The late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were times of great physical, political and socio economic change for Muslim cities. One of the most ethnically and religiously diverse Ottoman provincial capitals, Aleppo’s built up area expanded from approximately two square miles at the end of the eighteenth century to ten square miles at the end of the nineteenth century.13 The populations of its trading partners, Mosul and Hama, almost doubled between 1820 and 1920 to 90,000 and 60,000 respectively.14 In Palestine, Nablus metamorphosed from a small town at the beginning of Ottoman rule to a thriving regional trade centre with hundreds of tightly packed towering stone buildings by the mid nineteenth century.15 In the old city of Damascus, almost three quarters of private houses were rebuilt or redesigned in the second half of the nineteenth century. 16
In short, historic Muslim cities were living organisms that witnessed profound transformations before the impetus of colonialism and authori tarianism. Heritage activism today needs to acknowledge these eighteenth and nineteenth century dynamics and abandon the tendency to museumise ancient individual buildings as the religious essence of a nation’s particular
12 Gyan Prakash, 'Writing post Orientalist histories of the third world: Perspectives from Indian historiography’, CSSH, 32 (1990), pp. 383 408.
13 Abraham Marcus, The Middle East on the eve of modernity: Aleppo in the 18th century (New York, 1989), p. 338. See also Heinz Gaube and Eugen Wirth, Aleppo (Wiesbaden, 1984), pp. 191 220; and Keith Watenpaugh, Being modern in the Middle East: Revolution, nation alism, colonialism and the Arab middle class (Princeton, 2006).
14 Sarah Shields, Mosul before Iraq: Like bees making five sided cells (New York, 2000), p. 195. James Reilly, A small town in Syria: Ottoman Hama in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Bern, 2002), p. 73.
15 Beshara Doumani, Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and peasants in Jabal Nablus (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1996), p. 27.
16 Stefan Weber, Damascus: Ottoman modernity and urban transformation (1808 1918), 2 vols. (Aarhuis, 2009).
World History
