Beshara Doumani's new book on Ottoman Syria is a significant intervention into family history, urban history, and legal history. The author is most intensively in dialogue with fellow social historians whose work on the Ottoman Empire relies on local judicial records. Doumani was among an early cohort of scholars who used such records in the 1980s and 1990s to write social history, exemplified by his book on Nablus and its region titled Rediscovering Palestine: Family Life in the Ottoman Mediterranean (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). This new publication builds on and extends his earlier work to ask questions about family structures, political economy, and legal practices in the Ottoman Middle East.
Here, Doumani challenges essentialist assumptions of the Ottoman-Syrian past. These assumptions encompass patriarchy, the “traditional” Arab-Muslim family, and the meaning of shariʿa in the precolonial era. Doumani wants readers to realize how little of what is (thought to be) known about these matters is rooted in empirical research. He argues that the expression or manifestations of these concepts cannot be ascertained or understood by deductive reasoning, which produces little more than unexamined tropes and stereotypes. His alternative approach is to use family endowments and lawsuits from the towns of Nablus and Tripoli between the 17th and 19th centuries to understand how families were structured. The local shariʿa courts were central to establishing and adjudicating endowments, and through good fortune, extensive court archives from both places are extant in these years, allowing direct comparisons to be made.
Close reading and careful documentation reveal that family bequest patterns in Nablus and Tripoli were significantly different from one another, despite that both towns were linguistically Arab, majority Muslim, located in Syria, and part of the same Ottoman political structure. A few large families dominated the scene in Nablus. As part of these clans’ strategy for consolidating and retaining control of resources, men of these families deprived women of property and legal agency. In Tripoli, by contrast, productive property ownership was spread more widely and encompassed both men and women. Family endowments in Nablus were nearly all male-centric, privileging men and their descendants over matrilineal lines of descent. Moreover, few Nabulsi women made endowments. Family endowments in Tripoli, by contrast, typically designated women as beneficiaries, often in equal measure to male beneficiaries. Women also endowed productive properties in their own names in Tripoli. In both towns, endowments cut out agnates. In Nablus this had the effect of ensuring that male heirs and descendants would have exclusive access to a family endowment's income. In Tripoli, exclusion of agnates assured direct descendants (women and men alike) of income against the claims of other blood relations.
The book establishes this contrasting pattern between the two towns through a detailed discussion of specific endowments and of lawsuits connected to them. Doumani singles out particular litigants to describe and to trace their cases, in an effort to personalize (as much as is possible) the general story or analysis on offer. He describes four patterns in the structuring of family endowments, grouped according to the designation of beneficiaries, and he analyzes what patterns appear most often in the two cities, including changes over time. The specific cases are distilled and referenced in tabular data, used to support the analysis. The reader thus has access to a wealth of raw material from this research. Moreover, key or representative documents are photographically reproduced.
Having established a palpable difference in the two towns’ property devolution patterns, and noting the greater inclusion of women in Tripoli compared to Nablus, the book seeks to explain this difference by invoking the cities’ respective political economies. Leading families of Nablus depended on advance purchase (salam) contracts with regional peasants for delivery of olive oil, essential to the city's soap business. Tripoli's wealth, on the other hand, came from its fruit orchards, including mulberries used in raising silkworms.
For Nabulsi merchant-manufacturers to get their olive oil, a small number of tightly or narrowly held family businesses cultivated multigenerational relationships with peasant farmers. The urbanites did not own the villages’ olive groves, located as they were mostly on miri lands with villagers exercising usufructuary rights. But Tripoli's fruits, including its mulberries, came from the city's surrounding green belt, comparable in kind (though not in extent) to the Damascus Ghuta. Here, milk (private freehold) property was common, typically represented in urbanites’ ownership of trees in orchards (even when the underlying property belonged to a waqf). In contrast to Nablus, the wealth-generating products of Tripoli were directly owned by Tarabulsis and their partners in the market garden lands. It was not necessary for leading Tarabulsi families to consolidate their holdings in tightly held family networks to access their city's main source of wealth production. Nabulsis seeking influence in the countryside had to ally with, or be part of, clans with a history of paramilitary authority. But Tarabulsis from all walks of life (clerical, mercantile, artisanal) had direct access to their town's green belt.
This contrast, Doumani argues, explains the very different patterns of family structure and authority in the two cities. Rather than merely being local representations of generic modes of patriarchy, Arab-Muslim family life and “pure” precolonial shariʿa principles, variation in family structure, and authority in Tripoli and Nablus reflect the different political and economic forces that shaped the two towns. Implications of Doumani's analysis are that appeals to “tradition,” whether these are cast as pre-colonial, or Islamic, or Arab, are neither illuminating nor empirically grounded.
As someone who has looked at similar local judicial records for other Ottoman-Syrian towns, I am impressed with Doumani's industry and thoroughness. This book was a long time in the making, and no wonder given the masses of material that it marshals. Doumani knows the records of Tripoli and Nablus inside out, and he is a reliable guide to unlocking their meaning for his thesis. The specialist audience to whom this book is addressed will find much to ponder, not least the degree to which popular generalizations about social life in the past have little evidentiary grounding.
Nonspecialists may find the book dense or recondite. However, I hope that Doumani's arguments will find their way into new editions of widely read and widely taught textbooks. His interventions will encourage fresh thinking about patriarchy, family structures, and shariʿa in precolonial times. Words such as “Islam(ic),” “Arab,” and “Syria” are excluded from the book's title, perhaps in an effort to sidestep the baggage or assumptions often associated with them. Family Life in the Ottoman Mediterranean should be read by all who work in and teach social history of the Ottoman lands.
