Download PDF | Roxani Eleni Margariti, Adam Abdelhamid Sabra, Abraham L. Udovitch - Histories of the Middle East_ Studies in Middle Eastern Society, Economy and Law in Honor of of A.L. Udovitch, Brill 2011.
312 Pages
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
Jonathan P. Berkey is Professor of History at Davidson College. He studied at Williams College (B.A. 1981) and Princeton University (M.A. 1987, Ph.D. 1989), where Avrom Udovitch served as his dissertation adviser. He is the author of several books, including The Transmission of Knowledge in Medieval Cairo: A Social History of Islamic Education (Princeton University Press, 1992), Popular Preaching and Religious Authority in the Medieval Islamic Near East (University of Washington Press, 2001), and The Formation of Islam: Religion and Society in the Near East, 600-1800 (Cambridge University Press, 2003), which won the Albert Hourani Book Prize from the Middle East Studies Association.
Michael Bonner is Professor of Medieval Islamic History in the Department of Near Eastern Studies, University of Michigan. He received his Ph.D. in the Department of Near Eastern Studies, Princeton University, in 1987. His recent publications include Jihad in Islamic History: Doctrines and Practices (Princeton University Press, 2006, 2008), and Poverty and Charity in Middle Eastern Contexts, co-edited with Amy Singer and Mine Ener (SUNY Press, 2003). He has been a Helmut S. Stern Fellow at the University of Michigan Institute for the Humanities, and has held the position of Professeur Invité at the Institut d’Etudes de l’Islam et des Sociétés du Monde Musulman, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, and of Chaire de l’Institut du Monde Arabe, also in Paris.
Mark R. Cohen is Professor of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University and the current incumbent of the Khedouri A. Zilkha Professorship of Jewish Civilization in the Near East. His publications include Jewish Self-Government in Medieval Egypt; Al-mujtama al-yahudi fi Misr al-islamiyya fi al-usur al-wusta (Jewish Life in Medieval Egypt 641-1382), translated from the English; The Autobiography of a Seventeenth-Century Venetian Rabbi: Leon Modena’s “Life of Judah”; Under Crescent and Cross: The Jews in the Middle Ages; Poverty and Charity in the Jewish Community of Medieval Egypt; and The Voice of the Poor in the Middle Ages: An Anthology of Documents from the Cairo Geniza. He is a member of the American Academy for Jewish Research.
Olivia Remie Constable is Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame. She received her B.A. in Near Eastern Languages and Literatures from Yale University in 1983 and her Ph.D. in Near Eastern Studies from Princeton University in 1989, where she worked under the guidance of Avram Udovitch. She has published Trade and Traders in Muslim Spain: The Commercial Realignment of the Iberian Peninsula 900-1500 (Cambridge University Press, 1994), Medieval Iberia: Readings from Christian, Muslim, and Jewish Sources (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), and Housing the Stranger in the Mediterranean World: Lodging, Trade, and Travel in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages (Cambridge University Press, 2003). She is currently working on a new book project which looks at Muslim communities living under Christian rule in Spain and the western Mediterranean, 1050-1300.
Hassan S. Khalilieh is a Senior Lecturer in the Departments of Maritime Civilizations and Multidisciplinary Studies and the School of History at the University of Haifa. He received his Ph.D. from the Department of Near Eastern Studies, Princeton University, in 1995, and his LL.M. in Admiralty and Maritime Law, from the School of Law, Tulane University, in 2006. He is the author of Islamic Maritime Law: An Introduction (E. J. Brill, 1998) and Admiralty and Maritime Laws in the Mediterranean Sea (ca. 800-1050): the Kitab Akriyat al-Sufun vis-a-vis the Nomos Rhodion Nautikos (E. J. Brill, 2006).
Roxani Eleni Margariti is Associate Professor of Middle Eastern and South Asian Studies at Emory University. Born and raised in Athens, Greece, she received her B.A. in Western Asiatic Archaeology from University College London, her M.A. in Nautical Archaeology from Texas A&M University, and her Ph.D. in Near Eastern Studies from Princeton University in 2002. She is the author of Aden and the Indian Ocean Trade: 150 Years in the Life of a Medieval Arabian Port (University of North Carolina Press, 2007). Her current research focuses on political, social, and cultural aspects of Indian Ocean merchants’ networks before 1500 C.E., and on the cultural legacy and current status of Islamic monuments in Greece.
David S. Powers is Professor of Near Eastern Studies and History at Cornell University. He received his Ph.D. from Princeton in 1979. His courses deal with Islamic civilization, Islamic history and law, and classical Arabic texts, and his research focuses on the history of Islamic law and its application in Muslim societies. He is the author of Studies in Quran and Hadith: The Formation of the Islamic Law of Inheritance (University of California Press, 1986), Law, Society, and Culture in the Maghrib, 1300-1500 (Cambridge University Press, 2002), and Muhammad is Not the Father of Any of Your Men: The Making of the Last Prophet (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009). He is founding editor of the journal Islamic Law and Society and sectional editor (Law) of the third edition of The Encyclopaedia of Islam.
Yossef Rapoport is a Lecturer in the Department of History, Queen Mary, University of London. He received his B.A. from Tel Aviv University and his Ph.D. in Near Eastern Studies from Princeton University in 2002. He has published Marriage, Money, and Divorce in Medieval Islamic Society (Cambridge University Press, 2005). He has worked and published on the social history of the Islamic world in the medieval period, gender, and Islamic law, and participated in the study of the Book of Curiosities, a Fatimid cosmological treatise, at the Bodleian Library.
Adam Sabra is Associate Professor of History at the University of Georgia. He received his Ph.D. in Near Eastern Studies from Princeton University in 1998. He is the author of Poverty and Charity in Medieval Islam: Mamluk Egypt, 1250-1517 (Cambridge University Press, 2000), and co-editor with Richard McGregor of The Development of Sufism in Mamluk Egypt (IFAO, 2006). His research currently focuses on the social history of Sufism in Mamluk and Ottoman Egypt.
Boaz Shoshan received his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1978. He is Professor in the Departments of General History and Middle East Studies at Ben Gurion University of the Negev, Israel. He is the author of Popular Culture in Medieval Cairo (Cambridge University Press, 1993) and Poetics of Islamic Historiography (E. J. Brill, 2004) and editor of Discourse on Gender/Gendered Discourse in the Middle East (Praeger, 2000).
Petra M. Sijpesteijn holds the Chair of Arabic Language and Culture at Leiden University and is Chargée de recherche at the Institut de Recherche et Histoire des Textes at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris. She obtained her Ph.D. in Near Eastern Studies from Princeton University in 2004, after which she was a junior research fellow at Christ Church, Oxford (2003-2007). Her forthcoming book is entitled The Formation of a Muslim State in late Umayyad Egypt. She is also the co-editor of History and Arabic Papyrology (with L. Sundelin, E. J. Brill, 2001), From al-Andalus to Khurasan (with L. Sundelin, S. Torallas-Tovar and A. Zomeno, E. J. Brill, 2006) and Documents and Medieval Islamic History (with A. T. Schubert, E. J. Brill, 2008). She is currently working on a history of the Egyptian countryside under the first two hundred years of Muslim rule.
PREFACE For four decades Abraham L. Udovitch has been a leading scholar of the medieval Islamic world, its economic institutions, social structures, and legal theory and practice. In pursuing his quest to understand and explain the complex phenomena that these broad rubrics entail, he has published widely, collaborated internationally with other leading scholars of the Middle East and medieval history, and most saliently for the purposes of this volume, taught several cohorts of students at Princeton University. His teaching has been integral to his intellectual quest. This volume is therefore dedicated to his intellectual legacy from a uniquely revealing angle: the current work of his former students. Our purpose is not to produce a definitive assessment of any one aspect of Udovitch’s multivalent and ongoing contributions to the study of Middle Eastern economy, society and law, but instead to offer a collection of case studies that mirrors the breadth of his intellectual endeavors. Udovitch instilled in all of us a sense of the multiplicity of our field: “histories” instead of History, “legal practices” and “theories” instead of Law, “societies” instead of Society. This collection of essays reflects this sensibility. The diversity of subject matter and the breadth of chronological coverage exhibited by the papers in this volume is a tribute to the multiplicity of Udovitch’s own research and teaching legacy
Textual Genres and a Diversity of Methods The topics covered in the pages of the current collection range chronologically from the period preceding the rise of Islam in Arabia to the Mamluk era and geographically from Western Mediterranean to the Western Indian Ocean. Thematically, the papers in this volume explore pre-Islamic modes of exchange (Bonner); formative dynamics of Islamic narrative tradition (Powers); the balance of trade and war in the maritime world of the eastern Mediterranean (Rapoport); the political negotiations of Christian and Islamic Mediterranean sovereigns (Constable); the political and social capital of a prominent Sufi master (Sabra); the extent and limits of patronage for religious scholars in Mamluk society (Berkey); the treatment of slavery in the maritime legal traditions of the Mediterranean (Khalilieh); the adjudication of water rights in Mamluk Damascus (Shoshan); the development and first expressions of Muslim institutions (Sijpesteijn); and the historiography of Western Indian Ocean port cities (Margariti). One common strand that runs through all of these contributions is the methodological emphasis on close readings and re-readings of primary sources and the juxtaposition of different genres of narratives and documents, an emphasis that characterizes much of the work of Udovitch himself. They, just like Udovitch’ work, also refuse to be constrained by the separation of sources according to the religious communities that produced them—using Geniza documents to study the practice of Islamic law or Islamic normative sources to understand the history of Christian communities. Udovitch’s early career coincided with a momentous period in the writing of history in general and Middle Eastern history in particular. While the excitement over the methodology of the Annales school had taken firm root by the late sixties, at the same time the fertile reaction to it was coalescing into paradigm shifting movements in historical writing, including the schools of deconstruction and microhistory. Udovitch’s own work reflects his respect for interdisciplinary interrogation that embraces the methods of anthropology and the social sciences in general, and a love of narrative and of the unlocking of the capsules of history that are single or discrete groups of documents, archaeological finds, events, and persons. To better understand the reality of how people lived and interacted in the medieval period, he grounded his efforts in rigorous linguistic and philological training and turned his attention both to well-read classic texts, and to documents of everyday life, most notably the documents of the Cairo Geniza, in the reading and analysis of which he became a leading expert. As all the participants in this volume can testify, his teaching strongly reflected his enthusiasm for texts, both documents of everyday life and representatives of more formal genres. He often taught courses focused exclusively on reading documentary materials, be they Geniza documents or Arabic papyri, and also hosted workshops in Princeton devoted exclusively to that end. The explosion of documentary studies that started in the early days of Udovitch’s career and continues today means that his work constitutes a salient model for how to proceed in the writing of Middle Eastern history. Unedited texts are still being discovered and rediscovered in libraries and collections from #an$ā to New York and beyond—Arabic papyri, waqfīyas, Geniza documents—and documentary collections surface from unexpected quarters, such as the buried documents that archaeological excavations brought to light at the desert port of Quseir al-Qadīm. In addition to these, administrative and notarial compendia and chancery documents require similar analyses and inform us in comparable ways about the unfolding of past lives. The processing of such texts is still a major mandate in the collective project of writing Islamic and Middle Eastern history, and in this volume the papers by Berkey, Constable, Shoshan, and Sijpesteijn contextualize such discrete written records in a microhistorical approach that produces a richly textured portrait of daily life in the medieval period. The juxtaposition of documentary sources with normative legal and/or narrative texts and the reading against the grain of a variety of sources and across genres are related strategies, the potential of which is illustrated here by the papers by Bonner, Margariti, Powers, Rapoport, and Sabra.
Economic History Beyond method, the volume exemplifies a web of thematic strands within which Udovitch’s contribution to Islamic history is situated. Starting with the broad realm of the economic history of the Islamic Middle East, this contribution includes the investigation of economic practices and institutions, the multiple intersections of economic and social bonds, and especially the nexus between legal theory of commerce and commercial practice. In the words of one reviewer, Partnership and Profit in Medieval Islam “significantly broadened our knowledge of Muslim commercial arrangements, particularly for the early medieval period.”1 The work also demonstrates the kind of economic history to be written in spite of the dearth of thick quantitative documentation. Indeed, very early on Udovitch made the case for qualitative analysis of material pertaining to Middle Eastern medieval economies, especially in light of the continuing absence of significant quantitative material;2 the fruits of this approach are significant and consist in the elucidation of major economic and social institutions, especially capital mobilization, credit mechanisms, and monetary instruments, partnership arrangements, and government officials’ involvement in trade. In the same spirit of elucidating institutions of medieval economy, Petra Sijpesteijn “excavates” the many layers of an early eighth-century papyrus to probe the workings of the allocation of government stipends in the context of the Umayyad state’s taking root in newly conquered lands. The archaeology of this document indeed allows a glimpse of “army economics” that speak directly to the structures of the early Islamic state. Michael Bonner offers a reconstruction of the institution of pre-Islamic “silent trade” by reading against the grain of Muslim jurists’ discussions of the practice and juxtaposing both the legal and literary understanding of the practice in the Islamic context with anthropological and stucturalist economic theory. Rather than being an unintelligible or mysterious ritual of exchange between primitive peoples, the socalled silent trade practiced in Arabia on the eve of the rise of Islam thus emerges as a fine-tuned strategy for circumventing social barriers to commerce.
Social History A closely related set of questions central to Udovitch’s work pertain to the relationship between economic and social action and ultimately point to the common denominators—thematic and methodological—of social and economic history. Udovitch famously posited the fluidity and informality of economic relationships in medieval Islamic contexts in his 1974 article entitled “Formality and Informality.” While the balance between formality and informality may continue to spark new debate—debate that in itself testifies to the fruitful nature of the argument—the broader notion of embededness of social and economic practice that permeates much of Udo vitch’s work is well accepted and leads seamlessly into the realm of social history. Adam Sabra offers a lively portrait of Shams al-Dīn MaHmmad al-Hanafī, a Sufi master of 1400s Cairo, whose intellectual biography is inextricably linked to his political influence and his role as a link between his devotees and the Mamluk political elite. By subjecting the hagiographical portrait of this most important Shadhili mystic to historical analysis, Sabra unearths the political and economic dimensions of the patronage system which centered around Mu%ammad al- anafī and extended from the city to the countryside. In his article, Jonathan Berkey builds on his work on the social history of medieval Islamic education. He examines the wage data that can be extracted from waqfīyas in order to deepen our understanding of the economic underpinnings of the learned class.
The Mediterranean and Indian Ocean: Middle Eastern History in its Geographic Context Three of the papers mentioned above—by Sijpesteijn, Sabra, and Berkey—share with much of Udovitch’s work the focus on medieval Egypt. Udovitch’s current work, firmly situated as it is in the investigation of the Egyptian countryside, is also inexorably tied to the history of the Mediterranean as a whole. Mediterranean history has indeed been at the heart and the forefront of much of Udovitch’s work. He became involved at a time when the post-Pirennian, Braudelian framing of Mediterranean history had fully taken hold and his apprenticeship with Lopez galvanized his Mediterraneanist outlook. He was thus able to contribute to Mediterranean history as a Middle Eastern medievalist in a way that we consider routine today. Several of his Mediterraneanist concerns are reflected in the papers in this volume. In the realm of interdenominational relations that made the Mediterranean the quintessential arena of negotiation in the Middle Ages and render it today an exciting field of study, Udovitch sought to understand the ways in which communities interacted and accommodated differences in spite of prescriptive ideologies. In the process, he focused on the legal, economic and social adaptations some on the institutional level, that allowed for bridging “the gulf between rigid principle and supple accommodation.”3 The quest for these bridges is central in Remie Constable’s paper, as she dissects the negotiations between Tunisian afids and the Aragonese crown concerning privileges, especially religious freedom, for Catalan merchants and by extension all Christian traders in Muslim Tunis. This is a case of “transmediterranean communication”4 par excellence. Yossef Rapoport’s extends Udovitch’s outlook on the dynamics of the Mediterranean economy as viewed “from the south.” He argues for the ultimately military/naval provenance of the information on the topography and human geography of the Aegean world contained in the remarkable geographical manuscript titled “The Book of Curiosities.” To Udovitch’s argument that the European commercial revolution is inextricably linked to the increase of industrial production of textiles in the southern Mediterranean and a period of increased trade relations across the Mediterranean, Rapoport adds the issue of the adversarial relationship between the Byzantine and Fatimid states, and concludes that the geographical information of the manuscript emerged from a historical moment when strategic competition continued even as rigorous commercial ties increased. A mediterraneanist outlook is also evident in Hassan Khalilieh’s treatment of the question of treatment of slaves in maritime commercial law; his paper, along with his previous work demonstrates the interconnection of the different Mediterranean traditions of maritime law, but also notes their divergences. Beyond the Mediterranean, the interregional perspective and the engagement with oceanic history extend to the world of the Indian Ocean. Khalilieh’s article fills in the gaps of legal theory and practice with regard to the status of slaves on board ships with material from the Malay legal tradition. Margariti’s article is squarely located in the field of Indian Ocean studies, and informs the rather sparsely documented early period of medieval Indian Ocean exchanges with the unique testimony of the Cairo Geniza—recently made available through corpus of S.D. Goitein’s “India Book,”5 the importance of which Udovitch undertook to impress on his peers and students through courses he taught and papers he presented on the subject of Indian Ocean trade.
Link
Press Here
0 التعليقات :
إرسال تعليق