Street Violence and Social Imagination in Late-Mamluk and Ottoman Damascus (Ca. 1500–1800)

Popular politics in the Medieval Middle East

“…While acknowledging the roles that urban networks played in popular politics—such as the ties between religious scholars or neighborhood and ethnic connections—scholars caution against automatically reading popular violence as a projection of urban networks (Grehan, ). That is because some crowds do seem to have been spontaneous gatherings and had little to do with factional struggles or urban networks (Grehan, ). As anyone familiar with the surviving source material would attest, it is not always easy to discern the influence of such networks.…”

“…As anyone familiar with the surviving source material would attest, it is not always easy to discern the influence of such networks. As James Grehan points out, such a reading would also be somewhat reductionist and implicitly reads history from the top of the social order suggesting that “without these networks, [the people] had no real voice in urban affairs—or, for that matter, in the making of history” (Grehan, , p. 221). Such spontaneous rioting crowds include those that frequently objected to the shortage of bread or grain on the market and which repeatedly targeted the market inspectors ( muhtasibs) who were responsible for overseeing the markets and collecting various market taxes (Elbendary, ).…”

“…His survey reveals many of the continuities in the behavior of urban crowds in relation to ruling authorities. He argues that an “Ottomanization” of urban politics occurred although the exact signs of this are not fully explained (Grehan, ). The subtle shift in attitudes towards popular protest which he gleans in Ottoman era reports seems to point to a shifting of the blame and the increased and frequent targeting of chief qadis who often bore the brunt of the crowd's wrath, replacing muhtasibs of the Mamluk period (Grehan, ).…”

Popular Politics, the New State and the Birth of the Iranian Working Class: The 1929 Abadan Oil Refinery Strike

“…Although the 'cultural unity' implied by such a discourse might occasionally serve to reinforce social cohesion, it might equally subvert the social order. 125 This perennial feature of the discourse of popular protest should not therefore be interpreted to mean that the accompanying political activity was in any sense conservative, but rather represented an effort by the relatively powerless actively to renegotiate the terms of change by using the ideological concepts available and familiar to them.…”

Street politics in Damascus: Kinship and other social categories as bases of political action, 1830–1841

“…Famous cases in point are the clashes between scholarly factions in medieval times (Chamberlain, 1994, 167-75) or the struggle between political groupings during the eighteenth century (Schatkowski Schilcher, 1985). Religious or political fights often combined with unrest over subsistence issues such as bread riots or tax protests (Lapidus, 1967;Grehan, 2003). 1 Most citizens in Ottoman Damascus must have experienced at least one such event during their lifetimes.…”