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  • The World According to an Eighteenth-Century Barber
  • James Grehan
Dana Sajdi. The Barber of Damascus: Nouveau Literacy in the Eighteenth-Century Ottoman Levant (Stanford: Stanford Univ., 2013). Pp. xv + 293. $60

The eighteenth century holds one of the most surprising puzzles in all of Arabic letters: an original history set down by a mere barber, covering more than two decades of events (1741–62) in his hometown of Damascus. Long known to contemporary historians as Ahmad al-Budayri—or in his own hand, as Ibn Budayr—he cuts an unfamiliar figure in literary annals. In a society like the Ottoman Levant of the eighteenth century, in which very few individuals attained full literacy, how was it possible for a barber, of all people, to write such a book? Dana Sajdi sets out to tackle this mystery and make sense of this barber, who, alone among the tradesmen of the premodern Middle East, had the nerve to author his own history.

Sajdi’s study can be divided into two parts. In the first half, she tries to put her unlikely author in his times, and winds up pursuing the larger and more ambitious aim of recasting the way we think about Ottoman Syria in the eighteenth century. The second half of the book then turns to the barber’s chronicle itself. Through a close reading of the text, Sajdi offers up a cultural [End Page 97] history of reading and writing in Ottoman Damascus. It is this innovative literary biography that is the more convincing part of her overall argument.

Sajdi begins with the cultural context in which al-Budayri wrote. She asks how it was possible at all for us to get a chronicle by a barber. Her answer is that he arose in an age of “nouveaux literates,” authors who did not originate from the tiny literate circles of the religious establishment or state bureaucracy, which had long generated the literary output of the Middle East. They comprised a new set of voices, propelled upwards by a “new social order” expressed by the power and affluence of the provincial notables (a`yan), who were coming on the scene in the eighteenth century throughout the Ottoman Empire. In the rise of the notables, Sajdi sees a tide that lifted many boats. She links al-Budayri/Ibn Budayr to widespread “social mobility” (chapter 1), which gave him and the other nouveaux literates a burgeoning sense of confidence, leading them, in turn, to write about their times and thereby “consolidate” their new social position.

As Sajdi plainly acknowledges, authors like al-Budayri were rare indeed. They were “learned illiterates,” who picked up their bits of learning on the fringes of literate society (chapter 2), which was dominated by the religious establishment. Sajdi is quite resourceful in illuminating this little-explored cultural periphery. Our curious barber, she shows, was fortunate enough to open a shop in the center of Damascus and cut the hair of leading religious scholars. The barber’s chronicle, she further argues, was one of several produced by eighteenth-century Levantine “commoners,” most of whom wrote in a rather colloquial style. Who exactly were these new authors? To round out her sample, Sajdi brings out seven other commoners onto the stage (chapter 3): two “farmers,” Haydar al-Rukayni and his son, from Jabal Amal; an orthodox priest, Mikha’il Burayk from Damascus; a Jewish scribe, Ibrahim al-Danafi from Nablus; a Muslim scribe, Muhammad al-Makki from Homs; and two Damascene soldiers, Ibn al-Siddiq and Hasan Agha.

Here the great difficulty is to show how these authors fit into the category that Sajdi has built for them. Some of these “commoners,” on closer inspection, do not really seem so common: that is to say, they hailed from social backgrounds where one would expect to find literacy, namely the religious establishment and provincial bureaucracy. Although Sajdi regards them as commoners, she endows them with a distinctive literary voice. (She later elaborates this idea in chapter 5, where she contrasts the “disorder” of the barber’s chronicle with the “regularity” that she finds in the history of Ibn Kannan, a scholar.) But were “elite” histories always so very different? To...

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