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Acknowledgments I love historical mysteries, and this book is the product of my obstinate desire to solve one of the more perplexing ones within my own specialty, the study of Ottoman Egypt. Egyptian society in the seventeenth century was riven by the rivalry between two factions, the Faqaris and Qasimis, whose origins no one could explain. This book results from my search for their origins and the unexpected things I found along the way. The search has been marked by epiphanies that I would not have found credible had I not experienced them myself. Twice I was led to major revelations by happening to open books lying on conference exhibit tables. I learned about a major primary source, the S¥rat al-Z .åhir Baybars, while listening to a conference paper by Professor Linda Northrup, an expert on the Mamluk sultanate. The sources on which I have drawn in writing this book have been wildly eclectic, and the people who have contributed to its gestation have been similarly numerous, diverse, and far-flung. I have tried to acknowledge most of them in the endnotes. Here, I will limit myself to mentioning only major debts of gratitude; if I have omitted anyone, it is through absentmindedness alone. Research for this book was facilitated by a grant from the American Research Institute in Turkey, whose pleasant Istanbul facilities I enjoyed during the summers of 1997 and 1999 and whose library I used extensively during revisions in the summer of 2002. I am particularly grateful to ARITIstanbul ’s director, Dr. Anthony Greenwood, for locating a fairly obscure source after I had left Istanbul. I must also thank the Turkish Ministry of Culture for granting me research permission; the staff of the Topkapı Palace Library and the director of the Topkapı Palace Museum, Dr. Filiz Ça¶man; and the directors and staff of the Süleymaniye Library and the Başbakanlık Archives. Ohio State’s College of Humanities awarded me two one-quarter Special Research Assignments that gave me time to pursue this research. For research assistance during the early stages of the project, I thank Bo¶aç Ergene, xv Ayşe Koço¶lu, and Vincent Wilhite. I accomplished much of the writing at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton during the first part of 2000, when I was supposed to be working on a different project. For providing extremely congenial environments in which to undertake final revisions, I am grateful to the staff of the Atatürk Institute at Bosphorus University, and to its director, Şevket Pamuk, and Associate Director, Asım Karaömerlio¶lu, as well as to the Institut Français d’Archéologie Orientale in Cairo, above all Christian Velud, Hoda Khouzam, and Richard McGregor. Thanks to Martha Mundy for moral support and guidance on Yemeni place names, to Leslie Peirce for useful advice on practical matters connected with preparation of the manuscript, and to Amalia Levanoni for providing some last minute Mamluk sources. Thanks to Donald Quataert for his encouragement and for accepting this book as part of the series he edits. My colleagues Stephen Dale, Barbara Hanawalt, and Geoffrey Parker read an earlier version of the manuscript and offered valuable comments, as did Gabriel Piterberg and an anonymous reader for the State University of New York Press. Thanks to John Tully of the Goldberg Center in Ohio State’s Department of History and to Cord Camera for their help in producing the illustrations for this book. When I started research for this book, I decided that I would dedicate the final product to the memory of my late colleague Marilyn Waldman, who died in 1996. In the intervening years, three more friends and colleagues have died, all prematurely. Although they lived in widely separated places and worked in different fields, all enriched my professional and personal life. All four, as well, were strikingly similar in their empathy, generosity, and profound humanism and humanity. Finally, special thanks to Beshir and Stella, and above all to my husband, Robert “Mimar Bob” Simkins. May we never be the subject of similar origin myths. xvi Acknowledgments ...

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