8 - 14 March 2001
Issue No.524
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Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 8 - 14 March 2001 Issue No.524 |
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City limits
La ville arabe, Alep, à l'époque ottomane (XVIè-XVIIIè siècles) (Aleppo, an Arab City in the Ottoman Period: 16th-18th Centuries), André Raymond, Institut français de Damas, Damascus, 1998. pp372
André Raymond's name looms so large in studies of Ottoman-era Egypt that it is almost impossible to find a topic to which he has not made a decisive contribution. His interests vary widely within a field that might be termed urban history: he has placed his coolly analytical gaze and a seemingly unlimited capacity for unadulterated hard work at the service of his great affection for the cities he studies. The articles and books he has published in almost half a century make for an impressive bibliography, which alone takes up the first 10 pages of the present volume.
If Raymond's work was exceptional simply in virtue of its sheer quantity, that would be no bad thing, given that relatively little is still known about Arab cities under the Ottomans and that much remains to be done simply in terms of discovering the massive amounts of archival and archaeological evidence that have survived; yet this is not the case, for he allies a deep and abiding interest in long-term trends with a great love for detail. The question of how people lived -- which, ultimately, guides all anthropocentric history -- is therefore approached by many paths: urban institutions; administration; residential patterns; production and distribution networks; social stratification... Cairo occupies the predominant place in Raymond's heart and so, while the present book is ostensibly about Aleppo, many of its chapters return repeatedly to Egypt and its capital -- the sultanate's second largest city in Ottoman times.
The urban is something of an obsession for Raymond: his opus, which includes general studies like "Urban Signs and Study of the Population of the Great Arab Cities in the Ottoman Period" (1975) or The Great Arab Cities in the 16th-18th Centuries. An Introduction (1984), is also concerned with individual cities -- especially Aleppo and Cairo -- which he compares to draw conclusions that will shed light on these "original urban systems."
La ville arabe opens with an article titled "Ville musulmane, ville arabe: Mythes orientalistes et recherches récentes," which constitutes perhaps the most concise formulation of Raymond's reflections on these themes to date, and provides a kernel of the ideas expanded in the remaining chapters (a collection of articles Raymond published between 1974 and 1997 -- in addition to the final contribution, a hitherto unpublished study of Aleppo's Christians in the Ottoman period), all of which revolve around urban questions.
Originally published in 1995 as a contribution to J.-L. Biget and J.-Cl. Hervé's volume titled Panoramas urbains. Situation de l'histoire des villes, this first chapter tackles a question that has preoccupied researchers since the early 20th century: Is it possible to speak of an archetypical "Islamic city"? What follows is an overview and detailed critique of the classical Orientalist conception of Islamic urbanism (something of a contradiction in terms, according to that school of thought). With an incisive clarity that only occasionally reveals the true extent of his exasperation with "Orientalist myths," Raymond outlines the approach according to which "every phenomenon appearing in the civilisation of Muslim countries is totally conditioned by Islam as an all-encompassing, seminal religion in all aspects of the lives of the concerned populations." Robert Ilbert's pithy comment that "it is because most Orientalists... posited at the start... the fundamental role of Islam in the structuring of space that they found it again at the finish line" can be best understood in this context.
The Orientalist vision of non-Western cities was shaped, as far as French scholars were concerned, principally by the study of colonised nations (Algeria and Tunisia, then the Levant) where clearly visible traces of Graeco-Roman civilisation tempted the colonial authorities to present themselves as the rightful heirs to the traditions of antiquity. "Ancient urbanism, highlighted by prestigious monuments, inscribed in municipal regulations and institutions, and developed regularly, offered the model to be followed: the return to orthogonal thoroughfares, conquering the irregularity of Arab streets, clearly constituted the sign that civilisation and progress had triumphed over urban anarchy and decadence, which were now things of the past."
In imposing themselves as the antithesis of Ottoman rule in the countries they conquered, the French colonial authorities -- and, one supposes, the scholars who benefited from the body of the quantitative knowledge the modern colonial apparatus generated with regard to its subject populations -- elaborated a conception of the Muslim city as essentially a non-city, made up of a collection of absences: As a chaotic jumble of fragmented, isolated and often mutually antagonistic quarters, it is presented as "the negation of urban order." This vacuum, however, was characterised by certain elements: Muslim institutions (the hisba or market police; the qadi's tribunal); a central mosque, linked to a market; city walls endowed with gates; a palace or citadel where the ruler resided. Within this general framework, individual houses were seen as constructed according to religious precepts (blind walls around a central courtyard, open to the heavens, thus signified the residents' preoccupation with paradise and the afterlife) and an overriding concern with protecting the intimacy of family life.
Such simplistic functionalism could be dismissed as Orientalist claptrap if it did not correspond so neatly with the arguments put forth by the former subjects of colonial domination themselves. In a particularly lucid paragraph, Raymond sums up this "remarkable coincidence between the Orientalist and the Oriental," musing that Arab and Muslim researchers may simply have been misled by the tendency of French scholars to define as "Muslim" any characteristic of the Arab population in territories ruled by France. "One understands why the Arab epigones of Orientalist theoreticians adopted a vision that underlined the different character of their civilisation, and emphasised the feature through which their identity was affirmed with the greatest originality and permanence throughout political trials (and especially colonisation)," Raymond writes. "It is more surprising that they did not undertake a more vigorous critique of the very pejorative prejudices associated with this acknowledgement of Islam."
His own critique of the "Muslim city" model rests on the assumption, acknowledged as fairly obvious, that "a city constitutes a complex system that must be able to 'function' to the benefit of the population, numerous by definition, concentrated within it. The idea of 'urban anarchy' is thus non-sense." The problem then becomes one of bringing to light the specific elements that account for the city's constitution and functioning.
Raymond goes on to elucidate the specific elements that characterise traditional Arab cities. Most fundamental is the marked separation between economic and residential functions. The first are most often concentrated around the city's main mosque, where large public monuments are also likely to be found. The residential zones develop around the heart of production and commerce, in a loosely concentric hierarchy moving from central/wealthy to peripheral/poor. If Raymond dwells on the non-egalitarian nature of this organisation, it is to counter Orientalist assumptions of a society whose socio-economic homogeneity finds its spatial expression in an undifferentiated urban zone. If anything, he argues, traditional societies were marked by sharp inequalities and shaped by mechanisms of segregation based on religion and, to a lesser extent, on "national" or ethnic origin.
Moving from the whole to the single unit, he raises the point -- which, again, may appear self-evident -- that, while most housing may have followed the same general central-courtyard model, "there is all the misery in the world between a palatial residence in the city centre... and the elementary, almost rural courtyard house of the urban periphery, even if both are organised around a courtyard." Furthermore, other types of housing -- the multi-storey dwellings of Yemen or Rosetta; the collective living arrangements afforded by the funduq or, in Egypt, the rab'; or the communal hawsh of low-income groups -- show that the "Muslim house" is as mythical as the city said to surround it.
A final section in this introductory chapter is devoted to the question of urban administration and the authorities responsible for ensuring that the city continued to "work" -- the judge, religious endowments, communities based on geography, ethnicity or religion, or professional affiliation. The segregational phenomena that appear, in the Orientalist perspective, as leading to anarchy are presented here on the contrary as encouraging coherence and consolidation, with a multiplicity of self-administrating sectors participating in the city's management under the umbrella of fairly loose central control.
This is perhaps the point at which Raymond's analysis could have been taken further, and indeed to the logical impasse it suggests, for it fails to elucidate the mechanisms that integrated this collection of different groupings. How were responsibilities distributed among the sheikhs of residential quarters and the leaders of religious communities? Why were certain capabilities attributed to heads of craft guilds and others to officials responsible for market organisation? Were disputes involving an overlap in areas of specialisation resolved on a case-by-case basis, or were the rules governing various tasks well known and recognised more or less unanimously? Were the quarters and the guilds knit by close internal solidarities, as many historians suggest, or will further research reveal the same conflicts and disparities at the level of a single profession or an individual neighbourhood that we now know characterised the city as a whole?
While Raymond resorts to his initial division of the city along roughly commercial/residential or public/private lines in hinting at an answer to such questions, this framework is not sufficiently detailed -- and with good reason. Research has not yet provided scholars with the elements that will allow us to understand how the city worked on a daily basis, and will not do so until they begin to ask the pertinent questions.
The remaining articles may be read as elaborations on his central theme -- to wit, that Arab cities are part of a system which, while it bears the mark of its Muslim inhabitants, equally testifies to Mediterranean influences, as well as the imperatives of any urban entity. Out of a total of 13 articles, only six are concerned exclusively with Aleppo; the others discuss cities throughout the sultanate's Arab provinces, or take a few as examples -- Aleppo, Cairo, Damascus and Tunis -- to demonstrate the concrete development of certain phenomena. Of particular interest in this respect is the chapter on the tanneries of Aleppo, Cairo and Tunis, in which Raymond shows how urban expansion can be traced by following successive transfers outside the city limits of activities that were too noisy or polluting to remain near residential agglomerations.
Spanning as they do a period of almost quarter of a century, these chapters are a valuable collection of Raymond's seminal studies in the social history of the Arab world. They are also a record of one man's intellectual trajectory, showing clearly how his thought has evolved as new discoveries imposed the casting off of old tenets. The chapter on "Les grands waqfs et l'organisation de l'espace urbain à Alep et au Caire à l'époque ottomane (XVIè- XVIIè siècles," for instance, begins with the bald observation that "when studying the great Arab cities of the Near East in the modern period (16th-18th centuries), one is immediately struck by the almost complete absence of either specialised 'administrations' in the urban realm, or municipal institutions." It is certainly brave to place oneself thus at the mercy of one's readers, and to recognise, as explicitly as possible, that history must always be rewritten.
Reviewed by Pascale Ghazaleh
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