Everyday Life and Consumer Culture in Eighteenth-Century Damascus

VI. Fashion & Deportment

191 vi fashion & deportment In an entry for 1730, ibn kannan noted some distressing news. In what would later be known as the Patrona Halil rebellion , mutinous soldiers in Istanbul had overthrown and imprisoned the Ottoman sultan Ahmed III (r. 1703–30). These distant rumblings prompted a naïve reverie, in which the chronicler complimented the Ottomans for their relatively decent treatment of deposed sultans, “who were locked up and given a stipend until they died or were poisoned.” In the more distant “time of the caliphs,” he explained, palace coups were often accompanied by lamentable acts, such as the blinding of the former ruler, who would thereafter be disqualified from holding power. Equally shocking and outrageous, the fallen monarch would be dressed in the clothes of a commoner—sometimes little more than rags or unworked cloth—and, as a final humiliation, paraded through the streets in front of his former subjects.1 It was a detail that Ibn Kannan would not have overlooked. What offended him in these imaginary scenes was not merely 192 Fashion and Deportment the demotion, disgrace, and display of a sultan, but the very notion of putting such an august figure in the clothing of the “flocks” (raªaya)—that is, ordinary subjects. In other words, clothing was not merely a matter of personal taste and style; it placed a person within an all-encompassing social hierarchy that fashion helped to make visible and explicit. As Ibn Kannan understood, and would not have needed to remind his contemporaries, clothing has always been much more than a physical necessity. It was inseparable from a whole system of values, manners, and attitudes, all of which can be summed up, in a word, as fashion. At the core of this enormous subject , which has never been concerned solely with shifting trends in taste and design, is the body itself, which provides clothing with its essential form and movement. Many elements of fashion can be traced directly to beliefs about the body—more specifically, to what could, or could not, be displayed or left open to the public gaze. These taboos, though hushed and implicit, surrounded people as much as the physical clothing that they wore. In reconstructing standards of dress, we will thus take the body as our guide, starting with the head and face, which always received especially intense scrutiny, and then going on to consider the human form as a whole. One final section will look at variations in material and color, which articulated fashion and enabled it to project distinctions of wealth and status that, in some cases, were mandated by Islamic law or the Ottoman state. Yet these legal and administrative regulations should not be taken as a full reflection of social practice. Far more than other possessions, clothing shows how material culture easily blurred imaginary social boundaries and, in matters of fashion and identity, tended towards a looser complexity grounded in a common local culture. clothing and self-adornment: head and face Among the most visible parts of the body were the head and face, whose appearance was a matter of the greatest sensitivity. The first rule, binding for both men and women, was that the head had to be covered in public. Exceptions were so rare that they demanded an explanation. Murad alMuradi , a great Sufi master, went about bareheaded and escaped criticism only on account of his extraordinary piety.2 In the case of Sulayman al-Majdhub, a local folk saint, it was taken as one more sign of his mad- Fashion and Deportment 193 ness and listed with his other eccentric habits, such as talking incomprehensibly fast and loitering outside the bathhouse of Nur al-Din.3 For ordinary townspeople, no such excuses were possible. Careless exposure of the head was always treated as an unseemly breach of custom and moral sensibility. Headpieces were therefore an indispensable feature of local costume. In Damascus, which was no stricter than most other Middle Eastern towns, people did not wear hats in the Western sense, but rather a variety of turbans (qawuq). At the lower end of the economic ladder, turbans could be little more than a piece of cloth wrapped around the head. More elaborate models brought together several different components: a light skullcap (taqiyya) supporting a cylindrical cap (tarbush or fas), swathed in a long strip of cloth (shadd, shash, or shal4). Some attained a truly ponderous size and...