The Barber of Damascus: Nouveau Literacy in the Eighteenth-Century Ottoman Levant.

• Author: Zilfi, Madeline C.
• Position: Book review

The Barber of Damascus: Nouveau Literacy in the Eighteenth-Century Ottoman Levant. By DANA Sajdi. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford Univ. Press, 2012. Pp. xv + 293. $60.

Historians of the Middle East are acutely aware of the many unexplored dimensions of Middle Eastern historiography and of the paucity or inaccessibility of sources. New articles and books routinely point to such absences to highlight the significance of their findings. In the Ottoman field, there is a bit of competition over exactly which years in the Ottoman six hundred are the least served by primary or secondary commentary. Dana Sajdi's The Barber of Damascus can rightly be seen as illuminating not only the understudied Ottomanera Arab provinces, but also, with respect to the entire Ottoman empire, the only lightly researched eighteenth century. More important, though, are the book's contributions to thematic absences in pre-nineteenth-century historiography, namely, personal biography (as opposed to career histories), the circulation of ideas, and the articulated (rather than the surmised) view from below. Sajdi's study of the Muslim barber Shihab al-Din Ahmad Ibn Budayr and his history of Damascus has something important to add to all of these.

Ibn Budayr's history of the years A.H. 1154-75 (1741-62 C.E.) has been a known quantity probably only since the late nineteenth century when it was first published--in a severely expurgated form. It is this edition, titled Hawadith Dimashq al-yawmiyya (The Daily Events of Damascus), that has served scholars as a source for the history of the Syrian provinces, especially as the field of Ottoman-Syria studies has come into its own in the last three or four decades. Thanks now to Sajdi, scholars have access to the original version of the chronicle, which is held in the collection of Dublin's Chester Beatty Library and which Sajdi uses here. Like others who have looked into Ibn Budayr's history, Sajdi is fascinated by the author's self-confidently provocative political observations and street-level view of daily life. Her chapters are enlivened by colorful passages wherein Ibn Budayr praises or faults al-'Azm family grandees, the barbershop's notable clientele, and fellow city dwellers, high and low, unwholesome and inspiring.

The original version of the history restores many of Ibn Budayr's most outspoken political utterances, which the nineteenth-century editor judged unsuitable for one reason or another. As a chronicler of Damascus, Ibn...