Subalterns and Social Protest: History from Below in the Middle East and North Africa

337 Pages·2012·2.194 MB·English

by  Stephanie Cronin, Asef Bayat, Faika Çelik, John Chalcraft, Julia Clancy-Smith, Anthony Gorman, James Grehan, Roger Heacock, Gerassimos Karabelias, Fatiha Loualich, Vanessa Martin, Lamia Zaki

SUBALTERNS AND SOCIAL PROTEST
The articles in this collection, by the intensity of their focus on the oppressed
and the excluded, offer a challenge to the elitist nature of the history and
historiography of the Middle East and North Africa.
The collection is unique in its historical depth, ranging from the medieval
period to the present, and its geographical reach, including Iran, the Ottoman
Empire/Turkey, the Balkans, the Arab Middle East and North Africa. It is the first
to encompass both major social classes and sectors, the working class, the
peasantry, the urban poor, women, and marginal groups such as gypsies and
slaves, and their differing strategies: of survival, of negotiation, and of protest and
resistance.
Based on perspectives drawn from the work of the great European social
historians, and especially inspired by Antonio Gramsci, the collection seeks to
restore a sense of historical agency to subaltern classes in the region.
Stephanie Cronin is Iran Heritage Foundation Fellow at the University of
Northampton. Her most recent book is Tribal Politics in Iran: Rural Conflict and
the New State, 1921–1941, also published by Routledge.
SOAS/ROUTLEDGE STUDIES ON
THE MIDDLE EAST
Series Editors:
Benjamin C. Fortna
SOAS, University of London
Ulrike Freitag
Freie Universität Berlin, Germany
This series features the latest disciplinary approaches to Middle Eastern Studies. It
covers the Social Sciences and the Humanities in both the pre-modern and modern
periods of the region. While primarily interested in publishing single-authored
studies, the series is also open to edited volumes on innovative topics, as well as
textbooks and reference works.
1. ISLAMIC NATIONHOOD AND 5. MEDIEVAL ARABIC
COLONIAL INDONESIA HISTORIOGRAPHY
The Umma below the winds Authors as actors
Michael Francis Laffan Konrad Hirschler
2. RUSSIAN-MUSLIM
6. CITIES IN THE
CONFRONTATION IN THE
PRE-MODERN ISLAMIC
CAUCASUS
WORLD
Alternative visions of the conflict
The urban impact of
between Imam Shamil and the
religion, state,
Russians, 1830–1859
and society
Thomas Sanders, Ernest Tucker and
Amira K. Bennison and
G.M. Hamburg
Alison L. Gascoigne
3. LATE OTTOMAN SOCIETY
The intellectual legacy 7. SUBALTERNS AND
Edited by Elisabeth Özdalga SOCIAL PROTEST
History from Below in
4. IRAQI ARAB NATIONALISM the Middle East and
Authoritarian, totalitarian and North Africa
pro-fascist inclinations, 1932–1941 Edited by
Peter Wien Stephanie Cronin
SUBALTERNS AND
SOCIAL PROTEST
History from Below in the Middle East
and North Africa
Edited by Stephanie Cronin
First published 2008
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group,
an informa business
First issued in paperback 2011
© 2008 Stephanie Cronin for selection and editorial matter;
individual contributors their contribution
Typeset in Times New Roman by
Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd, Chennai, India
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic,
mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter
invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any
information storage or retrieval system, without permission in
writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the
British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
A catalog record for this book has been requested
ISBN13: 978–0–415–42355–7 (hbk)
ISBN13: 978–0–415–66582–7 (pbk)
ISBN13: 978–0–203–93926–0 (ebk)
CONTENTS
Notes on contributors viii
Acknowledgements xii
Note on transliteration xiv
Introduction 1
STEPHANIE CRONIN
PART I
The urban crowd and popular protest 23
1 Street violence and social imagination in late-Mamluk
and Ottoman Damascus (c.1500–1800) 25
JAMES GREHAN
2 Women and popular protest:women’s demonstrations
in nineteenth-century Iran 50
VANESSA MARTIN
PART II
Poor people’s politics 67
3 Popular protest,the market and the state in nineteenth-
and early twentieth-century Egypt 69
JOHN CHALCRAFT
4 Workless revolutionaries:the unemployed movement
in revolutionary Iran 91
ASEF BAYAT
v
CONTENTS
5 Transforming the city from below:shantytown dwellers and
the fight for electricity in Casablanca 116
LAMIA ZAKI
PART III
Peasants and nomads 139
6 Resisting the new state:the rural poor,land and
modernity in Iran,1921–1941 141
STEPHANIE CRONIN
PART IV
Marginals and outcasts 171
7 Probing the margins:Gypsies (Roma) in
Ottoman society,c.1450–1600 173
FAIKA ÇELIK
8 Emancipated female slaves in Algiers:marriage,
property and social advancement in the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries 200
FATIHA LOUALICH
PART V
European subalterns 211
9 “Making It” in pre-colonial Tunis:migration,work,and
poverty in a Mediterranean port-city,c.1815–1870 213
JULIA CLANCY-SMITH
10 Foreign workers in Egypt 1882–1914:subaltern
or labour elite? 237
ANTHONY GORMAN
PART VI
Subalterns and national movements 261
11 From national heroes to national villains:bandits,
pirates and the formation of modern Greece 263
GERASSIMOS KARABELIAS
vi
CONTENTS
12 Seizing the initiative,regaining a voice:the Palestinian
al-Aqsa intifadaas a struggle of the marginalized 284
ROGER HEACOCK
Index 313
vii
CONTRIBUTORS
Asef Bayat is Academic Director at the Institute for the Study of Islam in the
Modern World (ISIM), and holds the ISIM Chair at Leiden University, The
Netherlands. Before joining Leiden, he taught Sociology and Middle East Studies
at the American University in Cairo, Egypt. His interests range from Political
Sociology, Urban Space and Politics, International Development to Social
Movements and Contemporary Muslim Societies. His publications include Workers
and Revolution in Iran (London, 1987), Work, Politics and Power (London and
New York, 1991), Street Politics (New York, 1998), Making Islam Democratic:
Social Movements and the Post-Islamist Turn(Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press, 2007).
Faika Çelik is a PhD candidate at the Institute of Islamic Studies at McGill
University. She has recently been awarded an SSHRC (Social Sciences and
Humanities Research Council of Canada) doctoral fellowship for her dissertation
project on marginality and deviance in early modern Ottoman Istanbul. Her
publications include ‘Limits of Tolerance: The Status of Gypsies in the Ottoman
Empire’, Studies in Contemporary Islam 5, nos 1–2 (2003), pp. 161–82; and
‘Exploring Marginality in the Ottoman Empire: Gypsies or People of Malice
(Ehl-i Fesad) asViewed by the Ottomans’, European University InstituteWorking
Papersno.2004/39.
John Chalcraft is Lecturer in the History and Politics of Empire/Imperialism
Department of Government, LSE. He is the author of The Striking Cabbies of
Cairo and Other Stories: Crafts and Guilds in Egypt, 1863–1914(State University
of New York Press, 2004); ‘Labour in the Levant’, New Left Review45 (May–June
2007), pp. 27–47; ‘Engaging the State: Peasants, Petitions, Justice and Rights on
the Eve of Colonial Rule in Egypt’, International Journal of Middle East Studies
37, no. 3 (2005), pp. 303–25; ‘Of Specters and Disciplined Commodities: Syrian
Migrant Workers in Lebanon’, Middle East Report35, no.3 (2005); ‘Pluralising
Capital, Challenging Eurocentrism: Toward postMarxist Historiography’, Radical
History Review 91, Winter (2005), pp. 13–39; ‘The End of the Guilds in Egypt:
Restructuring Textiles in the Long Nineteenth Century’, in Crafts and Craftsmen
viii
CONTRIBUTORS
in the Middle East. Edited by Faroqhi, S; Deguilhem, R. (I.B. Tauris, 2005),
pp. 338–69; ‘The Cairo Cab Strike of 1907’, in Empire in the City: Arab
Provincial Capitals in the Late Ottoman Empire. Edited by Philipp, T; Hanssen,
J; Weber, S. (Orient Institute, 2002), pp. 173–200; ‘The Coal-Heavers of Port
Sa‘id: State Building and Worker protest, 1869–1914’, International Labour and
Working Class History60 (2001), pp. 110–24.
Julia Clancy-Smith is an Associate Professor of History at the University of
Arizona, Tucson. She published Rebel and Saint: Muslim Notables, Populist
Protest, Colonial Encounters (Algeria and Tunisia, 1800–1904) (Berkeley, CA:
University of California Press, 1994), co-edited and authored Introduction and a
chapter in Domesticating the Empire: Gender, Race, & Family Life in the Dutch
and French Empires (Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1998) as
well as a special issue of (‘Writing French Colonial Histories’), French Historical
Studies 27, no. 3, Summer (2004), pp. 497–505 (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press) and edited North Africa, Islam, and the Mediterranean World from the
Almoravids to the Algerian War(London: Frank Cass Publications, 2001) [Special
issue of the Journal of North African Studies 6 (2001): 5]. She is currently
completing a monograph entitled ‘Migrations: Trans-Mediterranean Settlement in
19th-Century NorthAfrica’, to be published by the University of California Press,
Berkeley, CA and is working on another book devoted to colonial education for
Muslim girls in French North Africa. In addition to these works, she is also
the co-editor for The Walls of Algiers: Narratives of the City in Text and Image
(Los Angeles, CA and Seattle, WA: The Getty Research Institute and the
University of Washington Press) to be published in 2009.
Stephanie Cronin is Iran Heritage Foundation Fellow, University of
Northampton. She is the author of The Army and the Creation of the Pahlavi State
in Iran, 1910–1926(I.B. Tauris, 1997) and Tribal Politics in Iran: Rural Conflict
and the New State (RoutledgeCurzon, 2007), and the editor of The Making of
Modern Iran: State and Society under Riza Shah, 1921–1941(RoutledgeCurzon,
2003); and Reformers and Revolutionaries in Modern Iran: New Perspectives on
the Iranian Left (RoutledgeCurzon, 2004). She is a member of the editorial
boards of Iranian Studiesand Middle Eastern Studies, a member of the advisory
council of Qajar Studies, and assistant editor of Holy Land Studies. Her current
work focuses on subaltern responses to modernity in Iran. She has recently
published ‘The Tehran Crowd and the Rise of Riza Khan: Popular Protest,
Disorder and Riot in Iran’, in the International Review of Social History(2005),
and is completing a new book entitled Shahs, Soldiers and Subalterns: Contesting
Power in the New Iran (Palgrave, forthcoming).
Anthony Gormanhas taught at universities in Australia, Egypt and London and
is currently a Lecturer in Modern Middle Eastern History at the University of
Edinburgh. He is the author of Historians, State and Politics in Twentieth Century
ix