12 - 18 April 2001
Issue No.529
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Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 12 - 18 April 2001 Issue No.529 |
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History through the keyhole
Poverty and Charity in Mediaeval Islam: Mamluk Egypt, 1250-1517, Adam Sabra, Cambridge: Cambridge Studies in Islamic Civilization, Cambridge University Press, 2001. pp192
The history of the Middle East has overwhelmingly been a history of states, so it is hardly an anomaly that the history of Egypt in the Middle Ages has largely been seen as a history of the Mamluk Sultanate. So much ink has been spilt on the biases inherent in such historiography, which persistently and consistently ignores the majority of historical actors, that one need not dwell on them again here. But perhaps one should. For while histories of Mamluk Egypt (1250-1517) commonly tell us a lot about the great sultans and their affairs, as well as about their policies, wars and monuments, we seldom get to hear much about the rest of Mamluk society, or about the ordinary people that lived then. Historians will quickly, and understandably, retort that such a bias in favour of the rich and powerful has a simple reason behind it, since the surviving sources from the Mamluk period also ignore the majority of the population. Mediaeval chroniclers, biographers, historians and encyclopaedists were scrupulous in recording the doings of the elite, who were often their patrons, and as a result the sources that have come down to us are also almost exclusively urban in nature, and they exclude the poor and the rural populations.
Qalawun's mediaeval complex, Cairo (photo from Le Caire, ed. Citadelles et Mazenod, 2000)
However, whatever the shortcomings of the source materials may be, a growing number of young historians are now working to subvert this rather skewed view of Middle Eastern history and society. And this latest publication, Adam Sabra's Poverty and Charity in Mediaeval Islam, is in this vein. It is part of a school that would argue that the reason why the history of Mamluk Egypt is as it is has more to do with a bias in the approach of traditional historiography than it has with any bias in the source materials available to the historian. For Sabra does not unearth any new sources; instead, he uses those that are available in innovative ways in order to study the unconventional, if apparently mundane, subject of the poor. In his book, he has tried to read between the lines of chronicles and histories and to read against the grain of waqf deeds, fiqh manuals and Sufi treatises in order to glean what he can about those who must have constituted a sizeable percentage of mediaeval Egypt's population, its poor.
Sabra begins his book with an interesting chapter analysing the various intellectual attitudes towards poverty and the poor in Mamluk society. This leads him to discuss poverty as a spiritual as well as material state, a notion best articulated in Sufi literature. This notion transcended strictly Sufi discourse to give rise to a paradoxical attitude in society as a whole and to one that still persists today. On the one hand, the poor were shunned, or at best tolerated as a burden, but on the other hand they were simultaneously revered as being the possessors of an exalted spiritual state. Sabra thus studies poverty as a social concept and as a religious ideal, in so doing comparing the attitudes of jurists (ideal, theoretical) to that of chroniclers (real, practical). This link allows him to reinterpret the rise of certain religious and social groups, such as particular Sufi orders and the harafish, and to look at the socio-economic basis and functioning of such groups.
In contrast to the modern nation-state, one of whose basic functions is the welfare of its population, mediaeval states were not regularly involved in social functions. As Sabra emphasises, charity was a fundamentally private act, not a state function, the Mamluk state having at best a minimal, sporadic role in regulating charity and poor relief. As a result, the charitable deeds of the ruling elite are widely recorded, and they are well known to us, such documents forming the basis, ironically, of Sabra's analysis of the Mamluk poor, as well as the basis of the analysis of other mediaeval historians. The small acts of kindness -- and there must have been many of these -- of the common people were not recorded; rather, it is the waqf deeds drawn up by sultans and their amirs that have come down to us. Sabra concludes that the urban-based military elite played a preponderant role in providing charity in the Mamluk period, further confirming the predominance of the military elite in society as a whole. It was this military elite that endowed large, profit-generating properties to pious foundations. This is how institutions such as the madrasas (schools) and grand hospitals of the period, such as the Bimaristan Al-Mansuri, were financed. It was the waqf endowments that financed education for poor children and orphans, as well as health care and food for the poor, housing for needy widows and divorcees and burial for the destitute. The latter was crucial, especially in times of famine or plague.
In fact it was chiefly at times of such calamities that the Mamluk sultan would make any kind of allowance for the poor, for alms-giving was considered a means of winning God's favour as well as a way of staving off the anger of the mob. It was often the threat of public disorder that prompted governments to intervene, such intervention including ad hoc price controls on essential foodstuffs, the selling of food at below market prices, the flooding of the market with foodstuffs direct from the sultan's storehouses, and sometimes even direct food distribution. Such policies, however, were never institutionalised, and they remained largely ad hoc responses to local crises. Sabra's account also brings out the fact that not all poor relief was voluntary, peaceful or charitable. Celebration of the feast of Nawruz, for instance, could often take the form of violent extortion, as the poor made sure that they got something from the rich, at least on a feast day.
In what is perhaps the most interesting chapter of the book, Sabra analyses the surviving Mamluk waqf deeds, which commonly stipulate wages for waqf officials as well as delineating the design of buildings, in order to glean information on the socio-economic situation of the poor and the standards of living in mediaeval Cairo. The waqf deeds often also specify the clothing and food allowances to be distributed by the foundation periodically to the poor, thus providing information to the historian on acceptable standards of clothing and diet in the period, information that is relevant to understanding the living standards of society as a whole. Sabra supplements his data with prices recorded by chroniclers, historians and market inspectors, and we thus are able to build up a picture of a mediaeval diet consisting of bread and cereals supplemented with fish, eggs and vegetables at times of price stability. As might be expected, the poor rarely if ever ate meat. An analysis of price change and changes in wages and waqf distributions also allow Sabra to judge the effects of certain crises, such as the Black Death plague, on the population of mediaeval Cairo and on its poor population in particular.
Also of interest in Sabra's approach are his attempts to compare poverty in mediaeval Egypt to poverty in Europe and in China over the same period. While these comparisons are not rigorous or entirely consistent across the book, they do open the way for comparative study in Middle Eastern historiography, signifying a laudable desire to emancipate the study of Middle Eastern history and society from what has sometimes been its scholarly isolation, as well as to free it of the orientalist outlook that has sometimes made of it an anomaly, or bizarre sub-species of the human condition. By comparing Mamluk Egypt to both Europe and China, Sabra avoids any suggestion of Eurocentric bias.
Sabra's attempt to write the poor into history and to write the commoners of Egypt into its national story is encouraging and admirable. But in so doing, he has had to negotiate many of the same stumbling blocs as his predecessors. In particular, in looking at the poor he has had to look through the keyholes of the rich, which perhaps explains the title of his work. For in the absence of the direct testimony of the poor, Sabra's study of "poverty" has ultimately been done through a study of "charity", which is to say that his study of the poor is, in fact, done through a study of the rich, often through the very eyes of the rich. At certain points, Sabra presumes the existence of an umbilical connection between poverty and charity, his book containing interesting analyses of discussions on begging -- its merits, the merits of giving alms to beggars, who was allowed to beg, etc. But what of cases where charity did not cover poverty? What of the different social and economic -- and therefore, necessarily, political -- mechanisms by which people dealt with poverty? What of theft, cheating, and tax evasion?
While Sabra's analyses of begging and of poverty, and of their merits, as well as his discussion of adab (learned discourse) in both legal and Sufi literatures, are most interesting, especially in revealing at least the learned's attitude towards poverty, one has to ask how many of mediaeval Cairo's beggars and alms-givers were aware of such a discourse. What, in short, did mediaeval poverty feel like to those who experienced it? Perhaps inevitably, Sabra's book has not been able to answer that question.
Reviewed by Amina Elbendary
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