Download PDF | Kristen Stilt - Islamic Law in Action_ Authority, Discretion, and Everyday Experiences in Mamluk Egypt-Oxford University Press (2012).
255 Pages
Acknowledgements
This book is the result of many years of thinking about the interaction between law and society in the context of Islamic history. In the course of preparing it, I have accrued many debts, and these acknowledgements can only serve as a token of my gratitude. At Harvard University, I had the honor of working with Roy Mottahedeh and Frank Vogel as my main advisors, and enjoyed the boundless wisdom and generous support of both. In courses, seminars, reading groups, and many individual meetings, they made a tremendous impact on my scholarly development in ways that I hope this book conveys. Other professors and scholars during my years at Harvard also played an important role in the development of my ideas and in the acquisition of research skills, especially Roger Owen, Cemal Kafadar, Wolfhart Heinrichs, Edward Keenan, Ridwan al-Sayyid, John LeDonne, Robert Wisnovsky, Aron Zysow, William Granara, Ayman El-Desouky, Stephanie Thomas, and Ghada Osman.
Wonderful graduate student colleagues such as Sarah Bowen Savant, Raquel Ukeles, Alexis Albion, Leor Halevi, Zayde Antrim, and Christian Lange provided another forum for intellectual discussion. While at Harvard, I enjoyed funding from many sources, including the Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) grant, the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, the GSAS Dissertation Completion Fellowship, and the Islamic Legal Studies Program. Grants from the Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Research Abroad Program and the American Research Center in Egypt (ARCE), along with a Harvard University Travelling Fellowship, allowed for nearly two years of research in Cairo. Scott Senecal generously provided some additional financial assistance and also arranged for housing during my research in London. In Cairo, the staff at the Bi-National Fulbright Commission and ARCE provided research support. I am particularly grateful to the Fulbright Commission for introducing me to Professor of History Qāsim ( Abduh Qāsim, a kind and generous advisor who helped me with the details of Mamluk chronicles. He and his family welcomed me into their home many times. Febe Armanios was a wonderful research companion, especially during days at the National Library and the Arab League Manuscript Institute.
I warmly thank Kambiz GhaneaBassiri and his family for opening their Cairo home to me (and the inevitable rescued cats who tagged along), and Kambiz, Adam Sabra, and Richard McGregor for book-buying expeditions and discussions. Tamir Moustafa and Hussein Agrama helped to sustain my modern interests by discussing their own research with me. I also want to thank Magda Aboulfadl for being my faithful running partner and occasional travel companion during my time in Cairo. This book began to take shape in my last year of teaching at the University of Washington, where a grant from the Society of Scholars at the Simpson Center for the Humanities provided some teaching release time and a wonderful community of scholars. In that process, Ellis Goldberg was very generous with his time, and some of the conceptual aspects of the book were worked out in discussions with him. I also thank Felicia Hecker, Associate Director of the Middle East Center at the University of Washington, for her support and encouragement.
The book was completed at Northwestern University. The School of Law Faculty Research Program supported the process, and I thank former Dean David Van Zandt and Interim Dean Kim Yuracko for their generous assistance. I want to recognize the help of the Pritzker Legal Research Center at Northwestern Law School and its Director Jim McMasters, with particular thanks to Irene Berkey, Audrey Chapuis, and Lynn Kincade. Chicago-area legal historians, gathered under the heading of the American Bar Foundation/Illinois Legal History Seminar, were willing to reach beyond the field of American legal history to offer helpful suggestions at key points in the book’s development, and I thank Christopher Schmidt in particular for reading drafts and for helpful discussions. The community of scholars of Mamluk studies is a particularly collegial and supportive one. Early in this project, Jonathan Berkey confirmed my sense that the muh:tasib deserved extensive study; his encouragement at that time was very valuable. Carl Petry advised me as the third member on my committee, and I am now privileged to be his colleague at Northwestern.
Li Guo read the entire book manuscript, and Warren Schultz generously shared his vast knowledge of Mamluk numismatics and offered extensive comments on Chapter 8. Mark Cohen and Febe Armanios contributed their expertise on Christian and Jewish communities and read drafts of Chapter 5 on that topic. Boğaç Ergene offered valuable comments on an early draft; Leslie Peirce raised important questions and points of clarification on Chapter 4 in particular; and Anver Emon read portions and helped with the title. Aron Zysow was always willing to discuss difficult conceptual problems, read drafts, and suggest sources for future research. I thank him for his intellectual companionship and ongoing mentorship. Frank Vogel shared with me insightful comments on the entire manuscript.
Two students, Rachel Levine and Eman Gamaal, provided helpful final hour research assistantship. David Powers very generously read the entire manuscript with the critical eye for which he is so well known and made very helpful comments and suggestions at a key point in the book’s development. John Tallmadge was a crucial editorial voice, especially towards the beginning of the process, and Peri Bearman brought her formidable editorial skills to the manuscript in the final stages. She also assisted with the index. Hanna Siurua’s careful and precise proofreading skills were of great assistance at the stage of page proofs, and she also prepared the book’s index. I thank Michael Hermann for making all of the maps and Matt Stilt for drawing the steelyard. I was fortunate to work with a very good team at Oxford University Press. I am grateful to my editor Alex Flach for his advice and especially for encouraging me to make the book accessible to a wide range of readers, to Natasha Flemming for her enthusiasm and dedication, and to Zoë Organ for her fine editorial work.
The anonymous readers chosen by OUP offered valuable comments that served to make this a better book. viii Acknowledgements I had the opportunity to present aspects of this book at many professional events, but several venues proved the most helpful to me: the University of Chicago Law School, the University of Chicago Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Northwestern University Law School, the Buffett Center for International and Comparative Studies at Northwestern, the American Society for Legal History 2010 annual conference, and several annual meetings of the Middle East Studies Association. I dedicate this book to two very special people: BJ Fernea and Dan Lev. In my first semester of college at The University of Texas, I took BJ’s Introduction to Middle Eastern Studies, sparking for me both an enduring professional interest and also a mentorship from and eventual friendship with an extraordinary woman. She encouraged my academic and career development in her penetrating way, and her sage words will always stay with me. I last saw her when she was screening her film, Living with the Past: Historic Cairo, to a full house at the American University in Cairo.
I only knew Dan Lev briefly while I was at the University of Washington before his passing, but the impact was powerful and enduring. At a time when I was just starting out as an assistant professor and exposed to sides of academic life I had not imagined existed, Dan, with his clear intellectual vision and commitment to scholarly integrity, was a beacon of all that is good about the academic enterprise and a source of comfort at a crucial time. Parts of Chapter 7 in an earlier form appeared in “Price Setting and Hoarding in Mamluk Egypt: The Lessons of Legal Realism for Islamic Legal Studies,” in The Law Applied: Contextualizing the Islamic Shari( a, ed. Peri Bearman, Wolfhart Heinrichs, and Bernard G. Weiss (London: I.B. Tauris, 2008), and I thank I.B. Tauris for allowing me to include this material. Also in an earlier form, parts of Chapter 7 appeared in “Recognizing the Individual: The Muhtasibs of Early Mamluk Cairo and Fustat,” Harvard Middle East and Islamic Review 7 (2006): 1–40, and I thank the Review for allowing this material to be included here. The cover image is courtesy of Documentation Center, Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture, Fine Arts Library, Harvard College Library, and I thank Sharon Smith at the Aga Khan Program for suggesting it to me.
The image, captioned “Silk Mercers’ Bazaar, Cairo,” is a drawing made by R. Phené Spiers and is included in his volume Egypt: A Series of Thirty-Six Views of Ancient and Modern Egypt (1887). Spiers, an architect, was given a travel grant by the Royal Academy in 1865–6 to draw sites in Egypt. The description of this drawing reads “Plate XXII. Khan Khaleel. This Bazaar, the chief mart for silks, dresses, slippers, carpets, &c. in Cairo, was built by El Ashraf Khaleel in 1292 A.D., and added to in 1501 A.D. by El Ghoree, who built the portal seen on the right.” By using this illustration, I intend to convey only a general sense of the architecture of one particular place in Cairo’s market; I do not suggest that the individuals or even the market stalls as drawn by Spiers resemble a scene that might have been found at the same location in the Mamluk period.
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