Imperial Power and Maritime Trade: Mecca and Cairo in the Later Middle Ages.

• Author: Bauden, Frederic
• Position: Book review

Imperial Power and Maritime Trade: Mecca and Cairo in the Later Middle Ages. By JOHN L. MELOY. Chicago: MIDDLE EAST DOCUMENTATION CENTER, UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO, 2010. Pp. Xiii + 305. $59.95.

Despite its religious significance for every Muslim, there is no doubt that Mecca was little active on the political scene after the Prophet's death. With the shift of the Islamic empire's political power to Syria and then Iraq, the whole region remained a peripheral area, barely mentioned in the works of historians across the ages. The annual departure of the pilgrimage caravan and its return with the accompanying palanquin (mahmal) were the main events that occupied the historians, along with the problems faced by the pilgrims while traveling to and sojourning in the holy city. A difference of treatment only occurs when Mecca and Medina came under the influence of the Mamluk sultans and Egyptian and Syrian historians began collecting more data on the region. While other cities of the Muslim world were a focal point for many authors who devoted several works to them. Mecca was subject to scant treatment in historiographical sources. Although two Meccan authors--al-Azraqi (d. 858) and (d. 885)--wrote the history of their city in the ninth century, it was not until the fifteenth century that another local author, al-Fasi (d. 1429), decided to dedicate several of his books to the same topic. Between them spans a gap of six centuries of almost total silence. From a modern point of view, the research carried out on the holy city reflects this state. Most of the studies deal with Mecca's early history (shortly before the appearance of Islam and during the first century of Islam) or with the late period (mainly the twentieth century with the emergence of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia).

Notwithstanding this, with the publication of his works on Mecca in the early fifteenth century al-Fasi inspired several authors during the same century and up to the nineteenth century to allot more time to Meccan history and to the region in general. Muhammad al-Habib al-Hila assembled the names of all these authors and the titles of their works in al-Ta'rikh wa-l-mu'arrikhun bi-Makka mm al-qarn al-thalith al-hijri ila l-yarn al-thalith 'ashara (London, 1994; see my review in Mamluk Studies Review 3 [1999], 223-30), whose publication constituted a landmark. In the meantime, the most significant of these sources composed between the fifteenth and the nineteenth centuries were critically edited and made available to a broader audience. Consequently, the writing of a history of Mecca in the middle period became a more achievable goal.

The book under review by John Lash...