Adm ou Azm - Historia da origem da familia.

Le livre de Robert Mantran, (Histoire de l’Empire Ottoman - Fayard - 1989 - Paris) dit que les gens de la famille Adm informaient lors de notre visite à Zouk Mikhael, au Liban, en 1958 soit:

“ Les origines des ‘Azm ne sont pas connues avec certitude. Ce qui paraît assuré, c’est qu’ils étaient une famille établie dans la région de Ma’arra, une petire ville située à une cinquantaine de kilomètres au sud d’Alep.

Ibrahîm ancêtre des ‘Azm, vint peut-être s’y installer comme militaire (djundî) vers 1650.”

Le nom a été transformé de ‘Azm pour Adm lors de l’installation au Liban et du changement de religion de musulmane pour maronite.

Plus tard un rameau s’est séparé pour aller s’installer en Egypte.

Comme il est dit, dans le texte de James Reilly, les plus fameux des ‘Azm,  As’sad Pacha, a été dépossédé de ses biens et exécuté.

Les plus proches parents étaient donc en confli avec la Sublime Porte aussi bien qu’avec la population.

Il est dit, au Liban, dans la région de la ville de Jounieh, que trois frères ‘Azm seraient venus s’installer dans les deux petits villages proches de Jounieh, i.e. Sarba et Zouk Mikail.

Ils changèrent de religion, adoptant le rite chrétien maronite de la région et changèrent leur nom de ‘Azm pour ‘Adm ( les lettres z et d sont voisines en langue arabe et c’est probable que ce fut une erreur de transcription vu que les deux noms s’écrivent de la même manière et que le manque d’un petit trait vertical sur le z transforme la prononciation de z en d)

- Des recherches devraient être effectués dans les régistres civils da Jounieh, Sarba et Zouk Mikail, pour obtenir les noms des personnes et leurs descendants.

- Un des frères ou un de ses descendants décida d’émigrer en Egypte. Son nom et de ses descendants avait été fourni par les municipalité de Jounieh et d’Alexandrie, mais le document à été égaré lors du voyage au Brésil.

- Des contacts sont nécessaires pour récuperer ces données.

 
                                                  Le palais Azem
A 100 m de la mosquée des Omeyyades, le palais Azem, d'époque ottomane (1749), abrite le musée des arts et traditions populaires (collections ethnographiques, présentées à travers de scènes de la vie quotidienne reconstituées avec des mannequins de cire, d'instruments de musique, de meubles anciens, etc.). Construit par le gouverneur de la ville, As'sad Pacha el-Azem, il a été racheté par les autorités mandataires françaises en 1922 (abritant l'institut français d'archéologie de Damas de 1930 à l'indépendance), puis en 1952 par l'État syrien.

http://pt.scribd.com/doc/56720997/16/al-Azm-family

James Reilly

University of Toronto

ABSTRACT

Elite and Notable Families of Ottoman Hama: Authority, Wealth, and Modern "Tradition"

This paper examines the patrician families of Hama (Syria) from the eighteenth to early twentieth centuries. It explores their identities, origins, and characteristics, and compares the material bases of notable families (linked to legal and religious offices) and elite families (linked to the Ottoman military system). The paper highlights, among other things, the importance of elites' and notables' affiliation with Sufi (mystical religious) fraternities; their administration of charitable and family endowments; links to craft corporations and the commercial economy; and their ties to Hama's agricultural and pastoral hinterland. Some of the older elite and notable families adapted to changing administrative and economic context of the nineteenth century, thereby entrenching their power in a modern context, while others failed to adapt and experienced a relative decline of their fortunes. Meanwhile, heretofore little known families of military origin took advantage of changing circumstances to rise from obscurity to elite status on the eve of the twentieth century. Thus the dominant families of twentieth-century Hama owed the particular features of their status, property, and authority to the modern processes of state formation and the integration of their region into wider economic networks associated with the integration of Ottoman Syria into the capitalist world economy. The widely remarked family-based "feudalism" of post-Ottoman Hama is seen to be a product of modern historical forces.

ELITE AND NOTABLE FAMILIES OF OTTOMAN HAMA:

AUTHORITY, WEALTH, AND MODERN "TRADITION"

James A. Reilly

Dept. of Near & Middle Eastern Civilizations

University of Toronto

Toronto, Ont., Canada M5S 1C1

Over 30 years ago Albert Hourani suggested that patrician Muslim notables mediated the politics of the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire in urban administrative centers. He went on to evaluate the Ottoman Tanzimat reform program through the paradigm of "politics of the notables." The questions that Hourani raised have subsequently generated a rich literature enriching our understanding of the politics of Ottoman Syria and Palestine. Such studies were one channel that led to the development of Middle Eastern family history. Notables exercised authority through and on the basis of their family ties, sometimes establishing de facto dynasties that endured the vicissitudes of Ottoman politics and even the collapse of Ottoman rule altogether. As Hourani noted, notables based their authority on a combination of factors, including cultural capital (e.g., aristocratic lineage and religious prestige) and control of material resources (e.g., land, tax farms). Studies of the "politics of the notables" had perforce to pay attention to the origins and sources of notable families' authority and wealth.

As Middle Eastern family history develops, the notable families themselves - their origins and structure, their material and institutional bases, their longevity - rather than their politics per se have begun taking center stage. Margaret Meriwether's recently published book on the elite families of Ottoman Aleppo asks how the elite families of the city lived and worked, and how variations among families correlated to different patterns of living within households, of marriage, and of transmission of property. Studies such as hers help to address the problem posed twenty years ago by Antoine Abdel-Nour when he expressed his regret that we did not know how Arab cities in the Ottoman Empire actually functioned. The emergence of family history as a recognized field within Middle Eastern history offers new tools for comprehending the varieties of patronage and social networks that were active in the Ottoman-Arab urban context. Family-centered patrician power exercised through social networks allows us to insert Arab or Middle Eastern cities into a wider discussion. Far from being unique to "Muslim cities," the relationship of patrician power to social networks has a wide resonance, and depends less on cultural factors (implicit in the concepts of "Islamic society" or the "Islamic city") than on widespread conditions of urban life in pre-modern, pre-industrial societies.

The present paper offers a sketch of the elite and notable families of Ottoman Hama in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It demonstrates that Hama's elite and notable families shared a number of characteristics with their counterparts in other Syrian urban centers. Moreover, it argues that Hama's patrician families, characterized as traditional power brokers in some twentieth-century literature, in fact consolidated their positions within a modern economic and institutional framework. This framework was defined by the spread of market relations, the legal consolidation of private landed property, and the reorganization of Ottoman provincial administration.

Hama's leading families consisted of elites and notables, following a categorization first developed by Julia Clancy-Smith nin the context of Ottoman North Africa. She emphasized elites' and notables' respective bases of power and authority. Elites

drew some, although not all, of their political authority from relationships with the state - either contesting it or supporting it - or both…. Religious notables on the other hand, tapped deep into other sources - sharifian descent, special piety, erudition, charity - the attributes demanded of the holy person…. They…wielded sociospiritual and moral authority….

Elite and notable bases of authority often overlapped or were intertwined, but the basic distinction between people of military and religious status is relevant to Hama.

In the eighteenth century three upper-class families dominated Hama's society. One was an elite family of military newcomers, the 'Azms. The others were notable families, the Kaylanis and the 'Alwanis, who possessed a tradition of Islamic learning and religious leadership, and whose prominence went back many generations. In addition there were a few families of lesser notables, the most significant of whom were the Sharabis and the Hawranis. Most eighteenth-century notables, whether of the greater or lesser kind, were ashraf or formally recognized descendants of the Prophet Muhammad. The embodiment of ashraf notables' status and position was a mosque or Sufi lodge (zawiya) or both, associated with and named after one or another ancestor. Notable families tended to live in the quarters or neighborhoods where their ancestors' mosques or lodges were built. The social and religious prestige of the ashraf notable families was buttressed by their control of endowments (waqfs) that supported mosques, lodges, and benefactors' descendants. In this respect Hama was a microcosm of Damascus and Aleppo, and comparable phenomena are evident in smaller regional centers such as Homs. The influence of ashraf notable families in Hama was part of a pattern that prevailed in the towns and cities of the Syrian interior.

Of all Hama's ashraf the Kaylanis were the most successful in maintaining their predominance from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. Hama's Kaylanis were one branch of a lineage that went back to 'Abd al-Qadir al-Jilani of Baghdad (d. 1166), eponymous founder of the Qadiriyya Sufi order. His descendants were hereditary shaykhs of the order, which had established itself in Syria well before the Ottoman conquest. The first Kaylani to leave a demonstrable imprint on Hama, Ibrahim, lived there in the seventeenth century. He built a mosque on the right bank of the Orontes (the al-Hadir district) just downstream from a sharp, nearly right-angle bend in the river. Palatial houses belonging to the Kaylani family subsequently were built nearby, and this section of al-Hadir became the locus of the family's presence in Hama. The section of al-Hadir in the environs of the Qadiriyya lodge and Kaylani mosques came to be known as al-Kaylaniyya.

In addition to being hereditary leaders of the Qadiriyya Sufis, the most pre-eminent Kaylanis were identified with the Ottoman-patronized Hanafi school of Islamic law. Kaylanis held many of the plum jobs in the religious and judicial hierarchy of eighteenth-century Hama. In the 1730s, 1770s and early 1790s Kaylanis were counted among Hama's Hanafi muftis (jurisconsults). For most of the 1790s a Kaylani also held the position of naqib or head of Hama's community of ashraf. At the end of the eighteenth century a former mufti, Ibrahim Efendi al-Kaylani (not to be confused with his seventeenth-century namesake), had become Hama's deputy judge ("deputy" to the Ottoman-appointed judge in Damascus; in effect, therefore, Hama's Islamic law-court judge). The appointment of Kaylanis to the top three positions in Hama's religious and judicial hierarchy during the 1790s - naqib, mufti, and deputy judge - testifies to the consolidation of the family's remarkable local prominence and set the pattern for the following century.

Another important family of ashraf were the 'Alwanis, whose recorded presence in Hama antedated the Ottoman conquest. They traced the prominence of their lineage to a native son, al-Shaykh 'Alwan (d. 1529). He was a scholar who had established a mosque and Shadhiliyya Sufi lodge in al-'Alaylat quarter on the Suq side of the river (the left bank), where he had lived and worked. Subsequent generations of 'Alwanis continued to live in and identify with al-'Alaylat, and to serve as shaykhs of their ancestor's Sufi lodge and custodians of his mosque. Like the majority of urban Syrian Muslims, 'Alwanis were affiliated with the Shafi'i school of Islamic law and in the 1730s the Shafi'i mufti of Hama was Muhi al-Din al-'Alwani. Later in the century, names of 'Alwanis also appear on the roster of Hanafi muftis. Such diversification indicates a politic flexibility on the part of various 'Alwani family members with respect to their legal affiliations.

The Kaylanis and 'Alwanis were Ottoman Hama's most successful ashraf families. This success is measured by the length of time - over one century - that members of these families held prominent posts in Hama's religious and civil administrations. Up to the eighteenth century the leading members of the 'Alwani family may have wielded more local influence than their Kaylani counterparts. During that century the office of naqib al-ashraf was more frequently filled by an 'Alwani than by a Kaylani. By the 1790s, however, Kaylanis had surpassed 'Alwanis in their control of religious and judicial offices. In the mid-nineteenth century, members of the Kaylani family concurrently held the offices of mufti, naqib, and deputy judge, as well as continuing to exercise hereditary leadership of the Qadiriyya order. The Kaylanis' monopolization of religious-judicial posts in the mid-nineteenth century signifies the consolidation of their position as Hama's pre-eminent family of ashraf, the only ashraf who succeeded in entering the select group of Hama's large landed proprietors in the final Ottoman decades. The 'Alwanis, for their part, suffered a relative decline in the nineteenth century, but nevertheless they continued to be counted among Hama's notables.

Two other ashraf families of note were the Sharabis and the Hawranis. Although not in the same league as the Kaylanis and 'Alwanis (they were not, for instance, associated with the positions of deputy judge, naqib, or mufti), the Sharabis and Hawranis nevertheless shared some of the attributes of the more prominent ashraf families. Both the Sharabis and the Hawranis established themselves in Hama in the mid- to late-seventeenth century. The Sharabis traced their position in Hama to al-Shaykh Yusuf of the Sa'diyya Sufis, who built the Sa'diyya lodge in the left bank neighborhood of al-Safsafa. The Hawranis' notable ancestor was al-Shaykh 'Uthman of the Rifa'iyya Sufis, who settled in Hama from the Hawran region south of Damascus after the Ottoman conquest and built a Rifa'iyya lodge in another left bank quarter, a portion of which subsequently became eponymously known as al-Hawarina. As often happened with holy personages, al-Shaykh 'Uthman was buried at the lodge and his tomb became a locus of pilgrimage. The Sharabis' and Hawranis' status as ashraf and their hereditary links to specific neighborhoods and Sufi orders assured them a role in the religious, judicial and political life of Hama, but they nevertheless were in the second rung of Hama's notable families. During the eighteenth century they represented the people of their neighborhoods to Ottoman officials, and in tandem with other notables (including 'Alwanis and Kaylanis) negotiated matters of public concern, particularly the payment of taxes.

The establishment or consolidation of Sufi-linked notable families in Hama during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was part of a general extension (or heightened visibility) of Sufism in the Ottoman Arab lands in this period. The presence of the Sa'diyya Sufi order in Hama's riparian neighbor, Homs, is attributed to a shaykh who built a lodge there in 1618. Sufi orders became salient features in Jerusalem's religious and social life at roughly the same time - i.e., the seventeenth century. Sufi affiliations created horizontal ties among confreres across distances and vertical ties within neighborhoods through the rites associated with visits to Sufi lodges and saints' tombs. Hence Sufism was a significant element in the consolidation or assertion of the authority of notable families. Sufism may also have served to create links between elite and notable families, as apparently occurred in seventeenth-century Jerusalem. For most people of Syria, religion was less as set of doctrinal abstractions and theological arguments than an integral part of social identity. People related to their beliefs by means of personal associations: with pilgrimage sites, with saintly lineages and with local men and women reputed to be holy in some degree. Thus the Muslim notable families of Hama and elsewhere drew on an array of cultural resources - including spiritual authority - to buttress their claims to urban leadership.

Notable families of 'ulama' (Muslim scholars) and ashraf were associated with the fields of religion and law. Their notability was recognized by the Ottoman state, but their sources of prestige (ashraf lineage, leadership of Sufi orders) were not state derived. This independent prestige distinguishes Kaylanis and 'Alwanis from the Hama's leading elite family, the 'Azms, whose pre-eminence flowed directly from their links to the Ottoman state. The 'Azms' earliest known ancestor, Ibrahim Bey, was an Ottoman soldier in the region of Ma'arrat al-Nu'man between Hama and Aleppo in the seventeenth century. After serving as district governor of Homs, Hama and Ma'arra for seven years, Ibrahim's son Isma'il Bey al-'Azm (d. 1733) was promoted to pasha and became governor of Damascus in 1725. In the decades that followed descendants and relatives of these 'Azms continued to occupy a significant position in Hama's society. The most illustrious of the 'Azms, As'ad b. Isma'il (d. 1757), served as district governor of Hama before becoming governor of Damascus. His brother, Ibrahim Pasha (d. 1746), served as governor of Tripoli, Hama's outlet to the Mediterranean. Both As'ad and Ibrahim forged enduring ties to Hama, which served as an economic and agricultural hinterland to Tripoli and Damascus and supplied these latter cities with silk and grain, respectively. Hama's political re-orientation in the direction of Damascus in the eighteenth century was reflected in and reinforced by the consolidation of 'Azm family political power in the first part of the eighteenth century. Although the wider political fortunes of the family waned in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, the 'Azm name nevertheless retained its luster in Hama.

Elite and notable families practiced both endogamous and exogamous marriage. Because a bride left her natal home to join her husband's family, endogamous marriage kept wealth and property within a family; such was the case in marriages contracted within the Sharabi, 'Alwani, Kaylani and 'Azm families. But inter-family marriages also occurred. Such marriages brought together families of similar social status. For example, early in the eighteenth century the Hawrani and Sharabi families were linked by the union of a son of 'Uthman al-Hawrani, founder of the Rifa'iyya Sufi lodge, and a daughter of Yusuf al-Sharabi, founder of the Sa'diyya lodge. Later one finds evidence of intermarriage and shared ancestry among Kaylanis and 'Alwanis. Kaylanis also intermarried with 'Azms, including the union of Sulayman Pasha al-'Azm (d. 1743), Isma'il's brother who served as governor of Tripoli, with a woman of the Kaylani family whose descendants included 'Azms and Kaylanis of Damascus. In addition to intermarriage among families of similar social standing or background, some 'Alwani men (at least) married women of non-Arab Ottoman or tribal background. The various considerations (material, political, and affective) that went into such unions are impossible to ascertain at this historical distance. However, conjugal patterns were important for notable families because of marriage's ability to strengthen or consolidate family solidarity (endogamous marriages), build links to families of similar status, or build useful political and economic bridges to families with complementary resources (tribal and political ties). Political cooperation between members of the 'Azm and Kaylani families was a characteristic of life in Hama as late as the turn of the twentieth century.

Elite and notable families lived in extended households, with the residences of 'Azms, 'Alwanis, and Kaylanis sheltering grandparents, their children and their grandchildren within extensive walled complexes. In such households the death of a patriarch produced a rearrangement of ownership shares and of living arrangements as married sons established their own independent households. Yet even in these cases the independent sons might live close to one another, as in the case of three large adjoining Kaylani houses in al-Hadir. At least some elite families had domestic slaves as part of their extended households. Male slaves were entrusted with their masters' business affairs, and manumitted slaves remained part of the owner's household.

The phenomenon of domestic slavery, and the inclusion of slaves in elite-family households, is another example of the way in which Hama resembled other regions of the Ottoman-Arab world in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The possession of slaves and the maintenance of ties to manumitted slaves was typical of elite social and political behavior. The presence of slaves and former slaves increased a household's size, influence and resources. The social meaning of slavery, in this context, bore little resemblance to the contemporaneous plantation slavery in the Western Hemisphere, which was driven and promoted predominantly by economic factors.

Leading notable and elite families, particularly the Kaylanis and the 'Azms, drew on various sources of wealth to support their aristocratic displays and to lubricate their patronage networks. Prestigious lineages were linked to family endowments. The family endowment - waqf dhurri - was a widespread Ottoman institution that enabled a person to endow his or her freehold properties for the benefit of designated relatives and descendants. The whole process was subject to the oversight of the Islamic law court. Because eligible beneficiaries were restricted to designated relatives and descendants of the founder, lineage carried not only social importance (in terms of one's prestige or standing), but also determined one's claim to the revenues of one or another family endowment. Endowments of notable ashraf families often mixed piety and family, designating some revenues for purposes such as the payment of Qur'an reciters and supplies of lamp oil at mosques or lodges associated with the founder's family. In this way notable lineages reproduced and renewed their association with particular religious or charitable institutions over a number of generations. 'Alwanis, Kaylanis, and lesser notables also were administrators of charitable waqfs including mosques and hospices. Administration of charitable waqfs gave notables supervisory powers over substantial commercial and some agricultural properties in Hama and its countryside.

As well as their administration of family and charitable endowments, notables and their families possessed substantial personal wealth. In 1791, for instance, two children and a grandson of the prominent religious scholar al-Shaykh Ishaq al-Kaylani (d. 1185/1771-1772) endowed as a family waqf a coffee house which they owned in the old al-Madina quarter (mahalla). Another coffee house in al-'Alaylat was owned (at least in part) by members of the 'Alwani family. Kaylanis owned shops in Suq al-Mansuriyya and al-Hadir, plus luxurious houses in al-Hadir, shops, gardens, a coffee house, an artisanal workshop, water mills, a public bath, and residential compounds (sing. hawsh). Individuals of notable status often had diverse property interests; Salih b. Ahmad al-'Alwani left an estate that included a large house; a bakery; half an orchard, half a shop, and two groves (sing. karm) in al-Ribah village; and a share of the 'Alaylat coffee house. Ahmad b. Hijazi al-'Alwani left houses and shares of an oven, a shop and the coffee house in al-'Alaylat, and lands and orchards in al-Ribah and Zawr al-Khamsa. Notables also possessed mills; in 1792, for instance, the mufti and the naqib of Hama (both Kaylanis) jointly purchased a mill at Amnun near Homs from villagers, local elites, and the mufti of Homs, all of whom owned shares.

The principal ashraf family endowment in late eighteenth-century Hama was that of the scholar and businessman 'Abd al-Qadir al-Kaylani (d. 1744). 'Abd al-Qadir endowed property in both Hama and in villages outside of Damascus for the benefit of his descendants; he also established a Damascus branch of the family. His endowment's properties in Hama included shops, orchards, a coffeehouse, a manufactory or workshop (karkhana), mills, a public bath, luxurious houses and simple dwellings. The properties near Damascus were farmlands in the Ghuta (Damascus oasis) villages of Kafr Batna and Bayt Sawa. In the former village, 'Abd al-Qadir had endowed the farmland association with his wife al-Sharifa Rahma bint 'Abd al-Rahman Efendi. Other ashraf family endowments included those of 'Alwanis and Sharabis. The 'Alwani endowments consisted of market-garden lands located in the environs of Hama. By 1800 their administration had been joined to that of the endowment of one Ibrahim Chelebi, whose assets were located in Tripoli but administered from Hama. Ibrahim's 'Alwani descendants administered all three of the endowments. Possibly Ibrahim was a Tripoli merchant who had married into the 'Alwani family. The Muhammad al-Sharabi endowment consisted of urban real estate, including shops and houses in the Sharabis' al-Safsafa quarter and nearby neighborhoods.

By the late eighteenth century the benefits accruing to 'Abd al-Qadir al-Kaylani's many descendants had become minutely subdivided and hence attenuated. Claimants generated legal documents specifying the rights and obligations of the various beneficiaries, but (in the words of one document relating to 'Abd al-Qadir's endowment) "the multiplication of shares is leading the endowment to ruin and is destroying all of its traces." Clearly, then, it was not enough merely to be descended from the founder of a major endowment; members of families like the Kaylanis and 'Alwanis had constantly to find new opportunities to enhance and renew their own and their lineage's wealth. If they failed to do so they might experience a relative decline in their economic fortunes even if they retained the cultural capital of their notable ancestry. In the nineteenth century, as will be discussed below, leading Kaylanis remained at the top of their game whilst 'Alwanis underwent a genteel decline.

In addition to their ownership of property and administration of endowments, certain notables also had close relations with craft corporations. For instance, in 1732 al-Shaykh 'Abd al-Razzaq Efendi al-Kaylani helped the bread-makers repay a debt to an agha, a debt that the bread-makers had incurred for wheat deliveries. In the same period, the Shafi'i mufti Muhi al-Din al-'Alwani joined with the naqib al-ashraf, 'Abd al-Mu'ti al-'Alwani, and other shaykhs and ashraf from the Sharabi and Hawrani families to guarantee a debt (probably deferred taxes) owed to a certain Ibish Bey b. Ibrahim Pasha by the heads of the corporations in general, and the butchers and bread-makers in particular. Thus notables acted as patrons of the craft corporations, indicative of close links between local religious figures and institutions (including Sufi orders) and the corporations. This relationship has parallels with the situation of Damascus, whose craft corporations were tied to Sufism by leadership, ritual, and ceremony.

Elites also acted as associates of merchants and traders. In part this relationship grew out of elites' (particularly district governors') official responsibilities which included overseeing and protecting the annual pilgrimage caravan to and from Mecca when it passed through Hama district. The caravan had considerable commercial significance, and supplying its needs enmeshed elites in the camel trade. Hama's district governors were also involved in the eighteenth-century silk trade between Tripoli and Hama. Merchants' prosperity depended to a degree on the kind of relationship that they had with the district governor and the local elites, who were associated with local as well as inter-regional trade. At one point the governor of Damascus owned a qaysariyya (covered market or caravansary) in Hama that he had purchased from a local agha. A member of the local administrative elite, A'rabi Agha al-Hatahit, bought six shops in Suq al-Mansuriyya in 1792, and was promised ownership of any dwellings he might build in an adjoining vacant enclosure. A'rabi Agha's possession of shops had the potential to create a proprietary or patronage relationship between him and any craft workers who might rent the shops from him. At the same time, shop possession made him responsible to the administrators of the Kaylani waqf to which the land and shops ultimately belonged.

Notable families enjoyed basic security of property as owners or as beneficiaries of family endowments, but the fortunes of military elites were not legally secure until the implementation of the Ottoman Tanzimat reforms in the nineteenth century. Prior to that time, military officials with the rank of agha, bey, or pasha were regarded as "servants" of the Sultan. Upon their death or dismissal from office their properties were liable to confiscation and accounting by representatives of the imperial treasury. Therefore, even if a serving official acquired extensive properties during his term of office, he could not count on retaining them after his dismissal, or passing them along to his heirs. The widow of a pasha who wished to continue living in his house, for example, had to buy it back when the imperial treasury sold off her late husband's confiscated properties. (Widows of notables or ordinary people, by contrast, normally inherited the conjugal home in whole or in part.) This insecurity of tenure helps to explain why elite "dynasties" were the exception rather than the rule prior to the nineteenth century. Whereas one can trace Kaylanis, 'Alwanis, Hawranis, and Sharabis over a number of generations, only one elite family enjoyed comparable longevity in Hama, namely the 'Azms. Their survival is attributable to the continuing need that the Ottomans had of them. However, when they died or fell from power, individual 'Azms had their properties confiscated in the same manner as happened to other military officials.

The vicissitudes of even a powerful dynastic family are demonstrated by the career of As'ad b. Isma'il al-'Azm. In 1732 a range of urban and rural properties were restored to As'ad Bey following his dismissal as district governor of Hama. A few years later, in 1743, As'ad was promoted to the rank of Pasha and became a successful governor of Damascus for 14 years. Yet he was dismissed and executed and his property confiscated in 1757, due to the pecuniary needs of a newly enthroned sultan. During his tenure in Damascus, As'ad Pasha established a family endowment which lent a certain stability to family fortunes, even though it too was vulnerable to administrative and political pressures in ways that notable-family endowments apparently were not.

The opportunities for wealth accumulation that office holding offered is shown in itemizations of confiscated 'Azm fortunes. The properties of As' ad Bey, itemized in 1732, produced annual net revenues of 2,462 piasters and included a marketplace (qaysariyya), a public bath, two water mills, and numerous orchards in the vicinity of Hama. To put the annual income figure of 2,462 piasters in perspective, compare it to the average price of a house or residence in Hama during the same period, namely 86.6 piasters. The properties of the late Faris Bey al-'Azm, enumerated in 1794, included livestock as well as properties in Hama, Homs, Tripoli, Latakia and Jabla appraised at 8,000 piasters. In the same month, the properties of the late Muhammad Pasha al-'Azm, governor of Damascus for most of the years between 1771 and 1783, were appraised at 9,000 piasters. (The average price of a residence in Hama during this period was 309.67 piasters. )

The major source of elites' aggrandizement was access to the surplus of the countryside and hinterland, where they were tax collectors and enforcers of government authority. District governors and aghas were responsible for provisioning troops and towns with grain, and as such they acted as grain merchants. The line often was blurred between grain whose revenues were directed to the provincial treasury, and grain whose revenues were pocketed by tax collectors and administrators in lieu of pay, or as a supplement to "legitimate" income. This form of institutionalized or routine corruption was common to other Ottoman provinces in the eighteenth century, and paradoxically it served to undergird local officials' ultimate loyalty to and dependence on the central government in Istanbul. The associates of aghas and district governors in Hama's countryside included urban-based moneylenders and tax farmers who served as relays between the governor and district govenor, on the one hand, and villagers and their representatives on the other. Elites' fiscal privileges were sublet; in 1793, for instance, an agha and a Christian moneylender sublet from Turkoman elders (ikhtiyariyya) the latter's right to the taxes of Turkoman villages outside of Hama. Elites' fiscal authority could resemble a de facto form of ownership, whereby a village was designated as being "dependent upon" (tabi'a ila) a given agha. Individuals of the elite amassed considerable fortunes in agriculture through ownership of cultivation rights and speculative advance purchases of crops (daman). Some also owned herds of livestock, especially sheep. Trade in livestock was especially identified with elites of Kurdish or Turcoman origin.

Hama's eighteenth-century court records indicate a significant degree of notable and elite influence in the countryside through the system of tax farming, including the leasing out of state fiscal and cultivation rights. The land system in Hama district in the eighteenth century was a hybrid, mixing classical patrimonial norms and practices with a functional devolution of wealth, influence and power to local elites and notables. The patrimonial model has been analyzed by Karen Barkey and Huri Islamoglu-Inan. Their case-studies concern Anatolia in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, yet their generalizations about Ottoman ideology and practice are relevant also to the district of Hama in the eighteenth century. The Ottoman state exercised its authority and collected taxes through intermediaries and officials who depended on the state for their positions and legitimacy. The intermediaries' dependence on the state was underscored by their frequent re-assignment and by the state's aforementioned practice of confiscating their properties when they fell out of favor. Through the mechanism of the Islamic law courts, the state offered peasants and cultivators a means to protest against illegal or unjust exactions on the part of the state's intermediaries and tax collectors. In this way, the argument continues, the formation of dyadic patron-client relationships was discouraged, and provincial intermediaries and peasants alike looked to the central authority for the advancement of their personal or collective interests.

In eighteenth-century Syria the governor was charged with this supervisory role. Governors of Damascus continued to invoke the patrimonial ideal to chastise tax collectors and officials for their unjust or illegal practices. A circular of 1788 warned village shaykhs in the Hama district not to take more than their legal share from cultivators, and denounced tax collectors (qassamin) who used "fear and terror" to intimidate peasants into paying illegal taxes. These themes were picked up twelve years later in another circular that emphasized the duty of officials to act with justice and mercy toward cultivators and the subject population generally, in the context of an order to reduce the rate of taxation for certain villages. Also consistent with the patrimonial model was the state's continued confiscation of the property of office-holders who fell out of favor (even if only temporarily), including members of provincial elites such as As'ad Bey (later Pasha) al-'Azm.

Yet alongside this evidence of classical-style "patrimonialism" are indications of what Islamoglu-Inan has called "the rise of local power nodules that characterized the post-sixteenth century history of the Ottoman Empire." The process of elite (and notable) entrenchment was discernible in eighteenth-century Hama, preceding and preparing the way for the full-blown emergence of latifundia in the final period of Ottoman rule. Of Hama's four major landowning families in 1907 - al-'Azm, al-Kaylani, al-Barazi and Tayfur - the first two were already prominent in the countryside of the eighteenth century, while the third may have shared control of villages as part of a recognized tribal leadership.

This last point points to a wider issue with respect to grain-producing land in Syria. Where intensive cultivation occurred, individual cultivators' rights to property were firmly established by customary or Islamic law. This was the case in areas of irrigated market-garden agriculture or fruit tree cultivation such as occurred in the Ghuta of Damascus, the gardens of Homs, or near Hama along the Orontes and in the western mountain foothills. In such regions it was common to find minutely subdivided individual landholdings. But in the dry-farming, grain-growing lands of the steppe, the concept of individual cultivators' rights had little meaning. Groups of cultivators dependent on the tax farmers or landholders for security (and often for seed-grains as well) were collectively bound to surrender a portion of this harvest in return for working the land. As settlement and grain cultivation spread in the nineteenth century, so did the geographic scope of the Hama-style latifundia that drew the attention of twentieth-century writers.

While the creation of large landed estates in the nineteenth century has not yet been subject to an archives-based study, the general outlines of this process are known. Mohamad Al-Dbiyat writes that after the Ottoman reconquest of Syria from the Egyptian army in 1840, the Ottomans exempted from taxes and military service subjects who settled and founded new villages east of the Orontes. Nusayris and Isma'ilis from the coastal mountains, sedentarized bedouins, and immigrants/refugees like the Circassians settled the steppes, and urban elites and notables gained ownership of these estates through the mechanism of the land code promulgated in 1858. In addition, prominent Hamawis 1) received land grants from the Sultan in recognition of their service; 2) purchased villages from tribal chiefs who (Al-Dbiyat alleges) "had little attachment to the land," or perhaps did not appreciate the full significance of the transactions to which they agreed; and 3) obtained land from indebted peasants unable to repay loans. The upshot of all of this was that sharecropping became the predominant form of cultivation on the newly settled steppes. Sharecroppers came to regard Hama as a bastion of "feudalists" remembered later for their "voracity and tyranny." Another recent study has said of Hama that "the great families who had links to the Ottoman administration acquired urban and rural properties by various means and to such an extent that it was rare to find properties or land possessed by ordinary individuals among the people." This statement reflects a common view of the general situation as it existed in the Hama district in the later Ottoman and Mandate periods. Since the land records of the Syrian government are not easily available to researchers, future work on this question may have to focus on the Ottoman records in Istanbul.

For the time being, however, we have recourse to the Islamic law-court registers of Hama. Despite their biases and omissions, the local court registers help to delineate the character of urban-rural relations in the Hama district in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. They affirm that two of the modern landowning families (al-'Azm and al-Kaylani) were already prominent in the affairs of the countryside in the eighteenth century as tax farmers, creditors, and/or waqf administrators. The other two families - Barazi and Tayfur - were relative latecomers and owed their emergence to their links to the Ottoman military and to tribal elites. Unlike the military family of the 'Azms, however, the Barazis and Tayfurs remained Hama-based and did not extend their influence to Damascus or other centers. Hama's triad of major families in the eighteenth century - Kaylanis, 'Alwanis, and 'Azms - gave way to a slightly more crowded field in the period that ensued. The 'Azms' rise to local prominence anticipated that of other Ottoman military families who entered the ranks of Hama's elite in the first decades of the nineteenth century. Often these parvenu military families were of non-Arab origin, usually Kurdish or Turkoman: the Barazis, Tayfurs and Jijaklis (Shishaklis). The Tayfurs came to prominence shortly afterward during the period of Egyptian rule in Syria (1831-40), when 'Abdallah Agha Tayfur served briefly as deputy governor of Hama. They continued to serve the state after the Ottomans re-established their authority in 1840. The Jijaklis appeared as tax farmers in the Hama district in the late 1820s. Men of the Barazi, Tayfur, and Jijakli families, bearing the military rank or title of agha, acquired villages and farmlands in the process of landed estate-formation that characterized the last decades of Ottoman rule in Syria. When the potential for officials' aggrandizement was combined with legal security of property in the nineteenth century, it is small wonder that other military families in addition to the 'Azms were catapulted into the ranks of Hama's elites. As previously noted, the only notables in the top rungs of Hama's landowning families on the eve of the First World War were the Kaylanis. All the other major landowners were elite families of military origin: the 'Azms plus the arriviste families of Barazi and Tayfur.

The rise of military families to prominence in Hama is also reflective of broader Syrian trends. Military factions in and around Damascus and Homs succeeded in establishing themselves as local power-brokers, and, eventually, as leaders of urban society. Like the 'Azms, Tayfurs and Barazis, these other military families leveraged their access to the riches of rural surplus into institutionalized political leadership. Examples include the Durubis, Jundis and Suwaydans in Homs, and the 'Abids and Yusufs in Damascus.

Once again, Hama appears as a kind of microcosm for the rest of Syria. The consolidation of absentee landholding in its hinterland illustrates what Philip S. Khoury has identified as the rise of a dominant "bureaucratic-landholding" class in Ottoman Syria from the second half of the nineteenth century. The creation of local councils gave them formal institutionalized access to government and administration. At mid-century the ten or so members of Hama's council included three Kaylanis (the Qadiriyya shaykh, the naqib al-ashraf, and the Hanafi mufti), one 'Azm, and a Tayfur. Given the modest size of their town and political base, Hama's notables were politically overshadowed by their counterparts from Aleppo and Damascus. Nevertheless, they and their descendants played significant roles in the politics of Hama until the land reforms of the 1950s and 1960s.

Elite families were deeply involved in the affairs of Hama's countryside. In 1852 Hamud Agha al-Jijakli, whose family had risen to local prominence in the preceding decades, sued two individuals from al-Bishnin village, including the village shaykh, for a total of nearly 3000 piasters and quantities of wheat. The major part of the debt, the agha maintained, was collectively pledged, making the village shaykh and his associate legally responsible for it. At the time the debt was incurred, the villagers had collectively pledged to make good the entire amount. Collective debt brokered by village shaykhs was a recurring pattern in the mid-nineteenth century, The Kaylanis, for their part, appear to have leveraged their near-monopoly of leading religious-judicial posts into rural-based wealth also. In 1851 the Islamic law court convened in the presence of the district governor and of Hama's recently established advisory council to notarize a debt in kind owed to the notable Muhammad 'Ali Efendi al-Kaylani, the head of the Qadiriyya order, by the villagers of al-Yafur al-Gharbiyya. The importance that the advisory council - convened by the district governor and composed of local notables and elites - placed on this debt is evidenced by the fact that its members personally witnessed the proceedings. Another indication that Hama's Islamic law court acted as an arm of the local elite and notability vis-à-vis rural people is evidenced in one villager's acknowledgment that he owed Bakir Agha al-Barazi (of the ascendant landowning family) a significant cash debt (3000 piasters) which he was obliged to repay. Indeed, the sums owed by rural people to urban creditors or moneylenders could be mind boggling. In a case witnessed by two highly placed Kaylanis, including Muhammad 'Ali the head of the Qadiriyya order, two muqaddams representing a Nusayri population acknowledged a combined debt of 160,000 piasters to a pair of creditors (including a Christian from Homs). The muqaddams incurred this debt as guarantors (sing. kafil) of their "tribe" ('ashira). This document reveals the extent to which some of the tribally organized Nusayri peasants were in the grip of urban moneylenders even before the military subjugation of the central and northern Nusayri mountains in the latter part of the nineteenth century. The unidentified "tribe" or community whom the muqaddams represented belonged to the southern section of the Nusayri peasantry who had long been subject to urban authority. Peasant indebtedness was a significant avenue through which urban elites and notables exploited the countryside and gained access to its resources.

The prominence of their male kin notwithstanding, few elite-family women are mentioned by name in the Hama court registers. The judicial sources' silence about these women is perhaps linked to the fact that until the 1840s elite men's property was subject to confiscation and seizure by the imperial. When elite men died their property was the state's to dispose of and family members did not automatically inherit it. The only unambiguous documentary evidence that women of elite families in Hama could expect to inherit property comes from the mid-nineteenth century. The scant mention of elite women in the Hama registers contrasts with that of notable-family women, whose names appear throughout the eighteenth century in the context of their purchase, sale, and inheritance of movable (and, to a lesser extent, immovable) properties, and as founders or beneficiaries of family endowments. The invisibility of Hama's elite-family women cannot be generalized to characterize the role of all women in Hama's society, and indeed the Hama pattern may not even be relevant to elite-family women in other Syrian centers. Early nineteenth-century, pre-Tanzimat judicial records from Damascus, for instance, include some striking examples of elite-family women who controlled extensive properties and sources of income. These include women of the 'Azm family who endowed properties that they owned in the vicinity of Damascus. Further abroad, in eighteenth-century Egypt elite women of Mamluk households also had extensive commercial and property interests.

One hypothesis to explain the dearth of elite women in the records of Hama property-holding is that elite families depended for wealth mainly on their access to rural surplus and taxation. However, opportunities for elites to acquire formal title (including inheritance rights) to land in Hama's exposed hinterland was more limited than in Damascus or Egypt, where extensive regions of irrigated cultivation were rooted in traditions of individual and private ownership. This hypothesis is buttressed by Beshara Doumani's comparative study of family endowments of Tripoli and Nablus in the nineteenth century. Doumani noticed that females were generally excluded from endowment benefits in Nablus, whereas they were included in Tripoli. He suggests that the divergent political economies - "the differences in the key material base of propertied families" - between Nablus and Tripoli is the key to explaining this variation. Tripoli was surrounded by a lush green belt within which the property rights of well-to-do-women were firmly established. Drawing analogies with Damascus, we can observe that in the Ghuta-like surroundings of Tripoli, freehold and endowment properties were accessible to men and women with money, where legal rights to the property were firmly embedded in legal procedure, and where management and exploitation of the property through hired foremen or agents was practical. In contrast, access to the surplus of Nablus's hinterland required ongoing attention, surveillance, transacting, and alliance-building between Nabulsi elites and merchants, powerful rural chieftains, and rival political claimants, a situation which militated against the emergence of stable and enforceable urban property rights in rural areas.

The relevance of this issue to Hama, and the contrast between the visibility of notable women and the invisibility of their elite counterparts, is that Hama bore a resemblance both to Tripoli and Nablus, with its rural surpluses functionally divided between elite families whose military character allowed them to profit from fief-like tax farms some distance from Hama; and notable families whose large properties were concentrated in the Ghuta-like garden properties associated with the Orontes valley.

Ultimately, the interests of elites and religious notables were intertwined. In some cases, such as the domain of the alimentary economy (food production and processing), elites and notables formed partnerships. For instance, the mufti Ibrahim al-Kaylani and the agha of Shaykhun, a caravanseray and fortress on the road to Aleppo, had a farming and livestock partnership in the village of Kafr 'Ayn for a period of time until 1793.

Trade with its pastoral steppe and with other parts of the Ottoman Empire continued to characterize significant sectors of Hama's economy in the nineteenth century. From the 1830s onward, though, Hama's trade occurred in a context different from before. The older Ottoman caravan economy was supplanted by and folded into a new, European-dominated world economy driven by the needs of capitalist industrialization. Grosso modo, the leading European powers sought to secure their access to the raw materials and the markets of the Ottoman Middle East, and to this end they sought new political, administrative and financial arrangements in the remaining territories of the Ottoman Empire. Although French interest in the Levantine cotton trade of the eighteenth century anticipated later developments, the real impact of the new world economy did not strike Syria until after the commercial disruptions of the Napoleonic Wars which ended in 1815. England's burgeoning industrial economy, freed of the preoccupation with war production, began to flood Syrian and Ottoman markets with inexpensive, mass-produced textiles that challenged the competitive position of Syrian weavers and artisans while creating new business opportunities for Ottoman importers and re-exporters. At the same time, England's and Western Europe's demand for food and raw materials created opportunities for elites with access to the land and its surpluses. The extension and intensification of trade, both international and regional, created concomitant pressures and incentives for the improvement of communications routes. Carriage roads and railways were introduced into in Syria over the course of the nineteenth century, and the advent of steamship traffic increased many-fold the quantity of Syria's maritime trade. Formerly outposts of the Syrian interior, Mediterranean ports such as Alexandretta, Tripoli, Beirut and Jaffa now took on greater importance. The Syrian-Palestinian interior and hill countries became a population reservoir for the rapidly expanding coastal cities and plantations.

In the nineteenth century, the Hama's district's role as an agricultural producer was enhanced as state authorities gradually subdued independent pastoralist and mountain peasant communities through a combination of co-optation and military force. Hama's experience in this regard was part of a larger Syrian story, suggesting parallels with the Ottomans' extended and bloody "pacification" of the Hawran region south of Damascus from the 1860s onward. Here too the Ottomans alternated between tactics of coercion and co-optation in order to subdue historically independent communities of pastoral nomads and of mountain peasants. The latter's estrangement from urban culture and power was expressed through confessional differentiation (Nusayris in the mountains west of Hama; Druze in the mountain of the Hawran).

The upshot of such "pacification" was the transformation of Hama's pastoral hinterland into a region of extensive cultivation dominated by big landlords based in the town. Historically autonomous rural communities in the hills and mountains paid the price in terms of loss of traditional liberties. Their losses amounted to a net gain for urban interests, however; with the countryside (and obstreperous country residents) now under the control of gendarmes and the army, the volume and regularity of pilgrimage and commercial traffic increased. Regional and long-distance trade continued along the older routes, made more secure by the reformed state structure that the Ottomans built up in the second half of the nineteenth century.

The extension of security into the steppe hinterland was a major priority of the state and its allied elites. The magnitude of the problem is indicated by the fact that, n 1851, the route between Aleppo and Hama was insecure for travelers; among the highwaymen were irregular troops who drew little distinction between tax collection and robbery. The steppe approaching Hama from the north was lightly populated, and its spotty cultivation contrasted sharply with the greenery of the city itself. In another symptom of insecurity, the governor of Damascus warned his subordinates in 1852 of incursions into the Hama region of large number of 'Anaza bedouins from the east who threatened cultivators, travelers, and the collection of state revenues. At about the same time, Nusayri mountain peasants to the west and northwest of Hama frequently held up and robbed travelers and caravans.

By the end of the nineteenth century, however, these types of challenges to urban-based authority had been overcome, and the government exercised unprecedented authority. Summarizing the changes that had occurred in the countryside, a French consular agent in Beirut with personal and professional ties to Hama noted in 1897 that the subjugation of bedouins and Nusayris in the last 20 years had permitted agricultural, industrial, and commercial growth:

…[L]a population rurale de la province de Hama-Homs vit, à l'heure qu'il est, relativement heureuse et dans un état d'esprit fort calme….à aucun époque le Gouvernement n'a dominé la situation intérieure comme il la domine à l'heure qu'il est et n'a exercé, avec plus d'absolutisme, son pouvoir et sur autorité…comme il l'a aujourd'hui…."

The cost of this security was typically paid by subjugated mountain peasants and pastoralists, many of whom henceforth lived as sharecroppers on lands belonging to their chieftains, urban notables, or the sultan himself. But the town, dependent as it was on trade and commerce for prosperity, benefited and grew. At mid-century the districts of Homs and Hama provided about two-thirds of the grain that Tripoli exported to Europe. In addition, Hama sent soda to the soap manufactories of "Turkey," and during the cotton boom caused by the American civil war Hama's merchants provided cotton for the weaving industry of Damascus. By the late 1870s Hama was sending significant quantities of wool to Tripoli for export to France, over and above the wool used in Hama's local industries. A decade later, Hama's cotton and silk goods were finding ready markets not only in Damascus and in Syrian coastal towns, but also in Egypt. In the 1880s Homs and Hama were exporting via Tripoli wool, silk and cotton cloths, and cereals; the latter were bound for Italy.

The conquest of the steppe and the extension of modern communications affected different economic sectors and interests unevenly. The development of an internal and overseas grain market worked mainly to the benefit of Hama's landowners, who consolidated their hold over newly settled lands. Increases in the volume of trade between Hama, the port of Tripoli, and Hama's hinterland was good news for merchants who plied these routes. Its status as a "small district town" notwithstanding, Hama's commercial links with Ottoman - and eventually world - markets were a noteworthy facet of its economic activity. These Ottoman and international markets were outlets for the raw materials produced in Hama's hinterland and for the manufactures of its craft workers.

In these respects Hama, like other towns of the Syrian interior, preserved the form of its pre-industrial economy but in a new context represented by the integration of the Ottoman Empire into the world economy, and the transformation of the Empire into a semi-colonial modern state. Hama's manufactures found wider regional markets due to steamships and railroads; likewise its agriculture expanded and formed the basis of a new landowning class. When a member of the Egyptian ruling family visited Syria in 1910 he extolled Syrians' fealty to "traditional" ways and forms; but the fact that he made his way by French-built rail, and was received (in Homs) by Christians espousing an Arabist cultural consciousness, suggests the depths of the changes that Syrians were undergoing. Likewise the local history of Hama authored by Shaykh Ahmad al-Sabuni, who published a newspaper after the restoration of the Ottoman constitution in 1908, reflected new currents when he criticized Hama's parochialism and worked to instill a "modern" consciousness among his contemporaries. Tradition that is conscious of itself as such is not truly "traditional"; although the form of Hama's economy in 1914 remained pre-industrial, its context was very much that of the modern age.

This sketch of elite and notable families in Ottoman Hama has demonstrated the following points. First, family history is a useful window for viewing a number of issues regarding the social and economic life of Middle Eastern cities in the early modern period. Family history illuminates sources of social authority and characteristics of political power. It offers glimpses of the dense networks of urban life centered around religious sites, neighborhoods, and craft corporations. It illustrates the impact and significance of a city's ties to its wider regional environment, including links to the rural hinterland. Second, the case or example of Hama allows us to flesh out our understanding of Syrian towns in the Ottoman period. The prominence of notables and elites, their interactions with each other and with their urban and rural milieus, their associations with religious institutions, merchants, craftworkers, and with the Ottoman state, suggest that Hama in many ways was a microcosm of the urban life of the Syrian interior. Comparable institutions and issues are visible in the better documented and more intensively studied metropoles of Aleppo and Damascus. At the same time, the significant differentiation in the economic prominence of women among elite and notable families affirms the importance of linking family structure and gender roles to their material base. Third, the origins and development of Hama's class of patrician landowners underscores the modern conditions that gave rise to apparently long-standing relationships and institutions. Rather than symbolizing a feudalistic throwback to an earlier era, the propoerties and institutionalized political power of Hama's landed families were very much a product of modern processes of state formation and integration into the capitalist world economy. Although landowners like the Kaylanis had a long and venerable aristocratic lineage, the same could not be said of others like the Barazis and Tayfurs. The particular manner in which particular elite and notable families coalesced into a landowning class makes Hama emblematic of the modernity of tradition.

END NOTES

1725

Beginning of rule of the Azm family in Damascus with the appointment of Isma‘il Pasha al-Azm as governor of the province. Between 1725 and 1783, members of the family held power in Damascus for a total of 47 years, in addition to periodic appointments in the provinces of Sidon, Tripoli, and Aleppo. The Azms, whose origins are not known with certainty, belonged to a notable family from the region of Ma'arra, south of Aleppo.

The Kin Who Count

Family and Society in Ottoman Aleppo, 1770-1840

By Margaret L. Meriwether

"Margaret Meriwether has written an excellent study of family life in Ottoman Aleppo.... Her book will be of great value to those interested in social studies in general, women's history, gender studies, and Middle Eastern studies in particular."

-Amira Sonbol, author of Women, the Family, and Divorce Laws in Islamic History

The history of the Middle Eastern family presents as many questions as there are currently answers. Who lived together in the household? Who married whom and for how long? Who got a piece of the patrimonial pie? These are the questions that Margaret Meriwether investigates in this groundbreaking study of family life among the upper classes of the Ottoman Empire in the pre-modern and early modern period.

Meriwether recreates Aleppo family life over time from records kept by the Islamic religious courts that held jurisdiction over all matters of family law and property transactions. From this research, she asserts that the stereotype of the large, patriarchal patrilineal family rarely existed in reality. Instead, Aleppo's notables organized their families in a great diversity of ways, despite the fact that they were all members of the same social class with widely shared cultural values, acting under the same system of family law. She concludes that this had important implications for gender relations and demonstrates that it gave women more authority and greater autonomy than is usually acknowledged.

Margaret L. Meriwether is Professor of History at Denison University in Granville, Ohio, where she teaches courses on Islamic and Middle Eastern history.

Bibliographie

- Histoire de l’Empire Ottoman - Mantran Robert - Fayard - 1989 - Paris

- Introduction à l’histoire urbaine de la Syrie ottomane (XVIº-XVIIº siècle)     

   Beyrouth, 1982

- Ottoman Rule in Damascus 1708-1758 - Barbir Karl K. - Princeton, 1980

- The changing face of the Fertile Crescent - Hourani Albert H. - Studia

   Islamica, 8 1957

- Family and Society in Ottoman Aleppo, 1770-1840 - Meriwether Margaret L.

http://pt.scribd.com/doc/56720997/16/al-Azm-family