Popular Culture in Medieval Cairo.

• Author: Pinault, David

Shoshan's book is brief (seventy-eight pages of text) but ambitious, crowding together a variety of intriguing sources ranging from sermons and hagiography to accounts of public processions and economic and political history. What emerges is an attempt to understand the Islamic tradition as it was experienced by the non-elite population of Mamluk Cairo.

Borrowing from methods developed by scholars of European popular culture, Shoshan in his introduction discusses ways of gaining access to non-elite understandings of classical traditions. Basing his approach in part on the work of Roger Chartier, a historian of early modern France, Shoshan asserts that elite and popular cultures are to be distinguished from each other not by identifying compartmentalized texts and labeling them either aristocratic or vulgar (whether these "texts" are to be understood as books or as religious processions), but rather by identifying the differing uses that elites and non-elites made of the commonly acknowledged sources of the tradition. With regard to Islamic society, this would mean analyzing the range of responses to texts such as the Quran and hadith. Shoshan does not develop fully this important point; but it is worth further articulation. To take one example: whereas the medieval ulama drew on Quranic scripture to develop a framework of legal guidelines for the structuring of Islamic society, professional storytellers (of the type described by Ibn al-Jawzi in his Kitab al-qussas) combined Qur'anic narratives with geographers' accounts and travelers' wonder-tales to produce pious entertainment for the masses.

Shoshan's first two chapters deal with Sufi sermons and hagiography. He analyzes the writings of the celebrated mystic Ibn Ata Allah, noting that some of his treatises were meant for a restricted circle of initiates, while others were intended for a mass audience. It is this latter genre that receives Shoshan's attention. He analyzes the imagery favored by Ibn Ata Allah in his mass-media sermons, suggesting how the use of comparisons and similes from farming and domestic life offers glimpses into the conceptual world of fourteenth-century Muslims. Less successful is Shoshan's treatment of a biography of the Prophet Muhammad attributed to Abu al-Hasan al-Bakri. Shoshan offers a summary of the events recounted in this sirah and briefly notes legendary biographical data emphasized by al-Bakri but omitted by other hagiographers; unfortunately he offers...