Endowments, Rulers and Community: Waqf al-Haramayn Ottoman Algiers.

CLANCY-SMITH, JULIA

Endowments, Rulers and Community: Waqf al-Haramayn Ottoman Algiers. By MIRIAM HOEXTER. Studies in Islamic Law and Society, vol. 6. Leiden: E. J. BRILL, 1998. Pp. vii + 188. HF1 98, $58.

This brilliant analysis of the Waqf al-Haramayn in Ottoman Algiers focuses on the one hundred and seventy years stretching from the latter decades of the seventeenth century to the French army's brutal assault on the capital city in the summer of 1830. The study's chronological limits are determined largely by the available documentation and by the fact that, while there are indications of the foundation's existence as early as the 1620s and 1630s, the institution did not come into its own until the eighteenth century. Indeed, one of the major points Hoexter makes is that the growth and development of the Algerian Waqf al-Haramayn, of the city of Algiers, and of the Turkish deylical state were intimately inter-connected processes. The author emphasizes the following two lines of inquiry through. out her study: first, the interplay between the meticulous laws laid down by Muslim jurists for the establishment and regulation of endowments and the actual manner in which these laws were applied within the larger context of the changing fabric of urban life in Algiers; and second, the conceptual issues that this particular case raises regarding scholarly investigations of large public foundations both in Islam and in the Ottoman Empire generally. Significantly, during the Algerian Haramayn's formative stage at the end of the seventeenth century, the creation of a large foundation, consciously patterned on its imperial counterpart, was directly tied to concerted attempts by Algiers' local rulers to forge an autonomous existence free from undue political interference by their masters in Istanbul.

In her scrupulous investigation of the management of properties, a contested issue in the study of waqf foundations, Hoexter offers a new interpretation of the "managerial policy" that characterized the Haramayn in Algiers (p. 141). Rather than disinterest or outright neglect by waqf administrators, on the one hand, or overly rigid application of the laws governing foundations, on the other, the author detects a "constant dialogue" between the [subset]ulama[contains]s interpretation of the letter of the law and the changing needs of the community at any given moment in time.

Hoexter's concluding chapter, devoted to the Haramayn and the Algerian Public Sphere," is a tour de force. By carefully comparing the evkaf-i harameyn in Istanbul with a provincial North African counterpart, Hoexter detects a number of critical differences in the way this institution operated in its local environment. For Algiers, the major distinction was the social identity or status of the endowers of assets. Unlike imperial models, where ruling elites constituted the major endowers, the Algerian Haramayn was "a joint venture of the rulers and the local population" (p. 167). Indeed, this institution consisted of myriad small endowments offered not only by those at the top but also by those toward the bottom of the social pecking order--barraniyaa (temporary workers); freed slaves, male and female; Andalusians; even people who belonged to the town's "floating population" (p. 167). Moreover, she argues that the growing social imbrication between Turkish ruling "others" and the city's indigenous inhabitants, mainly Arab or Berber, are indicators of larger transformations. By the eighteenth century, a "public sphere" as such had not only come into existence but had also been rendered more consonant with urban Islam's notions of morality and good order.

A number of tenacious historical misconceptions about the nature of late Ottoman Algeria are laid to rest by Hoexter's work. First and foremost, in this reviewer's opinion, is the idea that the Turkish Algerian state was in irreversible decline just prior to 1830. As I have argued elsewhere, and as Hoexter also stipulates, after 1817 Algeria had embarked upon an historical trajectory similar to that of neighboring Tunisia, with the emergence of a hereditary dynasty increasingly dependent upon its multiple ties with local notables and local society. Hoexter's findings and arguments are of such importance that they could eventually lead to a paradigm shift in our understanding of Ottoman Algerian history. Finally discredited is the old canard, dating not surprisingly from the colonial period, that Turkish rulers and rule in Algeria at its most enlightened contributed nothing of note to the country's development and, at its worst, plunged the region into centuries of the most benighted despotism.