LOVE PAGEANT: 18th-CENTURY DAMASCUS

 

SAMER AKKACH

 

​In 1749, an unprecedented social event unfolded on the streets of Damascus. A surviving memoir describes a provocative pageant orchestrated and performed by a group of brazen women to celebrate the recovery of a young Turk from a fatal illness, who was one the women’s lover. According to the diarist who recorded the event’s details, the women marched through the city’s marketplaces well dressed, wearing full make-up, and without head covers, letting their hair down and showing off their beauties. Some carried lanterns, candles, and censers; others held tambourins. They sang, clapped, and played the tambourins along the way, while large crowds lined up on both sides of the streets watching, some in amazement and excitement; others in shame and disbelief. In essence, this was a love pageant. It celebrated love openly at a time when men were zealously debating love and lust and their religious and moral implications. The love pageant, which was radically daring even by today’s measures, roamed the city terminating at the shrine of Damascus’ patron Sufi saint (shaykh Arslān), located on the outskirt of the city, where the women held a religious ceremony to thank God for the young lover’s recovery. (Akkach 2015, 77-96)

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The event raises many questions. Who were these remarkably daring women? To what social class did they belong? In what part(s) of the city did the live? Were they making a public statement about love? Were such pageants a common socio-spatial practice in the city? How did the Damascenes see and react to the love pageant? And what was the love pageant’s emotional impact on the city? Surprisingly, and despite the radical change this event represents at the time, we do not have any clues that help us answer these questions. The diarist who recorded the event, a local barber known as al-BudayrĪ, identified the women as the ‘town’s prostitutes’ (shlikkāt -l-balad). His identification has been accepted unchallenged by historians, and the depiction of these brave Damascene women as worthless prostitutes has been instrumental in erasing this radical event from the city’s enduring memories.

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In 1750, a few months after the love pageant, the same barber, al-Budayrī, recalls the joyful memories of a picnic he joined at the beginning of spring, where he and his friends sat in a well-known, elevated recreational spot (al-Sharaf) overlooking the banks of the city’s Baradā River that meanders gracefully along its beautiful valley outside the city’s protective walls. From his elevated spot, the barber could see families and large gatherings picnicking and entertaining at the lower ground next to the riverbanks. In his memoir, he recounts his great surprise to see ‘more women than men, sitting on the riverbank, eating, drinking, smoking, and having coffee all day long, as men usually do’. ‘This is something we have never seen’, the barber exclaimed, ‘nor anyone else before us had, until this time’. (Akkach 2015, 45-75)

The barber’s vivid memories of the city’s open social life are corroborated by other contemporary accounts. In his memoir, contemporary Damascene Catholic Father, Mīkhāʾīl Braik, tells us how Damascene Christians, both males and females, had abandoned the once enforced religious dress code and were able to wear whatever colour and cloth they like (except green). They were also able to trade freely, accumulate wealth, and show off their wealth by building large houses and extravagant palaces. This is unprecedented, F. Braik states, ‘it had never occurred before, nor will occur again’. F. Braik also speaks of the increasing social openness that saw large gatherings in the city’s beautiful parks and gardens, as well as the worrying freedom young Christian women had acquired. Now, he writes, they could meet freely with young men, and smoke and drink coffee in public without hindrance. He also referred to the Christians’ ability to drink wine and Arak in public during their recreational gatherings without the interference of anyone. (Akkach 2015, 97-119)

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These and other similar events that point to increase social freedom in Damascus provide an important reference to the city’s changing cultural and emotional character in mid-18th century. Surviving accounts indicate that the city witnessed radical social change, mostly during the relatively long rule of the local governor Asʿad Bāshā al-ʿAẓm (1743-1758), when the city enjoyed political stability and economic prosperity. (Shamir 1963; Akkach 2015, 161-86) The unprecedented liberal spatial practices and daring presence of women in the city’s public spaces testify to this radical development. The barber, who recorded what he had witnessed and heard over 21 years (1741-1762), felt confidently entitled to record the history of the city. This is an important part of the city’s social transformation. (Sajdi 2013) His remarkable memoir, written in informal local dialect, presents details ranging from mundane lists of prices of grocery items (rice, sugar, bread, oil, etc), to pilgrimage news, to major political plots and circumstances of wars, to the provocative activities of the city’s ‘prostitutes’.

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The barber’s account has not been rigorously cross-examined to establish the accuracy and validity of his claims. Contemporary Arab, especially Damascene, historians of 18th-century Damascus accepted the barber’s and priest’s narratives at face value. While being excited about the new social changes sweeping the city, both the barber and the priest were highly critical of the increased social liberty and personal freedom. Upholding his Catholic moral values, the priest launched a scathing attack on Damascene Christian women, whose shameful behaviours brought disrespect to the Church and the community. Likewise, the Muslim barber was equally dismissive of the women’s disgraceful performance, portraying them as ‘prostitutes’. Both positions reflect the Damascene society’s religious conservatism. They cloud our understanding of the real significance of the love pageant and women acting ‘as men usually do’. The diarists emotional reactions have obviously influenced the (mis)reading of the history of the city during this period, with the majority of contemporary Arab historians taking the same emotional stance and seeing these changes as signs of moral decadence and religious decline. While these hasty emotional conclusions can be easily contested by rational analyses of the details recorded in these and other memoirs, the dominating collective impression of this period remains very negative, thanks largely to rise of the Eurocentric Enlightenment narrative and its wholesale adoption by 19th-centry Arab historians. (Akkach 2007)

 

References

Akkach, Samer. 2015. Damascene Diaries: A Reading of the Cultural History of Ottoman Damascus in the Eighteenth Century. Beirut: Bissan.

Akkach, Samer. 2007. ‘Abd al-Ghani al-Nabulusi: Islam and the Enlightenment. Oxford: Oneworld.

Sajdi, Dana. 2013. The Barber of Damascus: Nouveau Literacy in the Eighteenth-Century Ottoman Levant. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Shamir, Shimon. 1963. “Asʿad Pasha al-ʿAzm and Ottoman Rule in Damascus,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 26,1: 1-28.