The Criminal Underworld in a Medieval Islamic Society: Narratives from Cairo and Damascus under the Mamluks.

• Author: Rapoport, Yossef
• Position: Book review

The Criminal Underworld in a Medieval Islamic Society: Narratives from Cairo and Damascus under the Mamluks. By CARL F. PETRY. Chicago Studies on the Middle East, vol. 9. Chicago: MIDDLE EAST DOCUMENTATION CENTER, 2012. Pp. viii + 365. $70.

The study of criminality and its punishment offers insights into the established social and political order of every society. In this volume Carl Petry collected more than a thousand narratives of crime from the Mamluk chronicles, with the aims of exploring attitudes to crime, identifying patterns of criminal activities, and assessing the response of the authorities.

As source, the rich Mamluk chronicles have obvious limitations. The chroniclers report only a miniscule fraction of all the criminal cases, and the literary aspects of the manner in which the authors construct the narrative of the crime cannot be ignored. Petry is right, however, to say that the narrative sources also offer advantages for the social historian. They are not formulaic, and they provide extensive commentary on the background of perpetrators, victims, and law enforcement personnel.

The chapters are organized according to the type of criminal activity reported by the chroniclers. Petry makes groupings according to the following categories: rioting, theft, fraud, vice, religious dissidence, homicide, and treason and espionage. Some of these categories are more coherent than others: the cases discussed in the chapter on homicide fit together very well.

Some interesting patterns emerge from the dense mass of cases collected. One is the power of urban gangs, especially in late Mamluk Damascus and Cairo. These appear to be heavily armed and sophisticated groups that targeted commercial markets; they deserve further study (pp. 63-70, 217-20). The section on slave revolts (pp. 37-42) is the first attempt known to me to bring together narratives of resistance by domestic, mainly black slaves, in this period. Frequent references to theft and murder by slaves against their masters also point to the agency of domestic slaves (pp. 224-31). Similarly, several rich narratives of resistance of individual peasants and Bedouin groups, labeled as criminal at the time, are also indicative of the complexities of power relationships in the countryside.

Another interesting pattern is the association of Mamluk soldiers with addiction to alcohol: the number of references to drunken soldiers suggests this was a social reality, not a literary trope (p...