Download Family Life in the Ottoman Mediterranean A Social History Beshara B Doumani 9780521133272 Books

Product details Paperback 372 pages Publisher Cambridge University Press (June 9, 2017) Language English ISBN-10 0521133270

Family Life in the Ottoman Mediterranean A Social History Beshara B Doumani 9780521133272 Books Reviews

• Beshara Doumani’s Family Life in the Ottoman Mediterranean is an outstanding contribution to Ottoman and Middle Eastern social history. It is also a testimony to the intellectual gains that come from painstaking and labor intensive research which – as the author frankly discusses in the Preface – inevitably slows down the pace of publication. Doumani’s central question is how property devolution as a system of social, legal and pious practices reproduced and transformed family life in the Eastern Mediterranean in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In order to answer that question he chose to do a comparative study of Tripoli and Nablus, for reasons he explains at length, and spent several years reading through thousands of court cases from the two cities’ shar’ia court records.
  
  The court records make it clear that the family waqf, or pious endowment, stands at the very center of property arrangements. Family waqfs are a (seemingly) well-known institution in the Muslim world, but readers would be mistaken if they think that Doumani has produced a dry study of a legal institution. The book is a rich portrait of individuals, of families and the choices that they made as they sought to protect and perpetuate both their families and the family name. Because of his deep immersion in the documents, time and time again Doumani is able to convincingly discern the motivations behind the founders’ precise instructions.
  
  For example, in 1802 the merchant, landlord and entrepreneur Sayyid Hajj Husayn Çelebi al-Husayni of Tripoli set up a family waqf. He took the unusual step of including the children of his uncles, as well as his sister’s son. Doumani was so intrigued by this that he went sifting through the eighteenth century registers to see if he could discover why. Eventually, he did. Sayyid Husayn was orphaned as a child and his older sister Tahira, as the only remaining member of the conjugal family, no doubt became his caretaker. At the same time, one of his uncles became his guardian just a few days after Sayyid Husayn’s father’s death. The provisions in the waqf, then, were “a way of recognizing and repaying their kindness and support as surrogate parents.”(p.114) His dissection of the choices made by Fatima, daughter of Abd al-Jalil al Mallah, also in Tripoli at around the same time, is equally incisive (pp.161-3) and shows that women were able to make choices too.
  
  Doumani’s main arguments are as follows. We have given undue weight to the Islamic rules of inheritance because most propertied individuals in Nablus and Tripoli preferred to devolve some or all of what they owned during their lifetime. The most common way to do this was to endow family waqfs. In Doumani’s words
  
  “The period from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century was the
  golden age of the family waqf in the Eastern Mediterranean, if not
  beyond, and it is difficult to overestimate its centrality to social,
  economic, legal and spiritual life in urban settings. My core argument
  is that the family waqf is the most flexible, expressive, and enduring
  legal instrument for governing long-term property relations between
  kin, and that it can be viewed as a charter or mini-constitution that
  also governs the moral-disciplinary order of kinship.”(p.22)
  
  Second, strategies of property devolution were very different in Tripoli and Nablus. These differences were many – mulberry trees were given pride of place in the Tripoli endowments while in Nablus it was the family home – but probably the most striking, and the one to which Doumani gives the most attention, was the exclusion of female children and their progeny in Nablus and their inclusion in Tripoli. The reasons for this were several; Doumani convincingly foregrounds the importance of political economy. In his words, “how people made a daily living helped shape the ways of organizing family life in anticipation of inevitable death.”(p.225) More generally, his book makes a persuasive argument for the wide varieties of local arrangements, against the idea of a homogenous Middle East united under the umbrella of Islam.
  
  Despite these stark differences, Tripoli and Nablus were united in favoring children over “horizontal property flows through lateral kin, including agnates.”(p.190) This was the case, even though the latter are specifically included in Islamic laws of inheritance. Doumani effectively uses this and many other pieces of evidence to support his third major argument, which is an attack on “pervasive stereotypes about the traditional extended family, popularly imagined to be the bedrock of Arab, Muslim or Eastern Mediterranean societies.”(p.192) This attack runs throughout the book and he certainly makes the case that these endowment deeds, most of which were very elaborate, allow us to pinpoint “the kin who count” for those who drew them up. He also shows that, although his actors acted within an Islamic idiom, they were able to manipulate that idiom for maximum flexibility and agency.
  
  Modernization theory has longed blamed the institution of waqf for inhibiting capitalist development in the Middle East. Although not a major focus of his book, through his discussion of family, gender and property Doumani provides abundant evidence of the ability of family waqfs to not only respond to market conditions but to actually facilitate investment. In Nablus, especially, family waqfs functioned as family firms.
  
  As with his first book, this book too is replete with lyrical images of a bygone world, something that is not very common in Ottoman historiography anyway. A description of work in the mulberry orchards of Tripoli at the beginning of the nineteenth century (p.248) is particularly evocative. Evident, too, in both books is Doumani’s affection for his protagonists and their concern with prudence, piety and moral rectitude.
  
  This book is essential, and delightful, reading for anyone interested in the history of the family, of gender and of property regimes in the Middle East, as well as the social history of the Ottoman Empire.