Elite and Notable Families of Ottoman Hama
Suhrawaradi
THE AUTHOR'S PERMISSION.
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.
*******PAPER******
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 in 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.