The Criminal Underworld in a Medieval Islamic Society: Narratives from Cairo and Damascus under the Mamluks.
Rapoport, Yossef
The Criminal Underworld in a Medieval Islamic Society: Narratives
from Cairo and Damascus under the Mamluks. By CARL F. PETRY. Chicago
Studies on the Middle East, vol. 9. Chicago: MIDDLE EAST DOCUMENTATION
CENTER, 2012. Pp. viii + 365. $70.
The study of criminality and its punishment offers insights into
the established social and political order of every society. In this
volume Carl Petry collected more than a thousand narratives of crime
from the Mamluk chronicles, with the aims of exploring attitudes to
crime, identifying patterns of criminal activities, and assessing the
response of the authorities.
As source, the rich Mamluk chronicles have obvious limitations. The
chroniclers report only a miniscule fraction of all the criminal cases,
and the literary aspects of the manner in which the authors construct
the narrative of the crime cannot be ignored. Petry is right, however,
to say that the narrative sources also offer advantages for the social
historian. They are not formulaic, and they provide extensive commentary
on the background of perpetrators, victims, and law enforcement
personnel.
The chapters are organized according to the type of criminal
activity reported by the chroniclers. Petry makes groupings according to
the following categories: rioting, theft, fraud, vice, religious
dissidence, homicide, and treason and espionage. Some of these
categories are more coherent than others: the cases discussed in the
chapter on homicide fit together very well.
Some interesting patterns emerge from the dense mass of cases
collected. One is the power of urban gangs, especially in late Mamluk
Damascus and Cairo. These appear to be heavily armed and sophisticated
groups that targeted commercial markets; they deserve further study (pp.
63-70, 217-20). The section on slave revolts (pp. 37-42) is the first
attempt known to me to bring together narratives of resistance by
domestic, mainly black slaves, in this period. Frequent references to
theft and murder by slaves against their masters also point to the
agency of domestic slaves (pp. 224-31). Similarly, several rich
narratives of resistance of individual peasants and Bedouin groups,
labeled as criminal at the time, are also indicative of the complexities
of power relationships in the countryside.
Another interesting pattern is the association of Mamluk soldiers
with addiction to alcohol: the number of references to drunken soldiers
suggests this was a social reality, not a literary trope (p. 129). The
stereotypical association of Persians with heresy and unorthodoxy is
also intriguing (p. 179). In terms of law enforcement, the cases of
consensual and non-consensual homosexuality show a pattern of leniency
with regard to attacks on male youth; similarly, the dress code for
women seems to have been rarely enforced (pp. 153-63).
An important observation regards the paucity of references to
blood-money (pp. 207-11, 249). Only three of the one hundred and fifty
cases of homicide reported in the chronicles refer to this major
principle of Islamic criminal law. Petry posits that this is primarily
due to the thoroughly urban settings of Mamluk Cairo, a real metropolis
in medieval terms, where lineages and tribes mattered less than they did
in the countryside.
On the issue of the relationship between the Islamic legal system
and non-Shari'a justice, it is interesting to note the dominance of
the wall, or prefect of the police, as the officer responsible for
investigating crime, overshadowing the ineffectual muhtasib. His
authority also seems to have expanded with time (p. 282). After the
culprit was found, cases could go either to Shari'a magistrates or
to regime officials; as would be expected, qadis were more involved in
cases of heresy and breach of public morality, but the regime officials
often had the final word in civil and matrimonial cases (p. 291).
Petry includes cases reported by the chroniclers as a crime, but
this is fuzzier than it first appears and makes it difficult to get
beyond the bias of the sources. In particular, cases that deal with
embezzlement of waqf monies or political infighting--which take up a
significant chunk of the book--do not belong to a book on the
"underworld." For Petry, casting the net so wide is justified
by the frequent collusion of the Mamluk military elites with criminal
activity. He makes an interesting comparison with late medieval European
cities, where aristocratic and military elites were often involved in
extortion and banditry. But he also notes that unlike medieval Europe,
there were no legitimate grounds for a Mamluk to assault women below
their rank (p. 150). The argument that members of the Mamluk military
elite were given immunity from criminal prosecution, which the author
himself espouses, is undermined by the more or less equal patterns of
prosecution for civilians and militarists (p. 304).
In some ways, this book belongs to an earlier generation of
scholarship. It is based almost entirely on a commonsensical reading of
the primary sources. Very little trace of the recent scholarship on
Mamluk social and legal history is found here, which makes the analysis
rather superficial compared to what has already been achieved in the
field.
However, Petry has done a huge service to social historians by
combing the Mamluk chronicles thoroughly and by providing translations
and summaries, either in the body of the text or in the extensive
footnotes. The title of the book refers to a criminal underworld;
indeed, the book is at its best when the cases come from the lower
strata of society, whether domestic slaves, Bedouin, or urban gangs.
Primarily because it directs the limelight to the underclass, this book
is likely to be a reference point for the study of everyday life in
medieval Islamic societies.
YOSSEF RAPOPORT
QUEEN MARY, UNIVERSITY OF LONDON
