The Urban Social History of the Middle East, 1750-1950

Preface

ix Preface • I A M D E L I G H T E D I A M D E L I G H T E D , and somewhat amazed, that this book at last seems inexorably bound to reach the reading public. There were dark days, dark months, even dark years, when its appearance seemed to hang in the balance, and I am more than grateful to all the contributors, who greeted each further delay with a combination of equanimity and resignation, as well as with a measure of kindly sympathy. My own interest in Middle Eastern cities dates back to my first visit to the region, at the end of my first year as an undergraduate in the summer of 1963. I took a train from London to Istanbul and then went on by bus and train to Syria, which I entered from Bab al-Hawwa, arriving in Aleppo late in the evening. Sitting in one of the open-air cafés under the citadel a few days later—and with a few weeks in Turkey already behind me—I realized I had found something I had not quite known that I was looking for: I had always wanted to be a historian, and I had toyed with working on Italy (which I had visited) and on Central America (which I had not). After Aleppo, I knew that I would work on the Middle East. Whether this decision was wise, or brave, or foolhardy is difficult to say: it is a choice that I have never regretted and one that has brought extraordinary richness to my life. When I first came to Aleppo and, to a greater extent, when I returned to the city with a more informed understanding of what I was looking at, I was profoundly excited by the suqs, the mosques, the citadel, the streets of the medina , and the magnificent mansions of the wealthy, both in the historic center and in the outer quarters. I had the great good fortune to get to know many families in the city, to visit them in their homes, and to understand the history x | P R E F A C E P R E F A C E of Syria and the complexities of its present politics through long conversations with them. I also remember wonderful excursions to the countryside, to Kurd Dagh, and to Qala‘at Sam‘an. I had taught Middle Eastern history for several years before starting to think thematically about the social history of cities. In the late 1980s, I began to work on the history of Aleppo in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but other preoccupations have meant that the monograph that I still intend to write has so far eluded me. Like most of my contemporaries, I was profoundly influenced by the work of the two great pioneers of the study of the Islamic court records, André Raymond and Abdul-Karim Rafeq, the latter one of the loyal and patient contributors to this volume. Over the last twenty-odd years, I have attended a number of conferences with Raymond and Rafeq, and have had the great good fortune to get to know them in both academic and social contexts. I am enormously grateful to those who have made this book possible. First and foremost, obviously, I must thank the contributors, who have stayed the course, updated their texts and bibliographies, endured different bibliographical regimes, and in some cases rewritten their chapters completely. I would like to thank Edmund Burke III, who suggested the project in the first place and kindly agreed to write part of the introduction. Second, it is a great pleasure to thank Mary Selden Evans of Syracuse University Press, and Mehrzad Boroujerdi, the editor of SUP’s series on the Modern Intellectual and Political History of the Middle East. Both were enthusiastic about the project when it was first submitted to them and encouraged me to bring it to fruition. I am especially grateful to Julie DuSablon, whose editorial skills and attention to matters of detail and consistency are truly extraordinary. Third, I should like to thank the Warden and Fellows of All Souls’ College , Oxford, for awarding me a Visiting Fellowship for the Hilary and Trinity terms in 2003, during which I was able to write most of the introduction in extremely congenial surroundings. Fourth, I would like to thank my colleagues Harris Lenowitz and Peter von Sivers at the University of Utah for their careful...