Textile Merchants

It is difficult to overestimate the importance of textiles to cultural and material life before and during the Ottoman period. In today’s world, where mass-produced clothes have a very short life and where fleeting fashions ensure a high turnover, it is easy to forget that clothes were valuable property that was maintained with great care and passed from one generation to the next.^[4] In the Islamic court’s method of registering inheritance estates, the long list of personal and business properties always began with an itemization of the deceased’s clothes: each garment was identified and priced, and its condition (old or worn out) was noted.^[5] On average, clothes were more valuable, by far, than were furniture and other household goods in estates registered during the first two-thirds of the nineteenth century. Expensive articles of clothing were a form of savings, akin to precious metals and stones. This was especially true for women, in whose estates clothes represented a significant proportion of the total worth.^[6]

An example is the protracted dispute that followed the sudden death, in 1860, of Umm Dawud,^[7] wife of Abdullah, a middle-class Christian textile merchant in Nablus. Umm Dawud’s mother accused her son-in-law of appropriating the best of his deceased wife’s clothes, thus reducing the pool of property to be divided among the inheritors, of which she was one. Abdullah argued that most of his wife’s clothes actually belonged to his own deceased mother and that he had merely lent them to his wife to wear, but not to possess, in the same manner that his deceased wife lent her clothes to her daughter-in-law. The dispute soon expanded beyond the confines of the immediate family and came to involve both the priest and the secular head of the small Christian community in Nablus. In the last negotiating session, a crowd of animated people ringed a pile of clothing, displaying and arguing the fate of each piece. Eventually the husband was awarded most of the items that his wife’s family claimed to be hers, not his, private property.^[8] Nevertheless, the cash value of the remaining clothes was 3,600 piasters—an amount equal at that time to the average purchase price of a bayt (pl. buyut), or single room in which a nuclear family lived.^[9]

This example also shows that gifts of clothes could be used to establish a set of authoritative relations. Abdullah’s mother established her authority over his wife, Umm Dawud, by giving her clothes. Umm Dawud, in turn, reproduced this set of relations by conferring clothing on her daughter-in-law. It is ironic that the manner by which hierarchical relations between the females of the household became established was used by a male (Abdullah) as an argument against his mother-in-law. In other words, he won partly because he cleverly packaged his argument in a gendered interpretation of local tradition and hierarchy, versus the mother-in-law’s assertion of Umm Dawud’s individual right to property.^[10]

In addition to their monetary value and political uses, clothes were a signifier of multiple shades of social status, wealth, rank, and individual identity, as well as place of origin. The color, form, design, and type of materials used identified the wearer from a distance. More important for our purposes, textiles straddled the shared spaces between social organization, economic relations, and cultural life. Textiles and textile merchants, for instance, played a central role in major religious events—such as id al-fitr (Feast of Breaking the Ramadan Fast, or Lesser Bairam) or, especially, id al-adha (Feast of the Sacrifice, or Greater Bairam)—as well as in personal life events, such as birth, the first day in school, graduation, safe return from the pilgrimage to the Holy Cities of Mecca and Medina, or, most important, weddings.

All of these events were celebrated with the purchase and making of a new set of clothes, or wardrobes, called kiswa, at least for those who could afford them.^[11] In his memoirs, Malik Masri, son of a textile merchant, recalled that in the early part of the twentieth century children did not go to sleep the night preceding id al-adha without first making sure that their holiday clothes were neatly folded and placed next to their beds so that they could quickly put them on the next morning.^[12] Because the acquisition of a new set of clothes was an annual occasion for most people, especially for children, the holidays brought such a rush of orders that tailors and shoemakers in Nablus kept their shops open all night in order to meet the demand.^[13]

The eager anticipation of family members for new holiday clothes also translated into many sleepless nights for the female members of the household who did the sewing. The desire to start the preparations early on is captured in the following letter, from a peasant to a textile merchant three weeks before id al-adha:

The Most Honorable Sir, Noble Brother, Hajj Isma‘il Arafat…

After emphatic regards, we put before you our hope that your most noble person will send us one whole piece [shaqqa] of red-colored dima of good quality. Please let us know the price, and do not worry about the payment at all. With the grace of God, Most High, we will send you its price after the Holiday with the bearer [of this letter], Husayn son of Sulayman al-Muhammad. We implore you not to delay its delivery to us at all, for you are well aware that the Holiday is upon us.…God bless you.

Ibrahim [not clear]

Jaba [village]

April 7, 1901^[14]

Textile wholesalers and retailers were also central to public life in Nablus in terms of cultural and physical space. Of all the various types of traders in this merchant city, they alone were referred to by the simple, generic term “merchant” (tajir), without qualification. All other merchants were identified by the particular commodity they dealt with, such as oil or grains. This predominance reflects the extent to which the meanings of “merchant” and “textiles” were intertwined, no doubt because textile merchants formed the largest subgroup within the merchant community and because Nablus contained a large textile-manufacturing sector.

The shops of textile merchants dominated Khan al-Tujjar (merchant caravansary), the most prestigious and expensive strip of commercial real estate in the city. In his memoirs Muhammad Izzat Darwaza (b. 1887), son of a textile merchant, noted, “From what I remember from my father and through my grandfather, the title merchant or merchants in Nablus mostly referred to owners of commercial textile and cloth shops. In Nablus, these shops were confined, or mostly confined, to a caravansary called Khan al-Tujjar, in the middle of Nablus.”^[15]

Mary Rogers, sister of the British consul in Haifa and a resident of Palestine during the second half of the 1850s, called this market “the finest arcade in Palestine.”^[16] Reverend John Mills, who spent three months in the city between 1855 and 1860 in order to study the Samaritan community, looked with great disdain on Nablus’s Muslim population; but he had only glowing things to say about Khan al-Tujjar:

The principal bazaar is arched, and is very large and fine for Nablus. It is the finest, by far, in Palestine, and equals any, as far as I observed, in the largest towns of the Turkish Empire. This is the clothing Emporium, and is well furnished with the bright silk productions of Damascus and Aleppo—the Abas of Bagdad—calicos and prints from Manchester, in varieties too numerous to be named—as well as the production of the town itself.^[17]

The significance of Khan al-Tujjar also had a great deal to do with its central location, which divided the city in half, not just physically but also psychologically, between “easterners” and “westerners;” labels that are still used today.^[18] For example, during the preparations for the Nabi Musa festival, held near Jericho every year for centuries until it was stopped by the British occupation in the late 1930s,^[19] young men from the eastern and western parts of Nablus descended on Khan al-Tujjar, each shouting slogans praising their part of the city. In the middle of the market they played a game of “catch”: they would face off and make forays into the other side, with the aim of catching the greater number of “prisoners.”^[20]

Khan al-Tujjar was also where many key holidays and events were celebrated. On occasion of the Prophet’s birthday, for example, the textile merchants worked collectively to decorate this market. They spread carpets on the ground and covered the walls with a variety of textiles, including silks. Flowers and dishes of sweets were put on tables brought from their homes especially for the occasion.^[21] After the evening prayers, people would saunter through Khan al-Tujjar, surrounded by merchants who displayed their brightly colored goods, and passed out free candy-covered almonds (mlabbas) and other sweets.^[22]

The critical cultural importance of textile merchants is corroborated by statistical evidence, albeit tentative, which suggests that they constituted the largest group within the merchant community as a whole.^[23] Between 1800 and 1860, 40 percent of the 51 inheritance cases that could be clearly identified as belonging to wholesale merchants were those of textile merchants.^[24] (One must quickly add that most merchants did not specialize in one commodity. Rather, it was common to find at least three commodities—textiles, oil, and grains—in the estates of most merchants.^[25] Assigning an occupation to families on the basis of the major income of their leading members does not fully address this perennial problem in Middle East historiography.) In contrast, the richer and more powerful merchants who specialized in oil and soap came in second, at about 20 percent of the total. They, in turn, were followed by grain merchants at 10 percent; leather merchants at 7 percent; and 7 percent for those dealing with precious metals and currencies. The remaining 16 percent included merchants who specialized in livestock, dried fruit, raw cotton, and a variety of other goods. Textile merchants, in other words, were twice as common as the next three ranking groups combined. Of these 51 cases, textiles were also the second most important commodity listed in the estates of merchants who dealt primarily in soap, oil, grains, or leather.^[26]

Finally, textile merchants were also important because they dealt in a commodity that happened to be the spearhead of European industrialization and a key component of the growing trade between the Ottoman Empire and Europe, especially Great Britain. The changing patterns of regional trade, therefore, shed light on the process of the capitalist integration of Greater Syria, especially its interior towns, into the world economy. Just as important, local networks of textile merchants reveal the connections between merchants and peasants, as we shall see in the case study of the Arafat family.