Search results

AbstractThis article explores the experience of the Great War in Syria and Lebanon with a specific focus on the famine that, combined with other wartime calamities, decimated the civilian population. Using food as its primary register, it looks at a wide range of largely untapped Syrian and Lebanese poems,zajal, plays, novels, memoirs, and histories written over the course of the 20th century, in order to illuminate the experiential dimensions of the civilians' war and to delineate some of the discourses that structured it. More specifically, it argues that the wartime famine in Syria and Lebanon gave rise to a remembered cuisine of desperation that is deeply informative about the ruptured world of the civilians' war.

In the summer of 2001 I was granted access to the registers (sijills) of the Ottoman Muslim court (al-mahkama al-sharciyya) of Beirut. These records, housed in the offices of a functioning court - the court attached to ImamcAli's mosque on Tariq al-Jadida in Beirut, occupy two bookshelves, tightly squeezed behind hundreds of volumes of the court's current files - the vast majority of which nowadays pertain to family law. The closet-sized room also doubles as the office of Mr.cAli Al-Dacuq whose occupation it was (and I assume, still is) to file and locate documents for an endless stream of worried people. Despite the dust, noise, and torrid heat, I managed, largely thanks to Mr. Dacuq's dogged optimism and good cheer, to conduct my own research and to document the holdings of the Archive.

In The Culture of Sectarianism: Community, History, and Violence in Ottoman Lebanon, Ussama Makdisi focuses on sectarianism as the defining experience in modern Mount
Lebanon—indeed, as the core of Lebanese modernity itself. This work is a meticulous
deconstruction of sectarianism as a discourse spawned by a particular historic
conjecture—Ottoman reform in the age of European domination—in and around the
tiny peripheral society of 19th-century Mount Lebanon. It is also an impassioned insistence not
only on the historic but also the moral urgency of recognizing the contingency of, and the human
agency in, the emergence of sectarianism and an invitation for hope in a Lebanese future that
might yet dare to embrace an alternative modernity. Makdisi's book is not only illuminated
by the scholar's insight; it is also animated by empathy for his subject matter and a talent
that brings local society and its mountainous vistas vividly to the mind's eye.

This article will examine the legal status of dhimmīs (non-Muslims) as documented in thesijillsof the shariʿa courts of Ottoman Damascus in the 18th and 19th centuries. It will focus on two related aspects ofdhimmīlegal life: the extent of the judicial autonomy granted to non-Muslims and the kind of justice thatdhimmīsobtained at the Muslim court.