The Barber of Damascus: Nouveau Literacy in the Eighteenth-Century Ottoman Levant by Dana Sajdi (review)

The advent of modernity in the Middle East and North Africa and, with it, the spread of literacy have often been interpreted through the interactions of local states and societies with the West in general, and with Western Europe in particular. Such interactions may indeed be significant in explaining most of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century emergence of mass literacy through the establishment of Western-style schools. Yet in the last couple of decades, scholars focusing on the internal dynamics of states and societies in this region have increasingly demonstrated that not only were there concomitant significant domestic transformations, but that these occurred independently of any interaction with the West. Such transformations especially point to the emergence of literacy among soldiers, merchants, artisans, and shopkeepers, and thus to the development of a new “professional” class, one referred to and celebrated in Europe as the “bourgeoisie.” Yet the ensuing role of the European bourgeoisie in controlling the rest of the world since the early modern period, and the sustained hegemony of democracy and capitalism as the contemporary political ideology and economic practice, make it impossible to escape the heavy epistemological weight of the succeeding nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries when writing history. This is why working temporally on the preceding eighteenth century, and spatially in locations other than Western Europe, becomes especially significant, as exemplified by this important book.

Dana Sajdi meticulously researches the eighteenth-century emergence in the Ottoman Levant of what she terms “nouveau literacy,” doing so through her critical reading of the memoir of a barber from Damascus. The barber, Shihab al-Din Ahmad Ibn Budayr, flourished around 1762, when this memoir was written. Intent on moving beyond the narrow literary terrain almost exclusively controlled by the religious literary elite of the time, Sajdi tracks down not only Ibn Budayr’s memoir, but also those of “a couple of soldiers, a court clerk, Greek Orthodox and Greek Catholic priests, a Samaritan scribe and a merchant (2).” Accessing these other memoirs enables her to very skillfully contextualize not only the barber in his particular social, economic, and political milieu in Damascus, but also the emergence of a new kind of literacy in the Levant at large. That many people beyond the narrow circle of elites have always had access to literacy is a truism; what is novel here is the process through which such exceptions coalesce into a pattern in the eighteenth century. Sajdi further articulates her newly coined concept of “nouveau literacy” by differentiating it from technical literacy, the mere knowledge of reading or writing. She is more interested in the cultural, meaning-producing aspect of literacy: namely, the process through which people from diverse backgrounds challenge the elite hold over the social apportionment of certain genres, and do so by specifically appropriating the genre of the chronicle in the eighteenth-century Levant.

Sajdi’s unique and innovative standpoint influences the manner in which she shapes her chapters. In chapter one, “The Disorders of a New Order,” Sajdi develops the larger temporal and spatial context within which the genre of the chronicle in general and the barber in particular were situated. The period from 1688 to 1815 is often referred to by scholars throughout the world as the “long” eighteenth century because of the vast number of monumental changes embedded within its span. The effects of these changes also impacted upon Damascus, engendering a “reshuffling of its social topography” (20) in the process. Ensuing cityscapes captured the consequences of the new interaction of power and display, as the city was marked by private mansions showcasing “period rooms” and escalating conspicuous consumption; publicly visible monuments including mosques, caravanserais, and fountains; and urban picnic and promenade areas where women also participated. My own work on eighteenth-century Istanbul examines a similar development. Also noteworthy in this process of urbanization are the accompanying anxieties about the destabilized social and moral...