Festgabe an Josef Matuz: Osmanistik-Turkologie-Diplomatik by Christa Fragner; KlausSchwarzReview by: Colin HeywoodJournal of the Royal Asiatic Society, Third Series, Vol. 4, No. 2 (Jul., 1994), pp. 268-270Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britainand IrelandStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25182897 .

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268 Reviews of Books

acumen of the people, and makes the interesting observation that it was "a general custom of the

Turkish empire" that "the weak are more protected than the strong; it is of no importance whether

they are Christians or Muslims" (p. 525). The administration therefore favoured Muslims in Beirut,

Christians in Jaffa.

The volume has been produced to the high standard to be expected of this publisher and is lavishly

illustrated, notably with portraits of the author and her relatives.

It is stated that the book "is not intended as a contribution to the History of Zanzibar" (p. ix).

The student of the political history of East Africa will learn very little from it, even about Barghash's

plot against his brother Sultan M?jid in which, at a very early age, the author was implicated. It is

useful to read, as offering a different perspective from these memoirs, Sir John Gray's article on them

in Tanganyika Notes and Records, vol. 37, 1954, and the paper by J. W. C. Kirk published by

Freeman-Grenville in his edition.

The reader is left with the impression of a rather sad life, much of it passed in shabby genteel

poverty. A devoted wife and mother and an affectionate friend, Emily Ruete seems to have had little

understanding of her situation. The support of the Empress Frederick can have done little to

commend her cause to Bismarck, or even to Wilhelm II. Her conversion to Christianity, however

uncomprehending, had implications under Islamic law of which she seems to have been quite

unaware, but which the rulers of Zanzibar could not be expected to ignore. Public opinion there can

hardly have been as uniformly favourable to her as she supposed. She felt herself rebuffed by the

British and betrayed by the Germans, but her expectations were not realistic. It is abundantly clear

from this book that, while living in Germany as an Evangelical Christian, she always pined for the

life-style of her home and the rituals of Islam.

C. F. Beckingham

Festgabe an Josef Matuz: Osmanistik-Turkologie-Diplomatik. Edited by Christa Fragner and

Klaus Schwarz with a foreword by Bert G. Fragner. (Islamkundliche Untersuchungen, Band

150.) pp. 364, illus. Berlin, Klaus Schwarz Verlag, 1992.

The present Festschrift in honour of the late Professor Josef Matuz has somewhat tragic

antecedents. The project was originally planned and edited (and several of the contributions were

obviously written) in the mid-eighties by Matuz's pupil, the Berlin scholar and well-known

publisher Klaus Schwarz. Tragically, the original manuscript was burned in 1989 in a fire in which

Schwarz himself lost his life. The component parts of the Festschrift were reassembled subsequently

and have been edited for a second time by Christa Fragner. By then one of the original contributors,

Professor Skender Rizaj of Prishtina, had been lost sight of in Kossovo, his contribution therefore

lost. Several of the remaining contributors ?

Blaskovics, Schaendlinger, Tardy -

died prior to

publication; Matuz himself is also now dead. A short foreword by Bert Fragner, which recounts the

history of a work not unmarked by tragedy, serves as introduction to a Festschrift which, as finally

published, contains a total of twenty-two contributions, mainly in those fields of Turkology,

Ottoman diplomatics and palaeography to which Matuz himself had contributed. The editors have

supplied a bibliography of Matuz's publications, but there is no index, as is usual (but regrettable)

with works of this type.

The Turkological contributions, like a number of others, have a decided Magyar flavour,

reflecting the recipient's own origins. They include essays by Klaus Kreiser on Hermann

Bamberger (seil. Arminius V?mb?ry) and Turkology; Erich Prokosch on an early twentieth

century "

krimtatarische "

text in reformed Arabic script, and a study by Wolfgang-Ekkehard

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Reviews of Books 269

Scharlipp on a collection of Turkish prayers of early eighteenth-century Byelorussian Tatar origin

found in a Polish-Arabic interlineated Qur'?n manuscript in the Francis Skaryna Byelorussian

Library in London. Pre-Islamic Turkology is represented by studies by Arpad Berta, on the Khazar

name for the Hungarians (she regards Constantine Porphyrogenitus's Ea?aproi ?a<f>aXoL as deriving

not as hitherto accepted from the Sabirs [Sabir > Savir > * Savar] but from Khazar * Savarti =

"Hinter dem rechten Fl?gel" {s?g artx) [seil, of the Khazar army]).

A further group of studies may be grouped under the rubric of Ottoman palaeography and

diplomatic. A contribution, obviously valuable, by the late J?sef Blaskovies, is devoted to the district

of ?rseki?jv?r (now Nov? Zamky in Slovakia) under Ottoman rule (1663-85), and based in part on

mufassal (TT 698) and waqf registers for the ey?let of Uyvar, is unfortunately written in Hungarian.

More accessible to the generality of specialists are useful contributions by Hans-Georg Majer on

two insa collections in Vienna attributed since Hammer's day to the late-seventeenth century

Ottoman statesman R?m? Mehmed Pasa, but now shown to be by other, unknown hands; a

documentary study by Claudia R?mer of an imperial provisioning order issued to the cadis of

Pozega and others from the Ottoman camp near Yagodina in April 1683, on the outward march of

the Vienna campaign, taken from a miscellaneous collection of original documents (Fl?gel 261) in

the Austrian National Library, and a further study by Val?ry Stojanow of a firman of Mahmud

II which turns out to be a passport dated 1241/1826 for an English sea captain, one James Headly,

master of the Loyal Britton {sic), outward bound from Istanbul for the Black Sea with 7920 qant?r of

coal! Ottoman epigraphy is also represented, in the form of a small collection of inscriptions

gathered by Martin Strohmaier, mainly of the eighteenth century and principally from

Midill?/Mitylene, Rhodes, and Anabolu/Nauplia (Nafplion), including a sefr??-inscription from the

last place, datable chronogrammically to 1147/1735, by one Mahmud Aga of the Ninth Janissary

Corps.

Further contributions with a documentary basis devoted to aspects of Ottoman history are by

Elizabeth Zachariadou (an edition of a short extract from a financial defter from the

Monastery of St John at Patmos dealing with the revenues of the sancak of Naxos in 1641); Suraiya

Faroqui (on the probate inventories of two wealthy provincial Muslim women of the early-mid

nineteenth century) and Christine Woodhead (on the Ottoman scribal service [dw?n-i h?m?y?n

k?tibleri] in the later sixteenth/early seventeenth century).

Turning to studies written with a broader brush, particular notice must be taken of Halil

Inalcik's study on the Islamization of Ottoman laws on land and land-tax in the mid-sixteenth

century under the influence of S?leym?n I's greatest legist, Ebu's-su'?d, which provides inter alia a

translation of Ebu's-su'?d's lengthy preamble to the 1568 tahrTrs for Skopje and Thessaloniki, which

summarize his method of interpreting Ottoman land law within the framework of the Shar?'a. Also

to be mentioned is the study by Anton Schaendlinger on Ottoman attempts at reform and the

political treatises which they engendered in the seventeenth century.

One may also note some at least of a number of contributions in what may perhaps be described

as more peripheral (or more miscellaneous) subjects. On widely diverse aspects of German-Turkish

relations are studies by Ingeborg Huhn on the Jews of Damascus in the mid-nineteenth century,

based on the papers of the German consul Wetzstein ; and a study, lengthy but rather thinner than

one would have expected from either scholar, by Barbara Kellner-Heinkele and Gy?rgy

Hazai, on an eighteenth-century Ottoman MS account of the German lands, preserved in

Budapest, which is entirely taken up with a facsimile text and a full, careful transcription on facing

pages, but provides virtually no commentary on what is admittedly a minor and anonymous work.

A study by Armin K?ssler deals summarily with German?Turkish economic relations in the

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270 Reviews of Books

Wilhelmine period. There are also contributions by Harald List (on carpets), Ferenc Szakaly and

Lajos Tardy (sixteenth-century dragomans of Hungarian origin in Ottoman service) ; Andreas

Tietze (on the terms pos?t, pusat) ; and Peter Zieme (on translation problems in old Turkish Buddhist

literature).

Finally, in conclusion, and in an oecumenical spirit, one must take notice of a contribution relevant

to our Indianist colleagues. This, by Bert Fragner, is a scrupulous and rewarding edition of a

Persian/arm?tt of Abu' 1-Hasan Qutb Sah (Berlin, Staatsbibliothek Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Pertsch

514). Abu' 1-Hasan was the last independent pre-Mughal ruler (from 1672 to 1687) of Golconda and

Haydarabad. The grant of revenue privileges published here was issued early in his reign, in

1085/1674, in favour of another, if more exalted shipman, Captain Antoni Paviloen, governor of

the Dutch East India Company settlement at Pulicat on the Coromandel coast. Coromandel is a long

way from the battlefields of Ottoman Hungary but its inclusion serves as an indication of the breadth

and vigour of many of the contributions to this -

by and large - most admirable and certainly well

deserved tribute.

Colin Heywood

Popular culture in medieval Cairo. By Boaz Shoshan. (Cambridge Studies in Islamic

Civilization.) pp. xv, 148. Cambridge etc., Cambridge University Press, 1993. ?27.95.

This short book is an important contribution to our understanding of the social and cultural

history of the Mamluk Sultanate. Hitherto virtually all studies of the culture of Mamluk Egypt and

Syria have been devoted to that of the ?lites, be they the military-political class (i.e. the Mamluks

themselves), or civilians. This was largely due to the nature of the sources themselves, which

primarily concerned themselves with the ruling military caste and the "respectable" strata in the

larger population. The author, however, inspired by work on popular culture by historians of

Europe, has succeeded in culling from these same sources information which enabled him to write

an informative and interesting book about the forgotten majority of the population and aspects of

their cultural life. It should be mentioned that, as the author states in his preface, this is not a

comprehensive treatment of the subject (which perhaps can never be written), but rather an analysis

of certain aspects of popular culture, about which sufficient material was found to justify conclusions

of a more general nature.

In his introduction, Dr Shoshan briefly discusses the social background of the popular classes in

medieval Cairo, having stressed (in the preface) that his discussion is generally limited to the Mamluk

period. He writes: "If one were to write a sketchy history of the commoners in medieval Cairo, it

would be, by and large, a history of their misery : economic hardship caused by heavy taxation,

monetary instability, and high prices ; and political oppression inflicted by the Mamluks and outside

enemies. Above all, it was Death, so it seems to me, which, ironically, was the prevailing factor in

the life of the commoners in late medieval Cairo "

(p. 4). This seems to me basically correct, although

I am not convinced that one can make such a generalisation for the decades c. 1260-13 40, when

under strong sultans, there was general stability and prosperity in Egypt. It may not be coincidental

that the examples adduced by the author refer to a later period. One might also wonder who were

the "outside enemies" who oppressed the common people of Cairo during the Mamluk period.

These, however, are minor reservations. The author concludes the introduction with a short

discussion of the concept of popular culture, giving the following working definition: "...the

culture treated in this book is of...those socially inferior to the bourgeoisie; hence, supposedly also

illiterate, at least by and large. It is a culture some elements of which were created by them, and others

for them" (p. 7).

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