The Old Courtyard House or Bayt Arabi is a type of traditional domestic architecture prevalent in Syria. Cities like Aleppo, Damascus and Hama feature examples that range from the modest to the sumptuous, dating from the 16th-18th centuries, featuring distinctive ornate architectural spaces like the qa’a or winter reception room, and decoration such as exquisite wooden wall revetments. Today the Courtyard House is perceived as an essential element of Syrian urban architecture. Museums of Popular Traditions celebrate great mansions with recreated dioramas of daily life in a vaguely defined pre-modern period. In addition especially since the 1990s, many courtyard houses have been refurbished as restaurants, hotels and luxury dwellings, prompting the gentrification of entire neighborhoods (as in the case of Judayda in Aleppo). This paper traces the modern history of the courtyard house. It was not always an object of nostalgic longing. Shortly after independence, it was excoriated as backwards and unhygienic, and many examples were razed during urban modernization schemes. Some Syrian women writers have deplored the drudgery of housekeeping the courtyard house requires. Since the early 1990s, however, Syrian popular culture has witnessed a renewed interest in the visible past. Under the rubric of “al-‘awda ila al-tarikh” (“the return to history”), cultural forms such as television serials focusing on the recent past, filmed in historic settings, are eagerly consumed. Old and new novels set in historic periods and memoirs are widely read. The courtyard house has become a focus of such cultural productions. Anthropologists and historians of contemporary Syria have noted the peculiar trajectories of this specific element from the past from museum displays to reproduction and recontextualization as settings for restaurants, festivals, or nightclubs. These constructions of the past, imbued with nostalgia, often foreground traditional gender roles, that are thus legitimized by their presumed long history. This paper critiques literary constructions of the “Old Courtyard House” and of its physical preservation. It emphasizes the lenses of gender and nostalgia to make explicit how the discursive and physical constructions of the Old Courtyard House perform a political role in the present.

Almost thirty years ago, André Raymond’s study of Aleppo’s urban demography in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries brought attention to Christian population growth in Judayda, the city’s northwestern suburb. The quarter began to develop as early as the fifteenth century, and by the sixteenth century key institutions were established in what would become Aleppo’s Christian quarter. The steady influx of Christians into the city from places as far away as Iran and Anatolia made it so the quarter was over 90% Christian at the turn of the 20th century. The growth of Aleppo’s Christian quarter also coincided with migration of Armenians from Anatolia and Iran. As part of a larger reconstruction of the early history of Aleppo’s Christian quarter based on archival documents from the shari‘a court archives in Syria and the Ottoman archives in Turkey, this paper explores the mostly unknown history of Armenians in the formation of Saliba Judayda quarter. This constructive period will be sharply contrasted with the willful and forced emigration of Armenians, as well as Syria’s Christian population more generally, in the twentieth century. As a result, this pre- and post-war emigration has depleted the quarter (and parts of the city) of much of its historic Christian population. Aleppo’s Armenian population has declined since the 1960s when the population stood at 150,000 to a pre-civil war population of approximately 57,000 in 2012, before the siege of Aleppo in Summer 2012. A city that once hosted most of Syria’s Armenian population, the population has dwindled over the last year as Armenians seek shelter in Lebanon, Turkey, and Armenia, a country offering citizenship to Syrian refugees of Armenian descent. What impact will the current war have on the character of formerly Christian neighborhoods like Judayda (Azzizieh, Sulemaniya, and Maydan, the latter being a quarter severely impacted in the current ‘Battle for Aleppo’)? As entire neighborhoods are flattened and depopulated during the civil war in Syria, how this trend will affect Aleppo’s urban quarters more broadly? What will this historic rupture mean for the writing of Syria’s urban history while both the site and its archives are endangered?

In 1832, Bishara al-Khuri had the unique distinction of becoming the first priest whom the Maronite Church assigned to study and master Islamic law. He would sit at the feet of religious scholars in Damascus, and soon afterwards return to Mt. Lebanon to assume his new duties as the chief Christian expert on Islamic law, for which he earned the sobriquet of ‘Christian mufti’. His career stands at a crossroads in Lebanese history that allows us to reexamine old assumptions about religion and law in the Middle East. Chief among them is that Middle Eastern legal systems have always been profoundly sectarian and divided. Inconveniently for this older model, research on Islamic court records over the past three decades has shown that non-Muslims routinely visited Islamic courts in the towns, which served as the pre-eminent forum of justice for urban populations. What this new research has not settled is the overall structure of the legal system, which is still conceived as a set of parallel courts for each religious community. The career of Bishara al-Khuri contains the outline of a more complicated framework, in which sectarian courts appear as the subsequent product of an Ottoman modernity distorted by European power. In al-Khuri’s youth, most litigation on Mt. Lebanon was still resolved by customary law. Muslim and Christian judges, whenever they intervened, acted primarily as informal arbiters. As al-Khuri came of age in the early nineteenth century, the Maronite Church was grappling with the consequences of a novel campaign promoted (1799) by Bashir II al-Shihabi, emir of the mountain, to enforce Islamic law throughout his domain. To comply with this order, the Maronite Church ultimately decided that it needed its own experts in Islamic jurisprudence, and hence sent off al-Khuri to be trained. The reaction of the church reveals a very different legal culture from what we have hitherto imagined. Far from defending its own ‘courts’, which did not really exist in any systematic form, it prepared to conform with the new dictates of the provincial administration. The construction of a sectarian system would commence only in later decades, which took al-Khuri’s career into unforeseen channels.

This paper provides a reconstruction of the process of identity formation in Mandate Syria through a detailed analysis of the day-to-day life of a Syrian military officer. A fundamental argument of this paper is that the French Mandate system, despite the flowery language provided by the League of Nations, actually helped foster a supranational identity that superseded and outperformed any construction of ‘Syrian’ or ‘French’ identity under the Mandate, as evidenced by the repeated military coups that plagued post-1948 Syrian society. To argue this point, the paper constructs the biography of this individual who served diligently in the Ottoman Army during both the Balkan Wars and World War I before entering into service under Faysal’s army in the brief period of ‘independence’ from 1918-1920. Following his time in the forces Arabes, this individual was recruited into the French Mandate troupes du Levant where he participated in military schooling, and even fought against the Syrian revolt in Jebal Druze in 1925. The paper takes this remarkably flexible military career as a starting point from which to question exactly how individual Syrians under the French Mandate conceived identity and nationalism. While significant studies exist in the historiography of the Hapsburg Monarchy, Germany, and the Ottoman Empire, relatively little exploration into the mindset and lives of career military officers has been made concerning Syria. This research is especially pertinent, as scholars have begun to question simplistic narratives of majority and minority in Syrian and Middle Eastern history. Drawing on diplomatic sources, ranging from League of Nations reports on military and civil education under the Mandate to British documents on French policy in Syria, this paper reconstructs the institutions that were, at least theoretically, intended to create an identity ‘fit’ for representation in the international community. These sources, when coupled with the personal papers of a Syrian military officer, provide us with a more nuanced understanding of how identity and nationalism were conceived in French Mandate Syria. Furthermore, this paper represents a shift in Syrian history that is representative of the changing nature of possible research. Archival research, despite its benefits, appears to be less of an option for emerging historians of Syria. Thus, this paper is a move towards a social history that incorporates the lives of individuals into already existing narratives, in an attempt to provide nuance and personality to what may often be seen as ‘traditional’ diplomatic history.