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By Michael Chamberlain
Michael Chamberlain makes a speciality of medieval Damascus to improve a brand new method of the connection among the society and tradition of the center East. the writer argues that historians have lengthy imposed eu strictures onto societies to which they have been alien. Western innovations of valid order have been irrelevant to medieval Muslim society the place social development was once based upon the creation of data and non secular patronage, and it was once the loved ones, instead of the kingdom employer or company, that held political and social strength. A parallel is drawn among the realized elite and the soldiers of Damascus who, via comparable concepts, got prestige and tool and handed them on of their families. by way of analyzing fabric from the Latin West, Sung China and the Sinicized empires of internal Asia, the writer addresses the character of political energy within the interval.
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Extra resources for Knowledge and Social Practice in Medieval Damascus, 1190-1350
Sample text
24 Introduction historical context, we can alert ourselves to the contingent nature of our own practices of analysis and description. Perhaps only by the systematic suspicion that attention to wider contexts induces can we try to avoid inscribing an image of ourselves in the past. The two areas most often brought into comparison are the Latin West, especially high medieval France, and Southern Sung China (1127-1279). These of course are large and varied regions, and can be used for comparative purposes only in broad strokes and with numerous reservations.
BourinDerruau, Temps d'equilibres temps de ruptures. XIHe siecle (Paris, 1990), 199-204, 256-9. 16 Rulers in the Latin West also had, in general, fewer and smaller cities than the ruling groups of some regions in the Middle East. In part because the political resources of kings in the Latin West were relatively meager (though undoubtedly increasing) a feudal aristocracy continued to appropriate a large share of surplus production and usually resided on the land, over whose inhabitants they retained jurisdiction.
Waqfiyyas and decrees are also useful, but must be used with care, since, as mentioned already, these documents mandated a result that often was not realized. Other sources such as the treatises written by jurists such as Ibn Jamaca, al-Subki, and Ibn al-Hajj pose more difficult problems of interpretation. These sources have been described as "pedagogical manuals," or descriptions of the functioning of educational institutions, or angry denunciations of the corruptions of their times. In most cases the intent of these authors in writing remains either unclear or misunderstood by contemporary historians.