Medieval Islamic architecture presents the scholar with a fascinating set of histo-riographical problems. Some are methodological; others are related to the nature of the sources, and they are shared by various other branches of research in medieval history such as urban history, topography, and the history of arts and crafts whose inquiries depend on the same sources. Still others are peculiar to the specific domain of architectural history. These last are the most challenging, for they require particular strategies that take into account the disparities in our knowledge of the two basic components needed to reconstruct the history of any architectural object: the physical remains and the contemporary documents related to them. There are three possible kinds of disparity: in the best cases, buildings that are still standing and in fairly good shape can be studied in light of relevant contemporary documents. In more difficult cases, the structures still exist, but supportive documents, written or otherwise, do not. Most difficult of all is when we have documents describing, or referring to, a structure or a group of structures for which we have no visible trace.

A number of Arab countries have been exposed to structural adjustment programs. Under the guidance of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, these programs are aimed at making various kinds of Arab socialist and mixed-economy regimes more “market-friendly,” a policy that started in the 1950s and 1960s in countries like Algeria, Tunisia, Syria, and Egypt. Considering the mounting social tension that results from continuing population growth, urban agglomeration, and unemployment, it would be naive to expect—with Fukuyama—an “end of history” as most countries try to adopt market regimes and to strengthen civil society and parliamentary democracy. As Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406) well knew, economic and social change is a never-ending process. In the search for viable and sustainable strategies it may be stimulating to consider the insights of this great scholar of the Arab world who wrote 600 years ago.

IBN KHALDUN'S SOCIAL SYSTEMS THEORY

Ibn Khaldun was born in Tunis into an influential clan of South Arabian origin with substantial influence in Islamic Spain and, after the fall of Seville in 1248, in north-western Africa. He was exposed to the turmoils of his time. He held his first position in 1352 at the court at Tunis at the age of 20 and then went on to high political, administrative, diplomatic, and judicial posts in the service of various rulers in the Maghrib, Spain, and Egypt.

For over 350 years, Egypt was the largest province of the Ottoman Empire, which had captured it from the Mamluk sultanate in 1517. It is well known that the Ottomans retained key Mamluk usages, above all in subprovincial administration, and that a number of the defeated Mamluks who were willing to cooperate with the new regime were allowed to join the Ottoman administration. In consequence, a number of practices of the Mamluk sultanate survived the Ottoman conquest. Critical administrative offices such as those of pilgrimage commander (amīr al-ḥajj), treasurer (daftardār), and deliverer of the annual tribute to Istanbul (khaznadār) were analogous to offices of the Mamluk sultanate, and the grandees whom the Ottomans installed in these offices were analogous to the Mamluk amirs of the sultanate. Above all, the practice of recruiting boys and young men from the Caucasus as military slaves, or mamluks, and training them as soldiers in households geared to that purpose appears not only to have survived but to have flourished in Ottoman Egypt. By the time of Bonaparte's invasion of Egypt in 1798, in fact, the province's military elite was dominated by Caucasian, and above all Georgian, mamluks. In the face of such apparent similarities with the Mamluk sultanate, it is tempting to define the military society of Ottoman Egypt as a continuation or revival of the sultanate.

From the day in April 1946 when the last French soldiers left and Syrians were finally able to run their own affairs, their policies toward other Arabs have differed significantly, although decreasingly over the years, from the policies pursued by Egyptians. Within their country, Syrian legislators used to privilege Arab over non-Arab foreigners in various respects, including the investment of capital as well as the acquisition of citizenship and political rights, while fewer, if any, advantages of this sort were granted in Egypt Such differences in the treatment of noncitizen Arabs at home have been paralleled by different policies toward other Arab states. Unity schemes, a prominent feature in inter-Arab relations generally, are one key area where approaches diverged quantitatively as well as qualitatively and where favorable attitudes in Syria often contrasted with considerable reluctance on the Egyptian side.

Even before an anthropologist‧s tour de force underlined the power of imagination as creation in narrative constructions of the “nation,” memory, myth, and might had been triumphantly parading the realm of historical scholarship. The torch of objectivity did not have to go cold for the heat of subjectivity to captivate and command audiences through print and signs, visual or aural. It is simply that the cornmodification of the past by the marketplace and the expansive imaginings of power have combined to reduce the once revered craft of the historian to a battlefield where mired imaginings posture as interpretations in a contest in which there are no umpires, only partisans. So it is not necessary to claim objective ground when presumably no such domain exists or even to spin yarns about “authenticity” and “falsification.” But it is possible to make an analytical distinction between the past as invention and the past as inspiration without denying the role of creativity or power in either conception.