This book discusses the largest and earliest medieval library of the Middle East for which we have documentation - the Ashrafiya library in the very centre of Damascus - and edits its catalogue.
The Impact of European Imperial Influences, Economic Rivalries, and Religious Tension on Muslim-Christian Relations during the 1860 CE Riot in Damascus.
Filled with rare encounters with Syria's oldest, most elite
families. Critics of anthropology's taste for exoticism and marginality will savor
this study of upper-class Damascus, a world that is ...urbane and cosmopolitan, yet in
many ways as remote as the settings in which the best ethnography has traditionally
been done... Written with a nuanced appreciation of the cultural forms in
question and how Damascenes themselves think, talk about, and create them. --
Andrew Shryock In contemporary urban Syria, debates about the
representation, preservation, and restoration of the Old City of Damascus have
become part of status competition and identity construction among the city's elite.
In theme restaurants and nightclubs that play on images of Syrian tradition, in
television programs, nostalgic literature, and visual art, and in the rhetoric of
historic preservation groups, the idea of the Old City has become a commodity for
the consumption of tourists and, most important, of new and old segments of the
Syrian upper class. In this lively ethnographic study, Christa Salamandra argues
that in deploying and debating such representations, Syrians dispute the past and
criticize the present. Indiana Series in Middle East Studies --
Mark Tessler, general editor
Drawing on fieldwork that spans nearly twenty years, Making Do in Damascus offers a rare portrayal of ordinary family life in Damascus, Syria. It explores how women draw on cultural ideals around ...gender, religion and family to negotiate a sense of collective and personal identity. Emphasizing the ability of women to creatively manage family relationships within mostly conservative Sunni Muslim households, Gallagher highlights how personal and material resources shape women's choices and constraints around education, choice of marriage partner, decisions about employment, childrearing, relationships with kin, and the uses and risks of new information technologies. Gallagher argues that taking a nuanced approach toward analyzing women’s identity and authority in society, allows us to think beyond dichotomies of Damascene women as either oppressed by class and patriarchy on one hand, or completely autonomous agents of their own lives on the other. Tracing ordinary women’s experiences and ideals across decades of social and economic change Making Do in Damascus highlights the salience of collective identity, place, and connection within families, as well as resources and regional politics, in shaping a generation of families in Damascus.
This book discusses the largest private book collection of the pre-Ottoman Arabic Middle East for which we have both a paper trail and a surviving corpus of the manuscripts that once sat on its ...shelves: the Ibn ʿAbd al-Hādī Library of Damascus.
High rates of divorce, often taken to be a modern and western phenomenon, were also typical of medieval Islamic societies. By pitting these high rates of divorce against the Islamic ideal of ...marriage,Yossef Rapoport radically challenges usual assumptions about the legal inferiority of Muslim women and their economic dependence on men. He argues that marriages in late medieval Cairo, Damascus and Jerusalem had little in common with the patriarchal models advocated by jurists and moralists. The transmission of dowries, women's access to waged labour, and the strict separation of property between spouses made divorce easy and normative, initiated by wives as often as by their husbands. This carefully researched work of social history is interwoven with intimate accounts of individual medieval lives, making for a truly compelling read. It will be of interest to scholars of all disciplines concerned with the history of women and gender in Islam.
Damascus was for centuries a center of learning and commerce. Drawing on the city's dazzling literary tradition-a rich collection of poetry, chronicles, travel accounts, and biographical ...dictionaries-as well as on Islamic court records, James Grehan explores the material culture of premodern Damascus, reconstructing the economic infrastructure, social customs, and private consumer habits that dominated this cosmopolitan hub in the 1700s. He sketches a lively history of diet, furniture, fashion, and other aspects of daily life, providing an unusual and intimate account of the choices, constraints, and compromises that defined consumer behavior.
Coffee, tobacco, and light firearms had arisen as new luxury items in preceding centuries, and Grehan traces the usage of such goods in order to get a picture of the overall standard of living in the premodern Middle East. He looks particularly at how wealth and poverty were defined and how consumption patterns expressed notions of taste, class, and power, illuminating the prominent role played by Damascus in shaping the economy and culture of the Middle East.
In assessing the magnitude of social change in modern times, we have few benchmarks from the period preceding the onset of modernity in the nineteenth century. This informative study will make possible more precise cultural and economic comparisons between different parts of the world as it stood on the brink of a radically new economic and political order. The book's focus on a little-examined period and region will appeal to scholars and students of urban social history and Arab popular culture.
In Die Rifāʽīya Boris Liebrenz explores the book culture of Ottoman Syria (16th to 19th century) through a unique Damascene private library and asks about the practice of producing and transmitting ...knowledge, as well as the nature of the reading audience.
Historiographical studies were carried out to clarify the regional origin and establish the dating periods of the Persian Shamshir blade. It was revealed that every section of the Persian Shamshir ...blade consists of damask surface areas having different macrostructure. The damask surface in the forte resembles the highest-grade Taban Damascus steel, the pattern of the middle section of the blade is typical of a medium-grade Kum Hindi steel, and the foible pattern corresponds to the lowest quality Sham steel. The features of carbide banding in the longitudinal and transverse directions were studied. It was determined that the damascene structure comprises a regular layered morphology of carbide banding of score 4 of inhomogeneity. It was concluded that the width ratio of the troostite sections to the carbide layers obeys the golden ratio rule (61.8%:38.2%). It was established that the main background of the damascene structure of the 17th-century saber blade Shamshir is the matrix phase of lamellar troostite, with a volume fraction of 78%, and the excess phase of pebble-type cementite carbide, with a volume fraction of at least 85%.
