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Reviews of Books
(lJaram) are all from the same triliteral root h *r*m.
Although Marmon makes a compelling case that eunuchs indeed were critical organizers of a variety of
important transitional spaces in the Mamluk world,
one is left puzzling how, beyond a metaphoric sense,
these three kinds of space were "sacred."
Notions of the sacred are complex, but there exists
considerable literature examining the nature of the
sacred to which the author makes no reference. This
recurring failure to address what the "sacred" implied
in Mamluk consciousness leads, for example, to a
particularly jarring comparison between shrines, such
as the Ka'ba in Mecca, and the Mamluk sultan in the
Cairo Citadel (p. 13). Linking three such different and
clearly profane spaces in Mamluk Cairo with the
genuinely sacred space of the Prophet's tomb in Medina is not only confusing, it obscures both important
distinctions in the sorts of boundaries, sacred and
profane, that eunuchs mediated as well as the various
reasons they were valued as mediators. As the focus
shifts from Cairo to Medina, where the author does
employ the concept of sacred space in a recognizable
and appropriate sense, the incongruity with her initial
applications of the term in chapter one becomes
apparent.
The endnotes are full of rich supplementary material and should not be overlooked. The lack of a
bibliography, however, is unfortunate. Similarly, the
absence of any comparisons to eunuchs as mediators in
other, especially non-Muslim, societies is disappointing. Despite these reservations, this book is a vital
contribution to our understanding of these intriguing
agents of mediation in medieval Muslim society.
CHRISTOPHER S. TAYLOR
Drew University
DROR ZE'EVI. An Ottoman Century: The District of
Jerusalem in the 1600s. (SUNY Series in Medieval
Middle East History.) Albany: State University of New
York Press. 1996. Pp. xii, 258.
This is a competent study that offers a richly textured,
sometimes lively account of social, political, and economic life in a remote district of the seventeenthcentury Ottoman Empire. It happily exemplifies the
better kind of writing being done in the sub-discipline
of Ottoman history, now beginning to merit some
attention from the rest of the discipline. Dror Ze'evi is
part of the third generation of Ottoman historians, a
group solidly grounded in the sources and simultaneously capable of rising above the details to engage
constructively broader theoretical issues.
Ze'evi displays a strong control both of the imperial
Ottoman sources located in the Istanbul archives and
the local court records found in Jerusalem. This ability
to utilize two distinctly different source bases quickly is
becoming a standard in the field. It is a marked
improvement on the preceding emphases on either the
central archives, with their state-centered focus, or the
court records, which too often have been used uncriti-
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
cally. The author's sophisticated use and blending of
the two sets of sources is no small deed, but Ze'evi's
achievement is more than a marrying of diverse archival materials. In fewer than 200 pages of text, he
engages a number of significant issues. Thus, for
example, he explores Max Weber's notion of the city
and the appropriateness of the concept of a uniquely
"Islamic city" (although I disagree with his inclination
to favor its sui generis nature, his discussion is constructive). Elsewhere, he examines the utility of peripheralization models on the one hand and Ibn Khaldun's
"desert and the sown" on the other.
There are seven well-done substantive chapters;
neither the introduction nor the conclusion are very
helpful. The first three chapters examine the overall
seventeenth-century context, the interaction of local
elites with their new Ottoman masters, and particular
local notable families and their evolution. Subsequent
chapters treat the interplay among desert, village, and
Jerusalem dwellers; the Ottoman land regime; the
workings of the local economy as well as the various
tax burdens; and the world of women.
In these chapters, Ze'evi offers important modifications to our understanding of the Ottoman land regime
and how ongoing legal imperial ownership meshed
with daily local use and control. I also want to single
out his fine account of local elites fusing together to
dominate the early seventeenth-century region and the
consequences that ensued from later reassertion of
direct control by the Istanbul government. Ze'evi's
exploration of the meanings of centralization and
decentralization for the resident population is very
useful.
Overall, this book will be of value not only to
Ottoman and Middle East historians but also to those
interested in the dynamics of state authority and the
complex and shifting ties between center and locality.
DONALD QUATAERT
State University of New York,
Binghamton
The Iranian Constitutional Revolution,
1906-1911: Grassroots Democracy, Social Democracy,
and the Origins of Feminism. (The History and Society
of the Modern Middle East.) New York: Columbia
University Press. 1996. Pp. xxi, 448. Cloth $40.00,
paper $17.50.
JANET AFARY.
Janet Afary's book is a well-researched, highly readable, and engrossing study of one of the most important periods in modern Iranian history. It joins other
classics on the subject. Unfortunately, it is also an
overly ambitious attempt to shift the whole historiographical debate on the subject. For the past eighty
years, historians of modern Iran, inside and outside the
country, have debated the question who played the
definitive role in that revolution: the clergy (Oi ulama),
the intelligentsia, the merchants and guild elders, or
the liberal landlords and tribal chiefs? Some credit the
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Middle East
religious leaders; others, the intellectuals; yet others,
the merchants; a few, the liberal aristocrats.
Afary makes short shrift of these earlier debates, on
the grounds that the main impetus for the revolution
came from the masses below: from "hundreds" of
revolutionary councils and grass-roots organizations
representing peasants, craftsmen, feminists, and social
democrats. She also argues that this participation was
mostly "spontaneous" and that the revolution eventually failed-much like the 1905 Russian Revolutionbecause the leaders refused to implement root-andbranch reforms and thus "distanced" themselves from
the revolutionary masses (p. 38). Those who fail to
appreciate this framework-including Barrington
Moore-are accused of having a "disparaging attitude
toward indigenous cultures and traditions" (p. 7).
If Afary had proved what she had set out to do, she
would have truly changed the whole historiogarphy of
modern Iran. Unfortunately, the evidence presented is
often debatable, if not questionable and tendentious.
The "hundreds of councils" turn out to be mostly
fly-by-night cliques led by local notables, even royalist
notables; those that endured for any length of time
were led mostly by the propertied classes. The book
goes over the well-known fact that large demonstrations and general strikes played a crucial role in the
revolution. But this does not substantiate the notion
that the pressure and the initiative came from below.
On the contrary, the book reconfirms the conventional
view that these protests were "organized," "led," and
even manipulated by clerics, merchants, and guild
elders. When these groups restricted the right to vote
to the propertied classes, there were no Leveller-type
protests. The book begrudgingly admits that the most
radical representatives of the craft guilds "deferred to
the authority of the ' ulama and the more traditional
merchants and landlords" (p. 72).
Similarly, the book makes much of the brief and
sporadic reports of village disturbances but glosses
over the fact that many of these reports appeared in
"letters to the editors" in newspapers notorious for
having editors who wrote letters to themselves. What is
more, every incident of rural discontent is taken to be
evidence of peasant revolt against landlords, whereas
many could have been caused by ethnic, clan, and
tribal issues. The Caspian was the only region to have
numerous peasant disturbances-but previous historians have already noted that and have further noted
that these disturbances often took the form of religious
messianism, not social radicalism. Likewise, much is
made of the later disarray among the constitutionalists, but the false impression is left that this disarray
was caused by "fear from below" and the issue of land
reform" In fact, the split was caused by secularism, a
topic also well covered by previous historians. The
reformers were weary of the masses, not because the
latter were too radical but precisely because they were
too conservative.
The book presents much interesting information
about the early socialists. But this information in no
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
way proves that these early radicals had grass-roots
organizations among the masses. On the contrary,
these socialists often admitted that their numbers were
few, that there was no "agrarian issue," and that the
clergy could still sway the "masses." They would have
been startled to read that they not only had a powerful
secret center but also a force of some 86,000 armed
volunteers (pp. 85, 355). The source for this fantasy
seems to be an obscure British journal named Wales
(p. 355). For the layman, this book reads like a "history
from below" and a belated homage to the heroic
masses. It can also be read as a disparaging dismissal of
the radicals who tried their best to bring about a
modest revolution in very trying and unrevolutionary
circumstances.
ERVAND ABRAHAMIAN
Baruch College,
City University of New York
SAMIRA HAl. The Making of Iraq, 1900-1963: Capital,
Power, and Ideology. (SUNY Series in the Social and
Economic History of the Middle East.) Albany: State
University of New York Press. 1997. Pp. viii, 215.
$18.95.
There are a number of good and original ideas in this
book, but on the whole it promises more than it
delivers. In particular, the grand schema of the brief
epilogue and briefer introduction is not elaborated in
any detail in the exposition of the empirical material in
the intervening pages. In addition, Samira Haj is
somewhat cavalier in her discussion of recent scholarship in the field, if and when she acknowledges it.
One of Haj's principal theses is that the "failure" of
the [Iraqi] national revolution of 1958 "and the pervasive violence of ... national politics" (pp. 1, 111-139)
are "best understood" by a consideration of the agrarian structures that developed in the course of the
nineteenth century. Such an argument is both suggestive and attractive, but it ignores or skips too lightly
over other causes of the revolution and distorts the
significance of the almost unlimited autonomy that
access to vast oil revenues gives to a regime with a total
monopoly of the means of coercion.
The most convincing part of the book is the nuanced
account of the evolution of agrarian structures from
late Ottoman times through the mandate and monarchy periods. Haj pinpoints the gradual emergence of
two fundamentally opposed groups of shaykhly landowners in the countryside: those interested in promoting forms of capitalist agriculture that would require
investment in machinery and skilled labor, and those
interested in the production of cash crops based on the
extensive cultivation of large estates by sharecroppers.
In general, late Ottoman, British, and independent
Iraqi policies favored the latter group through such
instruments as the Tribal Criminal and Civil Disputes
Regulation of 1916 (not 1919; p. 29), the Land Settlement Law of 1932, the Law Governing the Rights and
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