Pre-Modern History

Reprinted from the Middle East Studies Association Bulletin, Summer  2001 (with changes in orthography to HTML standards).
Copyright 2001 by the Middle East Studies Association of North America

History of the Civilizations of Central Asia, Vol. IV: The Age of Achievement: AD 750 to the End of the Fifteenth Century, edited by M. S. Asimov and C. E. Bosworth. 485 pages, maps, bibliography, index. Paris, France: Unesco Publishing, 1998. ISBN 92-3-103467-7

This volume on the history of Central Asia, edited by two distinguished senior scholars, Asimov and Bosworth, assembles many well known scholars of Central Asian and South Asian history. Since the planning for the series began twenty years ago, it is not surprising that most of the scholars chosen were those already well established then. The book is most useful in sections on dynasties and regions, such as the Ghaznavids, Seljukids, Khwarazmshah, and Karakhanids, for which the defining work was done by this cohort. For subjects which have enjoyed active recent scholarship, such as the Mongol and Timurid periods, it is less helpful, since most articles incorporate little recent work.

The most important organizing principles of the book are dynastic and regional; topical chapters on religious and popular movements, social and material conditions, and monetary systems give a different perspective and some unifying themes. The definition of Central Asia is nowhere spelled out, but seems to be centered more to the south than usual; this book includes Sind, Baluchistan, and Kashmir, along with Xinjiang, Transoxiana, and the steppe regions. Tibet is omitted, leaving a perceptible gap. The inclusion of smaller regions and dynasties usually left out of general histories, such as the Ghurids and the dynasties of Makran and Multan, Kashmir and Chitral, is welcome and will provide a handy reference for students and scholars working on states active in that region.

The major weakness of the book’s organization is that the reader achieves few broad insights into the region’s history. Neither developments over long periods, nor movements spanning different regions can be followed satisfactorily; the work focuses on the lifespans of individual dynasties, the chronology of rulers, and courtly cultural achievements. We are given no articles on the trade in military slaves or the east-west trade routes across Turkestan, and the eighteen pages on the Mongol Empire cannot begin to address the Mongol political institutions which transformed much of Asia. While local religious movements are addressed, major changes in the religious picture across Inner Asia between 750 and 1500 are not discernable without considerable digging.

I cannot claim competence to judge the accuracy of all articles in the collection, but I do discern considerable variation. The chapter on Central Asia under Timur cannot be recommended; readers of English looking for a concise discussion should stick with Roemer’s chapter in the Cambridge History of Iran (volume 4). R. Mukminova’s chapter on the later Timurids provides a welcome coverage of social history, but the translation is sometimes hard to understand. The chapter on coinage, on the other hand, provides an authoritative, if narrowly focused overview not available elsewhere.

The inclusion of maps at the end of the volume is welcome; this is an important aid found in too few books. It is a great help to have maps for several different regions and time periods, though more detailed coverage of the central areas would have been an additional advantage.

Beatrice Forbes Manz
Tufts University



Ibn al-Jazzar on Fevers: A Critical Edition of Zad al-musafir wa-qut al-hadir (Provisions for the Traveller and Nourishment for the Sedentary), Book 7, Chapters 1—6, introduction and translation by Gerrit Bos. (The Sir Henry Wellcome Asian Series) 217 pages, footnotes, glossaries, bibliography, index. London, UK: Kegan Paul International, 2000. $127.50 (Cloth) ISBN 0-7103-0570-2

Having already provided a critical edition of book six of the same work, Bos has provided us with another opportunity to indulge ourselves with Ibn al-Jazzar’s masterpiece. Given that Suwaysi-al-Radi had long before edited its first three books, we are now fortunate enough to have most of it available to us in non-manuscript form. These editions are certainly a great step forward in increasing our understanding and appreciation of medieval Islamic physicians, especially their practical evaluations and recommendations for diseases such as fevers.

The Introduction of Bos’s edition is quite short, thus forcing the reader to look up the works cited by Bos for a fuller exposition of the themes raised. For example, for biographical information on Ibn al-Jazzar, Bos directs the reader to his “Ibn al-Jazzar on women’s diseases and their treatment,” Medical History (1993). Similarly, the reader is directed towards other secondary works for fuller expositions on the cultural and intellectual milieu of Islamic physicians in the tenth century, and so forth. Nonetheless, Bos establishes some interesting connections while comparing Ibn al-Jazzar’s assessment of fevers and his recommendations on their cures with those of his predecessors, chiefly Galen and Ibn Sina, and his contemporary, al-Majusi. In the latter case, he also raises an interesting question concerning the relationship between al-Majusi and Ibn al-Jazzar, though he falls short of establishing anything concrete.

The Arabic text itself has been compiled using a number of manuscripts that are described, though only partly, in the Introduction (pp. 2-4). More importantly though, the Arabic text is so heavily annotated that one can easily construct the content of each manuscript individually. Bos chooses to rely on the Berlin, Oxford, Tehran, and Izmir manuscripts over the Dresden one, but his reasons for doing so are not entirely clear. Other than a brief discussion over the fact that the Dresden manuscript might have been copied by four different copyists, Bos’s reasons are more general than particular to this text itself. Moreover, though he argues away the significance of the Latin, Greek, and Hebrew translations for preparing this critical edition, one would have still preferred to see some comparative analysis between these translations and the Arabic texts themselves.

The fact that the English translation sticks quite close to the actual meaning of the text while maintaining a nice flow is a tribute to Bos’s skill as a translator. Though he does prefer using ‘which’ over ‘that’ and some other older, less active constructions, on the whole the translation reads well. Finally, an extremely useful aspect of the book is certainly its glossaries. Bos provides a good technical glossary of materia medica terms in both English and Arabic. The index is also provided in both English and Arabic. These aspects of the book, along with the rigor with which Bos has compiled the critical edition of the Arabic text and the skill with which he has translated it, ensure that it will prove to be indispensable for the study of medieval Islamic physicians for years to come.

Nahyan Fancy
University of Notre Dame


Genghis Khan: Conqueror of the World, by Leo de Hartog. 230 pages, maps, endnotes, bibliography, index. London, New York: I. B. Taurus, 1999. $16.95 (Paperback) ISBN 1-86064-375-2

The story of Genghis Khan (born Temüjin, d. 1227) is one that long has been a subject of fascination. His name struck terror in the hearts of millions of people in Inner Asia, China, and the Middle East as his bloody conquests established a foundation for the largest land-based empire in history. Not surprisingly, this great Mongol leader has attracted attention from a number of biographers in this century.

De Hartog’s narrative focuses on the career of Genghis, but is not strictly a biography because the final three chapters extend the story of the Mongols for two decades after the great Khan’s death. Although just recently issued in paperback, the book is not a new one. Originally published in Dutch in 1979, the author’s English translation first appeared in 1989. The current paperback edition has not been revised and the publisher apparently intends to sell it to the academic market. The author is not a native speaker of English, but the quality of the prose is generally clear and direct. Nevertheless, more careful editing could have corrected occasional infelicitous turns of phrase. For example he uses “cattle raising” as a synonym for “herding” even though he apparently realizes that the Mongols raised a variety of livestock (p. 3).

De Hartog—who does not have reading knowledge of the languages important for the study of Mongol history (Persian, Chinese and Mongol)—does not claim to have written a work of original scholarship. In the preface he mentions that Genghis Khan is directed to the general reader. Nonetheless, when he wrote the original Dutch edition, he was careful to consult important secondary works and translations of primary materials in German, English, and French that were available in the 1970s. Nevertheless, the 1989 English edition only cites a few important works of scholarship that appeared in the early 1980s, such as Paul Ratchnevsky’s biography of the great Khan.[1]

Since de Hartog is a non-specialist and the book is twenty years old, it not surprisingly has a number of flaws. For example, the author sometimes uncritically accepts legends in the primary sources. For example the story of the Khan being named Temüjin after a captured chieftain is presented as fact without a discussion of alternative accounts (p. 13). De Hartog’s interpretation of Mongol history also is dated. His description of Mongol political organization as “feudal” ignores more sophisticated debates about tribal formation that have been ongoing among anthropologists and historians. Most importantly, his thesis that Mongol success can be attributed to Genghis’ “shrewdness” overlooks the fact that the conquests continued for half a century after the great Khan’s death. As others have pointed out, Genghis’ innovations in organization can explain the sustained success of the conquests. Traditional tribal structures were dismantled and replaced by a more stable organization.

In sum, in an university setting this book is only suited to lower-level undergraduates who may find the simple, direct prose to be appealing. Otherwise, Ratchnevsky’s biography is to be preferred.

Jonathan Skaff
Shippensburg University of Pennsylvania

[1] Genghis Khan: His Life and Legacy, trans. by Thomas Nivison Haining (Blackwell, 1993).



Some Observations on the Influence of Byzantine Institutions on Ottoman Institutions, by Mehmed Fuad Köprülü. Translated, edited, and with an introduction and postscript by Gary Leiser. 195 pages, bibliography, index. Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu Basımevi, 1999. (Paper) ISBN 975-16-1127-X

According to its translator, this book-length article “can be regarded as the starting point for the modern study of the social, economic and cultural relationship between Byzantium and the Ottoman Empire, and for the modern study of the historical development of Turkish institutions in general” (p. vii). Its translation into English is long overdue. First published in Turkish in 1931 and translated into Italian in 1953, the work had “little or no effect” on Byzantinists or on Islamic historians in general, although among Turkish scholars it became “a kind of ‘gospel’” (pp. 164-65). Only the slow process, by no means finished, of the publication and translation of sources has permitted non-Ottomanists to reach conclusions drawn decades earlier in Some Observations.

Köprülü’s work countered the western scholarly consensus of the early twentieth century that the imperial success of the ‘barbaric’ Ottoman Turks was due only to western or Christian inputs, and specifically that parallels between Ottoman and Byzantine institutions resulted from Ottoman adoption and imitation of Byzantine practices. Köprülü pointed out that these conclusions rested not on evidentiary proof, since most western historians did not read Turkish sources, but on assumptions about western cultural dynamism and Turkish backwardness. The evidence, he maintained, showed that these institutions largely predated the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople and had earlier Islamic or even pre-Islamic antecedents. Byzantine influence could not be ruled out, but it was often indirect, traceable to Seljuk, Abbasid, or even Umayyad times. Conversely, the Byzantines were influenced by the Ottoman and earlier Turkish and Muslim polities as well.

Köprülü investigated economic life, landholding and taxation, the organization of the army, provincial administration and the bureaucracy, and the customs of the palace. Using what he called a genetic and comparative approach, he traced these institutions’ historical antecedents and stages of development through Islamic and Turkish sources. His detailed findings should be useful to those who study political culture, institutional development, class relations, or the evolution of terminology. The book will also be of interest for the study of historiography, as Köprülü was one of the first Middle Easterners to bring European scholarly methods to bear on Middle Eastern history and literature and to challenge western ‘orientalism’ not only intellectually but procedurally.

Leiser, the translator, has done a fine job with Köprülü’s convoluted prose, bringing it into conformity with modern academic usage. More problematic were the cryptic and incomplete notes, which Leiser has expanded and standardized. He has also cited more recent publications and translations of sources as well as important scholarly works published since Köprülü’s day, and he has updated and recast the bibliography. Some Observations should become essential reading not only for Ottomanists but also for Byzantinists and Middle East historians generally.

Linda T. Darling
University of Arizona


Les traditions apocalyptiques au tournant de la chute de Constantinople, edited by Benjamin Lellouch and Stéphane Yerasimos (Varia Turcica 33). 192 pages, footnotes, bibliographies. Paris, Montréal: L’Harmattan, 1999 (Paper) ISBN 2-7384-8477-8

The situation of Constantinople in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries as the bone of contention of two controversial yet often coexisting cultures gave rise to a highly complex apocalyptical literature on both sides, which persisted in different versions and functions well beyond the fall of the city in 1453. Les traditions apocalyptiques assembles contributions to a workshop held in Istanbul in 1996, uniting specialists from Byzantine, Ottoman, and Islamic studies. Balivet gives an overview of Byzantine apocalyptical motives, pointing out several parallels that refer to the Ottoman side. Bernardini highlights a curious case of Islamic-Christian syncretism in the story of Sultan Jomjome, otherwise known as Hikâye-i Kesikbaş, in both literature and painting. Yerasimos similarly traces one motive in Christian and Muslim tradition, that is, the ‘tree on the borderline,’ beginning with Daniel 4, 7-12 and the quranic sidrat al-muntahā, and leading down to the famous legend of the ‘Golden Apple.’ The differentiation between mere parallels and actual borrowings is not always clear, however. As many instances quoted here are reported by alien sources such as European travelers, it seems sometimes necessary to take their background and their own religio-political agenda into account.

All these contributions focus on common elements and exchange between Christians and Muslims, whereas Beldiceanu-Steinherr underscores the function of apocalyptic texts in confrontation. She draws a vivid picture of the cruel and troublesome history between the Babaî uprising 1240 and the battle of Ankara 1402. These events gave rise to several inner-Islamic apocalyptical interpretations, which were finally countered by the new image of the Ottoman sultan as champion in the Holy War. Congourdeau presents a Byzantine apocalyptic tradition that is, differently from the Ottoman, obsessed with the calculation of the date of the end of time, but also strongly imbued with the moralizing discourse. In new forms, the tradition persisted after 1453, now trying to predict the downfall of the Ottoman Empire. Among the authors of such calculations, Congourdeau draws special attention to Georgios Scholarios, the first patriarch of Constantinople after the Turkish conquest. Fodor depicts the Hungarian attitude towards the Turks as reflected in Hungarian apocalyptical traditions as one of monolithical national resistance. This makes Matthias Corvinus’s policy appear as a singular exception. Similarly, the frequent evocation of unity against the Turks in the sources as such casts doubt upon the alleged homogeneity of the nation. Gril convincingly dismisses the attribution of the mysterious prophecy of Ottoman rule and doom entitled aš-Šagara an-nu’maniya together with its commentaries to Ibn al-’Arabī, as’-S’afadi, and al-Qunawi, respectively. The obvious Egyptian and anti-Ottoman bias lead Gril to date the work to the time of the conquest of Egypt rather than to the late seventeenth century as seems indicated by some of his own observations. Several of the studies in this fascinating volume offer no final conclusions, but they definitely mark important steps towards a more comprehensive treatment of the extremely complex issue, and are as such highly welcome.

Gottfried Hagen
University of Michigan



The Advent of the Fatimids: A Contemporary Shi’i Witness. An Edition and English Translation of Ibn al-Haytham’s Kitab al-Munazarat, by Wilferd Madelung and Paul E. Walker. 192 pages (English), index. 134 pages (Arabic), index. London: I.B. Tauris, 2000. $45.00 (Cloth) ISBN 1-86064-551-8

The North African period of Fatimid history has received considerably less attention than the subsequent Egyptian period, largely because the available sources are more numerous for the later period. In the past, even those works written about the very early Fatimid period have focused largely on Sunni polemics or on the organization of the political community and administration. This approach is also understandable, given the nature of the sources: nearly all of the material we have had access to, whether for North Africa or Egypt, has been shaped by a decidedly anti-Fatimid point of view. Recent scholarship, however, has taken a welcome turn, and The Advent of the Fatimids is part of the new trend.

This impressive volume, brought to us by Madelung and Walker, the two acknowledged authorities on Ismaili thought, provides an authoritative Arabic text and translation of an important Fatimid treatise, one that will be of immense interest to specialists on North African Fatimid history and Ismaili thought. This is, in fact, the second collaborative project of Madelung and Walker (they published the Ismaili Heresiography of Abu Tammam in 1998), and we can only hope that they will continue their felicitous intellectual partnership. The Arabic text was edited from three available manuscripts with full scholarly apparatus. The translation is accompanied by exhaustive footnotes that include full identifications of individuals, long and crucial explanations for complex and often obscure ideas and events, and numerous references to other Arabic texts and scholarly literature. The notes are an education in themselves.

The text and translation are accompanied by Walker's introduction, which lays out in a readable and accessible form the major issues in early North African Fatimid religious history. Readers will learn more here than anywhere else (except for Walker's forthcoming book on Fatimid religious policy) about the configuration of North African Shi’i communities and about the character of the conflict between the Ismailis, on the one hand, and the Hanafis and Malikis, on the other. Even those who may not have a particular interest in the disputation itself should take the time to read the introduction, which makes an important and needed contribution to the literature on Shi’i history in general, and Ismaili history in particular. It seems ungrateful to ask any more of Walker than he has already done, but I wish that he had written at somewhat greater length on the genre of munazara itself. It would be helpful to read more about this disputation in particular in relation to the genre as a whole. It would also have been useful for Walker to discuss the particulars of why Ibn al-Haytham’s work was important for the Tayyibi redactors who copied and thus preserved the text.

The Advent of the Fatimids is an excellent text for use in a graduate seminar, and parts of the introduction and selections from the translation could be used very productively with advanced undergraduates.

Paula Sanders
Rice University


The Cambridge History of Egypt. Vol. 1, Islamic Egypt, 640-1517. Edited by M. A. Daly, Carl F. Petry, and Cary F. Petry. 645 pages, maps, illustrations, glossary, bibliography, index. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998. $130.00 (Cloth) ISBN 0-521-47137-0

The Cambridge History of Egypt is an excellent work, indispensable for research specialists and survey lecturers alike. My hat is off to editor/author Petry and the other seventeen authors for their accomplishment. The book does indeed achieve the stated goal of overcoming the ‘compartmentalization’ of Egypt’s lengthy history and exposing continuities, yet without sliding down the slippery slope toward an anachronistic national thesis, and keeping in sight the broader context in which that history is situated. The construction of this volume, beginning with chapters on the period of Roman and Byzantine rule and ending with one on the establishment of Ottoman rule, seems to signal that the conventional chronological boundaries of ‘Islamic’ Egypt are only that—conventional. Not that the Arab-Muslim and Ottoman conquests can be discounted as important turning points, but they and other major transitions, such as the emergence of Egypt as a center of power (mid-ninth to mid-tenth century) and the multiple impact of the counter-Crusade (Ayyubid and Mamluk eras) are presented as only they can be, in a regional or world context.

Although the Cambridge History format normally emphasizes conventional, politically defined periods, almost half of the chapters are topical, and deal with such subjects as the Christian and Jewish communities, monetary history, art and architecture, culture and society, historiography, Egypt ‘in the world system,’ and the Mamluk military institution. The chapters devoted to political-dynastic eras also take account of economic and social issues, and address scholarly controversies to some extent. Yet Irene Bierman’s chapter on art and architecture stands out, in a very strong lineup, as the only one that addresses the issue of the production of knowledge. Donald P. Little’s chapter on the historiography of the Ayyubid and Mamluk periods discusses the sources—the Islamic historiography—but there is no chapter on the modern historiography of Islamic Egypt. No chapter is devoted to women/gender, though I think it would have been possible, given the state of the historiography. Nor is there a chapter devoted to the (majority) rural society. Readers interested in women can use the index, but there is no index entry for ‘peasants’ or ‘agriculture.’

These gaps reflect the current state of historical studies, and perhaps also the scholarly ijma` within it, and of course they are more apparent in a work such as this one, which tries to pull together a millennium of the history of Islamic Egypt. They do not detract from the importance the volume under review, nor from the accomplishment that it represents.

Kenneth M. Cuno
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign



Consumption Studies and the History of the Ottoman Empire, 1550-1922: An Introduction, edited by Donald Quataert. (SUNY Series in the Social and Economic History of the Middle East) 358 pages, bibiliography, index. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2000. $23.95 (Paper) ISBN 0-7914-4432-5

This latest publication of the Biennial Conference on the Ottoman Empire and the World Economy is a valuable introduction to the study of Ottoman consumption. The contributors find consumption studies provocative and promising, frustrating and deceptive, in richly detailed and theoretically informed articles that plumb the eating, clothing, buying, and advertising habits of Ottomans, mainly those in Istanbul.*

Some articles engage historiographical and methodological issues. Quataert and Suraiya Faroqhi assess the usefulness of consumption studies to Ottoman history. Quataert’s introduction heralds consumption studies as an alternative to the state-centered focus of Ottoman historiography. But Quataert also cautions against emphasizing the cultural implications of consumption over the economic, wondering whether the Ottomans’ adoption of tobacco and coffee fostered a production increase in the early eighteenth century. Faroqhi voices optimism that consumption studies can unite economic, social, and cultural realms of historical inquiry. She dismisses dissenters who argue that consumption studies is the pet project of wealthy industrialized countries by noting that Ottomans, despite relative poverty, apparently were consuming more by the eighteenth century. Citing Jan DeVries’s ‘industrious revolution’ as a possible explanation, Faroqhi argues that estate inventories, travelogues, waqf records, archeological reports, and memoirs promise to show that the western regions of the empire hosted a borderland culture not so different from consumerist Europe. Three articles discuss methods of using particular sources. Joyce Hedda Matthews shows how a historian might tease consumption data out of Ottoman inheritance inventories in her study of seventeenth-century Manisa. Tülay Artan traces shifting food tastes of the eighteenth-century elite through records of the palace kitchens. On the nineteenth century, Nancy Micklewright shows that photographs—a tempting source of information about dress and other consumption habits, and an object of consumption themselves—are difficult to decipher.

Several essays study consumption to throw new light on old historical issues. Ariel Salzmann re-evaluates the Tulip Period within a transcultural trading context. Flowers, a commodity exported from east to west, became by the seventeenth century a “floral intertext of mass consumer society” (p. 88). Salzmann further argues that the 1730 Patrona Halil revolt was not a protest against this emergent cosmopolitan culture; rather, it concerned the just distribution of resources in a changing cultural economy. Likewise, Madeline Zilfi uses resistance to sumptuary laws to reinterpret eighteenth-century politics: “Whether through the use of new fabrics or by indulging in forbidden local luxuries, men and women seemed to be testing the right of the monarch to determine status” (p. 300). The execution of a non-Muslim beggar for wearing upper-class boots highlighted political tensions around minorities’ ties to foreign powers. Charlotte Jirousek echoes some of these findings in her study of the rise of mass fashion dress, but cautions that substantive change in fashion was tied to the rise of industrialization only in the late nineteenth century. Finally, Elizabeth Frierson uses early newspaper advertisements to show how Ottoman consumers disrupted capitalist markets and expressed majority-minority tensions. Muslim retailers and magazine editors painted non-Muslims as agents of a rapacious world market, urging Ottomans to be ‘loyal’ consumers and boycott Jewish and Armenian shops. Frierson’s demonstration that the buy-Muslim campaign continued from the Hamidian to the Young Turk era offers a new perspective on Ottoman resistance to Westernization and the rise of nationalism.

Elizabeth Thompson
University of Virginia

*Text is corrected from the printed version of MESA Bulletin, Vol. 35 No 1, page 97.


In the House of the Law: Gender and Islamic Law in Ottoman Syria and Palestine, by Judith E. Tucker. 221 pages, notes, glossary, bibliography, index. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1998. $40.00 (Cloth) ISBN 0-520-21039-5

Judith Tucker’s work is well known for its explorations into the world of the Muslim women in the modern era, beginning with her study of women in nineteenth-century Egypt (1986). The present volume, In the House of the Law, deals with the crucial ‘early modern’ seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Ottoman Syria and Palestine. The study is based upon a rich store of primary material comprising the fatawa of three Hanafi muftis and the court records of Jerusalem, Nablus, and Damascus. The themes treated cover some major concerns of Hanafi family law: marriage, divorce, the roles of parents, and sexuality and reproduction. The opening chapter sets out the urban context within which the muftis functioned, offering also brief details of the lives of each.

Tucker is concerned with gender and the law. She views gender in two ways: first as a symbolic construction by Muslims “who developed a consciously legal discourse,” and second as a social relationship, “the product of the historical development of human experience, a relationship that changes, evolves and adapts in rhythm with a changing society” (p. 11). Adaptation to change is witnessed in the law as well. This occurs through the practice of ijtihad exercised in the particular type of legal instrument by which adaptation was made possible, namely, the fatwa. Throughout the book, Tucker stresses the intellectual effort undertaken by the muftis in reviewing and weighing the opinions of their own legal school in the light of the actual cases presented to them. The mufti's decision could then “constitute a restatement of prior opinion or actually entail a shift in the interpretation of legal doctrine” (p. 14, my italics). This last phrase may initially appear an overstatement. In her conclusion, however, Tucker suggests that muftis responded to concrete problems with “flexibility, creativity and even compassion” (p. 184), and thus “[t]heir role as enforcers of gendered social control was modified, in part, by their sense of responsibility for upholding justice for everyone under God’s law” (p. 183).

Two points arising from this fascinating book caught the reviewer’s attention. First, what light does the muftis’ use of ijtihad in Ottoman Syria and Palestine shed upon vehement rejections of taqlid by eighteenth-century revivalists in Arabia and India, especially given that Shah Wali Allah’s India was also a region where Hanafi practice prevailed? Second, while the muftis and the courts tried to “soften gender privilege” (p. 112 and passim) in so many aspects of family law, it was in the area of sexuality and reproduction that they lacked either the means or the will to challenge the family’s monopoly over their womenfolk, since these were matters “too close to the heart of the kin-based social system for it to allow even a partial surrender to the courts” (p. 178). Tucker is to be congratulated for her sure-handed guide through the intricacies of family law at the historical moment when Syria and Palestine stood on the threshold of an era of rapid and dramatic change.

David Waines
Lancaster University


Arming the State: Military Conscription in the Middle East and Central Asia, 1775-1925, edited by Erik J. Zürcher. 168 pages. New York: I. B. Tauris, 1999. $65.00 (Cloth) ISBN 1-86064-404X

Arming the State contains nine papers presented in 1997 at a symposium in the Netherlands on non-Western, mostly Ottoman, military recruitment. Despite its composite character, the volume achieves considerable thematic coherence; all but the final two essays, on Central Asia (Kudryashev) and Iran (Cronin), examine areas within the former Ottoman empire, mostly pre-twentieth century. A brief introduction highlights significant differences between pre-modern Western European and Ottoman recruitment practices and emphasizes the most recent historical evolution, the widespread introduction of mass conscription. Successive essays explore the military implications of citizen conscription and its social consequences for the Ottoman empire in the late nineteenth century. Some essays investigate the Ottoman government's attempts at generalized military reform (Aksan, Zürcher), while others address specific regional patterns.

Resistance to citizen recruitment by former (and potentially still rival) provincial military élites is observed in both Syria (Douwes) and Bosnia (Moreau). In Syria the proliferation of alternate forms of military service—from regular army units and mercenary troop levies to conscript-based units, especially after 1800—led to destabilization of the provincial social order as rivals for military predominance vied for exclusive control (Douwes). Resistance, sometimes communal, by peasants and bedouin to state efforts to organize citizen militias after the abolition of the Janissaries in 1826 contributed to instability in the province (pp. 123 ff.). Nevertheless Douwes concludes that, although the transition to conscript armies was not just difficult and slow but also disrupted by periodic outbursts of violence, the end result was greater social stability. Douwes regards the removal of socially-privileged elements who dominated military provision before the mid-nineteenth century as, in general, a socially-progressive development. Provinces such as Bosnia were denied, by geographic proximity to active military fronts against contiguous Austria and nearby Russia, the luxury of a gradual transition to new military recruitment systems. This lack is clearly demonstrated in Moreau’s essay analyzing the disastrous consequences, both internally and at the front during the Russo-Ottoman war of 1877-78, of the indeterminate state of Bosnia’s mid-nineteenth century ‘military revolution.’ Neither its organization, its troop levels, nor the standard of training provided for its recruits made the new provincial army of Bosnia a credible match for the state-run and state-financed armies of its neighbors and potential adversaries.

Other contributions to the volume focus on key subjects such as Egypt (Fahmy) and Ottoman naval recruitment (Panzac). In sum, seven of its nine substantive chapters provide a useful and surprisingly comprehensive account of the social and institutional dimensions of Ottoman military reform in the late imperial era. As the editor points out (p. 16), until now the subject of military recruitment in non-Western contexts has hardly been touched. With the appearance of Arming the State, he and his co-authors can take justified pride in producing a distinguished exception to that general rule.

Rhoads Murphey
University of Birmingham