Reviving the Past and Confronting the Present: Crafts in Syria and Egypt, c. 1875–1925

Abstract

The article considers the ways in which traditional manual crafts in Egypt and Syria adapted to the challenges of the importation of mass-produced goods from Europe and changes in taste among local and foreign purchasers. While some crafts did not prosper in this environment, the evidence from surviving objects and primary sources indicates high levels of experimentation, including the creative use of new materials and technologies. The main part of the article presents a case study concerning four undated inlaid brass stands imitating a Mamluk original made for the sultan al-Nasir Muhammad ibn Qalawun in 1327–28. This stand was first exhibited in 1881, and was reproduced in several publications prior to 1900. The study concentrates on the treatment of the inlaid epigraphy, establishing formal differences between the prototype and the copies, as well as pointing out significant divergences between the copies themselves. The latter part of the case study considers the dissemination of specific motifs from the stand of al-Nasir Muhammad onto other types of Mamluk revival metalwork, such as boxes and trays. This comparative analysis offers a means to understand working practices and interrelationships between workshops.

Keywords:

• Egypt
• Syria
• Ottoman
• metalwork
• Mamluk revival
• imitation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Acknowledgment

I would like to thank Mariam Rosser-Owen for her invitation to take part in the conference at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 2018, and to contribute to this volume. I am also grateful to Mohammad Khaleeq, Erica Dodd, Ayman Salem, Keelan Overton, and the staff of the Doris Duke Foundation for Islamic Art, Shangri La, Honolulu, for their help during the research for this article.

Notes

1 On the interpretation of primary sources of the Ottoman period dealing with crafts and material culture, see Marcus Milwright, The Arts and Crafts of Syria and Egypt from the Ayyubids to World War I: Collected Essays vol. 7 of Islamic History and Thought ed. Peter Adamson et al. (Piscataway NJ: Gorgias Press, 2018), 8–16.

2 John Kelman, From Damascus to Palmyra (Edinburgh: R. & R. Clark, 1908), 8–9, 15, 17, 57–59.

3 Victor Mair, Painting and Performance: Chinese Picture Recitation and its Indian Genesis (Honolulu: University of Honolulu Press, 1988), 120–21, n. 44.

4 On the rise of printed books, see Hala Auji, Printing Arab Modernity vol. 7 of Arts and Archaeology of the Islamic World (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2016). For a theological discussion related to the telegraph by Jamal al-Din al-Qasimi, see Charles Kurzmann, ed. Modernist Islam, 1840-1940: A Sourcebook, trans. David Commins (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 181–87.

5 Ralph Bodenstein, “Sugar and Iron: Khedive Ismail’s Sugar Factories in Egypt and the Role of French Engineering Companies (1867–1875),” Abe Journal: Architecture beyond Europe 5 (2014). http://journals.openedition.org/abe/2498 (accessed August 14, 2019); Mustafa Kabadayı, “Working in the Fez factory in Istanbul in the Late Nineteenth Century: Division of Labour and Networks of Migration Formed Along Ethno-religious Lines,” International Review of Social History 54 Supplement (2009): 69–90.

6 Muhammad Sa‘id al-Qasimi, Jamal al-Din al-Qasimi, and Khalil al-‘Azm (al-Azem), Dictionnaire des métiers damascains, ed. Zafer al-Qasimi in Le Monde d’Outre-Mer passé et présent, Deuxième série, Documents III (Paris: Mouton and Co., 1960). For brief discussions of this text and its aims, see Dominique Chevallier, “A Damas, production et société à la fin du XIXe siècle,” Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales 19, no. 5 (September-October 1964): 966–72; Milwright, Arts and Crafts, 2–16.

7 Vitale Cuinet (d. 1900), quoted in Marcus Milwright, “Metalworking in Damascus at the End of the Ottoman Period: An Analysis of the Qamus al-Sina‘at al-Shamiyya,” in Metalwork and Material Culture in the Islamic World: Art, Crafts and Text. Essays presented to James W. Allan, ed. Venetia Porter and Mariam Rosser-Owen (London: I B Tauris, 2012), 278; Milwright, Arts and Crafts, 246, n. 62.

8 Pierre Bazantay, Enquête sur l’artisanat à Antioche. Les états du Levant sous Mandat Français (Beirut: Imprimerie Catholique, 1936), 37–38. For a translation of the relevant passage, see Marcus Milwright and Evanthia Baboula. “Damascene ‘Trench Art’: A Note on Mamluk Revival Metalwork in Early Twentieth-century Syria,” Levant 46, no. 3 (2014): 393–94.

9 Qasimi, Qasimi and ‘Azm, Dictionnaire, 356 (chapter 252). Discussed in Milwright, Arts and Crafts, 200–201.

10 Ibid., 40–41 (chapter 9: antikjī), 486–87 (chapter 419: naqqāsh). On these groups, see Milwright, “Metalworking in Damascus,” 237–38; Marcus Milwright, “An Arabic Description of the Activities of Antiquities Dealers in Late Ottoman Damascus,” Palestine Exploration Quarterly 143, no. 1 (2011): 8–18.

11 Milwright and Baboula, “Damascene ‘Trench Art’.”

12 The first significant contributions to this field of study are: Estelle Whelan, The Mamluk Revival: Metalwork for Religious and Domestic Use, exhibition booklet (New York: Jewish Museum, 1981); Stephen Vernoit, Occidentalism. Islamic Art in the 19th Century. The Nasser D. Khalili Collection of Islamic Art 23 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press and Azimuth Editions, 1997). Additional information on the topic appears in: Milwright, “Metalworking in Damascus”; Milwright and Baboula, “Damascene ‘Trench Art’”; Marcus Milwright, “Doris Duke and the Crafts of Islamic Syria,” Shangri La Scholars’ Working Papers in Islamic Art 2 (July 2012), 1–20, https://www.shangrilahawaii.org/research/Working-Papers/PDF-13/ (accessed August 9, 2019); Stefan Heidemann, “Late Ottoman Door Knockers from Syria,” in Facts and Artefacts: Art in the Islamic World. Festschrift for Jens Kröger on his 65th Birthday, ed. Annette Hagerdorn and Avinoam Shalem (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2007), 153–78; Sophie Makariou and Carine Juvin, “The Louvre kursi: Function and meaning of Mamluk stands,” in The Arts of the Mamluks in Egypt and Syria – Evolution and Impact, ed. Doris Behrens-Abouseif, Mamluk Studies I (Bonn: Bonn University Press, 2012), 37–53. For primary accounts of the practices of Egyptian and Damascene inlayers, see W. L. Hildburgh, “The Manufacture of Inlaid Brasswork at Cairo,” Journal of the Society of Arts 54 (1906): 215–16; Johannes Kalter, Margareta Pavaloi and Maria Zerrnickel, eds, The Arts and Crafts of Syria: Collection Antoine Touma and Linden-Museum Stuttgart (London and New York: Thames and Hudson and Editions Hansjeorg Mayer, 1992), 64–69.

13 These observations were advanced in Whelan, The Mamluk Revival; Vernoit, Occidentalism, 238–39.

14 Makariou and Juvin, “The Louvre kursi,” 47–49. Al-Nasir Muhammad had three reigns: 1293–94, 1300–1309, and 1310–41.

15 Gaston Wiet, Catalogue général du Musée Arabe du Caire: Objets en cuivre (Cairo: Imprimerie de l’Institut Français d’archéologie Orientale, 1932), 14–18, inventory no. 139. For translations of the stands from the collection of Doris Duke, see Wheeler Thackston “Shangri La Highlights in Translation.” Shangri La Working Papers in Islamic Art 1 (February 2012): 1–22 (see p. 11, no. 4). https://www.shangrilahawaii.org/research/Working-Papers/PDF-14/ (accessed August 9, 2019).

16 For example, see Esin Atıl, Renaissance of Islam: Art of the Mamluks (Washington DC: Smithsonian Press, 1981), 88–91, 96–97, cat. nos. 26, 30.

17 The collection was moved to its present location in 1903. The name was changed to Museum of Islamic Art in 1952.

18 Max Herz, Catalogue sommaire des monuments exposés dans le Musée National de l’Art Arabe (Cairo: G. Legekian & cie, 1895), 50, pls. III–IV.

19 Stanley Lane-Poole, The Art of the Saracens in Egypt (London: Chapman and Hall, 1886. Reprinted, Beirut: Librairie Byblos, n.d.), 187–90, figs. 74, 75. This second stand is also in the Museum of Islamic Art. Lane-Poole may well have been mistaken in his dating (thirteenth century) and his assertion that it came from the complex of Qalawun. See Makariou and Juvin, “The Louvre kursi,” 39–40.

20 Stanley Lane-Poole, Social Life in Egypt: A Description of the Country and its People (London: J. S. Virtue and Co., 1884), plates on 34–35.

21 My thanks to Mohammad Khaleeq and Ayman Salem for providing me with digital scans of these illustrations.

22 Makariou and Juvin, “The Louvre kursi,” 49–50, n. 63. For the biography of Parvis, see also Vernoit, Occidentialism, 238–39.

23 The use of stencils would have facilitated the transmission of designs, and may partly account for the appearance of errors of transcription.

24 The accession numbers are: A = 54.136.1; B = 54.136.2. These items were purchased at auction rather than from one of her Middle Eastern dealers. On her Syrian collection, see Milwright, “Doris Duke.”

25 Erica Dodd informed me that the stand in her collection had been sold to a private buyer.

26 My thanks to Ayman Salem and Keelan Overton for providing me with photographs of these objects. Two more examples, possibly from the workshop of Giuseppe Parvis, are located in the Topkapı Saray Museum. See Makariou and Juvin, “The Louvre kursi,” 49, n. 64.

27 On divisions of labor in present day workshops, see Claudia Kickinger, “Relations of Production and Social Conditions Among Coppersmiths in Contemporary Cairo,” in Crafts and Craftsmen of the Middle East: Fashioning the Individual in the Muslim Mediterranean, ed. Suraiya Faroqhi and Randi Deguilhem. The Islamic Mediterranean (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2005), 285–307.

28 I am grateful to Mohammad Khaleeq for this information. For a brief biography of Sir Frederic (or Frederick) Hewitt, see Edmund Lunney, “Sir Frederick William Hewitt: His Life and Work.” Anesthesis and Analgesia (March–April 1939): 77–79.

29 For example, the entry dealing with the maker of clay pipes (ghalāyin) claims that the only purchasers were bedouin, as they were unable to master the rolling of cigarettes. See Qasimi, Qasimi and ʿAzm, Dictionnaire, 330 (chapter 252). On the use of pipes among the bedouin at this time, see also Philip Baldensperger, The Immovable East (London: Sir I. Pitman and Sons, 1913), 38–39.

30 See comments on decorated wooden furniture in Milwright, “Doris Duke,” 13–15, figs. 15, 16.

31 On this phenomenon, see Jane Hathaway, “Mamluk ‘Revivals’ and Mamluk Nostalgia in Ottoman Egypt,” in The Mamluks in Egyptian and Syrian Politics and Society, ed. Michael Winter and Amelia Levanoni (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2004), 387–406.

32 On the interplay between indigenous and European viewpoints in the architecture of this period, see Mercedes Volait, “Appropriating Orientalism? Saber Sabri’s Mamluk Revivals in Late Nineteenth-Century Cairo,” in Islamic Art in the 19th Century: Tradition, Innovation, and Eclecticism, ed. Doris Behrens-Abouseif and Stephen Vernoit (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2006), 131–55.

33 For examples, see Vernoit, Occidentalism, 220–27, nos. 170–76; Sydney Goldstein, Glass: From Sasanian Antecedents to European Imitations. The Nasser D. Khalili Collection of Islamic Art 15 (London: The Noor Foundation in association with Azimuth Editions, 2005), 316–23, nos. 339–43; Milwright, Arts and Crafts, 218–219, pl. 5.

34 For example, see Milwright, “An Arabic Description”; Anke Scharrahs, “Two Layers of Authenticity: The Damascus Rooms at Shangri-La,” Shangri La Scholars’ Working Papers in Islamic Art 8 (November 2014): 1–25.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Marcus Milwright

Marcus Milwright is Professor of Islamic Art and Archaeology in the Department of Art History and Visual Studies, University of Victoria. He has held research fellowships at the Aga Khan Programs for Islamic Architecture at Harvard and MIT, and the Doris Duke Foundation for Islamic Art at Shangri La (Honolulu). His books include Islamic Arts and Crafts: An Anthology (2018), and he has written a number of articles based on the Dictionary of Damascene Crafts, reproduced in Islamic History and Thought, vol. 7, The Arts and Crafts of Syria and Egypt from the Ayyubids to World War I: Collected Essays (Piscataway NJ: Gorgias Press, 2018).