[Discussion] Outside In: On the Margins of the Modern Middle East

[Gonul Pultar]

	*Eugene Rogan, ed.* /Outside In: On the Margins of the Modern Middle 
East//. /The Islamic Mediterranean Series, vol. 3. London: I.B. Tauris, 
2002. vii + 263 pp. Notes, bibliography, index. $65.00 (cloth), ISBN 
1-8606-4698-0.

Reviewed by *Mary Ann Fay*, Department of Sociology, American University.
Published by H-Gender-MidEast <http://www.h-net.msu.edu/%7Egend-mid/> 
(September, 2003)


*Gender in Construction and Designation of Marginality*

Outside In: On the Margins of the Modern Middle East is a collection of 
ten articles about marginal men and women in Middle Eastern society in 
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The editor of the collection is 
Eugene Rogan, who has also written the introduction to the volume.

The collection is divided into four parts or thematic fields. The first 
by Francois Georgian examines patterns of consumption of coffee, 
alcohol, and drugs. The second focuses on the institutions by which the 
state, law, and society confined individuals, and includes articles on 
prisons, the poor, and prostitution in nineteenth-century Cairo by 
Rudolph Peters, Mine Ener, and Khaled Fahmy, respectively, and on insane 
asylums in Egypt and Lebanon by Rogan. The third section or theme is 
port cities and includes a study of migrant workers in Ottoman Salonica 
by Eyal Ginio and one of European migrants to pre-colonial Tunis by 
Julia Clancy-Smith, as well as an examination of public morality in 
Beirut by Jens Hanssen. The final theme is that of entertainers in 
twentieth-century Baghdad by Sami Zubaida and Cairo by Karin van Nieuwkerk.

In his introduction, Rogan describes the study of marginality as a 
division of history from below, that began with the social history of 
the French Revolution by such scholars as Jules Michelet, Georges 
Lefebre and George Rudé. The last two of these, by assigning political 
agency to the Third Estate, influenced British Marxist historians like 
E. P. Thompson writing on the Industrial Revolution, the emergence of 
the working class, and urban outcasts. Some of the consequences of this 
non-elite history or New Social History include the emergence of women's 
history as a distinct field and of subaltern studies in South Asian 
social history.

The New Social History, evolving as it did from Marxist theory and 
left-leaning historians, was not just the study of the non-elite or the 
marginal. Rather, the history of the common people was linked to a 
theoretical perspective that assigned agency to non-elite social groups 
and even, at times, power to change the course of history in radical or 
revolutionary ways. Indeed, the position of the non-elite at the 
periphery or the margins of society was no longer seen as simply a site 
of oppression but as one of resistance, agency, and even power. The 
elites who held formal power were no longer regarded as the sole or even 
the most significant historical actors. Social history transformed the 
non-elite, the common people and the marginal from the acted-upon to 
actors and from the objects to the subjects of history. It was not just 
a collection of studies about those who were absent from elite 
historiography; it was also a statement about history itself.

Post-modernism, with its critique of meta-narratives like Marxism or the 
Enlightenment and the claims these narratives made to universal 
"truths," poses a significant challenge to social history by undermining 
its theoretical foundations. So does the cultural turn in history and 
cultural studies in general, which take a discursive approach to 
historical and social scientific analysis derived from the work of 
Michel Foucault. Foucault's discursive method of analysis calls into 
question the concept of the unified autonomous self who has the will and 
the freedom to act against power and authority.

Post-modernism has undermined the theory and foundations on which social 
history and the various fields that it spawned have been constructed. 
Unfortunately, there is no discussion of this in the volume under 
review, although the reader will notice the absence of a common 
theoretical perspective or a common approach that links the individual 
articles to each other. What unifies the volume comes from the 
subject--marginality--and its open-ended definition as an individual's 
non-conformity to legal and social norms. The various authors have 
turned their attention to the local and the particular in specific 
locales in the lands of the Ottoman Empire before and after its 
dissolution, by focusing on various marginal groups such as the poor, 
the insane, migrants, prostitutes, tavern keepers, drinkers, and 
entertainers, among others. One of the strengths of the volume is the 
focus on groups that have been seriously understudied in Middle East 
history. In so doing, the collection expands our knowledge of Middle 
Eastern society at a time of transformation and contributes to our 
understanding of the functioning of the Ottoman administration, European 
imperialism, the emergence of the hegemonic states of the region, and 
the transition to the modern. In addition, many of the articles 
emphasize the historical nature of marginality, showing how this 
category changes over time as the marginal becomes central or what was 
once vice becomes virtue.

Three of the strongest articles in the collection are those by Ener, 
Ginio, and Clancy-Smith. All three focus on the socially constructed 
nature of marginality and the way that the law and the state define new 
categories of marginality in order to protect its revenue base, control 
the flow of labor, or ensure order and public morality. Ener, in her 
study of the poor in "Getting into the Shelter of Takiyat Tulun," shows 
the relation between the creation of new categories of deserving poor 
and able-bodied poor as well as the centralizing tendencies of the 
nineteenth-century Egyptian state and its intervention into areas of 
public and private life that had previously been beyond state control. 
Ener shows how new laws and a state apparatus to manage, police, 
transport, and institutionalize the poor developed between 1847 and 
1878. The division of the poor into the deserving and the able-bodied 
happened when the state attempted to harness the labor of Egyptians in 
agriculture and meet the demand for labor in industrial projects. Thus, 
begging was forbidden; the able-bodied poor were put to work and 
non-residents of Cairo were sent back to their villages.

In the case of Salonica, Eyal Ginio looks at the relationship between 
migrants to this port city and the desire of the Ottoman government to 
ensure the flow and stability of revenues and the provisioning of its 
cities. In his article, "Migrants and Workers in an Ottoman Port: 
Ottoman Salonica in the Eighteenth-Century," Ginio points out that most 
port labor was casual, short-term, low-waged, and relatively unskilled. 
As such, the port was a magnet for migrants from the countryside. The 
only officially recorded laborers were the porters who were in the 
employ of merchants and not the port administration. The Ottoman 
government tried, by imperial edict, to ban the migration to the capital 
of day laborers, nomads, and others from the Balkans. Peasant migration 
was forbidden and punished because it was regarded as a serious threat 
to agricultural production, tax revenues, and general order. Ginio 
explains, "In a society in which the individual's main obligation was to 
pay his taxes regularly, those who did not have a settled address or 
occupation deviated from the expected norm" (p. 134).

Like Ener and Ginio, Julia Clancy-Smith demonstrates that marginality is 
a social construction by showing how a disparate group of European 
migrants to Tunisia before the protectorate was declared in 1883 became 
marginalized. One of the facts of European colonialism/imperialism in 
North Africa, according to Clancy-Smith, is that it became a dumping 
ground for political undesirables and ne'er-do-wells as well as social 
groups unable to cope with the dislocations of nation-state building and 
industrial capitalism. These included European settlers from Algeria, 
Maltese, and Sicilo-Italians, along with those unwilling to serve in the 
Italian army, bandits and criminals fleeing the police, and lovers 
escaping unhappy marriages. Clancy-Smith calls them "subsistence 
migrants" and challenges the notion that they moved into the ranks of 
the colonizer and into the category of "European." Instead, she argues, 
Mediterranean marginals who peopled North Africa were considered only 
marginally "European" for much of the period and that gender relations 
played a significant part in calibrating "Europeanness." She writes, 
"Who could claim to be 'European' was uncertain, unstable and contested 
in the past century--and some of that uncertainty sprang from the 
intersections along the migration-marginality-gender axis" (p. 154).

What Clancy-Smith means by this is illustrated in her example of an 
impoverished Maltese widow, Hanna, and her daughter who sold wine in the 
market. They came to the attention of the authorities because they 
stayed open after normal business hours. As women without men, and thus 
deprived of male surveillance, and who sold spirits, they were regarded 
as women of uncertain virtue and a source of public scandal, social 
disorder, and danger. Thus, they violated the gender norms of the time, 
which was an indication of non-Europeanness. Clancy-Smith is the only 
one of the ten authors to integrate gender analysis into her study and 
show its importance in the construction and designation of marginality. 
As she points out, women experience migration differently from men and 
while migration results in the restructuring of gender relations, the 
most common result is the restructuring of gender asymmetries.

In two articles, the authors question or problematize the categorization 
of two groups that are commonly believed to have been marginal in Middle 
Eastern society, namely, the consumers of alcoholic beverages and 
prisoners. In the first, "Ottomans and Drinkers: The Consumption of 
Alcohol in Istanbul in the Nineteenth-Century" by Francois Georgeon, the 
author points out that while Muslims were forbidden to consume alchohol, 
it was not forbidden to Christians and Jews. Thus, alcohol consumption 
became an issue of identity and boundaries between groups. The Ottoman 
government banned alcohol from time to time along with tobacco, coffee, 
opium, and wine. However, besides upholding religious orthodoxy, the 
government was also interested in avoiding public assembly, limiting 
promiscuity between different social groups and different communities, 
and protecting public order. Thus, public consumption became the target 
of official condemnation rather than private use. In the nineteenth 
century, the reforming Sultan Mahmud II (r. 1808-1839) was a drinker and 
encouraged his ministers to drink as a sign of modernity. The new penal 
codes of the Tanzimat Period (1839-1876) did not prohibit alcoholic 
drinks. The drinkers included the two ends of the social spectrum, the 
Ottoman elite even before the Tanzimat and, at the other end, soldiers, 
sailors, artisans, workers, coachmen, and other members of the lower 
classes.

In the case of prisoners, Rudolph Peters in "Prisoners and 
Marginalisation in Nineteenth-Century Egypt" argues that prison 
sentences had no strong stigmatizing effect and released prisoners were 
not marginalized socially. According to the author, many offenses 
contained in the penal code and punished by the state were based on 
norms not shared by ordinary Egyptians. Some of these offenses, 
Egyptians realized, served the interests of the state and the ruling 
group, while others conflicted with established customs relating to 
honor or feuding. There were other offenses that Egyptians did not see 
as criminal including tax evasion, draft-dodging, desertion, sheltering 
deserters, and escaping the corvee. Those imprisoned for such offenses 
were considered victims of state oppression. Peters is investigating the 
Egyptian prison system before the British occupation of 1882 and admits 
that little is known about the system of judicial punishment before that 
time. Therefore, he acknowledges that he cannot give an unequivocal 
answer to the question of whether the prison system led to the 
stigmatization and the social exclusion of released prisoners.

Articles by Rogan and Khaled Fahmy consider two groups of marginalized 
persons, the insane and prostitutes, within the context of centralizing 
states and European imperialism. The first, "Madness and Marginality: 
The Advent of the Psychiatric Asylum in Egypt and Lebanon" by Rogan, 
explores the social construction of mental illness and the emergence of 
psychiatry as a branch of medicine. Although in the nineteenth century, 
psychiatry was a pseudo-science, the treatment of those designated 
mentally ill in Cairo and Mount Lebanon did improve. There, unsanitary 
and often inhumane asylums were replaced by institutions that were 
hygienic, light, and airy. Patients were not restrained and were allowed 
to work outdoors in gardening, for example. What is objectionable, 
according to Rogan, is that psychiatry and institutionalization were 
introduced by Europeans who imposed the social norms by which mental 
illness was defined, thus displacing local norms with allegedly 
universal ones based on scientific principles. Rogan compares the 
situation in Cairo and Lebanon to the introduction of psychiatry as a 
branch of colonial medicine in India and the Cape Colony of Southern 
Africa. In all three, local norms were displaced by foreign ideas 
imposed by Europeans who had the political power to ensure that their 
ideas prevailed.

Fahmy, in "Prostitution in Egypt in the Nineteenth Century," considers 
the state's concern with and monitoring of prostitutes and brothels from 
1834, when the government of Muhammad 'Ali Pasha banned prostitutes and 
dancers from Cairo and banished them to the south. Since the state 
collected considerable revenues from public dancers, musicians, and 
entertainers, and had an insatiable need for revenues, Fahmy speculates 
that it probably taxed prostitutes as well. Why, then, would it cut off 
this lucrative source of revenue by banning prostitutes from Cairo? 
Fahmy argues that the main reason for this was the Pasha's belief that 
prostitutes threatened the discipline and health of the troops in his 
newly formed army as well as students in government schools. Of 
particular concern was the high incidence of syphilis, which was 
believed to be spread mainly by prostitutes. Once the large army created 
by Muhammad 'Ali was disbanded and the threat posed by prostitutes had 
receded, concern shifted from the prostitute's body to brothels as the 
site of sedition, danger, and infestation.

In "Public Morality and Marginality in Fin-de-siècle Beirut," Jens 
Hanssen's study of marginal groups in Beirut is woven into an urban 
history of the city's expansion after the civil war of 1860 that 
included the emergence of venues of leisure and pleasure. Hanssen argues 
that marginal men and women were produced "not merely by objective 
alienating practices of rapid urbanization but, significantly, by the 
discourse on public morality that developed after 1860" (p. 204). 
Intellectuals like al-Bustani and Zaydan were important contributors to 
the discourse on morality that viewed marginality as an obstacle to the 
imagined and industrious and prosperous future of Beirut. The Ottoman 
government viewed alcohol consumption in taverns and bars, theaters, 
brothels, and gambling as threats to social order and responded through 
licensing and opening regulations as well as police and hygiene 
surveillance.

The final two articles are studies of twentieth-century entertainers in 
Baghdad and Cairo. Sami Zubaida, in "Entertainers in Baghdad, 
1900-1950," considers the shifting boundaries of marginality. He points 
out that entertainers were considered marginal for two reasons: first, 
the predominance of Jews among instrumentalists, and next the 
association of entertainment with drink and prostitution. Zubaida then 
considers the effect of the establishment of the Iraqi nation-state, the 
creation of conceptions and institutions of national culture, and the 
construction of the category of "art" to include music and song, on the 
marginality of entertainers. Zubaida argues that the boundaries of 
marginality did shift in the modern period for various types of 
musicians and entertainers, but he concludes that it is doubtful whether 
even now the social marginality was ever entirely removed.

Karin von Nieuwkerk, in "Shifting Narratives on Marginality: Female 
Entertainers in Twentieth-Century Egypt," looks not at shifting 
boundaries, but rather at changing attitudes toward female singers and 
dancers by three generations of women in the same family: Umm Nawal, her 
daughter Nawal, and her granddaughter Bint Nawal. Von Nieuwkerk bases 
her study on extended interviews with the three women about their 
activities as entertainers, the business itself, and, most importantly, 
their attitude toward the business today and the women involved in it. 
Only Umm Nawal and possibly her daughter, Nawal, worked as entertainers, 
although the daughter denied doing so. The granddaughter, Bint Nawal, 
who never worked as a dancer or singer, strongly condemned the business 
and the women who worked in it as shameful and haram (forbidden in 
Islam). According to von Nieuwkere, this is the opinion of most 
middle-class Egyptians. Nawal, a respectable housewife married to an 
engineer, denied her family background at the same time as she defended 
her new middle-class status achieved through education.

The volume makes a significant contribution to our understanding of 
understudied groups in Middle Eastern society as well as to late-Ottoman 
administration of the Arab provinces and its fiscal policies, European 
imperialism, and the emergence of the modern nation-states of the 
region. The authors make use of a variety of sources including 
government documents and reports, memoirs, travel accounts, and oral 
histories. Like many other collections, it is somewhat uneven. 
Nevertheless, it is recommended as a contribution to Middle East 
history, which lags far behind its European counterparts in the study of 
society's marginal men and women.