The view from the province: Syrian chronicles of the eighteenth century.

• Author: Masters, Bruce

History is little studied by the literati of Aleppo. They give themselves no concern about other countries, and know little or nothing of distant states or of the revolutions of the great Empires in the Western world. They are in general but superficially versed even in the Saracen history, notwithstanding the number of books which have been written on it, many of which are not rare in the East. But this on several accounts is not surprising. The learned men do not make it a regular study, in the manner they do law; they are inattentive to dates and chronology; history supplies little more to conversation than unconnected anecdotes, retailed without precision ...

- Alexander Russell(1)

The Paucity of Extant Manuscripts from eighteenth-century Aleppo seemingly confirms Russell's observation that the writing of history was not a major intellectual concern in that city in its third century of Ottoman rule. The same could easily have been said for contemporary Damascus. Although a few chronicles representing both cities have survived from the period, they were not produced by Syria's traditional intellectual elites. Forsaking history, the ulama turned their energies to law, poetry, or the biographical dictionaries of their own social peers - the tabaqat literature. Given this general disinterest on the part of Syria's intellectuals with their own history, a view that is reflected in the virtual absence of discussion of eighteenth-century Syrian historiography by twentieth-century scholars,(2) the chronicling of the events of that troubled century was left to semi-literate amateurs.

The question why Syria produced so many chroniclers drawn from outside the country's intellectual circles in the period is an intriguing one.(3) Syria's historians of the eighteenth century wrote apparently neither for any patron nor to instruct those who would govern, unlike their contemporaries either to the north in the Turkish-speaking core regions or in neighboring Mosul.(4) Although the Azm dynasty often was singled out for praise by the Damascene chroniclers, their histories were not written as panegyric for a patron's largess. If these authors wrote largely for themselves alone as the intended audience, then the reason they chose to record the events at all may lie in the very insecurity of their times.

Historical hindsight tells us the eighteenth century was a transitional period for the Ottoman Syrian provinces. Economically, the region began to experience the process by which it was drawn into a larger world economy. Politically, new elites emerged to challenge the sultans' claim to absolute authority, without providing any new basis for political legitimacy, other than through the force of arms. The social, political, and economic order of the pax ottomanica, and the security it brought, was breaking down as would-be warlords contested for the cities and tribal peoples asserted their hegemony over the countryside. For urban Syrians, it must have seemed as if the social fabric of the world they knew was unravelling before their very eyes. As in other troubled periods in human history, certain individuals were perhaps moved by the events to record them, seeking to provide order in the face of chaos and to leave testimony of what they had endured.

Unfortunately, the four writers to be discussed in this paper gave few, if any, clues within their texts as to why they thought it necessary to record the events through which they lived. As voices of social groups that were historically silent in Muslim culture, however, Syria's chroniclers have left to succeeding generations invaluable insights into the cultural and political values of their contemporaries. As such, it is the world views underlying the accounts of these chroniclers, rather than the actual events which they described, that allow modern readers to reflect upon the ways in which urban Syrians comprehended both the turmoil of their century and their place in a wider world.

THE AUTHORS

In any discussion of eighteenth-century Syrian historiography, four works stand out as significant: 1) Mikhail Burayk al-Dimashqi, Tarikh al-Sham, 1720-1782 (History of Damascus); 2) Ahmad al-Budayri al-Hallaq, Hawadith Dimashq al-yawmiyya 1154/1741-1175/1762 (Daily Events of Damascus); 3) Hasan Agha al-Abid, Tarikh Hasan Agha al-Abid (The History of Hasan Agha); and 4) Yusuf Dimitri Abbud al-Halabi, al-Murtad fi tarikh Halab wa Baghdad (An Exploration of the History of Aleppo and Baghdad).

All four chronicles have been edited, although the work of Yusuf Abbud has not yet been published.(5) The first two chronicles have been widely used by modern historians of eighteenth-century Syria, providing the foundation upon which all histories of the Azm family were based until scholars started to integrate materials from both the Syrian and Ottoman archives into their studies.(6)

Alone among the four, Mikhail Burayk tells us in his prologue why he wanted to write down his city's history. He states that he thought it necessary to recount the history of the Tatriarchate of Antioch (discussed in greater detail in his other surviving work, Al-Haqaiq al-wadihiyyah fi tarikh al-Kanisah al-Antakiyyah al-urthudhuksiyyah, "The Obvious Truths in the History of the Antiochan Orthodox Church") and of governors of the city, both just and unjust. With his unabashedly ecclesiastical orientation, he represents a tradition of Christian historiography in geographic Syria which flourished in the earlier centuries in Syriac and which was continued, through the medium of Arabic, in Mount Lebanon down through the eighteenth century.(7) His chronicle, with its accounts of the coming and going of clergy between Cyprus, Mount Athos, and Damascus, also suggests possible intellectual links to the Greek Orthodox historiography of his contemporary Balkans.(8)

In explaining why he began his narrative in 1720, Burayk cites it as the year in which he first experienced a historical consciousness, as the year the Azm dynasty came to power in Damascus, and as the time in which adherents of the Roman dispensation began to multiply among Syria's Christians. Mikhail Burayk, a Byzantine Orthodox monk who was later ordained a priest, was a staunch supporter of Orthodoxy in the face of what he perceived to be the assault of the proponents of the new "Frankish" heresy against the traditional structures of Orthodox religious authority in the Arab East. This animus toward the Uniate movement permeates his account almost as much as does his perception of belonging to "the new people of Israel,"(9) a self-conscious minority dependent on the whims of an often corrupt government for its well-being. With his unrepentant partisanship of Constantinople over Rome (see, for example, his disavowal of the efficacy of either Catholic or Gregorian Armenian baptism, pp. 37-42), Burayk was the only historian from among the four with a well espoused ideology underlying his account.

The account by Ahmad al-Budayri, reportedly a barber and a member of a Sufi mystical order, is by contrast devoid of any apparent ideology. The work's intrinsic value as an authentic voice suffers from the fact that it was edited by the nineteenth-century antiquarian, Muhammad Said al-Qasimi,(10) and the original manuscript has apparently not survived. Al-Qasimi's hand is apparent in the grammatical editing and standardization of spelling that reflect nineteenth-, rather than eighteenth-century usages (Istanbul for Islambul, or attributing the death of a city official to "dusintariyyah")(11) and we must wonder if the work's content was edited to conform to the moral and political sensibilities of a cultivated Damascene of the mid-nineteenth century as well. Nonetheless, the work, with its wealth of trivial details, gives us an unparalleled series of snapshot images of eighteenth-century Damascus. With his attention to the details of the affairs of guilds and mystical orders, al-Budayri provides his readers with a view of the city's life that unquestionably was formed outside the diwans of power.(12)

The same could not be said for the chronicle of Hasan Agha al-Abid, covering the years 1772-1826. We know little about the author. His prose is simple and redolent with the colloquial Arabic of Damascus' streets. Whether this is an indication of possible non-Arab origins is, however, problematic. It is not even certain if Hasan Agha belonged to the Abid clan which became prominent in nineteenth-century Damascus,(13) but we know from both his own account and from other contemporary sources that he served the governors of Damascus in various military capacities: repairing forts along the hajj route, guarding the hajj itself, and in campaigns against both the Wahhabis and insurgents in Lebanon.(14) As such, his account is largely a narration of political events and it is the poorest of the four in terms of socio-historical details. Nonetheless, its value lies in its presentation of a subaltern interpretation of events by one of those who served the chain of short-term governors of Damascus.

The last of the four accounts, written by Yusuf Abbud, appears to be one of the few chronicles to have survived from eighteenth-century Aleppo. Although other eighteenth-century works are cited by the two twentieth-century historians of the city, Muhammad Raghib al-Tabbakh and Kamil al-Ghazzi,(15) these, unfortunately, do not seem to exist in any manuscript collections. Abbud's account, which has been utilized by Abraham$Marcus,(16) is a rich mine for details of Aleppo's social and economic history in the latter part of the eighteenth century. Abbud, whose chronicle covers the years 1771-1805, was a merchant and a partisan of the Catholic reform...