Download PDF | D. Wasserstein - Mamluks And Ottomans_ Studies In honour Of Michael Winter-Routledge (2005).
270 Pages
Mamluks and Ottomans, dedicated to Michael Winter, aims to highlight aspects of variety and continuity in the history of the Middle East between the thirteenth and the eighteenth centuries CE. The studies in this book look at the area from Istanbul through Syria and Palestine to Arabia, Yemen and Sudan. They demonstrate the great wealth of materials available, in a wide variety of languages, from archives and manuscripts, police records and divorce documents, through inscriptions and buildings to art works of every kind. The topics covered are equally varied:
● Sufism
● the festival of Nabi Musa
● religious institutions and their administration
● the politics of architecture
● royal biography
● social and military organization
● doctors and charity
● a Great Fire (a century before London’s)
● pilgrimage guides
● land tenure
● medieval divorce
● confidence tricksters.
The contributors, from a dozen-odd institutions, show how much can be done and how much remains to be done in this field, making this book essential reading for those with research interests in Ottoman studies, Islam and Middle Eastern History.
David J. Wasserstein is Professor of History and of Jewish Studies at Vanderbilt University. He is the author of The Rise and Fall of the Party-Kings and The Caliphate in the West, and of numerous articles on topics in medieval Islamic and Jewish history.
Ami Ayalon is Professor of Middle Eastern History at Tel Aviv University. He is the author of The Press in the Arab Middle East: A history; Reading Palestine: Printing and literacy 1900–1948, and many articles on the modern political, social and cultural history of Arab societies.
Introduction
This book has a double aim. Unlike those who aim at two targets and miss both, we feel confident that we are giving no hostages to fortune in making this claim. The two are so closely intertwined with each other that their juxtaposition here seems only natural. In the first place, this is a collection of articles that have as their common theme the time and the area of the crossover from the later Mamluk period to the early Ottoman period in Egypt and the surrounding area. For a very long time, perhaps since the start of modern research on the period, there reigned the view that until 1516/1517 Egypt and the countries of the Fertile Crescent were ruled from within, that Arabic is the language of our principal sources for that era and that research has to concentrate on essentially local issues and problems. With the Ottoman conquest in 1516/1517, Egypt and the neighbouring lands become the obscure provinces of a huge empire with a faraway capital and faraway concerns; any interest their local problems may present to the student of history is minimal, and many if not most of the serious sources are in Ottoman Turkish. Such problems as are worthy of study are essentially different from those of the Mamluk period, despite the resurrection of Mamluk identity and strength in Ottoman Egypt and perhaps elsewhere in the region. Here are two distinct areas of study and research, as dissimilar as, say, Pharaonic and Ptolemaic Egypt.
Thus presented, the situation is seen in all its absurdity. Even if there had been little real continuity, it would be incumbent on us to enquire into the nature of the changes that occurred between Mamluks and Ottomans, to ask why such continuity was little or lacking, to wonder how the changes were effected. How much more true is this, given the vast range and depth of the continuity that actually existed. Yet the split has continued, even to this day, sustained by the paucity of scholars who possess an adequate command of the two languages and their resources. This dichotomous vision should be questioned – or, better still, discarded – if we are properly to understand the historical experience of Arabic-speaking societies in Egypt and the Fertile Crescent during the period from the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries. One of our aims here, then, is to demonstrate, via a series of studies concentrated around that epochal date of 1516/1517, why it is so.
This ties our collection also to our second aim, which is to honour Michael Winter. Winter is one of those rare scholars with equal fluency in Arabic and in Ottoman Turkish, and one of those still rarer scholars who have chosen deliberately to use that double fluency in order to work across and over 1516/1517 and its outdated implications of closure and rupture. The recent collective Cambridge History of Egypt is divided into two volumes, one covering the period 640–1517, the other going ‘From 1517 to the End of the Twentieth Century’. Only one contributor is represented with articles in both volumes. Michael Winter wrote the last article in volume 1, ‘The Ottoman occupation’, and the first in volume 2, ‘Ottoman Egypt, 1525–1609’. (Those who wonder about the years 1517–25 must read both chapters.) We all write history with some awareness of what came next, which colours how we interpret the past; but Winter is unusual among historians of the Mamluks in his profound knowledge of what came after the closure of 1516/1517 and in using that knowledge to illuminate what he writes on the preceding period. A glance at the lengthy list of his publications shows a constant willingness to use his intimate familiarity with both eras to offer insight into each of them, based on an understanding of their interdependence. It also reveals his enviable command of the existing scholarship in the field with its different interpretations.
This makes whatever he writes not only lucid and penetrating but also authoritative, and its reading a gratifying pursuit. Michael Winter belongs to a generation of Israeli scholars with roots still in Europe. He was born in Czechoslovakia in 1934, and had the good fortune to move to Palestine before the outbreak of the War. He grew up in Haifa, attending the famous Réali high school, and in time pursued studies in Arabic and Middle Eastern history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Later on, following a period of several years as an inspector in the Arab section of the Ministry of Education, he went to the United States for postgraduate work. At the University of California in Los Angeles he prepared his doctoral dissertation under the guidance of Gustav von Grunebaum, on the life and thought of ‘Abd al-Wahhab al-Sha‘rani, a sixteenth-century Egyptian Sufi thinker. Upon his return to Israel in 1972, he joined the faculty of the then young department of Middle Eastern and African History in Tel Aviv University, where he spent the rest of his career. The dry facts of an academic life tell us little, though they may hint at much.
The European background, as well as the period, point to a polyglot upbringing and a varied intellectual environment, producing a scholar who is at home as much in Ottoman archives as in discussions of German poetry. The Jerusalem training, followed by study with von Grunebaum, point to the rigor and thoroughness of the scholar’s preparation for the tasks ahead, amply confirmed in Winter’s writings and teaching themselves. All together serve to remind us both that scholarship is a humanistic and a humane activity, and that all of us who engage in it are links in a chain of tradition which ties us at once to the founders of our disciplines and to our students and in turn to their students, stretching on into the future.
In coming to consider the question of an offering to honour Michael Winter on his retirement – no, his pre-retirement – from active scholarship, we were thus faced with no difficult task: the obvious and only really appropriate offering was a collection of studies which should exemplify the leitmotif of Winter’s career: the necessity to study Mamluk and Ottoman Egypt in their mutual interdependence. We asked our authors to bear in mind the special interests of Michael Winter while preparing their contributions to this volume, and their variety testifies inter alia to the breadth of his own contributions to scholarship.
These have ranged from classical Arabic literature to modern Islamic religious movements. In a volume like this we could not hope to offer representation of the entire range, and we chose very deliberately to restrict the volume to the Mamluk–Ottoman fulcrum which we see as representing most characteristically the central concerns of Winter’s career. Another volume, in Hebrew, appearing simultaneously with this, presents a collection of studies on other subjects with which he has been concerned, in particular education in the Islamic world and religion in modern Islamic societies. In both volumes, the contributors have chosen to write about topics which Winter himself has addressed in the past. In both they have also reflected another aspect of his personality that he would certainly not wish to be forgotten – that of the teacher.
In this, Winter has had actually two careers, the first as a teacher of Arabic (and later as an inspector of Arabic teaching) in schools in Israel, the second as an academic teacher and educator. All of our contributors are his colleagues and friends, but they are also, formally or otherwise, his students. In what they write here, they bear living testimony to his conviction of the truth of the Talmudic adage that ‘it is not for us to finish the work, but neither are we free to desist from it’. In offering him the tribute of this collection, we remind him of the continuation of that sentiment, ‘If you have studied much, then much reward will be given to you’.
Ami Ayalon David J. Wasserstein Tel Aviv, July 2005
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