modern political forces. The Iraqi Com-
munist Party organized broad popular constituencies among the intelligen-
tsia and the workers and also had a wide following among the urban poor in
the middle decades of the century. Their rivals and antagonists in opposition
politics were adherents of various strands of Arab nationalism. In the 1940s
and 1950s, the Shi‘i and Kurdish quarters of Baghdad were strong bastions of
communism, while some of the Sunni quarters were centers of Arabism. Here
we have another example of modern political organization and ideology being
articulated through urban identities and solidarities.13
The second half of the twentieth century saw the recasting of urban politics
and popular movements in the Middle East and North Africa, as in other parts
of the developing world. The pace of population growth and the enormous vol-
ume of rural to urban migration transformed most cities. For the most part the
regimes became more monolithic and authoritarian and effectively suppressed
modern organized political forces and incorporated or co-opted autonomous
social associations such as trade unions. Th is process was greatly facilitated
by the enormous oil wealth accruing to some of the regimes, which also con-
tributed to the transformation of the urban landscape. The newly urbanized
poor have been largely cut off from any source of political organization or

13. See Batatu 1978, 709–925; Farouk-Sluglett and Sluglett 2001; see also Zubaida 1991.
 Urban Social Movements | 253

mobilization, except, that is, for “Islam,” which was generally able to escape
repression through the mosque, communal networks, and welfare services. On
several occasions the frustration of the poor broke out in riots, some, like the
1977 outbursts in Egyptian cities, clearly “bread riots” like those of the past.
Islamic political forces of various kinds have tried to harness these mass
frustrations, with considerable success in some instances. The Islamic Salva-
tion Front in Algeria is one example: its success in popular organization and
mobilization culminated in victory in the elections in 1991 and led to the mili-
tary coup d’état that suppressed it. The Islamic forces in the Iranian Revolu-
tion of 1979 utilized the zeal of the crowds as well as bazaar organization and
fi nance. In the early twenty-fi rst century the Islamic Republic has become
much less able to manage or contain economic problems and disruptions
than its predecessor, and the urban crowds are on the march again express-
ing their frustrations in demonstrations and riots, suppressed by the might
of the Islamic Republic, but also, during the 1997 presidential elections with
their landslide vote for Khatami, seen as a relatively liberal reformer, as against
the now-entrenched interests of the conservative Islamic establishment. The
(manipulated) election of the hard-line populist Mahmud Ahmedinejad as
president in 2005 signaled the continuing turbulence of mass sentiments and
discontents, so far prevented from organized political expression by increased
repression. Th is turbulence and repression seem to characterize contempo-
rary Middle Eastern political fields, both shaping and inhibiting the political
modernity signaled in earlier decades.
 GLOSSARY

BIBLIOGR A PH Y

INDEX
 Glossary

‘abat, ‘ubi: woolen cloak

‘amma: commoners
agha: military notable
ahl al-kitab: people of the book, monotheists with written scriptures (normally
Christians, Jews, Sabaeans, and Zoroastrians)
al-ahya’ al-barraniya: outlying suburbs
ajir: apprentice
amir al-hajj: leader of the pilgrimage
‘anatiyya: makers of silk robes
‘avania, ‘awn: extraordinary taxes
‘aqd: (apprenticeship) contract
ashraf, sharif: descendant(s) of the Prophet
askari: military class (Arabic)
askeriya: military class (Turkish)
‘attar: druggist
awamir sultaniyya: administrative decrees and orders sent out from Istanbul to the
provinces
a‘yan: notables
bash(i): head, chief
bast: sanctuary (in the sense of protected place)
bay‘ bi-al-dayn: sale on credit
bazar bashi: chief merchant
bedel-i askeriyya: cash payment in return for exemption from military service
berat: certificate of foreign protection (given by consuls etc. to non-Muslim
Ottoman subjects)

257
258 | G L O S S A R Y

bilad al-makhzan: rural areas under the control of, or paying taxes to, the central state
çift lik: plantation, estate
cizye: Turkish for jizya
dabbagh: tanner
dallal: auctioneer, broker
dayn: debt
dhimmi, Turkish zimmi: non-Muslims in Muslim lands (in practice, Christians,
Jews, and Zoroastrians)
evkaf: see waqf
diwan: council (as in city council, provincial council)
fatwa, Turkish fetva: legal opinion delivered by religious scholar
fiqh: jurisprudence
fuqaha’, sing. faqih: legal or religious scholar
futuh, sing. fath: early Islamic conquests
futuwwa: street gang
gedik: equipment for a workshop
habus: see waqf (North African equivalent)
hajji: one who has made the pilgrimage to Mecca
hara: city quarter
harir: silk
hawsh: house built round central courtyard
hayy, pl. ahy‘a: city quarter
hirfa: guild
hujja: certified legal document
i‘ane: additional taxation to provide money for the army
iltizam: tax farming
imtiyazat [ajnabiyya]: Capitulations (for foreigners), giving them a special legal
status within the Ottoman Empire
jizya: canonical tax paid by non-Muslims
kafi l: (fi nancial) guarantor
kapudan bashi: admiral of the fleet
kasba: historic or precolonial city
kahya: quarter or village head
khan: caravanserai
khatib: mosque preacher
khayyat: tailor
khilu: the right to use vacant premises
khuwwa: protection money
 Glossary | 259

madina: historic/precolonial city

mahalla: city quarter
mahkama, pl. ahakim shar‘iyya: Islamic law court(s)
makhzan: central government of Morocco
maktab: elementary or Qura’nic school
malikane: lifetime tax farm (iltizam)
mastaba: stone seats on sidewalks between shops and the street
mawat: “dead” or uncultivated land
Mecelle: Ottoman Civil Code (issued 1869–78)
mellah: Jewish quarter (in North Africa cities)
mi‘mar: builder
milk, mulk: freehold propery
miri: state land
mu‘arrif: individual charged with assigning the amount of tax guild members should
pay
muft i: jurisconsult
muhami: lawyer
muhandis: engineer
muhassil: tax collector
muhtasib: market inspector
multazim: tax farmer (possessor of iltizam)
murabaha: the investment of money at interest
mutawalli: manager of an endowment (waqf)
mutasallim: lieutenant governor of a province
nahdha: Arabic literary and linguistic renaissance of the late nineteenth century
najjar: carpenter
naqib al-ashraf: custodian of the records of the descendants of the Prophet (in a
particular city)
ocak: Ottoman regiment in Egypt
qadi, Turkish kadi: judge
qanun, pl. qawanin: civil (i.e., non-Islamic) statute(s) of the Ottoman state
qanunnamler: lists of civil statutes
qard: loan
qassab: butcher
qassam shar‘i: court official responsible for the canonical division of the property of
deceased persons
qaysariyya: commercial building, often for storage of manufactured goods
qism: division, share
260 | G L O S S A R Y

ra‘aya: flock, subjects

sabbagh: dyer
sadah, sing. sayyid: descendants of the Prophet Muhammad
salam: contract to purchase crops before the harvest
sani‘: journeyman
sarraf: money changer
sayyid, pl. sadah: descendant of the Prophet Muhammad
shahbandar: chief merchant
sharaka/shirka: business partnership
shar‘i: sanctioned by Islamic law
sharif, pl. ashraf: see ashraf
shartnameh: rules for qualification
shaykh al-balad: city chief
shaykh al-mashayikh: paramount shaykh
sijillat: documents that form the Islamic court records
simsar: broker
sipahi: cavalryman
subashi: city police chief
sukhra: forced labor
suq: covered market (bazaar)
sura: section of the Qur’an
sürgün: forced migration and resett lement
taba‘: follower
ta’ifat: sect, confessional group, guild, corporation
ta’ifa al-ru‘sa: merchant corporation in Algiers
tariqa, pl. turuq: (Sufi) brotherhood
timar: an assignation of rural fiefs
timariot: fief holder
uluf: military rations
‘urf: customary (e.g., tribal) law
ustadh, usta: (guild) master
waqf, awqaf; Turkish vakf, evkaf: mortmain properties, endowments in perpetuity
wasta: connections, influence, “networks”
yamak: assistant, subordinate (in the case of mergers between more and less
powerful guilds)
yerliyya: local janissaries
zabtiyya: irregular troops
zahir: outside (the walls of)
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 Index

Abadan, 155, 166, 179, 250, 251 Ankara, 3, 70, 152, 155, 159, 167, 169, 175,
Abd al-Nasir, Jamal. See Nasser, Gamal 180
Acre, 77, 86, 91, 94–95, 99, 101, 138, 198, Armenians, 36, 38, 100, 164, 165, 167, 190,
220, 238, 198, 220, 238, 239 193, 196, 199, 203–5, 207, 209, 212–15
Ahmad Bey (ruler of Tunis), 98 ashraf (sing. Sharif), 6, 84–88, 119, 129,
Ahmad Jazzar Pasha (ruler of Acre), 6, 91, 226, 229–30
95 Austria, 5, 203
Ahmedinejad, Mahmud (prime minister awqaf. See waqf
of Iran), 253 a‘yan. See notables
Ahwaz, 155, 157, 166, 175, 179, 251 al-Azhar, 41, 321, 232, 233, 236–39
Aleppo, 4, 5, 13, 14, 19, 25, 27–30, 33, 36, ‘Azm family (of Damascus), 32, 79, 84, 138
37, 39, 53, 56, 65, 68, 71, 72, 74, 77, 78,
80, 81, 83, 84, 88, 100, 105–21, 123,
130, 131, 136–39, 143, 144, 152, 156, Baghdad, 6, 26, 35, 56, 57, 59, 60, 67, 68,
159, 161, 162, 167, 168, 170–72, 176, 74, 77–79, 83–85, 92, 99, 100, 158, 159,
193–97, 203, 204, 206, 209, 220, 221, 165, 167–70, 174, 206, 212, 214, 215,
225, 227–30, 235 221, 252
Alexandria, 15, 33, 38, 144, 149, 159, 160, Balkans, 53, 68, 72, 104, 105, 134, 165
163, 194, 167, 171, 174–76, 205–7, 212, Bandar ‘Abbas, 92
214, 216, 221, 222 Barbary corsairs, 91, 92, 95–97
Algeria, 16, 17, 46, 96, 165, 175, 193, 194, Basra, 33, 35, 74, 77, 91, 92, 98–100
197, 205, 253 Beirut, 25, 33, 44, 95, 106, 134, 144, 145,
Algiers, 17, 36, 76, 77, 91, 92, 95–97, 101, 148, 159, 163, 164, 167, 168, 176, 196,
155, 158, 159, 162–65, 167, 169, 172, 197, 201, 203, 206, 209, 211, 212, 215,
175, 178, 212, 216 216
Alliance Israélite Universelle, 39, 211 Beirut/Damascus carriage road, 134
Amman, 26, 151, 167, 180 Bône (‘Annaba), 96, 178

315
316 | I N DE X

Britain, 46, 179, 204; urban studies in, 7–9; commerical (after 1847), 30, 105, 106;
urbanization in, 12; in the Middle East, mixed (Egypt), 205. See also sharia
22–23, 34, 51, 56, 57, 95, 100, 135, 137, Crete, 3, 165
141, 142, 147–49, 175, 176, 181, 203, Crimea, 45, 151, 165
207, 209, 221, 242, 245, 246–48 Cromer, Earl of (consul-general in Egypt),
Bursa, 3, 165 75, 205, 218
Bushire, 92
Byzantines: legacy of in Ottoman period,
31, 71, 104, 131 Damascus, 19, 25, 26, 30, 32, 34, 35, 39, 44,
55, 61, 72, 74, 77–79, 81–84, 87, 88, 94,
99, 105–7, 109–111, 113, 116, 119, 120,
Cairo, 15, 16, 18, 19, 21, 23, 24, 26, 35, 36, 122, 128, 129, 132–39, 143, 144, 148,
38, 40, 67, 68, 70–72, 74, 75, 77, 78, 83, 152, 155, 158, 159, 162, 163, 165, 167,
84, 87, 91, 107, 122, 144, 145, 148, 149, 170, 171, 176, 192–97, 203, 208, 209,
152, 154, 156, 158–64, 167, 170–73, 212, 214, 215, 220, 221
175, 176, 180, 185, 194, 205, 212, 214, Danger, René, 148, 176
216, 217, 225–31, 233, 237, 240–43, Décret Crémieux (1870), 205
246–47, 251 dhimmi, 37, 187, 188, 192–94, 196, 202,
capitulations (extraterritorial privileges) 210, 218. See also non-Muslims
38, 93, 105, 199, 202, 205, 207 “dual cities.” See villes nouvelles
caravanserais, 106, 114
caravan trade, 60, 83, 100, 106, 107, 134
Casablanca, 20, 155, 157–59, 164, 166, 175, Écochard, Michel, 34, 148
177–79 Egypt, 3, 5, 19, 21–23, 25, 26, 28, 29,
Catholics: in Ottoman Empire, 134, 136, 31, 32, 40, 41, 45, 47, 52–54, 58, 64,
203, 204, 210, 211, 221 72–76, 79, 80, 82, 84, 87, 90, 94, 95, 99,
cholera, 35, 162 122, 143, 147–52, 154, 164, 168–70,
cizye. See jizya 174–76, 192, 193, 202, 204–7, 210, 211,
coffee, 29, 83, 107, 111–12, 219, 251 213, 214, 218, 221, 222, 225, 230–34,
Communist movement/parties, 41, 140, 236–39, 240–46, 247, 253
242, 243–245, 250, 251; Italian Com- Empain, Baron, 149, 175
munist Party, 245 epidemics, 35, 162, 196, 205
Constantine (Algeria), 17, 178, 195 Erzurum, 55, 70
Copts, 193, 203–5, 207, 210, 213, 222, 239 Eskişehir, 165
Corn Laws, 46 Essaouira/Mogador, 24, 38, 193
cotton, 30, 46, 50, 51, 62, 63, 91, 94, 95,
109, 113, 119, 124–27, 135, 143, 149,
242 fatwa, 239, 248
courts: in general, 2, 104, 105, 118, 121, Fez, 9, 18, 20, 24, 159, 161, 166, 170, 171,
131, 132, 144, 191, 202, 205, 232; 174, 175, 177, 178, 196, 209, 216
 Index | 317

France: in the Middle East, 91, 137, 147, industry (Middle East), 35, 44, 46, 143,
203, 204, 209; Ayatullah Khumayni 173, 207, 208, 212, 241, 243, 251
residing in, 152, urbanization in, 12, 13, interest on loans (arguments for and
14, 157; urban studies in, 8, 15–22 against), 30, 48, 50, 51, 56, 57, 67, 104,
French Revolution, 13, 16, 20, 105, 134 130, 131, 132, 220
Iran, 5, 23, 37, 41–43, 55, 70, 152, 155–57,
161, 162, 164, 166, 168–70, 173, 176,
Gaza, 130 177, 179, 181, 183, 184, 188, 190, 192,
Germany: urban studies of, 12, 14 195, 196, 198, 199, 200, 202, 208–11,
grain trade, 11, 39, 44–51, 55–57, 61, 66, 215, 216, 222, 240–42, 246–53;
82, 83, 92, 125–27, 232 Constitutional Revolution (1905–11),
Greece, 203 41, 164, 247, 248; Islamic Revolution
Greek Orthodox Christians (Rum Ortho- (1979), 42, 152, 242, 252. See also
dox), 94, 190, 191, 203, 204, 209, 213, Persia
221 Iraq, 12, 23, 26, 28, 29, 31, 34, 41, 46,
guilds, 6, 18, 19, 27, 29, 73, 102, 104–22, 54, 76, 85, 90, 99, 100, 141, 147, 148,
134, 135, 138, 171, 172, 190, 192, 225– 150–52, 156, 158, 211, 225, 226, 228,
28, 233, 235, 238, 240, 241, 247–49 241, 252
Isfahan, 154, 165, 170, 171, 179, 192, 193,
247, 249
hajj, 30, 77, 79, 107, 123, 124, 126, 127, 131, Isma‘il (ruler of Egypt), 149, 164, 174, 175
132, 134, 184, 234 Isma‘iliyya (suburb of Cairo), 149, 217,
Hama, 30, 77, 106, 119, 122–27, 130, 131, 218, 246
176, 194, 197, 209 Istanbul, 3, 5, 15, 19, 28, 32, 35, 36, 38, 53,
Hanafi legal madhhab, 107, 111, 129, 132, 57, 62, 67, 69, 70, 72, 75, 78, 80, 82, 92,
187 94, 95, 97, 99, 101, 107, 122, 131, 152,
Haussmann, Baron, 149, 164, 177 154, 156, 158, 159, 160–67, 170, 171,
Hawran: grain trade of, 61, 83, 134 174–76, 180, 197, 201, 205, 206, 209,
Hijaz, 68, 134, 135, 137, 181 213, 214, 216, 217, 221, 225, 227
horses: trade in, 63, 116, 188 Italy/Italian, 5, 9, 23, 94, 148, 203, 204,
Hourani, Albert, 7, 20, 25, 63–65, 86–87, 207, 210, 242, 245
146, 226, 229 Izmir, 33, 38, 74, 77, 91, 92–94, 95, 99, 100,
Husaynid beys (rulers of Tunisia), 91, 97, 101, 144, 159, 160, 163, 165, 167, 198,
98 205, 209, 214, 221

Ibrahim Pasha, 45, 90, 174 Jalili family (of Mosul), 32, 79
Indian Ocean: as trading area, 91, 98, 100 janissaries, 6, 32, 56, 73, 78, 81–85,
Industrial Revolution, 11, 105, 134, 154, 89–90, 97, 99, 103, 128, 225, 228–30,
157 233
318 | I N DE X

Jerusalem, 34, 76, 77, 78, 84, 156, 168, 170, meat: as commodity, 44, 55, 83, 106, 110,
171, 174, 176, 197, 201, 239 118
Jidda, 137, 180, 186 Mecca, 77, 128, 168, 180
jizya (Turkish cizye), 37, 188, 199, 202, Medina, 77, 128, 168, 180
203, 218 Mediterranean: as trading area, 4, 10, 11,
judge(s), 27, 31, 32, 71, 78, 80, 82, 93, 99, 22, 91, 94, 95, 98, 122, 142–45, 152,
100, 104–6, 108–17, 119–21, 127–28, 162, 165, 185, 207
129, 131, 133, 151. See also qadi Meknès, 9, 175, 177, 178, 196
mercenaries, 32, 79, 81, 83–85, 90, 93, 97,
99, 103, 128, 225, 228–30, 233
Kemal, Mustafa (president of Turkey), millet system, 37, 190, 191, 201, 219
152, 175 minorities, 36, 37, 38, 93, 144, 149, 170,
Kerman, 195, 196 182–223, 227, 238, 239
Kuwait, 101, 155, 157, 167, 180, 216 Mogador. See Essaouira
money-lending: loans and credit, 30, 48,
50–53, 104, 130, 131; as means of
labor/trade unions, 243–52 controlling rural hinterlands, 30, 48,
Land Law, Ottoman: of 1858, 28, 53, 55, 50–54, 57, 64, 104, 115, 116, 122–25;
139; of 1867, 164 attempts to avoid being seen, 30, 50, 51,
law, Ottoman, 31, 71, 79, 81, 93, 103, 104, 56, 67, 104, 130–32, 220
128, 173, 190, 200. See also qanun; Morocco, 16, 17, 18, 23, 24, 37, 38, 148,
sharia 154, 157, 165, 166, 168, 173, 175, 191,
Lebanon, 30, 44, 46, 53, 136, 137, 143, 145, 197, 198, 208, 212, 216
147–50, 201, 210, 220 Mossadeq, Mohamed (prime minister of
London, 8, 12, 25 Iran), 250–51
Lyautey, Louis Hubert (resident-general in Mosul, 6, 25, 26, 32–35, 45, 46, 51–53, 60,
Morocco), 165, 177 63, 74, 75, 77–79, 83, 84, 88, 91, 99, 159,
162, 167
Mubarak, ‘Ali (Egyptian urban engineer),
Mahmud II (Ottoman sultan), 85, 90 174
makhzan, 97, 193 muft i, 7, 105, 111, 226
malikane, 32, 54, 132 Muhammad ‘Ali (ruler of Egypt), 40, 41,
Mamluks: in Egypt, 18, 25, 71, 75, 79, 80, 45, 73, 75, 85, 90, 134, 136, 164, 173,
82, 84, 85, 90, 225, 226, 230, 232, 233, 217, 230, 232–34, 238–40, 247
235, 237; in Iraq, 79, 85, 99, 100, 225; muhtasib, 105, 106, 114, 227
in Syria, 25, 31, 95, 225 municipality, 15, 70, 102, 120, 171, 201
Maronites, 137, 148, 203, 209 Muslim Brotherhood, 243–45
Marrakesh, 16, 36, 156, 161, 170, 171, 174,
177, 178, 196, 209, 216
Mashhad, 171, 173 Nablus, 52, 76, 77, 185, 209
 Index | 319

Napoleon Bonaparte, 18, 20, 40, 46, 91, 95, Poche family (Aleppo), 204
137, 151, 154, 173, 230 Police/policing: in France, 14; in Middle
Nasreddin/Nasir al-Din (shah of Iran), East, 32, 71, 73, 79–81, 85, 97, 172, 205,
164, 173, 217 231, 246
Nasser, Gamal (Jamal ‘Abd al-Nasir) ports/port cities, 24, 32, 33, 71, 91–101,
(president of Egypt), 152, 242 106, 134, 162, 179, 183, 206, 209
nationalism, 61, 141, 148, 150, 240, 250–52 Port Said, 157, 166
nomads, 58, 59, 60, 63, 64, 66, 116 Portugal/Portuguese, 5, 9, 98
non-Muslims, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 93, 118, Prost, Henri, 175
136, 177, 178, 182–223, 244. See also protégés (of European powers), 30, 38,
dhimmis 105, 136, 144, 203–5, 218, 222
notables (a‘yan) in urban politics, 6, 7, 10, provisioning, 31, 32, 40, 71–73, 77–82, 90,
17, 23, 25, 31–34, 40, 48, 53, 55–57, 152, 226, 228, 232, 234
60–62, 67, 69, 74, 81, 82, 84–89, 95,
97, 99, 102, 132–33, 139, 143, 146,
149, 151, 153, 179, 211, 213, 221, 222, qadi, 27, 29, 30, 105, 108, 128, 130, 202,
225–29, 233, 238–40, 244, 248, 251; 217, 227, 228
Hourani’s “politics of notables” (1968), Qajar dynasty, 41, 70, 77, 164, 190, 199,
7, 25, 86–87, 146, 226, 229 209, 247–49
qanun, 31, 71. See also law, Ottoman
quarters (of cities), 13, 37–38, 39, 40, 81, 84,
ocaks, 91, 96, 225, 230 86, 93, 97, 108, 118, 136–38, 145, 148,
oil: mineral, 155, 160, 164, 166, 169, 170, 170–80, 194–97, 206, 212, 215–18, 220,
179, 180, 241, 250–52; olive, 46, 52, 65, 221, 226–28, 231, 233, 234, 238, 240,
94, 121, 231 241, 242, 245, 247, 249, 251, 252
Oran, 17, 159, 162, 165, 178 Qur’an, 118, 186, 187, 188

Palestine, 23, 72, 87, 94, 147, 148, 156, 174, Rabat, 23, 24, 36, 155, 167, 171, 175, 177,
203, 216 178, 216
Pact of ‘Umar, 187, 192, 201 revolution(s): French, 13, 16, 20, 105, 134;
Paris, 8, 14, 16, 20, 23, 24, 26, 33, 35, 63, Iranian Constitutional (1905–11), 41,
130, 131, 148, 149, 154, 155, 159, 164, 164, 247, 248; Iranian Islamic (1979),
173, 177, 200, 217, 243 42, 152, 242, 252, Industrial, 11, 105,
peasants: in Middle East, 28, 29, 30, 40, 134, 154, 157; in Middle East, 2, 36,
43–55, 60–65, 119, 122–28, 130, 131, 152, 153, Turkish (1908), 55, 105
137, 139, 145, 166, 240, 242, 244 Reza Shah (ruler of Iran), 36, 41, 176, 200,
Persia, 100, 134, 162, 164 249, 250
Persian Gulf, 92, 98, 100, 101, 196 rice, 50, 51, 52
plague, 5, 162, 196, 205 Riyadh, 154, 157, 169, 180
320 | I N DE X

Rum Orthodox. See Greek Orthodox Tabriz, 159, 162, 163, 185, 249
Christians Tangier, 156, 178
Russia, 5, 80, 94, 181, 191, 203, 204, 209 tanzimat reforms, 5, 15, 33, 38, 39, 41, 73,
75, 103, 143, 199–210, 210, 216, 219
taxation, taxes: assessment and collec-
Sa‘da, 194 tion of, 6, 14, 31, 32, 37, 38, 40, 41, 45,
Safavid dynasty, 38, 70, 117–19, 121, 164, 47–58, 60–64, 66, 69, 72–91, 93, 94,
173, 188, 190, 193, 222 97, 100, 108, 111, 112, 115, 116, 119,
Salonica, 198, 199, 209 124, 125, 127, 128, 132, 139, 144, 188,
San‘a’, 168, 170, 172, 174, 175, 181, 193, 191, 193, 199, 200, 202, 205, 225–28,
194, 196, 197, 214 235–36, 238, 248
Selim III (Ottoman sultan), 73, 85, 90 tax-farming, 32, 69, 75, 87, 88, 94, 100, 116,
Seljuks: legacy of in Ottoman period, 31, 191. See also malikane
71, 157 Tehran, 36, 155, 158–60, 162–64, 169,
Shafi‘i legal madhhab, 120, 129 170, 173, 175, 176, 177, 192, 217, 248,
shahbandar (head of merchants), 99, 115 251
sharia: as system of law, 31, 41, 71, 78, 104, Tel Aviv, 36, 157–59, 167, 169, 180
105, 128, 131, 132, 144, 200, 229, 232, tobacco: as crop and commodity, 29, 44,
235, 236; records of court proceedings 107, 241; Tobacco Protest of 1891–92,
(sijillat), 1, 9, 21, 26, 27, 104, 122, 130, 247–48
131, 144 Tripoli (Lebanon/Syria), 44, 201
Sharif. See ashraf Tudeh (Iranian Communist Party), 250,
sheep, 28, 58–60 251
Shiraz, 156, 161, 171, 185 Tunis, 5, 23, 46, 52, 68, 76, 77, 91, 92,
sijillat. See sharia 95–98, 101, 159, 163, 165, 167, 172,
silk, 30, 44, 62, 91, 109, 113–14, 117, 121, 178, 197, 209, 216
143, 165, 192 Tunisia, 46, 52, 68, 97, 197
Spain/Spanish, 5, 16, 97, 185, 203
steamers/steamships, 106, 134, 143
Sudan, 147, 148, 236 ulama, 7, 17, 27, 41, 70, 75, 107, 123, 124,
Suez Canal, 18, 30, 134, 135, 155, 157, 164, 125–28, 130, 132, 133, 148, 226–38,
166, 175, 246 247–51
Sufi sm/Sufi practices, 2, 17, 29, 107,
111–12, 219, 251
Syria, 19, 21, 25, 26, 28–32, 34, 40, 41–46, villes nouvelles, 9, 23, 34, 35, 36, 155, 156,
53, 58, 74, 76, 78, 80, 83–86, 90, 94, 175, 177, 179, 180, 181, 216
104–7, 110–12, 118, 122, 124, 128, 130,
131–41, 143, 147, 148, 150, 152, 156,
159, 174, 210, 215, 225, 226, 239 Wafd Party, 41, 243–45
 Index | 321

waqf, (pl. awqaf), 4, 27, 36, 128–31, Yazd, 156, 165

170–73, 232–33 Yemen, 107, 194, 195, 196
wool, 30, 46, 52, 58–60, 62, 63, 66,
125–27, 135
women, 12, 27, 63, 96, 97, 119, 120, 124, Zahir al-‘Umar (ruler of Acre and Galilee),
125–27, 186, 198, 219, 228, 229, 238, 91, 94, 95
249 Zoroastrians, 184, 187–90, 195, 196, 200,
working class, 19, 144, 241, 244, 250, 251 214, 221