In contemporary Damascus, the modern oboe and an instrument known as its predecessor, the zurna, are heard on a daily basis as they continue to be employed in Syrian popular and folk music practices. After observing the pervasiveness of the sounds of these instruments in Syria, …
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The traditional houses of Damascus date from the 18th and 19th centuries but fragments and written accounts reveal that such interiors existed in the 17th century as well. What distinguishes these houses from other Islamic examples are not their spaces, courtyards and materials,…
The disappearance of a Cappucine priest, Father Thomas, and his servant, Ibrahim Amara, in 1840 in Damascus, produced consequences far beyond the local scene, affecting the policies of the great powers, the rivalry between Muhammed Ali of Egypt and the Ottoman Sultan, and Jewish…
This dissertation investigates the political and commercial relations among Israel/Judah, Aram-Damascus, and Tyre/Sidon in the ninth and eighth centuries scBCE. The work consists of five chapters, organized according to the reigns of the Assyrian kings prior to the capture of Sa…
The last hundred years of Ottoman rule in Syria saw the incorporation of Damascus into the world economy, the decline of traditional elites and rise of national sentiment, and the transformation of the urban fabric by growth, class stratification, new infrastructures, public spa…
This dissertation examines the career of the Arab Academy of Science in Damascus roughly over its first formative decade, from 1919 to 1930. It situates the Academy’s work in relation to concerns about language modernization characteristic of the Nahda, or Modern Arab Renaissanc…
Despite inspiring a rich and varied literature from historians of Europe and North America, topics related to everyday life have remained an obscure and neglected field of Middle Eastern social history. As part of the effort to recreate the long-forgotten habits, tastes, and per…
This study investigates writings about "people of blights" ( ahl al-'ahat in Arabic) - a category that included physically different, disabled and ill individuals - that circulated among a group of Muslim male scholars connected by the social bonds of friendship and academic men…
My dissertation examines visual and aural marketing practices used by merchants in the suqs (marketplaces) of Damascus, Syria. In the busy and cramped spaces of the city's large marketplaces, where a range of factors makes for intense economic competition, merchants must enact a…
In Cairo and Damascus, the Ahl al-bayt are commemorated in a variety of shrines and mosques, small and large, old and of recent date. Many of these shrines and mosques are still standing and are being used today; some have been lost and others are neglected or in ruins. My disse…
Modern Syria is the site of this intellectual and spiritual exploration of Sufism, the mystical dimension of Islam. Sufism, long considered a dying form of Muslim worship, and a system often criticized by some governments and fundamentalist organizations, is enjoying a renaissan…
This dissertation investigates the governance of seventeenth-century Damascus by examining claims upon the productive capacity of land, and the collection and redistribution of agricultural taxes. The inquiry into what the state governs and how it does so starts with the observa…