Litigants and Neighbors: The Communal Topography of Ottoman Damascus

Comparative Studies in Society and History

Volumn 44, Issue 3, 2002, Pages 511-533

  Al Qattan, Najwa ^a  

^a LOYOLA MARYMOUNT UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 85012572287     PISSN: 00104175     EISSN: 14752999     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0010417502000245     Document Type: Article

References (63)

1. The Christians comprised Greek (Syrian) Orthodox, Armenian, Maronite, and Catholic communities. Among the Jews there was a Karaite community. For an informative discussion of the Christians of the Arab East, see Robert M. Haddad, Syrian Christians in Muslim Society: An Interpretation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970). In the absence of reliable (official) figures, a rough average based on population estimates provided by European observers will have to suffice: in 1787 Volney estimated the Damascus population at eighty thousand people, twelve thousand of whom were Christian
2. (M. C-F. Volney, Voyage en Syrie et en Egypte pendant les annee's 1783, 1784, 1785 [Paris: Mouton, 1787; repr. 1959], vol. 2, p. 250). Half a century later, Porter reported that the population of the city totaled around 108,000 among whom 14,000 were Christians and 4,600 were Jews
3. (J. L. Porter, Five Years in Damascus Including an Account of the History, Topography, and Antiquities of that City with Travels and Researches in Palmyra, Lebanon, and the Hawran [London: John Murray, 1855], vol. 1, p. 139).
4. These figures closely approximate the estimates of the Bowring Report of a decade earlier (John Bowring, Report on the Commercial Statistics of Syria [London: William Clowes and Sons, 1840; repr, New York: Arno Press, 1973], p. 8).
5. In 1890 Cuinet put the total population at 165,000 and estimated the Christians at 54,000 and the Jews at 5,000 (Vital Cuinet, Syrie, Liban et Palestine: Ge'ographie administrative sta-tistique, descriptive et raisonne'e [Paris: E. Leroux, 1896], p. 386).
6. There is a large number of published Arabic-language accounts of the 1860 riots. See, for example, Hasr al-litham ’an nakabat al-Sham (Cairo, 1895);
7. Iskander ibn Ya'qub Abkarius, The Lebanon in Turmoil: Syria and the Powers in 1860
8. trans. J. F. Scheltema (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1920);
9. Muhammad Abu'l Su'ud al-Hasibi, “Lamhat min tarkikh Dimashq fi ‘ahd al-Tanzimat,” ed. Kamal S. Salibi in al-Abhath, 21 (1968) and 22 (1969);
10. Mikhayil Mishaqa, Murder, Mayhem, Pillage, and Plunder: The History of Lebanon in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, trans. Wheeler M. Thackston, Jr (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988), pp. 244–68.
11. For a list of unpublished manuscripts dealing with these events, see Fritz Steppat, “Some Arabic Manuscript Sources of the Syrian Crisis of 1860,” in Les Arabes par leurs archives, eds. Jacques Berque and Dominique Chevallier (Paris: Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 1976).
12. For more recent scholarly analyses of the 1860 riots, see Linda Schatkowski Schilcher, Families in Politics: Damascene Factions and Estates of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1985), pp. 87–106;
13. Leila Tarazi Fawaz, An Occasion for War: Civil Conflict in Lebanon and Damascus in 1860 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), pp. 78–100;
14. Kamal Salibi, “The 1860 Upheaval in Damascus as seen by al-Sayyid Muhammad Abu'l-Su'ud al-Hasibi, Notable and Later Naqib al-Ashraf of the City,” in Beginnings of Modernization in the Middle East: The Nineteenth Century, eds. William R. Polk and Richard L. Chambers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968);
15. Philip S. Khoury, Urban Notables and Arab Nationalism: The Politics of Damascus, 1860–1929 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983);
16. Abdul-Karim Rafeq, “New Light on the 1860 Riots in Ottoman Damascus,” Die Welt des Islams 28 (1988): 412–30. On the blood-libel
17. see A. M. Hyamson, “The Damascus Affair “1840,” Transactions: Jewish Historical Society of England 16 (1945–1951); L. Loewe, ed., Diaries of Sir Moses Montefiore, 2 vols. (Chicago: Belford-Clarke Co., 1890);
18. Salo Baron, “The Jews and the Syrian Massacres of 1860,” Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research 4 (1932–1933);
19. Jonathan Frankel, The Damascus Affair: “Ritual Murder,” Politics, and the Jews in 1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
20. On the Jewish community in general, see Moshe Ma'oz, “Changes in the Position of the Jewish Communities of Palestine and Syria in the mid-Nineteenth Century,” in Studies on Palestine During the Ottoman Period, ed. Moshe Ma'oz (Jerusalem: The Magnes Press, 1975);
21. Thomas Philipp, “The Farhi Family and the Changing Position of the Jews in Syria, 1750–1860,” Middle Eastern Studies 20 (Oct. 1984); 37–52.
22. See also al-Maghribi, “Yahud Dimashq mundhu mi'at ‘am,” al-Majma’ al-Ilmi al-Arabi 9 (1929): 641–43;
23. Yusuf Nu'aisa, Yahud Dimashq (Damascus: Dar al-Ma'rifa, 1988); both of which are hostile to their subject matter.
24. For an example of Muslim apologetics, see Abdur Rahman Doi, Non-Muslims Under Shariah (Lahore, Pakistan: Kazi Publications, 1979).
25. See also Stanford J. Shaw, The Jews of the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic (New York: New York University Press, 1991). For discussion of this issue
26. see Mark R. Cohen, “The Neo-Lachrymose Conception of Jewish Arab History,” in Tikkun 6 (Mar./Apr 1991): 55–60;
27. Under Crescent and Cross: The Jews in the Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994);
28. Simon Shamir, “Muslim-Arab Attitudes Toward the Jews,” in Violence and Defense in the Jewish Experience, eds. Salo W. Baron and George S. Wise (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1977), pp. 191–203.
29. For a typical example of this kind of “scholarship” which reifies Islam and essentializes the dhimmi condition, see Bat Ye'or, The Dhimmi: Jews and Christians under Islam (Rutherford, Madison, and Teaneck: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1985)
30. The Decline of Eastern Christians under Islam: From Jihad to Dhimmitude, Seventh “Twentieth Centuries (Rutherford, Madison, and Teaneck: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1996).
31. For examples of studies that embrace notions of trans-historical communities but not necessarily anti-Islamic attitudes, see Avigdor Levy, ed. The Jews of the Ottoman Empire (Princeton: The Darwin Press, 1994);
32. Benjamin Braude and Bernard Lewis, eds., Christians and Jews of the Ottoman Empire: The Functioning of a Plural Society, 2 vols. (London and New York: Holmes and Meier Publishers, Inc., 1982).
33. For a discussion of the conspiracy theories that emerged out of the 1860 crisis, see Schilcher, Families in Politics, pp. 91–95.
34. For persuasive examples of this kind of analysis, see Schilcher, Families in Politics
35. Fawaz, An Occasion for War
36. Rafeq, “New Light.” On the Mount Lebanon massacres
37. see Ussama Makdisi, The Culture of Sectarianism: Community, History, and Violence in Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Lebanon (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).
38. On the events in Aleppo, see Bruce Masters, “The 1850 Events in Aleppo: An Aftershock of Syria's Incorporation into the Capitalist World System,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 22 (1990) 3–20. For a recent response to Bruce Masters' thesis
39. see Yaron Harel, “Jewish-Christian Relations in Aleppo as Background for the Jewish Response to the Events of October 1850,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 30 (1998): 77–96, in which the author resorts to “religious fanaticism” as historical explanation.
40. For a particularly persuasive and eloquent example of this, see Makdisi, The Culture of Sectarianism. See also, David Nirenberg, Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996).
41. Ronald C. Jennings, “Zimmis (non-Muslims) in Early Seventeenth-Century Ottoman Judicial Records: The Sharia Court of Anatolian Kayseri,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 21 (1978): 251, 271, 274;
42. Jennings, Christians and Muslims in Ottoman Cyprus and the Mediterranean World, 1571–1640 (New York: New York University Press, 1993), pp. 69, 133;
43. Suraiya Faroqhi, Men of Modest Substance: House Owners and House Property in Seventeenth-Century Ankara and Kayseri (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 154, 200–10.
44. [N. J. Pantazopoulos, Church and Law in the Balkan Peninsula during the Ottoman Rule (Amsterdam: Adolf M. Hakkert, 1984), pp. 53–57, 59, 65–66, 93, 107];
45. Amnon Cohen, Jewish Life under Islam: Jerusalem in the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984), pp. 110–39;
46. Mohammad Afifi, “Reflections on the Personal Laws of Egyptian Copts,” in Women, the Family, and Divorce Laws in Islamic history, ed. Amira El Azhary Sonbol (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1996), pp. 203–6.
47. Jewish women also appear to have sought shari'a marriage contracts which mandated material support (nafaqa) and were by far easier to annul in cases of spousal desertion (Aryeh Shmuelevitz, The Jews of the Ottoman Empire in the Late Fifteenth and the Sixteenth Centuries: Administrative, Economic, Legal, and Social Relations as Reflected in the Responsa (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1984), pp. 66–67, 69.
48. There are simply no extant records of any communal courts. Equally significant is that the sijill s do not make a single reference to such courts. For a detailed discussion of this issue, see Najwa Al-Qattan, “Dhimmis in the Muslim Court: Legal Autonomy and Religious Discrimination,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 31 (1999): 429–444.
49. See, for example, Faroqhi, Men of Modest Substance; Andre’ Raymond, The Great Arab Cities in the Sixteenth “Eighteenth Centuries: An Introduction (New York: New York University Press, 1984);
50. Daniel J. Schroeter, “Jewish Quarters in the Arab-Islamic Cities of the Ottoman Empire,” in A. Levy, ed. Jews of the Ottoman Empire. On Syrian cities
51. see, Abraham Marcus, “Men, Women, and Property: Dealers in Real Estate in Eighteenth-Century Aleppo,” Journal of the Social and Economic History of the Orient 26 (1983): 137–63;
52. Marcus, “Privacy in Eighteenth-Century Aleppo: The Limits of Cultural Ideals,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 18 (1986): 165–83;
53. Abdul-Karim Rafeq, “al-Bunya al-ijtima'iyya wa'l-iqtisadiyya li-Mahallat Bab al-Musalla (al-Maydan) bi-Dimashq (1825–1875),” Dirasat Tarikiyya 25/26 (Mar-June 1987): 7–62;
54. Antoine Abdel Nour, Introduction a' l'histoire urbaine de la Syrie Ottomane, 15–17 sie'cle (Beirut The Lebanese University, 1982).
55. Abdel Nour, Introduction a'l'histoire urbaine, pp. 109–10;
56. Abraham Marcus, The Middle East on the Eve of Modernity: Aleppo in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), pp. 189–90;
57. Marcus, “Men, Women, and Property,” pp. 138–39;
58. Faroqhi, Men of Modest Substance, p. 19.
59. See Antoine Abdel Nour, “Types architecturaux et vocabulaire de l'abitat en Syrie aux XVIe et XVIIe siecle,” in L ‘Espace social de la ville Arabe, ed. Dominique Chevallier (Paris: G.-P. Maisonneuve et Larose, 1979), p. 61. In his Introduction a’ l'histoire urbaine, p. 126, the author remarks that a second-floor room for receiving strangers was called a murabbac in Aleppo, a tabaqa in Sidon, and a qasr in Damascus. In Damascus tabaqa referred to the second floor of a residence; most Aleppo houses did not have a second floor.
60. Marcus, “Privacy in Eighteenth-Century Aleppo.” In a rare document dated May 1782, Sho'a w. Musa al-Tabbakh and his half brother Shamuil w. Ya'qub al-Hilu “two Jewish men ”submitted in court that they held equal shares of a property they had jointly purchased seventeen days earlier, that their shares were clearly demarcated, and that hence forth “fully content and open-minded, they have no business with each other's property” [sijill 217/21 Jumada II 1196].
61. Abdel Nour, Introduction a' l'histoire urbaine, p. 123.
62. See, The Logic of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (California: Stanford University Press, 1990), p. 269;
63. Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), pp. 109–11.