IN APRIL 1699, an unusual disturbance broke out in the streets of Cairo. As part of the annual pilgrimage caravan, which escorted Muslim pilgrims through the Sinai Desert to the holy cities of Arabia, a solemn procession was conveying a new silk covering destined for the Ka ba, or Sacred Shrine, in Mecca. Among the most notable participants were a group of North Africans, who created an uproar as they moved through the streets. Fired by religious zeal, they insisted on applying their own brand of Islamic morality to the crowd of onlookers. In choosing targets for chastisement, they were very specific, beating all the people whom they found smoking tobacco. As the tumult grew, they made their decisive mistake. Seizing a member of a local paramilitary group, they smashed his pipe, and during the ensuing quarrel, went so far as to hit him over the head. The crowd had apparently seen enough. Even as soldiers rushed to the scene, the "people of the marketplace" took matters into their own hands and began attacking the North Africans. The violence ended only with the arrival of a Janissary officer, who hauled the North Africans off to prison. 1 Looking back on this incident from a very different time and place, with our own concerns and passions about tobacco, it is hard not to be struck by the deep emotions that smoking, even then, was capable of eliciting. Walking around Middle Eastern towns today, one could never imagine that such struggles ever took place. Nearly everyone has now accepted smoking as a public freedom. Few people would dream of condemning it as a moral scourge, or of banishing it from the streets and markets. If smokers today hear medical warnings about the dangers of tobacco, they remain oblivious to the acrimony that it once unleashed. This tolerant consensus did not emerge all at once. After its first arrival in the Ottoman Middle East at the end of the sixteenth century, tobacco would ignite intense debates about its legality and morality. The altercation in the streets of Cairo highlights these divisions in opinion. Invoking religion and morality, the rowdy North Africans were determined to put an end to smoking, and felt justified in using extreme measures. On the other side, the "people of the marketplace" completely denied this presumptive right to intervene in the affairs of others or to act independently on behalf of religion. To make their point, both camps were willing to come to blows. Why had tobacco become the subject of such bitter controversy? As contempo-2 For one of the most trenchant critiques, see Jack Goldstone, "The Problem of the 'Early Modern' World,"
No abstract
On February 13, 1763, "Abd al-Rahman ibn Ahmad walked into the main courthouse of Damascus as a defendant. He had divorced his wife that very day and was now liable for the unpaid portion of her dowry, which according to the provisions ofIslamic law, was owed to the wife at the time of divorce or the death of her husband. 'Abd al-Rahman insisted that his debt came to fifty piasters, but his wife, represented by her brother, was adamant that it was really one hundred. He would admit only that he had divorced his wife, and demanded evidence from the plaintiff to support her claims. When no proofs were offered, well-known rules went automatically into effect: in the absence of any other evidence, the court would take the defendant's word. "Abd al-Rahman needed only to swear a simple oath. The judge asked for him to come forward, place his hand on a copy of the Quran 1 and formally testify to his innocence. But at that moment, something quite unexpected happened: he refused. The judge asked him twice more, but each time, he would not approach. It was a fateful decision which left the judge with no choice, for reluctance to take this kind of exculpatory oath was regarded as a tacit admission of guilt. The judge immediately ruled against "Abd al-Rahman and ordered him to pay one hundred piasters to his wife. 2 Browsing through the voluminous records of the Islamic courts, which operated in provincial centers throughout the Ottoman Empire, one periodically comes across the same mysterious cases' Why would defendants, who had an easy opportunity to acquit themselves, not submit to a seemingly harmless oathj" What prompted this inner censorship, this sudden change of heart? The court records tell us nothing about motives and offer few other details, and so we can only speculate. Perhaps these defendants were unusually upright individuals who, in the moment of truth, could not betray their conscience. But if they were really so honest, one would need to explain why they had ever bothered to contest the case-not to mention, why they had not told the truth in the first place. One possibility is that defendants like "Abd al-Rahman were carry' ing out the equivalent of a legal bluff, knowing full well that they were in the wrong, but hoping not to be caught. If so, this loss of nerve would be costly as well as embarrassing: the losing side was required to pay all the expenses of the proceedings. They were certainly not trying to conduct the equivalent of a plea bargain; confession of guilt did nothing to reduce the sentence imposed by the judge, which was virtually automatic.' More likely, they had practical motives. They may have feared the consequences of perjury and assumed that the truth would eventually come out anyway: better to come clean now than to lose face later. These concerns were not imaginary. Ottoman Damascus functioned as an essentially oral culture, which meant that only a small number of religious scholars and scribes had much facility with the written word. Most people relied
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