Download PDF | Michael Chamberlain - Knowledge and Social Practice in Medieval Damascus, 1190-1350-Cambridge University Press (1995).
215 Pages
Michael Chamberlain focuses on medieval Damascus to develop a new approach to the relationship between the society and culture of the Middle East. The author argues that historians have long imposed European strictures onto societies to which they were alien. Western concepts of legitimate order were inappropriate to medieval Muslim society where social advancement was dependent upon the production of knowledge and religious patronage, and it was the household, rather than the state agency or the corporation, that held political and social power. An interesting parallel is drawn between the learned elite and the warriors of Damascus who, through similar strategies, acquired status and power and passed them on in their households. By examining material from the Latin West, Sung China, and the Sinicized empires of Inner Asia, the author addresses the nature of political power in the period and places the Middle East within the context of medieval Eurasia.
Preface
It is sad but unavoidable that a single book can never pay off all the debts its production has incurred. This study began as an attempt to understand the social uses of knowledge by the learned elite of Damascus, and took me in directions I originally had no intention of pursuing. The book is aimed at a number of audiences, in part to acknowledge that it could never have been completed without borrowing from other disciplines. Having taken much from anthropologists, sociologists, comparative historians, and historians of China and the Latin West, I hope they will find something here to interest them in turn.
The notes are at the bottom of the page, not to give an impression of scholarly formidableness, but to allow the book to be read in two ways. Scholars of medieval Islamic history will notice that the notes not only are intended to support the argument, but in many cases to advance it. Scholars of other fields may read the narrative without reference to the notes. This book, not to mention the greater part of my education, would not have been possible without my teacher Ira Lapidus. Without his example, I would have not tried to become a historian; without his guidance and support, I would never have made it thus far. I am also grateful to my teachers, William Brinner, Eugene Irschick, Hamid Algar, Andre Ferre, and others. I must also thank the history departments at Berkeley, Stanford, and Wisconsin. This book would not have been possible without the support and good conversation I found in these three places.
I am especially indebted to Peter Duus, Richard Roberts, and Joel Beinin for their support and encouragement at Stanford. I am also very grateful to Andre Wink, whose ideas entered the dissertation upon which this book is based before either of us knew we would find ourselves in Madison, and who has given me much advice and support since my arrival here. As much as anything else, this book is a product of talks with friends, the support of friends, and thoughts about friends, so I would like to thank Rikki Allanna Zrimsek, Irene Keller, Margaret O'Brien, Lisa Saper, Margaret Malamud, Wendy Verlaine, Mia Fuller, James Ketelaar, David McDonald, Mary Conn, Peter Flood, Holly Huprich, and Brendan Phipps. To Krystyna von Henneberg, who helped me through the dissertation upon which this book is based, I owe more than space allows me to express.
I would also like to thank readers of various versions of the manuscript, who pointed out errors and infelicities and suggested new ways of thinking about these problems and presenting them: Richard Bulliet, William Courtenay, Patricia Crone, Dale Eickelman, Jan Heesterman, Krystyna von Henneberg, Anatoly Khazanov, David McDonald, Margaret Sommerville, Andre Wink, Lynne Withey, and the readers for the Press whose names are unknown to me. I am much appreciative of the efforts my editors, Marigold Acland and Mary Starkey, have put into the production of the book. It goes without saying that all errors are my own.
Also many thanks to the Ecole des hautes etudes en sciences sociales, where some of these ideas were first presented. The libraries in which I have worked, and where I have always been happy, include the University of California, Stanford University, the Hoover Institution, the University of Wisconsin, Cambridge University, the British Library, the Bibliotheque Nationale, the Vatican Library, and the Siileymaniye, Kopriilu, and Topkapi libraries in Istanbul. To the staff of the Kopriilu, where often I worked long periods alone, I am especially grateful for many small kindnesses. To the people in Damascus and Aleppo who have helped me with this project, and shown me so much kindness, I have not the words to express my gratitude.
I am also grateful to Donald Little for supplying me with microfilms of manuscripts that have been withdrawn from circulation in Istanbul. Finally, I can hardly express enough my thanks to Jacqueline Sublet and the Institut pour Phistoire et la recherche des textes, both for their kindly reception and their incomparable collection of microfilmed manuscripts. For the money that supported this project I thank the US taxpayer (trebly), the Mellon Foundation (doubly), the Graduate School at Berkeley, The Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (doubly), and the Middle East Study Center of the University of California and the history department at Stanford (both multiply).
Introduction General statement of the problem This book is about the social uses of learning in high medieval Damascus. The topic offers an opportunity to address two problems that historians of the period have puzzled over but not resolved. The first arises out of the methodologies Western historians have applied to high medieval Islamic societies. Over the last two generations a number of historians have applied various methodologies of European social and institutional history to the period. The medieval Middle East would appear to be a suitable object of these approaches. The apparently undivided sovereignty of its rulers, the role of law in the regulation of its social life, the relatively high monetization of its economies, the existence of bureaucracies and large urban garrisons of standing armies - collectively these give the high medieval Middle East the characteristics of a highly complex and urban society on a par with early modern Europe. It should be not surprising perhaps that appearing frequently in studies of the period are familiar entities such as "government," "the state," "higher education," "the army," "bureaucracy," and "administration." Notions such as "dynastic legitimacy" and the distinction between the private and public spheres also find their way into the field. Historians often employ these concepts casually, but uncritical use has often put the field in danger of anachronism and confusion.
Another problem with this approach is that it often leads historians to use "corruption," "usurpation," and "illegitimacy" as explanatory devices when the entities and institutions they study do not function as expected. Several recent historians have acknowledged that the formal objects of social and institutional history have often eluded us. The most sensitive accounts of the period have stressed the informality of social practices and groups, while others have described informal analogues to the permanent hierarchical institutions and social bodies characteristic of other medieval societies.
This notion of informality is useful to the extent that it distinguishes the high medieval Middle East from societies that had permanent hierarchical institutions and groups. But the observation is largely negative. It does little but reiterate that the high medieval Middle East was not characterized by some of the structural characteristics of some other Eurasian societies of the period. Also, in its implicit comparison to Europe, the focus on informality has often concentrated less on what was there than what was not. This first problem led to the principal issue that this book seeks to address. In looking for the defining possibilities and constraints on culture, social life, and politics, can we be satisfied with describing either the "corruption" of the formal institutions of other societies or their "informal" analogues? The second problem concerns the evidence that has come down to us from the high medieval Middle East. The period is rich in sources.
It also had abundant supplies of cheap paper, a dry climate, and administrative traditions stretching back to late antiquity. However, in spite of conditions conducive to the production and preservation of document collections comparable to those of the Latin West, the period is surprisingly poor in original document collections. George Duby's memoirs might tempt medieval Islamic historians to lament the past's unfairness to the field.1 To the ten thousand original documents Duby exploited from the archive of the Abbey of Cluny alone a historian of the high medieval Middle East might counterpoise a much smaller number from some very large empires. Given the small number of original documents that have survived from the high medieval Middle East, and the inadequacy of concepts derived from European historiography, it might seem reasonable to question whether a social history of the period is possible at all. The point of departure of this study is the similarity between the historiographical and conceptual problems.
Where the sociological emphasis has been on the "lack" of formal institutions and group structures, the historiographical problem has been to grapple with the "scarcity" of original document collections. Given that in both cases the somewhat artificial standard of comparison is Europe, a reexamination of the methods of social history as applied to the Middle East might lead to new perspectives on these lasting problems. The line of inquiry that this study proposes is to examine the practices by which power and status were acquired, exerted, and asserted. In the high medieval Middle East, this study will argue, it was the elite household (bayt, pi. buyut), and not the state, the agency, or the autonomous corporate or religious body, that held power, and that exercised it in most of its social, political, cultural, and economic aspects. When we compare the medieval Middle East with other Eurasian societies of the period, a more productive approach is to examine the practices by which powerful households acquired power and prestige and passed them on to their descendants. Studying the practices of the patriarchal household - "economy" in the Aristotelian sense - also brings together various fields that historians have dealt with as separate conceptual unities.2
Attention to the strategies of households rather than the taxonomy of formal institutions also helps us compare the Middle East with other societies without treating Europe as a privileged standard. It also helps us to understand how the exercise of power in the period formed the inescapable environment of elite households, both civilian and military, and shaped their strategies within it in similar ways. This approach in turn allows us to examine the surviving "literary" sources in a new light. If we ask how elite strategies of survival made use of writing, we can exploit in a new way those written materials that were preserved in large numbers. Is the relative scarcity of collections of original documents due to accidental (and therefore unproblematic) loss, or to another reason that we have overlooked? If archival administrative, household, or corporate documents survived only in small numbers, what accounts for the preservation of the large number of sources, especially the biographical dictionaries, that social historians have seen as "literary" and "formulaic"? Why were these sources composed, stored, and preserved?
What ends did the effort and money invested in these materials serve? This book is an exploratory essay that works out these two problems together. It ceases lamenting the absence of original documents, or squeezing what can be got out of the small number that have survived. Rather, this study interprets the surviving "literary" sources as a means of understanding the cultural practices by which households attempted to survive in time. By reading these sources in this way, we come to understand issues that have long eluded medieval Islamic historians. How did our subjects imagine the nature of the social universe and maneuver within it? How did households acquire status and power and hold onto them over time? In the absence of stable and hierarchical institutions, how are we to understand the exercise of power in the period? The interior of the household was denned by the silence that respected its sacred and untouchable character. However, our sources, often written by members of these households, and many more describing the careers of their members in some detail, give us a unique if oblique view into how households survived in the larger world.
This study will attempt to show that these elusive, "formulaic," and literary sources were not merely spared the accidents that somehow befell other more "serious" sources, but rather that they should be interpreted as repositories of the practices by which households survived over generations. By using these sources to understand how elite households made use of cultural practices for social ends, we accomplish three things. First, we begin to exploit the sources that are available to us in a more critical and productive manner. Second, we may compare the medieval Middle East to other agrarian civilizations of medieval Eurasia with greater sensitivity - though this study will suggest more than it settles in this respect. And finally we can reach a more precise understanding of the accurate though non-specific notion of the "informality" of high medieval Islamic societies.
Social survival in the high medieval Middle East European observers of the medieval Middle East have long been interested in, and often horrified by, the precarious conditions of social survival of its elites. Beginning in the early modern period, and continuing into the present, European writers have searched the Middle East for the mechanisms which reproduced European feudal, aristocratic, or bourgeois society. Failing to find what they expected, many have experienced the Middle East as the nightmarish reversal of the European social order.3 In a subjective sense these writers were correct. There is no doubting the rarity in the Middle East of the formal mechanisms of transmitting status that Europeans have prized.4
Civilian elite (ac yan) households could not make use of such European institutions as inherited rights, immunities, franchises, charters, deeds, titles or patents of nobility or office, or hereditary privileges. Nor could the ac yan restrict their status to small groups through the cultural strategies of elite groups elsewhere. They had little of the "natural" taste and "good breeding" of hereditary aristocracies, nor the ideology of bureaucrats and professional associations. Moreover, unlike elites in the Ottoman empire or Sung China, to mention just two examples, they were unable to insert themselves into state agencies to acquire or transmit elite status. As the ac yan "lacked" these legal, corporate, or state mechanisms of household survival, there seems little reason to reject the traditional European perception of them as the "servants" or "slaves" of despots, and of the social order generally as either "despotic," "disorderly," or "corrupt."
However, what this perception fails to account for is the successful survival of ac yan households throughout the high medieval Middle East. In Damascus (which added to these apparent impediments to social reproduction a number of its own) some households transmitted their status from the early sixth/ twelfth century to well beyond the middle of the eighth/fourteenth. Many others passed on their status more modestly but just as certainly for two or three generations. This book asks how these households, living in a turbulent period, able to control property only with difficulty, made use of cultural practices associated with knowledge (Him) in their strategies of social survival.
Knowledge, cultural capital, and social survival Long before contemporary scholars began to look at knowledge as the "cultural capital" of elites, medieval Muslim writers associated knowledge with social survival. "The capital of the student," wrote Ibn Jamac a, "is his thoughts."5 Ibn al-Hajj also linked money and knowledge as forms of social capital: "knowledge (c ilm) will protect you, while you have to protect your money. Knowledge judges others while money is adjudicated. Money decreases when it is spent, while knowledge is accounted as alms when it is dispensed."6 As much as their "treasures of knowledge, not of gold" the words by which they represented themselves - culamtf ("learned"), ahl al-c ilm ("people of knowledge") - affirmed their association of status with knowledge.7 Yet, as critical as understanding the social uses of knowledge is, how ac yan households made use of learning in their strategies of social survival remains an open question. This is not due to any lack of interest in the subject of learning broadly defined. Since the Middle Ages, European scholars have studied Islamic scholastic, philosophical, scientific, and legal literatures, and a large and ever-growing body of scholarship on these subjects has appeared since. More recently intellectual historians have studied the lives and works of exemplary scholars or important movements.
They have been joined by institutional historians, who have traced the origins and diffusion of institutions related to the transmission of knowledge. Social historians have also been interested in the ac yan, for a variety of reasons. The ac yan were the authors of our sources, which reflect their lives and concerns. The learned elite were also judges {qddls), teachers, and communal leaders. Ira Lapidus has analyzed the social roles of the learned elite to criticize the notion that "Oriental despotism" atomized cities into isolated groups incapable of cooperating with one another.8 Historians following Lapidus have looked to the culamaD to explain how a precarious social equilibrium was maintained in the face of ethnic and religious diversity and contradictory interests.9 Lapidus, Joan Gilbert, and Carl Petry have analyzed how the c ulamaD mediated among military and ruling elites, merchants, artisans, and the common people; how they carried out administrative and judicial functions in the absence of bureaucratic state agencies; and how they ensured continuity from generation to generation in unsettled societies.10 However, even though a large body of literature has appeared on Islamic intellectual, legal, and institutional history, and a smaller one on the social functions of the learned elite in cities, these approaches have been less concerned with understanding how the ac yan used knowledge for social and political ends. Legal and intellectual historians have considered socialhistorical questions to be on the margins of their central concerns. When they have studied the social aspects of knowledge, they have wanted to understand the contexts or origins of important ideas, and not the social and political uses of knowledge in historical time in specific places.
Institutional historians, I will argue below, have often mistaken practices of social competition for institutional structures. Both groups have also seen the culamaD as a natural and unproblematic social category throughout Islamic history, and have often been insensitive to local and temporal variations. Social historians have been more alert to the specific character of the groups that referred to themselves as the ac yan or culama\ However, because these historians have been largely concerned with the culamaD 's social roles, they have emphasized the learned elite's relational characteristics vis-a-vis other groups. The ac yan's intrinsic properties, their struggles with one another, how they made use of their learning and cultivation in social competition, all remain open issues. Even though historians have long been interested in the study of learning and in the social functions of the culamaD , we have yet to investigate relations between universal cultural practices and particular social strategies. This book is an inquiry into how the ac yan of Damascus, over a 160-year period in the high Middle Ages, acquired and made use of knowledge in their strategies of social survival. By studying the social uses of knowledge, my aim is to raise and address a number of central problems in the social and cultural history of the high medieval Middle East.
How did ac yan households reproduce themselves in time? How did they defend themselves from predation by warriors? By what means did the ac yan gain their useful loyalties and cultural distinction? What were the practices by which they competed with one another? How did they imagine the nature of the social universe and plot their trajectories within it? The answers to these questions, this study will suggest, lie not in the social, legal, and institutional structures and processes that have long attracted scholarly attention.11 Nor can they be described satisfactorily as "informal" or "personal" without draining them of their particularity and complexity. Rather, these problems are better addressed by interpreting the social uses in historical time of cultural practices that scholars have often seen as universally "Islamic," and without particular social uses. Much of this study will cover what may appear to be well-trodden territory. The cultural practices that this book will examine are nearly universal in premodern Islamic societies, indeed in literate agrarian societies in general. Lecturing, reading, writing, reproducing texts, debating, discipleship, and scholarly friendship seem so widespread as to be marginal to the interests of social historians.
These practices and relationships were similar to, and often influenced by, ancient rhetorical education, medieval scholasticism, and medieval Jewish education. It is not surprising therefore that scholars have studied the production of knowledge in the context of the history of education: in other places, it is where practices related to the production of knowledge often converge. However, in the case of Damascus I hope to show that we have often misinterpreted these practices precisely by studying them as "educational." In Damascus, cultural practices associated with the production of knowledge had different meanings and uses. Placing these practices in their correct context reveals much about broader and unresolved issues concerning power, culture, and social relations. This study focuses on the ac yan in part because the sources on them are better than on the social history of other groups such as the warrior elite and (to a much greater extent) the common people. However, ac yan households can be studied not only to advance our understanding of medieval Islamic scholarship, or the culamaD as a social category, but also to address relations among power, culture, and social life on a more general level.
Modern scholars have generally drawn a hard and fast distinction between warrior elites (amirs) and the ac yan, and have seen their relationships to one another as a division of social and political labor.x 2 However, this book will show how both amirs and a c yan had similar relations to rulers, similar forms of social and political competition, and imagined the social and political universes in similar ways. In particular, as I shall show in the following chapters, many of the cultural practices we have taken to be "educational" in the case of the ac yan had much wider uses, and often characterized military households as well. We will also see, to the extent possible, how the common people made use of these practices. By using the limited information available on the common people, I hope both to question the extent to which these cultural practices were monopolized by the elite and to ask how universal practices were contested by particular groups.
In order to arrive at this argument the book will first devote a number of pages to discussing the nature of political power in Damascus, in the Middle East as a whole, and in the wider context of Eurasian history in the period. Two central concepts of the argument are what may be termed the "maladroit patrimonialism" of high medieval Middle Eastern rulers; and its relationship to "fitna," or struggle, sometimes violent and sometimes not, carried out without reference to the "state" or interference from it. Fitna is a term with so many meanings that it should be discussed at the outset. Its meanings in the classical Arabic lexicons and in the Qur'an and hadith include "disorder," "civil war," "factional competition," "sedition," "madness," "temptation," and the sexual attractiveness of women, in all cases implying either a threat to legitimate order or a collapse into social, political, psychological, or sexual disorder.
What this study hopes to accomplish is to demonstrate that while fitna was indeed feared as dangerously divisive and destructive, in concert with maladroit patrimonialism it remained nonetheless the inescapable environment and indeed the fundamental dynamic of politics and social life. By examining the relationship of maladroit patrimonialism to fitna we can understand the distinctive and often misunderstood character of high medieval Middle Eastern politics. Rulers lived in cities and recognized few impediments to seizing the wealth of others.
Rulers also had the power to redistribute status and revenue sources continuously. However, we cannot consider them "despots" in any real sense of the term. Rulers had no monopoly of coercive force. Throughout the period under consideration, rulers never had the knowledge, the agencies, and the independent coercive power to coordinate and control the subordinate elites upon whom they depended to rule. Rather, power was diffused among the households of powerful amirs and ac yan. Rulers were dependent on the same households - of both ac yan and amirs - whom they regularly subjugated to predation. Thus the peculiar character of high medieval Middle Eastern politics.
The dynamic tension in high medieval Middle Eastern cities such as Damascus was between the diffusion of power and revenue sources among elite households on the one hand; and the physical propinquity of rulers, their ability to reassign revenue sources, and the relative absence of restraints on their seizure of property on the other. This tension is what gives fitna its explanatory utility. Two major spheres of ac yan social life - what we have formalized as "higher education" and the "suppression of heresy" - were both experienced by our subjects as arenas of fitna. In both cases they experienced fitna within the domain of knowledge much as amirs did within the domain of war. This study will suggest that we look beyond the formal, public, and legalistic aspects of power and social life, and try instead to understand their abiding possibilities and constraints.
By studying the competitive practices of fitna as exercised by both amirs and ac yan, we come to understand on a more general level what historians have formalized as the distinct spheres of "society," "culture," and the "state." We can also undermine the anachronistic notion of the existence of "state" and "society" as distinct entities, and of political and social competition as the separate domains of amirs and ac yan respectively. Fitna, as we shall see in the course of this study, was not the temporary breakdown of a preexisting legitimate order, but in concert with maladroit patrimonialism formed the central dynamic of all elite social and political life. It imposed its logic on most of their political and social relationships.
Approaches to culture and society in the medieval Middle East When Western scholars have studied medieval Middle Eastern peoples, they have brought with them an implicit theory, often a deterministic one, of relations between culture and social life. Europeans have long taken Islam as a historically transcendent object of inquiry. The constitution of Islam as a historical object began with the earliest European descriptions of the Middle East.
Beginning with the crusades, and continuing into the present, it has often been Islam that "explains" the terrifying, pathetic, or exemplary otherness of Middle Eastern peoples.13 When we think about the "feudal" Latin West or "imperial" China it is an attribute of their political organization that we seize upon as emblematic of what is most important about them. But the words by which scholars represent the medieval Middle East - the Islamic World, Islam, Islamdom, the Muslim World - reveal how Western scholars have continued to take religious culture to represent the Middle East. Even today, a glance at journal or course titles will reveal the degree to which this concentration on religion continues to dominate the field.
Like many generalizations, this focus on Islam both hides and reveals a truth. There is no doubt that many people in the pre-modern Middle East understood power and collective life with reference to the sacred, more so perhaps than is true of some other pre-modern societies. The ac yan of medieval Middle Eastern societies styled themselves - and in our period supported themselves - as a religious elite. Rulers and warriors explained their strategies and sometimes understood them in religious terms. Moreover, the sources were shaped by a religious sensibility when they were not religious in intent, and cannot be interpreted without an understanding of their religious content. However, having registered the importance of religion as an object of study, giving Islam the priority it has had brings with it several drawbacks. First, this approach has often obliterated differences among Middle Eastern societies that are distinct in other respects.
Islamicists have looked for continuities among societies as different as the seventh-century Hijaz, ninth-century Baghdad, and fourteenth-century Damascus, and have often enshrined correspondences among them as truths about a single historical object. In addition, the Islamicist approach has tended to focus attention on origins (of ideas, groups, religious practices, etc.) as a category of historical explanation. Finally, by failing to situate relations between culture and society in specific historical contexts, the Islamicist approach has occasionally lapsed into an essentialism, one that seeks to explain all behavior with reference to a single cultural construct. Ignoring what it dismisses as local or pathological variations on a universal theme, or taking local practices as evidence for universal structures, this approach has regularly effaced the specific character of the societies it examines. It rarely asks how culture becomes a stake or a weapon in specific struggles. In short, Islamicist studies of the pre-modern Middle East have often erased differences among Middle Eastern societies, while constructing artificial and often misleading differences with Europe. Recent studies of relations between society and culture have tried to escape the occasional universalism and essentialism of this approach. One strategy has been to bring to the study of the medieval Middle East some of the concepts and methods of European social and institutional history. A number of monographs have examined cities, bureaucracies, institutions of justice and social control, cultural institutions such as madrasas ("law colleges") and khanqahs {sufi "convents"), groups such as sectarian communities, men's associations (futuwwas and ahdath), legal schools {madhhabs), sufi orders, and legal and administrative phenomena such as vra ^(charitable foundation) and iqtac (temporary land grant).
These studies have put the historiography of the high medieval Middle East on a more self-conscious and comparative basis. However, as promising as such approaches seemed at the outset, they have not worked as well as their proponents expected. The most sensitive studies of the period have realized that formal entities, agencies, institutions, and groups did not determine social relations in the medieval Middle East to the extent they did in the Latin West. Studies of formal entities have advanced only partial explanations of the nature of political and social power, of how ac yan households reproduced the conditions of their elite status, how they passed on their status and wealth to their descendants, how they constructed and imagined their social ties, and how they competed among themselves and against others.
Where social historians began by calling into question some of the anachronistic assumptions of earlier Islamicist scholarship, some of their most important conclusions have been largely negative: formal entities and institutions did not determine social life in the expected manner. By lamenting the "corruption" or positing "informal" analogues to "formal" European practices and entities, we have yet to disengage from ideas we have learned to distrust. The problem for historians is that after having taken terminology, methods, and concepts from European social history, we have often failed to question their applicability to societies outside Europe. When we attempt to describe a society so distant in time, the first task is to understand Europe's historiographical practices in relation to Europe's own practices of domination and social reproduction. When it has failed to take these fundamental differences into consideration, the modern historiography of the medieval Middle East has often imposed European social ideals on societies that cannot sustain them.
The problem of evidence A similar problem arises when we look at the application of European methods of exploiting historical evidence to Islamic social history. If there is any medieval Middle Eastern city that seems open to the practices of social history, it is Damascus. There is perhaps more literary, epigraphic, and material evidence on Damascus in the Ayyubid and Mamltik periods than on any other city of the high medieval Middle East, with the possible exception of Cairo. Travelers' accounts, chronicles, biographical dictionaries, buildings, street plans, inscriptions, coins, manuals for clerks and secretaries, and treatises on every aspect of intellectual life exist in large numbers. Damascus was also fortunate, from the perspective of historians, in having several generations of local historians and biographers. It would seem that the abundance, variety, and detail of the sources make Damascus an ideal subject for social historians. Yet in the midst of apparent plenty, social and cultural historians of Damascus - together with historians of other cities of the medieval Middle East - have found the sources impoverished on many of the questions they most wanted to answer.
The chronicles and biographical dictionaries convey little information on several of the critical problems that historians have tried to address, while these sources carry masses of information that historians have seen as marginal to their interests. Failing to find the desired information on the social functions of structures and groups, and deluged by what seem to be anomalous or useless anecdotes, scholars of the period have often concluded with some reluctance that these sources are "austere," "stereotypical," or "formulaic."14 Given the deficiencies of the sources with respect to the critical questions of social history, some scholars have doubted whether a social history of the high medieval Middle East is possible at all. Damascus, although it possesses sources in greater quantity than most other cities, has posed many of the same intractable problems as other cities of the period. There are several possible strategies that historians might adopt in the face of the difficult nature of the evidence for high medieval Islamic societies. One, already long essayed, has been to sift through the standard sources for their information on social, political, cultural, or economic groups and institutions. While much important work remains to be done, few surprises are to be expected from this approach, and crucial questions remain that it cannot address. A second strategy is that adopted most notably and successfully by Joan Gilbert for high medieval Damascus and Carl Petry for late medieval Cairo.15 Gilbert and Petry tabulated the quantifiable information in the biographical dictionaries to address a number of questions about the social origins and composition of civilian elite groups.
These scholars have shown that patient handling and sensitive interpretation of serial data can produce important conclusions regarding the affiliations, composition, and social origins of the civilian elite. They have also argued persuasively that accurate prosopographical data can be extracted from the ever-problematic biographical dictionaries. However, in addressing several critical issues, this approach has pointed to others which by its nature it cannot settle. How did the ac yan understand their relationship to the social world? What were their strategies for reproducing the conditions of their elite status? By what institutions, codes, and practices did they struggle for power, wealth, and prestige among themselves and against others? These are questions that elude study by quantitative methods even though they may benefit from them. A final strategy has been the intensive exploitation of the few original documents that have survived from the period. We know that in this highly literate period large numbers of petitions, decrees, contracts, qadl-records (records of judges' opinions), wills, estate inventories, and administrative documents were drawn up. However, few of these have survived in the original.
Scholars have long regretted this absence of major document collections from the high medieval Middle East. Many scholars, it is fair to say, believe that it is the rarity of documentary evidence that is responsible for the wide gaps in our knowledge of the social history of the period. * 6 Some scholars have also lamented that medieval Middle Eastern historiography has lagged behind other fields because of the small number of original documents that have survived from the period. In part because of the rarity of original documents, historians of the high medieval period have given those documents that have been found ever-growing attention, and have placed ever-growing hopes in them.17 Exploiting original documents, however few in number they may be, has several apparent advantages.
Countering the charge that historians of the medieval Middle East privilege literary sources, the study of documents has promised to put the field on the road to historiographical legitimacy. It also has promised to shed new light on issues that other sources obscure or ignore. Yet as obvious as it might seem for historians to privilege collections of original documents, here too the results have been mixed. Even the most active proponents of original documents have recognized that the number of surviving documents is much smaller than is the case for the high and late medieval Latin West, Sung China, or the Ottoman empire, to take just three examples, and that the uses historians may put them to are more limited still. But one question we have yet to ask is whether document collections had uses in the high medieval Middle East comparable to their uses in these other societies. Is accidental loss the reason that historians have so few original document collections from the high medieval Middle East? One way to address this problem is to compare the uses of collections of original documents in the high medieval Middle East with other societies in which documents have survived in larger numbers. The collection of original documents has a privileged status in European historiography in part because it has a privileged status in European social and political competition.
In the Latin West documents were unmistakable proofs of privilege, exemption, competence, precedent, honor, or possession. As nations, classes, corporations, religious bodies, families, status groups, and factions fought out their struggles with documents, they took measures to preserve them. This accounts in part for the survival of a large number of collections of original documents from high medieval Europe compared to the high medieval Middle East. The critical position of the document within European social and political competition also shaped the development of modern European historiography. When European historians began to exploit original documents, it was often to examine such symbolic charters to subvert or assert inherited rights,autonomy, sovereignty, titles, and ownership. Collections of documents therefore survived in greater numbers not by accident, but because elite groups exerted themselves to preserve them. And the crucial role of documents in European historiography is in like manner grounded in European practices of social and political competition.
In the high medieval Middle East, however, rulers maintained patrimonial if not absolutist claims, considered most of the wealth of their subjects their own, and permitted other social bodies none of the formal autonomies they had in Europe. Individuals, households, religious bodies, and groups did not brandish documents as proofs of hereditary status, privilege, or property to the extent they did in the Latin West. Nor were their strategies of social reproduction recorded, sanctified, or fought out through documents to the extent they were in Europe. There were several partial and occasional exceptions to this general observation. First, subject religious communities {dhimmis) preserved two categories of documents over time. As dhimmis had a defined legal status and a contractual relationship to the dominant community, some preserved documents that asserted specific exemptions or privileges.
The Geniza records, which stored the written materials of the Jewish community of Cairo, are the other form of document collection preserved by a subject religious community.18 The Geniza's importance to the study of Mediterranean and Indian Ocean economic history is incomparable, and it has made the Jewish communities of Cairo and others with which they were in contact some of the best-studied communities in the medieval Mediterranean world. However, the Geniza was not an archive but a closed storehouse, and the papers that were preserved there were kept because of religious restrictions that forbade the destruction of written materials. It also is more valuable on the history of Jewish and merchant communities than on the dominant elite.19 A second exception is the trove of documents from the Haram al-Sharif in Jerusalem that Donald Little has studied with laudable tenacity, thoroughness, and precision. As valuable and rare as this find is, it appears to be composed for the most part of the records of a single qadi that survived by lucky accident.20 At the same time as these sources demonstrate the extent to which a single individual could make use of documents, their casual storage shows how their importance was relatively minor in the long-term control of power, property, or status. A third exception are documents such as the permission granted by one individual to another to represent a text or a body of knowledge (ijazas) and certificates of pilgrimage or study that attested to the learning or piety of single individuals. These were in the normal course of events kept by their recipients, although in at least one case a book of transmitters of hadlth (accounts of the Prophet's words and deeds) was preserved in the mosque in the Hanball neighborhood of al-Salihiyya on Mount Qasyun.21
Although these categories of documents provide useful information on a number of subjects, none is directly comparable in size or importance to the collections of original documents of the high or late medieval Latin West. The fourth exception to this general observation is the waqfiyya, the foundation deed of the household charitable endowment (waqfahli or waqf ahliyya). The foundation of waqfs was one of the critical social and political practices of the period, as has been demonstrated most notably by one of the finest historians of medieval Cairo, Muhammad Muhammad Amin, and put into application in a recent excellent study by Jonathan Berkey.22 As the waqf was perhaps the sole secure and readily available means of controlling property over time, waqfiyyas were without doubt a means by which the control of property was associated with documents. Individual waqfiyyas were kept in various places. Although the registry of waqfs (diwan al-awqaf) may have kept some records of individual waqfs, one indication of the lack of faith individuals placed in document collections was the inscription of the stipulations of the waqf on the lintel or around the dome of the building the waqf supported.
The beneficiaries of lesser waqfs often kept (or concealed) the original deed themselves. Moreover, waqfiyyas have to be used with care, as they refer to the intentions of the founder of a waqf. While these documents are without question informative on a variety of issues, we often do not have independent confirmation that the provisions of waqfiyyas were actually enacted. In fact, numerous reforms of waqfs and accusations of the "corruption" of waqfs and the usurpation of their income are fair though not conclusive indications that often they were not.
In any case, waqfiyyas are most convincing as sources on the social uses of waqfs when their provisions are confirmed by other sources, rather than refuted as is often the case. The waqfiyyas that have survived also say more about a small section of the ruling (especially warrior) elite's temporary control of property than they do about the ac yan. In Damascus, at least, a number of ac yan families controlled household waqfs over time, but most protected property with some difficulty and without the sanctification of possession through waqf. With these occasional and partial exceptions the high medieval Middle East had few collections of original documents comparable to those preserved by the corporate bodies of the Latin West.
As a general and necessarily loose principle, where in the high and late medieval Latin West collections of documents were on occasion lost by accident, in the Middle East it was by accident that they survived. Moreover, in spite of the patrimonial practices of ruling groups in the Middle East, state archives and imperial literature would be of less use to urban social history, even had they survived, than such sources elsewhere. Scholars have turned up the occasional petition or handful of administrative documents, but in spite of the magisterial scholarship that these documents have inspired, they are valuable precisely because they are rare.23 Even at the time, although registers and archives of various types existed, neither the bureaucracy nor recipients of these documents preserved them over long periods in major document collections comparable to those of the Latin West, the Ottoman empire, or Sung China. Nor was there any imperial literature in the medieval Middle East comparable to that of Sung China.24 Documents were important to the functioning of the regime, especially in recording who (temporarily) controlled what (temporary) revenue source.
Middle Eastern diwdns (registries) carried out cadastral surveys, kept detailed records of land and land grants, and were charged with the provision of money, grain, and goods to the ruler's household and his military formations. Rulers also wrote (with the aid of the chancellory) decrees for a variety of purposes. However, the document collections that existed appear not to have had the critical role in political or social competition characteristic of state, corporate, or household archives elsewhere. The chronicles rarely mention document collections in the context of social or political competition. This is not entirely due to neglect. Commercial contracts never extended to the political arena, and political relations were not generally understood as contractual. Nor did the decree produce elite status over generations, though there were a few exceptions. While petitions and their ensuing decrees were drawn up, these dealt with ephemeral problems. They rarely provided a basis for a notion of precedent, either in common law or in state practice, and there was little need to preserve them over long periods.25 It is significant that in terms of decrees that produced temporary elite status we have models of decrees in manuals for secretaries rather than the decrees themselves. Otherwise state or administrative documents do not provide information on many of the crucial questions of urban political or social history to the extent they do elsewhere.
Here again the absence of surviving document collections is not entirely reducible to accidental loss, as scholars have often assumed.26 A more satisfying explanation can be found in the nature of state power. If high medieval Middle Eastern rulers claimed a more undivided sovereignty than was the case with states in the Latin West, in common with other horse-warrior states of medieval Eurasia they had neither the knowledge nor the skills to administer the societies they dominated. Together with other such regimes they had a functional dependence on their subjects. Rulers in general did not penetrate the cities they dominated through intrusive state agencies, but by fitting themselves into existing social and cultural practices and turning them to political use. The formal state agencies of the high medieval Middle East were rudimentary compared to those of the Ottoman empire or Sung China, to take just two examples, and the agencies that existed preserved few documents (with the exception of land registries) over long periods. Even regions such as Egypt whose secretarial traditions stretched unbroken from Antiquity did not have a powerful or intrusive bureaucracy compared to states in other times and places.
The Sung use of documents in the administration of the economy, in keeping detailed censuses, and in controlling subordinate elite institutions generally had few analogues in the medieval Middle East. In consequence, just as there were few large collections of original documents from notable and magnate households, cities, guilds, courts, or religious entities such as social historians of Europe have exploited, there were also few state archives (and little imperial literature) comparable to the Ottoman empire or Sung China. The scarcity of original documents thus represents a fundamental difference in the social uses of writing from the other societies we have been considering. Groups in the high medieval Middle East did not incorporate, acquire formal autonomy or liberty, or reproduce themselves in time through documents in the manner of groups elsewhere. With the partial exception of the waqfiyyas, the few documents that have survived from the period convey less information about social relations than documents elsewhere. In most cases the possession over time of offices, status, property, and autonomy was neither claimed nor contested with reference to document collections.
The antagonisms that Europeans fought out with decrees, titles, charters, patents, and deeds were contested in other domains. There is no question that medieval Islamic historians should continue to search out documents and cherish those that they find. However, rather than privilege collections of original documents, we should return to a more fundamental question: how did the ac yan make use of their control over writing to advance their social and political strategies? If the ac yan of the high medieval Islamic Middle East did not generally preserve document collections as a means of transmitting status, did they make no social use of preserved written materials? One solution to this problem is to try to make better use of the evidence we do possess. If we stop asking what collections of original documents are available from this society or that, we can try to understand relationships among the storage of written materials, the contestation of the past, and the strategies of elites. This study suggests that it is the very "literary" information that has frustrated scholars in their search for more respectable sources that carries the most revealing information on relations between social strategies and cultural practices. Biographical literature in particular had many of the same uses in high medieval Damascus as collections of original documents had elsewhere and in other periods.
The stereotypical material in these literary sources is not irrelevant to social history. On the contrary, it exists in such abundance because it had social uses that motivated our subjects to compose and preserve it. The difficulty remains how to approach these problematic sources. Some were written later than the period they describe, all are filled with unverifiable anecdotes and shaped by literary conventions that are difficult to interpret. An obstacle that all social historians face is that our view of our subjects' practices is inevitably obscured by our subjects' own practices of representation. The sources from the high medieval Middle East include thousands of often idealized descriptions of individuals, accounts shaped by long-enduring literary conventions. When we read chronicles and biographical dictionaries we face the inevitable problem of distinguishing reliable accounts from literary commonplaces. While it is clear that dates, places, and names were generally correct, it is harder to demonstrate the accuracy of the anecdotes that were told of individuals or the honorifics that were applied to them.
This is why scholars have often hesitated to accept information on single individuals from these sources. However, anecdotes such as those found in chronicles and biographical dictionaries also had social uses that can be interpreted. If we use these sources to understand the meanings and uses of the language in the biographies, we need not be hindered by the possibility that a specific anecdote or honorific may not have applied to a single individual. Whether these anecdotes were true or false is in some respects less important than that to those who told them and listened to them they made sense. It is their plausibility - how these memorialized accounts of individual lives fit into a social logic that our sources and their subjects shared - that we need to understand. To the extent that such language was formulaic it is something of an advantage, as through it we can glimpse at how our subjects imagined the social universe and plotted their movements within it. Rather than get bogged down determining the veracity of single anecdotes, historians should learn to listen to these stories, to understand how the ac yan made use of the past and contested it. For this purpose the biographical dictionaries and chronicles of Damascus have some positive advantages over the collections of original documents preserved by groups in some other contemporary societies.
To the ac yan these accounts constituted the useful past, a past that was intended to secure their futures. As such these sources can be interpreted to understand how they perceived the social world and learned to survive in it. Moreover, historiographical suspicion can be carried too far in the case of the high medieval period. This material poses fewer problems of interpretation than the biographical dictionaries of earlier periods of the Islamic Middle East, of Sung biographical literature, of saints' lives in Europe, or of late antique hagiography. Some of these biographies are quite lengthy, were written and read by their contemporaries, and included information that their subjects themselves provided.27 We also have a number of accounts that scholars wrote about themselves, though to call this material autobiographical would be an overstatement. Because of the large amounts of material written by individuals about their contemporaries, associates, and intimates, we have in the case of high medieval Damascus a less obstructed view of our subjects than similar literature from other periods provides. So where we may never know whether particular people in fact had the "honor" or "piety" that a particular source attributed to them, these anecdotes are likely to have been "true" in the sense that these stories were believed by their contemporaries. To dismiss this information would be like claiming that the concept of "honor" is unimportant for the cultural history of medieval Europe because we know that some men called honorable were not, or might not have been, or that even if they were we can never be sure because honor was an expected topos. To ignore this information because it may be "untrue" is to ignore what are perhaps the most productive sources on some of the critical questions of the social and cultural history of the period.
There are other sources that can help us interpret some of the difficult material - especially the ubiquitous but unspecific words and phrases encountered at every turn - in the biographical dictionaries. Fatwas (legal opinions of individual jurists) and epistles (rastfil) provide invaluable and relatively unproblematic supplements. Waqfiyyas and decrees are also useful, but must be used with care, since, as mentioned already, these documents mandated a result that often was not realized. Other sources such as the treatises written by jurists such as Ibn Jamac a, al-Subki, and Ibn al-Hajj pose more difficult problems of interpretation. These sources have been described as "pedagogical manuals," or descriptions of the functioning of educational institutions, or angry denunciations of the corruptions of their times.
In most cases the intent of these authors in writing remains either unclear or misunderstood by contemporary historians. Another problem is that some of these writers were from cities other than Damascus, though many passed through the city at one time or another. In all cases we have to read these sources critically, and we must be especially concerned to take into account the motives of their authors in writing them. But as these sources provide detailed descriptions of cultural practices that the biographers refer to obliquely if ubiquitously, they are invaluable as a supplement to the major sources of this study. Less of a problem is the late date of some but by no means all of the chronicles and biographical dictionaries examined here. Safadi, the author of the largest and most detailed biographical dictionaries of the period, died in 764/1363, and Nuc ayml more than a century after that.
However, even though the great tabaqat or biographical dictionaries have survived better than smaller works, many other scholars wrote biographies of their contemporaries in their lifetimes, and all indications are that later scholars copied their predecessors' work with care. Moreover, several sources "written" by later authors such as Ibn Abd al-Hadl or Nuc ayml were in large part compilations of earlier texts.
The selection and rearrangement of this material was common among these writers, and is an interesting topic in itself; but the vast amount of common material in earlier and later works confirms that later writers in most cases copied their predecessors as faithfully as they could. Moreover, we should ask whether accounts copied by later writers in their "own" works are any less reliable than the "original" sources copied by later (occasionally much later) copyists. As I shall show below, the search for "authorial intentionality" or "individuality" in the production and reproduction of these texts imposes modern expectations concerning how texts are composed and transmitted on a very different period. In any case, the large quantity of material written by high medieval Damascenes about themselves and their contemporaries is possibly unequaled in medieval Middle Eastern historiography.
The gap between the literary commonplace and the social reality need not be a barrier to historians. One suggestion of this study is that none of this "literary" material is meaningless or without social uses. That we possess these biographies and personal anecdotes at all is a tribute to the money, labor, and knowledge invested in composing and preserving them. If we square our strategies for exploiting historical sources with our subjects' practices of representation and their uses of written material, these sources present some positive advantages over the collections of original documents preserved by some other contemporary Eurasian societies. If we learn to read these sources carefully, we can begin to understand the specific character of high medieval Middle Eastern social and cultural history with greater sensitivity and without an ever-implicit comparison to Europe.
Knowledge and social practice When the methodologies of European social and institutional history are applied to the high medieval Middle East, and it emerges that formal groups and institutions in the Middle East had different forms and uses, we should pose the question: why has the study of formal institutions and group structures occupied such a central place in European social history? Perhaps the most important reason is that European practices of domination and social reproduction were expressed through differentiated institutions and well-defined social bodies, much more than was the case of the medieval Middle East. Comparisons of the formal institutions and groups of the Middle East and Europe have undoubted heuristic value. However, if historians are to avoid forever conjuring up an image of Europe in the world outside it, we should be alert less to structural differences than to differences in social practice.
A question social historians of the medieval Middle East should ask is what were the practices that produced and reproduced elite status, rather than whether its institutional and group structures were similar to those of the Latin West. Attention to social practice can help historians understand (and avoid) the imposition of concepts derived from European experience on societies outside Europe. Europeans have long imposed notions of legitimate order on their subjects through metaphors of functioning structures and bodies. Such notions of order have long shaped the "scientific" description of societies through metaphors taken from machines, buildings, cell structures, and texts.28 One point of this study is to suggest that the social life of the medieval Islamic world (at the very least) cannot be diagrammed on a chart or a map, interpreted as a "text," or represented through metaphors derived from functioning bodies. Nor can it be analyzed juridically as a system of rules. Rather, it is best approached by examining the practices by which groups oriented their actions to the future. It is in understanding such practices -rather than the structural forms that these practices took in Europe and a number of other societies - that social historians may find new approaches to old problems. Interest in the practices by which households transmit their status has a long history in European social thought. Although attention to the uses of culture within the social strategies of groups goes back to Durkheim, Weber, and Fustel de Coulanges, among recent writers it is Elias and Bourdieu who have opened up new fields of reflection for historians.29 Elias and Bourdieu studied practices of social reproduction out of a rejection both of the objectivist claims of mid-twentieth-century social science and the subjective or phenomenological hermeneutics proposed as alternatives to it.
Bourdieu in particular has tried to understand how his subjects plot out their movements within the social world's possibilities and constraints. To Bourdieu, the critical practices of a society are to be found not in the "rules," but rather in the "practical sense" or "practical logic" by which people seek to understand the world and shape their futures in it.30 Some of the most crucial of these practices are those by which lineages invest time, labor, and experience to acquire the symbolic and social "capital" that becomes expendable currency in the struggle for household survival.31 To Bourdieu, attention to the strategy rather than the rule is not a "replacement of structure by consciousness" as a subject of interpretation, but rather is a means of understanding how the structural and the individual interact. This rethinking of the practices of sociological analysis has opened up new possibilities for social history. Examining practices of social reproduction enables us to establish interrelations between domains that historians have considered distinct. By examining household strategies, we can better consider relations among sex, property, the family, power, culture, and social relations simultaneously. We also widen the phenomena that social historians study to include manners, deportment, conduct, ritual, the presentation of the body, and the imitation of the old by the young.32 We can also use evidence that social and cultural historians have seen as anomalous or elusive. Accounts of dreams, gestes, gestures, and bons mots, the tall tales, cover stories, and hagiographic commonplaces of biographical anecdotes all provide useful information on relations between cultural practices and social strategies. Such an approach will help us understand better where the modern conceptual unities of politics, culture, economy, and society merged in Damascus and in other areas of the high medieval Middle East - in the household. This study seeks to interpret practices that social historians of the high medieval Middle East have largely ignored in their search for the "deeper structures" of social life, and that cultural historians have seen as universally Islamic, largely without particular social meanings and uses.
In particular, this study shows how the ac yan acquired and used the rare symbolic capital by which they claimed power, resources, and social honor and passed them on within lineages. The ac yan of Damascus advanced their strategies of social survival through cultural practices associated with knowledge. Scholars have studied these practices as aspects of higher education. However, the analysis of what follows is not a contribution to the study of education. Its aim is quite different. Lecturing, reading, writing, friendship among scholars, and the imitation of cultural exemplars can address some larger and long-unsettled questions, not just to approach institutional history or the history of education. By studying such practices we can begin to understand how elite households constructed their fundamental social bonds, competed among themselves and with others, and passed on their status in time. In order to compare the social history of the high medieval Middle East to that of other medieval societies, we should examine these practices, rather than the structures and institutions that in Europe were one way such practices were articulated. Although this is not a comparative study in the sense that it compares two societies systematically on any given problem, and still less contributes to a universal model, it nonetheless makes comparisons throughout. The reason for this is three-fold. First, from the earliest European descriptions of Islamic societies, disentangling European projections from Middle Eastern realities has been difficult at best. Since the medieval period, most European descriptions of the Middle East have been at least implicitly comparative, and contemporary historians can only benefit by trying to make these comparisons explicit. Second, when studying practices as elusive and universal as those related to the production of knowledge, situating them against similar practices elsewhere can elicit some of their particular meanings and uses. Finally, by putting the place and period in the widest possible historical context, we can alert ourselves to the contingent nature of our own practices of analysis and description. Perhaps only by the systematic suspicion that attention to wider contexts induces can we try to avoid inscribing an image of ourselves in the past.
The two areas most often brought into comparison are the Latin West, especially high medieval France, and Southern Sung China (1127-1279). These of course are large and varied regions, and can be used for comparative purposes only in broad strokes and with numerous reservations. But there are defensible reasons for bringing them into a study of the high medieval Middle East. One is that both regions experienced larger developments in Eurasian history that also affected the high medieval Middle East, and can be studied to understand the peculiarities of the Middle Eastern experience. A second reason is that in several of the crucial questions of the study - the nature of medieval sources, the problematic issue of state power, the study of medieval education, among others - the Latin West and Sung China provide wellstudied and familiar points of comparison. But the most important reason for bringing in these two regions is that it enables us to criticize the mistaken imposition of European notions of order on the high medieval Middle East. The Latin West and Sung China have been seen as societies that correspond reasonably well to European notions of legitimate order. One of the principal arguments of this book is that scholars have long imposed preconceived ideals of order on the medieval Middle East, and have seen departures from these ideals in the Middle East as "corruption," "despotism," or "disorder." By studying societies that fit (however problematically) modern European notions of legitimate order we come to understand the different character of social life in the high medieval Middle East generally, and more specifically in the case examined here, Damascus. Each of the chapters that follow will try to understand how the ac yan households of Damascus made use of knowledge in their strategies of social survival. Chapter 1 examines how changing forms of domination in seventh/ twelfth- and eighth/thirteenth-century Damascus transformed the recruitment, relations to power, and conditions of social reproduction of the civilian elite.
It places these developments in the wider context of Eurasian history in the period to bring out the peculiarities of the high medieval Middle East, and to introduce the concepts of maladroit patrimonialism and fitna as they shaped the social history of Damascus. Chapter 2 looks at madrasas and dar al-hadlths to understand how the household charitable foundation (waqf ahli) and the transmission of knowledge intersected in the social life of the city. This chapter addresses previous scholarship more than the others, both to show how the problem has been misconstrued and to set up the arguments in the following chapters. The central argument of the book begins with chapter 3. This chapter argues that the proliferation of household charitable institutions transformed the arena of elite social life by establishing a large number of stipendiary posts called mansabs, not by providing the ac yan with a new and specialized form of "higher education."
The chapter shows that mansabs became objects of social struggle among the ac yan in the same manner as iqtac s (temporary land grants) became prizes of competition among amirs. The chapter argues that in both cases it is only by studying competitive practices of fitna that can we understand the distinctive character of politics and social life in the city. Chapter 4 examines how the ac yan gained their cultural distinction, advanced their social strategies by it, and passed it on within their households. Its purpose is to examine the ritual, mimetic, and performative practices that underlay what in the modern world (and in much scholarship about the medieval Islamic world) are conceived of as separate cultural and social domains. By looking at how both warrior and ac yan households made use of these practices, this chapter also proposes to demonstrate that they cannot be trimmed down to fit a discussion of "higher education," as they have usually been conceived. Chapter 5 examines how the ac yan made use of their control over the production of knowledge in their larger social strategies. In this chapter I hope to show that the domains of "law," "education," and the "suppression of heresy," were conceived as arenas of fitna in which social prizes were contested by similar practices and represented in nearly identical language. The chapter argues that just as civilians and warriors maneuvered in a similar environment, the arena of fitna, their practices within it further blur the distinction between the "political" domain of warriors and the "social" domain of civilians.
Geographical limitations, chronology, transliteration, and citations Specific geographical and chronological designations remain unresolved problems in the history of the medieval Islamic world. The term "Middle East" is of course anachronistic, but it is useful to the extent that it defines one region of the larger Islamic world that has posed similar conceptual and historiographical problems. In this book the term refers to those areas that were subjected directly or indirectly to Saljuk forms of political power, legitimation, and social control, especially Egypt, Syria, Anatolia, al-Traq, and Iran. These regions were so distinctive that this study does not presume to pronounce on all of them, but rather to address students of the period, who face similar problems in each of them. Chronology poses a similar difficulty. For the purposes of this work the somewhat artificial notion of a "high medieval" period resolves a number of problems. The high medieval period in Syria and Egypt begins with the arrival of the "military patronage" Saljuksuccessor states of the Nurids and Ayyubids in the mid-twelfth century. Forms and practices of political power, patterns of military recruitment, the support and way of life of urban elites, and relations between cities and villages all changed in this period throughout Syria and Egypt. The period is one in which Syria and Egypt maintained a strong and fairly stable position within Mediterranean and Indian Ocean patterns of trade, and in which Syria and Egypt experienced the arrival of large numbers of outsiders such as Franks, Kurds, Turks, and Mongols. The terminus is more difficult to define, but the Black Death of 748/1347-749/1348-9 was, if not the end of the period, the beginning of the end. The epidemic not only had a devastating effect on the region demographically, with the economic, social, and political consequences that followed, but also transformed the Mediterranean economy.
In any case, a transitional period between the Black Death and Tamerlane's invasion of Syria in 803/1400 inaugurated the marked changes that gave the late medieval period its distinctive characteristics. Transliteration: I have followed a modified International Journal of Middle East Studies format, with several differences. Titles and proper nouns are spelled as they are in data bases and research resources, i.e. without assimilation of the definite article or elision of the hamza al-wasl. In the transliteration of texts, nouns are largely unvoweled except when necessary to avoid solecisms such as the placement of three consonants in a row, to convey the correct reading, or in the case of poetry, where I have given a transliteration of sound rather than script in order to permit easier verification of my readings. Well-known persons and places are referred to by their standard English name, when there is no possibility of confusion: Saladin for Salah al-Din Ayyubi, Mecca for al-Makka, but al-Traq rather than Iraq to call attention to differences between medieval and modern usage. The term Syria refers to the region bounded by the Tarsus to the north and al-c ArIsh to the south. Citations: in citing Arabic sources I have followed the practice of Arab historians of separating the volume from the page number with a slash. For example, SafadI, al-Wafi, 22/101 refers to volume 22, page 101.
In citing Arabic manuscripts I have generally followed the pagination of the texts as written in by later scholars or librarians, with a referring to the left page and b to the right, when appropriate, that is to say when it is impossible to verify foliation or when the letters are written in the text. In manuscripts with multiple pagination, I have cited the number on the page that seems to fit the dominant scheme, even though in one or two cases the dominant scheme shifts in mid-text. Until these manuscripts are reliably edited and published there will always be room for confusion and debate, and I hope that others who have used these texts will bear with me if our citations do not agree exactly. Citations of unpaginated chronicles are by the year.
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