Ottoman History Podcast - Nouveau Literacy in the 18th Century Levant

Episode Date: November 11, 2016

with Dana Sajdihosted by Chris Gratien and Shireen Hamza Download the podcast Feed | iTunes | GooglePlay | SoundCloud In the conventional telling of the intellectual history of the Ottoman Empire and the Islamicate world, there has been very little room for people outside the ranks of the learned scholars or ulema associated with the religious, intellectual, and political elite of Muslim communities. But in this episode, we explore the writings of Shihab al-Din Ahmad Ibn Budayr, an 18th-century Damascene barber, as well as a host of writers that our guest Dana Sajdi has described as representatives of "nouveau literacy" in the Ottoman Levant. We discuss how non-elite writers left records of the people and events they encountered during a period of socioeconomic transformation in Greater Syria, and we listen to readings from the text of Ibn Budayr--the barber of Damascus--that bring to life the literary style of the unusual and extraordinary authors who wrote from the margins of the learned establishment in early modern Ottoman society. « Click for More »

you're listening to the adamant history podcast to find out more about today's topic or check out some of our other episodes along with maps images documents and other materials related to the history of the adamant empire and the modern middle east visit us on the web at adamant history podcast.com. Hello, welcome to another episode of Ottoman History Podcast. I'm Chris Grayton. I'm Shirin Hamza. Today's episode is part of our series on the history of science, Ottoman or otherwise curated by Nir Shafir. For a complete listing of that series, visit our website, ottomanhistorypodcast.com. We've got a lot of episodes on a range of topics relating to the history of science and knowledge in the Ottoman and Islamic world. Today's episode fits

into our subheading of the cultures of the book, where we're talking about literacy. And in fact, the subject is what we're going to call nouveau literacy in the 18th century Ottoman Levant. Our guest is Dana Sajdi. She's associate professor in the Department of History at Boston College, and she's the author of a work entitled The Barber of Damascus. Again, that subheading is nouveau literacy in the 18th century Ottoman Levant, and that's out from Stanford University Press in 2013. Professor Sajdi, welcome to the podcast. Thank you. It's very exciting to, welcome to the podcast. Thank you. It's very exciting to have you on the podcast to discuss this really unique work

within the study of the history of the early modern Middle East. I think it's a great example of one of the different ways we can approach the subject of literature and of reading and of knowledge during the Ottoman period. And I wanted to start off by asking you, you know, I really related to your introduction because you talk about that you finally found your Minocchio, is what you said.

So, Minocchio is the figure from Carlo Ginsberg's very iconic work of microhistory, The Cheese and the Worms, sort of a miller who constructed this whole cosmos for himself. We won't talk about that. But I mean, that statement was so relatable to me because I'm not a historian of literature or anything like that. I work on environmental history. But once in a while, you find these sources that you're just like, I found my Minocchio. You know, it's something that you can't ignore when you find something that just opens up

another world onto the history that you've already been studying for so long. So tell us about your Minocchio, Ibn Budair, and how he inspired you to sort of write this work. So as a background, I had been trained as a medievalist, and I had read the chronicles of the Ayyubid and Mamluk period. And I was at the same time, being exposed to historiography, especially from historians of Europe. And of course, you know, Carlo Ginsberg's book was one of the first things we read. And then it was, you know, Natalie Zeman Davis, and then Darnton, and then all of these early modernists, as examples of like the new history at the time. And of course, there was subaltern studies. So while I was learning about all of this and looking into my medieval chronicles and looking for the voices of the marginal, I was really dejected because I spent a whole year reading all of them. And there will be incidental mentions of the people, but you did not kind of, we were not able to do anything but a descriptive history.

kind of we were not able to do anything but a descriptive history. And so while being dejected and being upset that we don't have the right sources, because all the sources that we were reading were by the scholars, the ulama, I was reading Tarif Khalidi's book on Arabic historiography and found in some footnote that, you know, about 18th century barber and farmer historians. That's Ibn Budai, the barber of Damascus. century barber and farmer historians. That's Ibn Budai, the barber of Damascus. Anyway, so I went and looked for these people that Khalidi mentions, and they were all unusual people.

They're not scholars. And amongst them was a barber. So when I went and looked for this barber, indeed, there is a chronicle by the barber that was published and edited and published in the 50s by Ahmed Azad Abdul Kareem. But the catch is the following, that the chronicle had been burglarized by a 19th century scholar, and who had, in his own words, refined it and edited it. So we knew this is a story of a barber, but this was not his voice. Anyway, so I wrote my dissertation on 18th century chronicles. not what this was not his voice anyway so I wrote my dissertation on 18th century chronicles but then as I was finishing the dissertation I came across by complete coincidence the chronicle

of the barber the unique copy that was housed in Chester P.T. library and when I looked at it I realized that I found my Minocchio because it was so different and so fresh and so significantly different from the 19th century version that I thought, this is my protagonist, this is my Minocchio. And the fact that there's a 19th century version brings things so much clearer, into relief, in such a strong way that I just decided to make my book about the barber. And so we're going to get into the, you know, the cosmos and understanding of history that's in the work of Ibn Budair, the barber of Damascus, as you call him, and sort of how it challenges maybe a more monolithic or hegemonic understanding of

history writing during the 18th century that we've sort of received from previous scholarship and that you encountered in some of your earlier work. But before doing so, like, let's set the stage. We can do it through his eyes. What's going on in the 18th century Levant, sort of during the long 18th century in Syria, in the city of Damascus in particular, sort of the social changes that are going on in the city? A lot was going on. And I only realized this after really reading the barber and becoming very close to his context. So I'm a veteran of Damascus. I've gone there since I was a child.

It's the first stitches that I had on my head were in Damascus. But so what we knew as growing up, what I knew as the old city of Damascus, it's kind of very well known for its houses, you know, arranged around the courtyard, these beautiful, you know, little treasure boxes that they were called. And so I thought, this is old Damascus.

Then I realized that all I know as old, or most of what I know as old Damascus is actually an 18th century aspect of the city. So the topography of the city had changed and the 18th century had all these new mansions, which now dominate a part of the walled city. Going back from there is like, what are these mansions? Where did the money come from? Who are these people who built these mansions? Going backwards, it becomes a very easy kind of connection because we know from the work of Quran from 35 years ago that there's this period of the rise of the notables.

And it is what classically Ottomanists have called this decentralization or what Ariel Saltzman called as privatization, which is that in the 18th century, Istanbul decided to devolve fiscal and political rights from the center to the provinces. And what happened is that there was an influx of new money and the rise of these new families who ruled and administered and actually kind of and collected the resources of the area. So there's new money and a new way of doing things. But also, it was a time of reinvigorated Mediterranean trade, and integration to the world economy, if you will. And that gave rise to port cities like Acre and later Beirut. So there's a reorientation of Damascus as a provincial capital towards the sea, and also kind of a local way of collecting revenues that had not been before so there's a new money and new money means people move to the town you know to the city and so it's like the rockefellers move to town right and so what so i call this a new order it's really

a disorder because it is kind of a reshuffling of the social map. And this is where I intervened with the classical scholarship about the rise of the Ayaan. The Ayaan don't just rise and nothing else happens. So there's both vertical and horizontal movement. There is a lot of social positions changing. And this is reflected not only in the new money and also the topography and i see the changes or the entry of these of new authors on the text of history as related to the social changes and the topographical changes so in these three spaces there's a relationship and a disorder a social topographical and literary disorder right and so thinking back from like maybe the 19th or early 20th century, what you're essentially describing is the rise of these Damascus households that sort of build themselves into the urban

landscape and become economic and political fixtures, families that are associated with, you know, the aristocracy of old Damascus that remain very politically influential into the 20th century, even under the French as sort of centers of political resistance against French intervention. So this 18th century period that you're describing is sort of the ascendance of a lot of these families that people who have visited Syria will recognize. You know, the National Museum is housed in the famous Lazm Mansion. Welcome back to

Ottoman History Podcast. Chris Grayton and Shirin Hamza here talking to Dana Sajdi about her book, The Barber of Damascus. We're speaking about nouveau literacy in the 18th century Ottoman Levant. You know, sometimes people ask me about the podcast, you know, where do you get your money? How is it supported? And the truth is we don't have any sources of funding and have no intention to really have them. It's totally self-sustained. That's how we stay efficient. That's how we stay efficient.

That's how we stay independent. And that's how we ensure that we are all mutually interdependent on each other's efforts. But for the listeners who do want to support us, there is a way you can do that. You can go to iTunes or wherever you are accessing the podcast and do rate us with however many stars you believe we deserve. Five is the preferred amount.

And even write a review so we can not only let the iTunes community know about what we're doing here on the podcast, but also get your feedback. You mentioned that the rise of these elite families in the 18th century is something similar to the Rockefellers coming to town. The influx of that new money into the city caused a lot of reshuffling in the landscape. Was Ibn Udair and his migration of sorts into the walled city part of a larger movement of people? It is not very clear to me from my sources that that happened on a large scale or not. But we know that these families, when they move into town they are gonna they're going to develop these networks that go from high to low from inside to outside so it is very clear

that for example one of the other characters in the book who is a scribe in a court in the town of Hems that his whole life was dependent on a person, a military person, actually, who was aspiring to become the district governor. So you could see how he was totally attached to this new guy, and his fortunes rose and fell with him. So what I'm trying to say here is that the change you know with the new elite there's also new networks and while I cannot place Ibn Budair himself on a very specific network with

these families I can place some of the other characters in that so there's definitely a reshuffle and Ibn Budair has moved from you know kind of having lived in a neighborhood that is outside the city walls to the inside of the city was kind of a very fortuitous one, because he ended up apprenticing at a very high-class barbershop

in the center of the walled city. So, Dana, we've been talking about Ibn Budair, this barber of Damascus. We know he's a barber, but tell us about his social world. He comes, as you say, he moves in from outside of the city walls, comes to Damascus and becomes situated in this urban landscape within which he eventually becomes a writer. So what's his life like? What's going on at the barber shop?

And how is it part of the larger transformation of Damascus? So the barber was from a family of porters, you know, and their grandparents and cousins, everybody worked in grandfathers, everybody worked as a porter on the pilgrimage route to Mecca. And I don't know what happened that he didn't inherit his family business and that he ended up apprenticing at a barbershop in Bab el-Barid. Bab el-Barid is a very important neighborhood in the intramural city because it's right next to the Umayyad Mosque. It's right next to kind of the elite colleges of Damascus. And so he moved to a place that is full of high culture, if you will.

And he apprenticed with this barber, master barber, who seems to have had as clients all these very famous scholars and mystics sufis of damascus who would come to his barber shop obviously that's where they worked and he was around and so uh ibn buddh was fortunate enough to apprentice with this man whom he called my father and whom he called you know the person who allowed things to open up for me in so many words and so it seems that ibn buddha got uh in touch and kind of socialized with all these big scholars in the barber shop and we also know that ibn buddha got an education it was not a full-time education but he he's read books in jurisprudence, in mysticism.

And we don't know if he attended classes, if he went to the colleges or he got these in the barbershop. But we know that he was quite well educated. He talks about the books that he read and he talks about the books that his children read. So he was very invested in his children's education so he ends up moving from out of town to inside the city and having a family and then having his own barber shop also in that very important culturally rich center and having the same kind of clientele as his master barber and so what is happening at the barbershop is very interesting because Boudir does not actually talk about his barbershop in his chronicle, in his work.

What he talks about are the kinds of clients that he has because they're so important. And so in the style of the scholars, he wrote obituaries once they died. And so in these obituaries, he will never miss a chance to say that they were his clients or that he touched them, especially if they're mystics. So that was his way of kind of being a part of that social world and entering it and talking about it.

So Ibn Budair is this person, he's a barber whose position, he's sort of taking care of the beards of the most respected bearded men of Damascus. And so he has his intimate contact with a scholarly world and then becomes a scholar of his own. Well, almost a scholar, because he never really, he never pretends to be a scholar. He is a practicing barber and he's proud of it. But the scholarly thing that he does is that actually he writes a book, a book in the scholarly style.

So it's not that he wants to be a scholar. He just has the confidence to actually author a book. If you go today to any barber in the area around Harvard and MIT where we're sitting, I don't think you'll manage to encounter many barbers who, because they have clients who are professors, will actually write a book. So what was interesting about that moment… You might have even a couple people with PhDs, actually, but that's a separate issue. Yes. So what is important about this phenomenon, the barber himself, and this phenomenon is that these people who have no business writing books in that particular genre actually have the confidence to write these books. And so the

genre that he used is historically a scholarly genre, although it was not taught in the colleges, but its scholars had historically written chronicles. And here to define a chronicle, had historically written chronicles. And here to define a chronicle, it is a record of events and kind of structured chronologically. But what is important here at this period is, you know, since the late medieval period, that these books have become more and more to do with contemporary history, and less with past events. So they are usually written about the events that taking a place in the author's lifetime. So they're really very contemporary. And so being called history is a little bit of a misnomer is just recording things for history for posterity kind of thing. So he chose to write and other people of similar backgrounds chose to write in this genre. And that's kind of an encroachment on what had

been kind of a hegemonic space that was within the hegemony of the scholar. This phenomenon that you're describing in your book, you refer to as nouveau literacy. Can you tell us more about this phenomenon? What was new about it? Okay, so the term nouveau literacy is obviously related to the term nouveau riche. And nouveau riche, as you know, is a descriptive used by aristocracy to kind of distinguish themselves from newly arrived, new moneyed people and how their behaviors and their habitus and their social kind of interaction is actually not in conformity with the kind of comportment of old money.

So I'm using this as an analytical framework, but removing the derogatory aspects of it. And so Ibn Budir and I found five, six other people who have done the same thing, whose background is not in scholarly culture and who end up contributing to scholarly culture by writing history books. So I see them as new, you know, as arrivées, new arrivals on the text of history. And as new arrivals, they bring with them their old baggage and their old, you know, kind of social and literary habits. old, you know, kind of social and literary habits. And so they bring it into the new text and thus effect a lot of change in the content and the form. And so the chronicle is no longer the kind of old scholarly chronicle.

Now it's a novel kind of product. And when they come in, they bring their own stuff. And so whether it's their language, their grammatical constructions, or their kind of interests so what people might consider as gaffes and faux pas so they do to the chronicle what historically had not been done to it and they like you know they allow content and language that had never been used before and so that's what nouveau about it the authors are new the content is almost you know is is almost new and the product is new and i guess one of the things you're referring to is

orality right so history outside of the the learning class the ulama class would be mainly discussed orally and transmitted orally and so um the ordinary person when coming to the the literary world is going to bring some of this, what to them is a very intuitive orality of relating historical events, but in written form. So this is a great question, because it's not orality as such, because ulama, you know, whatever, publication of a book in the pre-modern period was oral, and education was oral. oral yeah and and education was oral and so um you know to get a phd you had to sit with your with your mentor and live with them basically the whole time and it's through this companionship that you actually kind of got authority transmitted to you but it's a specific kind of orality that

these nouveau literates bring to the text so and this orality really at least in the barbers text it's very very clear that it's coming from what are the epics that were told by storytellers yeah and these kind of hakawatis exactly and so it is you know things like um uh whatever you know the the epic of antara the epic of um um of z epic of Zahir Bebers. So there were all these epics that were being told either in coffee houses, on the streets, and possibly in barbershops. And I'll get back to that connection. And so the kind of stories are, it's like theater being narrated. And so usually they report first person speeches,

they do it in rhyme, but it's still kind of the prose is the larger framework. So we see in the Barber's text, so much of this storytelling techniques and styles that had not been accustomed in the scholarly chronicle. Well, Donna, could we trouble you to read a couple examples of this text? So for the listeners who do know Arabic or just want to get a sense of what it sounds like, for them to understand what you're referring to? Yes, here is an episode when the kind of strongman rebel from Acre, Zahir Omar, is having an encounter. And Zahir Omar was a semi-autonomous ruler in Palestine,

and the Sultan was not very happy with him because he was not conforming to kind of the revenue collection and forwarding as others had done in the period. And so the governor of Damascus was assigned to kind of put an end to Al-Zahir Omar. So this is an encounter between Al-Zahir Omar and the governor of Damascus, who is Suleyman Pasha Al-Azm. And Ibn Budair is reporting about their last encounter. And the report starts. So it's got the rhyme of sort of a fable, as you're saying. Yes, it has this very stochastic, it gives a dramatic pitch to the chronicle in a way that theater does. And it gives this sense of urgency and a sense of the first-person conversation.

It really adds a lot to the text that you don't usually find in Ulema texts. One of the things we get in this great theatrical reading you've just done, which isn't even apparent, you know, when you read the book, we have these examples transliterated in Latin script, but you don't actually get the sense of the rhythm when reading it. When I read the book, I did not know that it was going to sound like that, even though, of course, I can read the rhyming Arabic on the page. It doesn't have that. Why don't you give us give us one more one more if you don't mind reading one no not at all it's one of my favorite things so um so this episode

is a humorous episode and i actually actually it's tragic comic it's not humorous and this is also one of the aspects of this text is that it allows in terms of content what ulama usually don't write about and this is an episode that I called the minaret suicide and it is about the story of someone whose brother-in-law was bringing women to the house and doing not good things with them and so he was offended that he had turned his house to a place of ill repute. And so he decided to go and speak to the notables of the town, or maybe to the governor, and tell them about the kind of his brother-in-law's bad behavior. And what happened is that the notables didn't really,

they ignored him, they didn't listen to him. And so they did not set the moral order right. As a result, the man apparently went to the mosque and um and prayed upon himself the dawn prayer and got himself up and climbed up the minaret and screamed out uh oh umma of islam uh i'd rather die and not having to deal with the state of this time and he throws himself from the minute and dies and so the way that ibn buday reports this is also with some rhyme in it so here we start at the person who ends up committing suicide talking to his brother-in-law وقال له ايش هذه الافعال تتلف نساءنا والعيال فنهره واراد ضربه وكان من الجهال فذهب الى كابر الحارة واخبرهم بذلك الشام فمعيبوه وشغلوه بالكلام لانهم غطسين جمعا الى فوق الاذام

and then it goes on to say that he went to commit suicide then just before he committed suicide he screamed in other words he's talking about it as you know he he actually mentions the word pimping that i'd rather die and not have to deal with the pimping of the state of this time and one of the other things in that little excerpt you just read again beautifully for us is the conspicuous presence of the word ish. The word for what? Actually, I mean, maybe we can even get into the historical transformation of spoken Arabic in Damascus

because today maybe people would say shu instead. But ish, of course, is colloquial. It's not the formal Arabic. And you say, of course, is colloquial. It's not the formal Arabic. And you say this is deliberate use of colloquialism here. Okay, so I don't know if it's deliberate as such, but I think the infiltration of colloquial in this text is that Ibn Bidayr wrote as he knew how to write and probably as he spoke. But the deliberate part was to try to make it like high Arabic.

Yeah. So I think it's the other way around. So he was trying as much as possible to make it sound like literary Arabic. And so he would add rhyme. He would sometimes overcorrect, you know, hyper, you know, hyper change things from colloquial to high Arabic. And so kind of over correct in the spelling. And so what we have here is that he moves between the colloquial register and the literary register back and forth in the service of rhyme, and in the surface of

the intent, like, you know, is this an urgent event? And so when it's urgent, he adds rhyme to it. And so whatever comes to mind, he will just put it together in order to make the point, which is the drama of it all. Welcome back to Ottoman History Podcast, Chris Grayton and Shireen Hamza, here with Professor Dana Sajdi talking about her book, The Barber of Damascus, out from Stanford University Press. To find out about that book and also to find out about other relevant reading for this podcast, visit our website, adamanthistorypodcast.com,

where we've got all the necessary links and a great bibliography supplied by none other than Professor Sajdi. So far, we've been talking a lot about Ibn Budair, the eponymous barber of Damascus. What about some of these other nouveau literates that you've mentioned so far? Okay, so in addition to Ibn Budair, I have found, or actually they're published, but I kind of strung them together as a part of a phenomenon, six other people. One, two soldiers from Damascus, one Greek Orthodox priest from Damascus, one Samaritan scribe from Nablus in Palestine, a couple of agriculturalists from father and son from Lebanon called Arrukainis, and finally a scribe from the city of hymns. And so they all also wrote contemporary chronicles around the same time period. And they are from such varied backgrounds. And they all kind of converged on the same genre that I couldn't help but think of them as together making a phenomenon. And what is interesting about

all of them is that each one of them is also entering a new social position or a new social world. And hence, the phenomenon of nouveau literacy is that, you know, they're moving from one social position to another, and they're encountering a new world, and hence using the chronicle to negotiate in that new space. Can we hear a little bit more about the text that they wrote? The old wrote contemporary chronicles, but depending on the background of the author, the text was inflected by their own positioning. So, for example, we have a Samaritan scribe from Nablus. I mean, I don't know if people know that the Samaritan community is very small but still survives.

They're a group of pre-rabbinic, for whom the holy place is not Jerusalem, it's Nablus. And they've been living there ever since time immemorial, basically. And they actually had had a history of chronicle writing in the medieval period, but then it was cut, you know, kind of completely, it completely stopped,

or at least nothing survived after the medieval period. And then you have this one scribe who writes a chronicle about the city of Nablus itself. So usually, historically, they would write about the community, the Samaritan community, but this time it was about the city. And similarly, I have to digress here. The Greek Orthodox priest also writes about the city of Damascus as opposed to the particular Christian community or about the ecclesiastical, you know, kind of history. So, what is interesting about these two men who come from minority communities is that they're actually writing about the cities and themselves as an integral part of the city. And Nablus is an old city, as you said, but as we know from the work of Bashar al-Dumani, this is precisely a period within which Nablus

is kind of transforming as a small provincial center. But that's exactly the part of the same phenomenon. So it is with the rise of the Toucan family as a part of this new kind of order that this scribe, because he knows how to read and write, is hired. And so his entire kind of positioning is based on the rise of the Tukan family and hence his voice as and he speaks not only for the city

but also for his community um you know he managed to buy land and to you know to allow Passover you know kind of the particular feast for the Passover to happen um because of his dependence on the Tukan so again this is a new movement here. And you'll find it in each of the examples that there is such a movement that is happening either communally or individually. We encourage our readers to check out Professor Sajdi's book to find out more about these fascinating 18th century authors. But moving into the discussion of the afterlife of Ibn Bidayr's text, what did the 19th century editor al-Qasimi mean when he said he refined the work of Ibn al-Badr, who is clearly very literate person? Basically, for a scholar of the late 19th century, of course, who is

a part of now a new social and literary movement of, you know, the Arab Enlightenment, al-Nahda, for him, the kind of low Arabic and the so-called grammatical mistakes and bad usages, what he considered bad usages, for him, these are not textual. Arabic had been redefined and standardized in the late 19th century. And so it was kind of, it just was jarring for this alim to see that such language entered a text. So for him, some things about what Ibn Budair had to say were interesting or important enough, but the form, he didn't like the form of it. did was just basically change his language from colloquial to standard Arabic, translate some of the words that are in Turkish, in Ottoman Turkish, or actually a couple in Persian into Arabic, and finally remove almost all rhyme in the text. And so what he did is just he flattened it completely and of course because much of the chronicle is about the quote-unquote suffering of the of of the little man and and ibn buddhari

speaks as a little man um against the big people the akabir the notables there's so much in it about kind of the oppression of the notables or the negligence of the notables there's so much in it about kind of the oppression of the notables or the negligence of the notables. There's so much of the Chronicle about the prices and the perpetually rising prices of produce. So what the Aalim does is that he removes all these repetitive things, whatever he thinks is boring and repeated, and omits some of the actual events that he thinks are not suitable. repeated and omits some of the actual events that he thinks are not suitable. So what he does is he cuts the barber's tail and he actually omits all personal references of the barber to himself. So the barber, whenever he wrote an obituary of a scholar or a mystic, he made sure to mention how he had personal contact with these people. And so, that's how we know who he was

friends with and who he socialized with. But al-Qasimi removed all self-references out of the text. So, what happens in all of this is that al-Qasimi's kind of view of this book, why he thought it was important was not that it was the voice of the barber or the presence of the barber. But this is a book that told you about the Azim rule of Damascus in the 18th century and all these big scholars. So for him, this was heritage. This was history. And so this is for the new enlightened 19th century person to look back at their past. And the barber is actually almost an annoyance. The fact of the barber authorship is almost an annoyance.

And so while he does mention that it was a barber, and he mentions himself that his grandfather was a barber, he ends up kind of emitting all self references, anything unique or particular to the barber he emits out of the chronicle, but he tries to be faithful to the chronology of events. I mean, this is very fascinating because you're essentially talking about what we might call the self-conscious modernization of literary and scholarly style in Arabic during the 19th century. He's removing the subjectivity from historical texts, which is very much in line with the sort of objectivist representation of history during the 19th century that is in many ways still with us today.

I'm sure that a lot of your subjectivity is also omitted from your texts, but not all of it. It's good that you have some of that in the beginning. So, to conclude, I mean, I want to ask you about what happens to Ibn Budair's texts, the relationship to the late 19th century Arabic scholarship, how it relates to the larger question of

how we see the Nahda, sort of the big, what's remembered as sort of the big intellectual sea change in Arabic literature, the rise of literacy in the Arab world. You know, you have some interesting comments at the end of your book about how Ibn Budair relates to the way we see the Nahda, the rise of print journalism as well.

Maybe you could elaborate upon that. Yes, I'd be very happy to do that. So the way that we periodize Middle Eastern history, we have like an early Islamic period, then somehow a medieval period that not many people know about. And then it is decline and the Ottomans, and then it is the Nahda and kind of the modern period, which is so detached and usually seen as unrelated to the previous periods. And despite the fact that people have been talking about, you know, that this could not

be just the encounter with the West, but I still have yet to see modernists who relate what they work on to the 18th century or to earlier to the early modern period. So what happened is when I was doing medieval chronicles, and when I got to the 18th century, I always looked at chronicles as newspapers. To me, it was an obvious thing, because this is the only written form in which news is transmitted, right? Other than like letters or word of mouth. So to me, the importance of the chronicle was that it kind of recorded daily events. And that's how people learned about what is happening in the other town. But then when I came to the 19th century just to kind of compare the Barber's original text with the Baudelaire's version,

I kind of learned about Al Nahda and I learned that kind of the printing press is the hallmark of Al Nahda and the newspaper is the paramount text in Al Nahda project and about the sudden proliferation of journals and newspapers in abundant numbers. I mean, the numbers are huge. Like you have like, I don't know, 12 newspapers opening a day, something very crazy.

Anyway, so everybody had talked about this as a sudden thing. You know, the printing press came and there was the revolution and everybody somehow became journalists and suddenly the scholar is removed from the picture he's no longer at the center stage and now it's the public new public intellectual with new education and a new kind of canon that comes with him so i looked at this carefully and i realized wait a second it doesn't you know this kind of print journalism doesn't catch on suddenly just because of that. It cannot happen like that. There are social practices and these social practices, I mean, you know, this is too sudden. And so when I looked at 18th century chronicles as a scribal version, a pre-print journalism, whereby the, you know,

kind of the authority of the alim had already been broken. He's no longer a centaur already in the 18th century. And so once print arrived, it's the same social practice and it's the same kind of people that took up the newspaper. So I see the pre-print nouveau literate as kind of the new journalist who's going to pave way for the public intellectual of the 19th century. So this way you see that there's a continuity of practice. Of course, there's many, many changes. I'm not saying that, you know,

there was an encounter with the West, there was an encounter with new knowledge, etc. But then there was a lot of continuities and this is the only way I can explain how newspapers and journals became so preponderant, which is a continuity from the past. Well, and this whole practice of reading newspapers aloud in coffeehouses, of course, makes a lot more sense within this context

where we've sort of traced from the Hakowati to the chronicler to the journalist. Exactly. So it's the same social practices whether it's the in authority or in consumption so production or consumption they're very very similar pre-print you know in the pre-print period to the post-print period well donna as i said at the beginning of the podcast it's a really fascinating and unique work it's kind of a kind of thing that like we hope to see more of i for those who are listening out there and want to find more texts such as this or can dig them up it's uh it really does change the way we we read the early modern period uh and and as you've shown here offer uh new links

to understanding how the early modern becomes the modern sort of simply put uh and so i really want to thank you for coming on the podcast today joining us sharing a little bit of your work and reading those uh theatrical passages as well, thank you very much for having me. And I have to tell you that I'm giving you six stars, not only five, for the podcast. Thank you very much for the podcast. We're very grateful for that. We want to also thank our audience for tuning in

and remind them that on our website, you can find a link to where you can pick up The Barber of Damascus by Dana Sajdi from Stanford University Press. In our blog, outofmysterypodcast.com, that's where you'll also find a bibliography with other relevant reading, a great place to leave your comments and questions. I also want to invite you to join us on Facebook.

We've got over 25,000 fans in our Facebook group now, so if you want to give your two cents about Dana Sajdi's book and let your voice be heard, that's the best place to get a little bit of attention for yourself, as some of our listeners like to frequently do. So we'll leave you today with a recording. We've featured this band before on our podcast. The singer is none other than Nurcin Eleri,

who was featured in a previous episode about Night Time in late Ottoman Istanbul. It's a very famous Arabic composition. I believe a musical arrangement that dates maybe even to the Ottoman period, Lama Bada Yatathanna. We'll leave you with this clip from Nurcin and the band Muhtalif.

And I invite you to join in next time. Until then, take care. و جمال فتنة اغرم بلا ده سرده اسمنت هنهي نمه وادي وايا خيرتي وادي وايا خيرتي ملي راقم وشهوتي في الهوط بيمين نواتي إلا مالي قلب جمال

إلا مالي قلب جمال Mali gül şamal illa Mali gül şamal illa Mali gül şamal aman aman aman aman موسيقى I have no other choice but to go to the mountains I have no other choice but to go to the mountains جمال إله مالي جمال أمان أمان أمان أمان