A wide range of works on the history of economic life and social institutions of the pre-colonial East, including the Arab countries, have appeared in recent years in Western European and American bourgeois orientalism. A special place among them is occupied by a series of publications devoted to the social structure and role of the city in the "traditional" (medieval) Muslim society1 . Various aspects of this problem, such as the specifics of the internal organization of a Muslim city of the Middle Ages, the specifics of its economic functions, and the system of city - village relations, have become the subject of extensive scientific discussion. In the 1960s and 1970s, they were discussed at a series of symposia convened by groups of specialists in Islam and Middle Eastern history from the Sorbonne, Oxford University, and the University of Pennsylvania ^.2 Several monographs have been published that present the results of specific studies (mainly based on the material of medieval Egyptian and Syrian cities), as well as generalizing schemes that create a collective, conditional image of a traditional Muslim city.

The discussion, which was initiated by a colloquium held in Oxford (1965), was attended by such authoritative scientists as K. Caen - Professor at the Sorbonne, founder of the Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, A. Khurani-professor at a number of American and Beirut universities I. M. Lapidus-professor at Cambridge University, author of studies on the history of Cairo, Damascus and other Middle Eastern cities, whose theoretical views found a wide response among specialists and had a great influence on modern concepts of the city's place in the socio-economic structure of Arab - Muslim societies. In the 1970s, works on the social history of Cairo were published by S. Staffa, a Dutch researcher, and J. Abu-Lugod, a professor at Princeton University, a specialist in sociology and urban issues ^.3 A series of local-historical studies focused on a comprehensive and detailed study of the economic life, topography, architecture and social anatomy of a single city (from the time of its foundation to the present day or in the chronological framework of a certain era) was continued by the works of American historians K. L. Brown, W. Spencer, and J. Abou - Lugod's publication on the Moroccan capital Rabat ⁴ .

¹ As K. Z. Ashrafyan notes, an important reason for the growing interest in the history of the city in the East "was the modern process of urbanization, which takes place in the conditions of stability of pre-bourgeois, traditional ties, which are partially modified and penetrate into the modern capitalist socio-economic structure" (K. Z. Ashrafyan, Medieval City of India of the XIII-mid-XVIII century, Moscow, 1983, p. 8).

² The Islamic City. A Colloquium. Oxford and University of Pennsylvania Press. 1970; Shevallier D. (avec colrab. A. H. Sobhi et alia). L'espace social de la ville arabe P. 1979.

³ Abu-Lughod I. L. Cairo: 1001 Years of the City Victorious, Princeton, 1971; Staffa S. J. Conquest and Fusion: The Social Evolution of Cairo A. D. 642 - 1850. Leiden. 1977.

⁴ Brown K. L. People of Sale. Tradition and Change in a Moroccan City 1830 - 1930. Cambridge (Mass), 1976; Spencer W. Algiers in the Age of the Corsairs. Norman. 1976; Abu-Lughod J. L. Rabat: Urban Apartheid in Morocco. Princeton. 1980.

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The study of territorial and social microstructures of a traditional Muslim city (neighborhoods, ethnic and religious communities), as well as the study of economic and socio-cultural relations between a city and a rural district based on country and narrow-regional material, has also developed significantly in foreign historiography in recent years. G. Baer, a specialist in the economic history of Egypt and other Middle Eastern countries, published in the United States and England, made a great contribution to the development of this problem ^.5

Most historians of Oriental studies working in Western Europe and the United States use the terms "feudalism" and "feudal system" (respectively, "feudal city") with significant reservations, or avoid them altogether. A significant number of authors question the correctness of the definition of medieval Arab and Arab-Ottoman societies as feudal because they did not possess a number of features characteristic of "classical" feudalism (the system of vassalage, the hierarchy of estates, the presence of large land ownership, etc.). At best, the emergence of temporary, unstable feudal institutions or "quasi-feudal" structures in Arab countries is recognized. In bourgeois historiography, there is also a tendency to completely deny the possibility of using abstractions and categories developed on the basis of studying European countries to analyze the social reality of the East. Many scholars prefer to use the terms "traditional" Arab (Muslim) society, "traditional institutions", and "traditional structures", meaning forms of social relations that existed in the pre-colonial era or before the direct collision with Western civilization, i.e. before the beginning and middle of the XIX century. ⁶ The concept of "traditional" in relation to the city, depending on the context, takes on the meaning of "pre-colonial" or"pre-industrial". (We can also talk about a modern city, but not involved in the modernization process).

As a rule, in foreign literature, the features of the urban system of the Arab Middle Ages are determined from the perspective of comparative analysis, by direct comparisons with the model of the European city . At the same time, researchers ' attention is focused on identifying contrasting features in the processes of evolution of medieval societies in the West and the Islamic East. Considering the formation of forms of urban life in the Arab region, historians note such features as the continuity of urban tradition, the impressive scale of economic growth of cities in the early Middle Ages, when Europe was experiencing a prolonged period of deurbanization, and at the same time-the inertia of the city as an element of the socio-political system (in contrast to the active role of cities in societies).

Indeed, the high level of population concentration in cities and, in some cases, the leading importance of the city as an economic center determined the peculiarity of the early stage of development of feudal states that developed on the territory of the Eastern and Southern Mediterranean after the Arab conquests of the VII-early VIII centuries. In the Arab Caliphate, urban development was intensive, large administrative centers were created anew, many ancient capitals and provincial cities continued to exist, long-distance trade and a network of "caravan cities" along its routes developed ^.7

⁵ Ваеr G. Village and City in Egypt and Syria 1500 - 1914. In: Udovitch A. L. (ed.) The Islamic Middle East 700 - 1900: Studies in Economic and Social History. Princeton. 1981; ejusd. Fellah and Townsman in the Middle East. Studies in Social History. Lnd. 1982.

⁶ For more information, see: Smilyanskaya I. M. The study of the traditional socio-economic structure of Arab countries in the XVIII-early XIX centuries in Western European and American historiography of the 60s. In: Modern Historiography of the countries of the Foreign East, Moscow, 1975.

⁷ It is estimated that in Southern Mesopotamia (Sawada), Egypt, and pre-Mongol Central Asia, the proportion of urban residents ranged from 20 to 30%. Cities with a population of 100 thousand people or more were not uncommon. According to experts, in the central regions of the Muslim world (Egypt, Syria, Iraq), the development of cities in terms of quantitative indicators approximately corresponded to the level reached in the late Roman and Byzantine times. In the first centuries of Islam, urban life received an impetus for development, for example, in Central Asia, which previously did not have a large population.

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The continuity of urban tradition was one of the most striking features that distinguished the countries that entered the area of Arab-Islamic civilization from Western Europe, where the transition from antiquity to the Middle Ages was accompanied by a shift in the center of gravity of economic and social life to the village community, a reduction in the sphere of commodity and money exchange was observed, appearance. Karl Marx's remark that "in the Middle Ages (German era) the village as such is the starting point of history" is widely known ^.8 The city was formed in the conditions of Europe only from the turn of the XI century and became the focus of forces that were in conflict with the feudal order. The development of productive forces and the deepening of the social division of labor serve as the basis for the accelerated rise of cities. In the Islamic East, during the same period, the growth of the urban population, which continued in some countries, and in Egypt, which apparently reached its apogee in the XIII - XIV centuries, did not indicate progressive shifts in the structure and nature of social production, or changes that heralded a transition to a higher stage of stage-formation development. The city remained an integrated part of the feudal system; there was a rich merchant class, but not a layer of burghers, there were uprisings of the urban lower classes, but there was no struggle for urban autonomy.

In general, the second half of the Middle Ages is a period of urban decline in the Arab-Muslim region; this trend is expressed in different countries at different times, but in the XV - XVII centuries it becomes almost universal and is one of the signs of slowing down, if not regressing, the overall pace of development of these countries in the sphere of culture and material production. A comparison of the historical destinies of Europe and the Middle East has led many authors to conclude that it was the absence of a phase of struggle for urban autonomy, and as a result - the invariably subordinate position of the city in relation to the centers of state power, that was the key moment of the Arab Middle Ages. This fact explains the whole course of the historical process, the stagnation of society, the lack of the genesis of capitalism on its own basis.

S. Stern, one of the participants of the colloquium of 1965, describes the dichotomy of the development of medieval European and Muslim civilization as follows: "Islamic civilization in many respects directly continued the traditions of late antiquity: centralized bureaucratic management, active industrial and commercial activity of cities - all this was the legacy of the previous era. Such continuity in the sphere of social life was not observed in the Latin-German West, where various circumstances led to the formation of a feudal system instead of a centralized state, to the disappearance of cities... However, since the beginning of the eleventh century, Western Europe has been accelerating its development; trade and cities have been reviving. These processes were accompanied by an amazing flourishing of corporate municipal institutions. Citizens unite and oppose the feudal lords, win the city's charter of liberties... In the Muslim world, there was nothing like a communal movement, only an ephemeral appearance of elements of urban autonomy. " ⁹ Continuing his point, Stern argues that Islamic society, by its very nature, could not create the prerequisites for the formation of any secular corporate institutions, and the absence of a municipal organization is only a special case of this phenomenon. ¹⁰

such an extensive network of urban settlements, and in such areas (western, central Maghreb), where the "urbanization" of the ancient era left a superficial trace and most of the cities founded under Roman rule by the time of the appearance of the Arabs had already been in ruins for several centuries (see Belenitsky A.M., Bentovich I. B., Bolshakov O. G. Medieval city of Central Asia. L. 1973; Histoire du Maroc. P.-Casablanca. 1967, pp. 39-40).

⁸ K. Marx and F. Engels Soch. Vol. 46, part 1, p. 470.

⁹ Stern S. M. The Constitution of the Islamic City. In: The Islamic City, pp. 31 - 36.

¹⁰ This thesis is supported by A. Khurani, according to whom political independence in the form of urban autonomy, as well as a corporate organization on a professional basis, similar to the European workshop, could not exist in the Russian Federation.

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In the search for causality of phenomena that determined the specifics of the Muslim city, representatives of Western Oriental studies offer a number of interpretations aimed at identifying factors of a sociological order. A conceptual scheme developed by the American scientist I. Lapidus attracted special attention in the circles of specialists. In general terms, it is reduced to the theses about the internal "split" of the Muslim city (mosaic of its social structures) and the absence of the opposite between the city and the village. In a series of works published in the late 60s, ¹¹ Lapidus revised many of the ideas that existed before him in the Oriental literature, in particular the point of view of experts on Arab culture G. Gibb and G. Bowen, who believed that in the world of Islam there was a sharp line between the city and the countryside. He put forward the proposition that urban and rural environments in the Middle East were of the same type in the social sense and formed a continuum-not an antithetic pair; the Muslim city was distinguished only as a spatial and geographical reality, a "physical entity".

According to the views of Lapidus, supported and developed in the works of S. Staffa and J. Abu Lugod, the cities of the Middle East, even the largest of them, did not form a single social organism, but were a sum of separate communities, enclosed within urban neighborhoods and differing in ethno-cultural and religious foundations of their life. Clearly marked out in the city itself (often surrounded by walls) neighborhoods that united Christians, Jews, Sunni Muslims, Shiites, adherents of different sects, Sharia schools, or simply people from one area, were micro-societies with a certain mechanism of internal management and regulation. Neighborhoods sometimes acquired a special role in economic life - economic specialization, but they did not become socially homogeneous. In cities such as Damascus, Aleppo, and Cairo, "there were no areas dominated by a particular class." ¹² The city blocks were populated by both rich and poor, they usually had their own plebs and intermediate layers, their own top, which was made up of prominent ulema and merchants or emirs, surrounded by their own clientele.

Being rather isolated in relation to each other, inner - city ethno-religious communities, Lapidus emphasizes, turned out to be closely connected with one or another related group of the rural population. He argues that a Muslim city can be considered as a collection of villages concentrated on one territory ^.13 This idea is also developed by the English orientalist B. Turner, from the point of view of whom the inner life of cities in the Muslim world was an unstable balance of forces in a system of cells-quarters, and this system itself was in fact a projection of the tribal, family-clan organization of the village ^.14 The alienation and contradictions that existed between the narrow, self-sufficient communities into which the urban population was divided were, in Turner's opinion, a permanent factor that prevented citizens from forming into a class that was aware of its unity, as was the case in Western Europe.

The idea of a pronounced, even physical disunity among the population of a Muslim city is central to Abu Lugod's work. By establishing a link between epochs, it seeks to show that the fragmentary nature of the traditional (pre-industrial) city also passes into the fabric of the social organism of the Arab cities of modern times, giving a special color to the modern process of urban development.-

in the Arab world, because it would contradict the very philosophy of Islam, which presupposed the comprehensive solidarity of the Muslim community (Ummah) in the face of the divine will (Hourani A. The Islamic City in the Light of Recent Research. In: The Islamic City, p. 14).

¹¹ Lapidus I. M. Muslim Cities in the Later Middle Ages. Cambridge. (Mass.) 1967; ejusd. Muslim Cities and Islamic Societies. In: Middle Eastern Cities. Berkley - Los Angeles. 1969; ejusd. Muslim Urban Society in Marniuk Syria. In: The Islamic City.

¹² Lapidus I. M. Muslim Cities in the Later Middle Ages, p. 87.

¹³ Ibid., p. 95, ejusd. Muslim Urban Society in Mamluk Syria, p.199.

¹⁴ Turner B. S. Weber and Islam. A Critical Study. Lnd. 1974, p. 103.

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locations. In his extensive work on Cairo, Abu-Lugod draws attention to the reflection of the specifics of the city's social life in the outline of its geographical plan. (She writes that her goal is to study history not from high places, but from the maze of narrow streets in Cairo.) The paper concludes that in Egypt and other Arab countries, the lack of urban autonomy was explained, firstly, by the fact that the city was not a refuge from the feudal lord, a place where a person could find freedom, but by the "domain of the feudal lord" (a point of concentration of the ruling class), and secondly, by the fragmentation of the city, the fact that that all its layers, the elite (Ayyans) and the lower mass, broke up into a kaleidoscope of cells formed along the lines of kinship ties, ethno-religious affiliation. Among the majority Muslims, the situation of religious disunity was maintained due to the development of the system of religious fraternitys15 .

Thus, in modern Western orientalism, there is an idea of a high degree of heterogeneity and even a peculiar caste of the traditional Arab city. The conclusions and conclusions of individual authors are summarized in the thesis that the fragmentation and atomization of the Muslim city caused by the ethno-confessional heterogeneity of the population provided the ruling class (for example, in Egypt, the Mamluk xenocracy) with the opportunity, acting as an arbiter, to keep the city in subjection, use it as the main support of power; and this situation determined the stagnation of forms of social life, despotism.

In connection with the problem of urban autonomy, the Western literature of the 60s - 70s raised the question of the role of guild organizations in the cities of the Muslim world, the degree of their similarity and difference from the European medieval guilds. Some experts admit that some elements of the guild organization were inherited from the Byzantine era, while others believe that professional guilds arose in the late Middle Ages on the basis of religious unions in the mainstream of the Sufi movement (a mystical trend in Islam). Despite the controversy over the origin of the workshops, it has become more or less generally accepted that in Arab and other Muslim cities, trade and craft categories ("sinf", "taifa")are considered to be more or less common. they were not a civil corporate institution, an association similar to the workshop of medieval Western Europe ¹⁶ . They served as an instrument of state control, an additional lever through which the central apparatus directly controlled the urban population - tax collection, purely police functions ,regulation of production. ¹⁷ Such authors as G. Baer and E. Hershlag express the opinion that it was the state, including the Ottoman authorities, that initiated the creation and design of the guild system in order to ensure the loyalty of citizens and strengthen their economic positions ^.18

Some experts attach great importance to the fact that in Arab society, where patriarchal traditions played a major role, various kinds of group ties were constructed or interpreted as family-kinship relations ^.19 The thesis about the primacy of "family principles" of social organization, which gave stability to inner-city communities, is developed in the book by S. Staffa, devoted to the socio-economic history of Cairo from the early Middle Ages to the middle of the XIX century. The author emphasizes that Cairo society was permeated from bottom to top by a system of real or conditional family ties. Staffa writes, for example, that the ruling class of Egypt, recruited from foreign slaves, Mamluks, who belonged to the sultan or his family.

¹⁵ Abu - Lughod J. L. Cairo, p. 70.

¹⁶ The Cambridge History of Islam. Vol. II. Cambridge. 1970, pp. 529 - 530.

^17K. Kazn considers it generally undesirable (distorting the meaning) to translate the Arabic-Turkish term "sinf" and its equivalents with the words "corporation" or "guild" (Cahen C. Y-a-t-il eu des corporations professionnelles dans le monde musulman classique? In: The Islamic City, pp. 61 - 62).

¹⁸ Baer G. Egyptian Guilds in Modem Times. Jerusalem. 1964; ejusd. Fellah and Townsman, pp. 149 - 222; Hershlag Z. L. Introduction to the Modern Economic History of the Middle East. Leiden. 1964.

¹⁹ See Smilyanskaya I. M. UK. soch., p. 78.

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The emirate was divided into " bayts "(houses), whose members considered themselves brothers. Each Mamluk Beit had as its seat, stronghold, and zone of influence a specific quarter of Cairo, subjugating it and drawing the population into the extended family structure ^.20

The idea of a patriarchal-family organization of a traditional city comes to the fore in the works of the French orientalist D. Chevalier, who proceeds from the general idea that the tradition of marriage within patrilineal groups was a distinctive feature of Arab culture and a determining factor in the social life of both the village and the city. ²¹

According to the theory of D. Chevalier, the whole complex of social relations and interpersonal ties in an Arab city was determined by the kinship system. An individual's self-awareness and attitude towards another person was determined primarily by belonging to a particular family clan. D. Chevalier considers the features of the traditional city through the prism of its spatial structure. Therefore, he began by criticizing the widespread opinion in the literature that the urban architecture of the Muslim Middle Ages carried an irrational beginning, that it differed from the strictly ordered ancient model of urban planning by spontaneous, "anarchic" development. (Such a concept was put forward at one time by the French orientalist J. R. R. Tolkien. Sovaget, a major specialist in the architecture and history of ²² Syrian cities, is supported by his students.)

Rejecting the idea of the unsystematic urban development of the Muslim era, Chevalier believes that the organization of the space of the Arab city had its own logic and regularities, "it was dictated by the structure of the social organism and its life" ²³ . According to Chevalier, the contradictory principles of religious and social ethics are transmitted in the architectural ensembles of Arab cities. Cubic forms of residential development are the best way to limit enclosed spaces (house, block) and ensure the isolation of a tribal or family clan. Above the mass of buildings rise the arrows of minarets, symbolizing the idea of the absolute and linking the city into a whole.

Chevalier's concept is in line with the school of "Annals", whose representatives widely use the method of structuralism and, focusing on local laws of the historical process, attach particular importance to identifying the specifics of demographic and ethnological characteristics of the studied societies. Chevalier's hypothesis about the family model of organization of traditional Arab society largely coincides with the ideas of the Maghreb specialist L. Valensi (Professor at the Sorbonne, scientific secretary of the Annales magazine), who has written a number of works on the economic history of North African countries at the turn of the Middle Ages and modern times. ²⁴ Valancy believes that the concept of "feudal mode of production" is not applicable to characterize the social system of pre-colonial North Africa. It defines the Maghreb society of the XVIII-early XIX centuries. as archaic (segmental), the foundation of the social and political organization of which was blood relations ²⁵ . Genealogical tradition, Valensi writes, determined the worldview of the people of that time and their idea of the past-

²⁰ Staffa S. J. Conquest and Fusion, pp. 124 - 132.

²¹ This concept is most fully described by Chevalier in the theoretical part of his book on mountain Lebanon (Chevallier D. La societe du Mont Liban a l'epoque de la revolution industrielle en Europe. P. 1971).

²² Sauvajet J. Alep. Essai sur le developpement d'une grande ville syrienne des origines au milieu du XlX-e siecle. P. 1941; ejusd. Le plan antique de Damas. - Syria, t. XXVI (1949); ejusd. Esquisse d'une histoire de la ville de Damas. Revue des Etudes islamiques, t. VIII (1934).

²³ Chevallier D. L'espace social de la ville arabe, p. 8.

²⁴ Valensi L. Le Maghreb avant la prise d'Alger (1790 - 1830). P. 1969; ejusd. Fellahs Tunisiens. L'economie rurale et la vie des campagnes aux XVIII-е et XIX-e; siecles. P. 1975; ejusd. The Tunisian Fellaheen in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries. In: The Islamic Middle East, pp. 709 - 724.

²⁵ Galissot R., Valensi L. Le Maghreb precolonial: Mode de production archaique ou mode de production feodal? - La Pensee, 1968, N 142; Valensi L. Archaisme de la societe maghrebine. In: Sur le Feodalisme (Centre d'etudes et de recherches marxistes). P, 1971.

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lom: "The individual existed in a system of concentric circles, the largest (extreme) of which was a tribe or group of related tribes that traced their origin to a single mythical ancestor." ²⁶

The idea of a segmental type of organization of Arab society has become widespread in modern Western literature. This idea is carried out, for example, by Tunisian researchers F. Istanbul and A. Zgalem in the description and analysis of the social structure of pre-colonial Maghreb cities. Although the population in the Arab countries of North Africa was relatively homogeneous in ethnic terms and did not differ in confessional fragmentation, nevertheless, they believe, North Africa did not know the real development of urban self-government. The periods of independent cities in the Maghreb may have been relatively long, but these cities never developed into autonomous communes of the European type. According to these authors, the reason for the absence of such a phenomenon as urban autonomy was the specific interaction between the structural elements of society as a whole and the city as a part of it. The urban population, like the rural population and the nomadic steppe tribes, was constantly divided into factions, warring leagues (called "leff" or "soff"). These associations had a supra-ethnic character, went beyond professional, religious and cult ties, and at the same time were "artificial formations", having neither a class nor an economic basis. Just one group of city blocks joined a coalition against another part of the same city blocks. The fact that the city was constantly divided into two or three hostile factions significantly limited the ability of citizens to form a " communal consciousness "and allowed the central government to assert its positions. ²⁷

It is easy to see that the above-mentioned system of views, which became widespread in foreign historiography in the 60s-70s, reproduces in many elements the ideas of M. Weber, who in his works on the history of economy and world civilizations formulated the position of the actual absence of the city - as a social phenomenon-in Muslim countries and in the East as a whole. Speaking about Asian countries, Weber emphasized that "autonomous governance and, most importantly, the corporate character of the city and the concept of the citizen as opposed to the peasant were either completely unknown to them or only partially known and then in the form of weak hints" ²⁸. Following Weber, who saw the main source of differences between the destinies of the East and the West in the peculiarities of the sphere of consciousness, in the system of moral values and ethical norms accepted by society (and within this concept contrasted Christianity with Islam), some specialists dealing with the problem of the Muslim city tend to attach decisive importance to the social function of religion. For example, Khurani, while finding significant inaccuracies in Weber's interpretation of Islam, emphasizes the fruitfulness of his conceptual approach to the question of the influence of religion on the socio-economic development of society. ²⁹

From the point of view of other researchers, the significance of Weber's views for today's science lies not so much in his thesis - a very controversial one - about the relationship between religion and economics, but in sociological observations and analysis of the political structures of various societies and civilizations, in particular Eastern despotisms ^.30 It is known that Weber justified the idea of the exclusivity of Christianity, especially the Protestant Church, by proving that its ethical attitudes had a close connection with the development of the "spirit of capitalism". He argued that Christianity was the religion that prepared European society for rational development.-

²⁶ Valensi L. The Tunisian Fellaheen, pp. 710 - 712.

²⁷ Zgnal A., Stambouli F. La vie urbaine au Maghreb precolonial. - Annuaire de l'Afrique du Nord, 1973, Vol. XI, pp. 191 - 199.

²⁸ Weber M. Gorod. Pg. 1923, p. 21.

²⁹ Hourani A. Europe and the Middle East. Lnd. 1980, pp. 71 - 72; ejusd. The Islamic City, pp. 14 - 15.

³⁰ Turner B. S. Op. cit.

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a new way of thinking and the formation of a capitalist worldview ³¹ . Considering the flourishing of civil corporate institutions of the medieval city in Western Europe as the most important prerequisite for bourgeois society, Weber explained the possibility of the emergence of such institutions by the peculiarities of religious consciousness and the sphere of cult life.

Most modern Western Orientalists, including Turner, who has specifically analyzed Weber's theory and his assessments of traditional Muslim society, agree that the German scholar's interpretation of Islam as a "warrior religion" was fundamentally wrong. At the same time, Turner is convinced that Weber's final conclusions and his characterization of the Muslim city as a system with extremely weak interrelation of its constituent elements are confirmed by the latest sociological research. According to Turner, Protestant ethics did not play such a decisive role in the development of the "spirit of capitalism" and it was not the ideology of Islam that hindered the formation of a capitalist economy in Arab countries, but a special type of social life of the urban population, different from that in Europe, the relationship between the city and the countryside, between the city and the military-bureaucratic elite, authorities ³² .

An in-depth analysis of the ethnographic features of the Near-Eastern cities, contained in the works of foreign orientalists published over the past decades (including Lapidus, Abu Lugod), sheds light on many poorly studied aspects of the social history of Arab countries. However, the theoretical constructions created on the basis of these specific sociological studies suffer from a one-sided and mechanistic approach. Many researchers attempt to interpret the patterns of development of the eastern city, based only on the internal conditions of its existence, and absolutize the role of factors related to the specifics of the internal mechanism of the organization of urban society. Finally, it is very controversial to say that the urban and rural environment were of the same type and merged as a phenomenon that characterized traditional Muslim society. By the way, there are clear disagreements on this issue in the Oriental literature.

English orientalists H. Gibb and G. Bowen, authors of works on the culture of Islam, once argued that the contrast between city and country that exists in any society was nowhere more pronounced than in the medieval Muslim world: "It was a complete contrast between two different civilizations." A similar idea was expressed by the French orientalist J. Velers, who studied the Syrian village ³³ . In recent studies (under the noticeable influence of Lapidus ' works), a different, directly opposite conceptual scheme has begun to prevail. However, we must admit that it is not accepted by everyone. In a number of works of Arabists, the thesis develops that in the countries of North Africa and the Middle East, the interaction of three elements was crucial: a city - a nomadic steppe - a settled village. Since in the economy of medieval Arab states, for example, S. Amin points out, the leading role was played not by their own production, but by income from transit trade, a symbiosis was formed between ^the city and nomadic tribes, thanks to which long-distance trade was carried out34 . The peasant world, Amin writes, was alien to this " commercial civilization." In the Levant, where there was linguistic unity, peasant communities were separated in religious terms (Druze, Maronites, etc.). In the Maghreb, where the Sunni sense of Islam prevailed and the population was homogeneous along confessional lines, the peasants were isolated in the mountains, preserving the Berber language and customs. ³⁵

³¹ M. Weber History of the farm. Essay on general social and economic history. Pg. 1923, pp. 220-221.

³² Turner V. S. Op. cit., p. 173.

³³ Gibb H. A., Bowen Н. Islamic Society and the West. Vol, l, pt. I. Lnd. 1950, p. 276; Velers J. Peasants of Syria and Lebanon, Moscow, 1952.

³⁴ Amin S. Unequal Development. N. Y. - Lnd. 1976, pp. 32 - 38.

³⁵ Ibid., pp. 13 - 58; ejusd. La nation arbe: Nationalisme et Lutte des classes. P. 1976, p. 10.

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Baer took a special position. In his last articles and book (1982), he developed the idea that there was no single system of city - village relations for the entire Middle East (Arab or Muslim world). The authors ' methodological mistake in trying to create a generalizing model was, according to Baer, the generalization of phenomena characteristic of a certain period and a very specific area, locality, or country ^.36 In fact, there was a variety of local variants, due to historical and cultural features, the specifics of the natural environment of individual regions. In addition, the nature of relations between the city and the countryside changed over time. Baer argues that the Lapidus scheme, based mainly on the material of Aleppo and Damascus in the 11th and 15th centuries, is not applicable to describe the types of economic and social relations between urban and rural environments that developed in Egypt and Syria during the Ottoman period.

Speaking about Egypt, Baer first of all draws attention to the fact that contemporaries perfectly understood the differences between the city and the countryside in terms of living conditions and material life. No less profound was the contrast between culture and religion. Baer believes that in economic terms, contacts between town and village in Ottoman Egypt were extremely weak. Thanks to a sufficiently developed domestic handicraft industry, the village provided itself with handicrafts, the set and quality of which corresponded to the needs of the population with a low standard of living ^.37 At the same time, the Egyptian city met a significant part of its agricultural needs at the expense of its own production and depended only on grain supplies. But they were carried out not through trade exchange, but in the form of in-kind taxes levied on the peasants. In general, the exchange of goods between the city and rural areas was very limited.

Without entering into a direct polemic with the authors who defended the idea of uniformity of city and village in the Arab East, including in medieval Egypt, Baer argues that during the period of Ottoman rule, the watershed between urban and rural society in this country was very sharp. An important role was played by the fact that the dominant social stratum (the Turkish-Mamluk elite), concentrated in the capital, almost completely represented an ethnically alien, foreign-speaking element. The influx of population to the cities was almost nonexistent. If a fellah appeared in the city, it was only for a short time: to pay a late tax, to settle some business with a multazim (a person who received from the state the right to collect taxes from a certain village or district). In rare cases, farmers or their children went to the city for permanent residence. Two factors - the stagnation of the urban economy and a strict system of regulating production through workshops-closed the city, preventing migration from the countryside. Baer notes the absence of any urban growth during the Ottoman period. The population of Cairo declined from 500,000 in 1512 to 260,000 in 1798., at the same time, the Egyptian capital concentrated 2/3 of the total urban population of the country. If a peasant left the village for some reason (tax oppression, the tyranny of the multasim and their agents), his refuge was not the city, but remote desert or mountainous areas ^.38

According to Baer, the text of the 17th-century literary monument "Rural Joys in the Explanations to the Qasidah of Abi Shaduf"shows how clearly contemporaries realized the opposite of the city and the village, saw differences in the way of life of the Fellahs and citizens in all aspects, up to religious beliefs and rituals. This is a collection of stories about the life of the Fellahs, anecdotes related to their adventures during random visits to the city. "Rural Joys" is a rare, perhaps unique, work of the grotesque genre, which has no analogues in the Egyptian written tradition and in Arabic literature in general ^.39 It is not for nothing that the interpretation of its content, as well as the question of the subject, is considered.-

³⁶ Ваеr G. Fellah and Townsman, p. 107.

³⁷ Baer G. Village and City, p. 602.

³⁸ Ibid., p. 605; ejusd. Fellah and Townsman, p. 13.

³⁹ Baer G. Fellah and Townsman, p. 37.

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the author's motives have been the subject of intense controversy. It is written in the form of a poem, allegedly composed by a certain Abi-Shaduf, and comments on it by the real author, the Cairo Ulama Yusuf Al-Shirbini. The author contrasts the refined urban order with the rural way of life, expresses in every possible way his contempt for the peasantry, rural labor, and the countryside in general, emphasizes the rudeness of the Fellahs, the depravity of their morals, and the ignorance of rural residents - not only peasants, but also village fakihs( interpreters of the law), judges, and notaries, who appear in comic sketches of "Rural Joys". as people who do not understand elementary issues of theology and sharia, in Baer's opinion, Al-Shirbini's work is interesting as a source that reflects the socio-psychological atmosphere of 17th-century Egypt, the views of the townspeople (the stratum of the Cairo population), their opposition to the peasants, and in a broad sense - the provincials, the villagers.

Turning to the material of Syria and Palestine, Baer highlights as an example a number of districts that represented three significantly different local types of relations between the city and the countryside: 1) Aleppo (Aleppo) and Damascus, 2) Antioch (Antakya), Hama, Latakia zones, 3) Mountainous areas of Lebanon and Palestine ⁴⁰ . He focuses on the field of local history, identifying different types and levels of economic and socio-cultural relations between urban and rural populations and explaining their specificity and multiplicity by the interaction of a set of ambiguous factors (geographical, political, economic, etc.), each of which could alternately be brought to the fore and play a decisive role in specific conditions. In this context, the question of identifying patterns of evolution of the social division of labor and other forms of relations between the city and the countryside is virtually eliminated. The task of supra-country, regional generalizations seems to Baer impossible in general.

The question of the historical role of the city of the Arab East as a whole remains poorly understood. In Soviet historical science, the problem of regularities in the development of the urban system in the East is posed in the context of studying the typology of feudal societies. Soviet scientists point out the need for a comprehensive approach to the analysis of internal and external factors in the development of the city's social structure in relation to the general processes of stadium-formation evolution.

In the works devoted to the Arab countries of North Africa, the Middle East, and Central Asia, it is noted, in particular ,that periodic migrations of nomadic peoples led to the archaization of social relations and caused the revival of tribal traditions and institutions within the feudal system. ⁴¹ The Mongol invasion destroyed productive forces and interrupted urban development in Central Asia, Iraq ,and much of Syria. ⁴² It is noteworthy that K. Z. Ashrafyan noted that the works of foreign orientalists attach somewhat exaggerated importance to the fact that in the East, including in India, cities did not fight with feudal lords for communal privileges. "It seems," the author writes, "that here we are dealing with a tendency to universalize a particular pattern of development of a European city." ⁴³ The struggle for "communal" freedoms, which took place with the support of the royal power, which was interested in curbing vassals, was determined by the norms that existed in society, serfdom and the seignorial power of the feudal lord over the city, i.e. conditions that were absent in most Eastern countries.

⁴⁰ Вaer G. Village and City, pp. 629 - 635.

⁴¹ Meyer M. S. Problems of typology of feudalism in the Middle East. In: Conference "Typology of developed feudalism in the countries of the East". Abstracts of reports and reports, Moscow, 1975, pp. 3-6; Vidyasova M. F. On some features of the evolution of the feudal system in the Maghreb (the role of nomadic migrations). - Vestnik Moskovskogo universiteta, seriya vostokovedeniya, 1979, N 1, p. 30.

⁴² Bolshakov O. G. Srednevekovy arabsky gorod [Medieval Arab city]. In: Essays on the history of Arab culture of the V-XV centuries, Moscow, 1982, p. 214; Belenitsky A.M., Bentovich I. B. Bolshakov O. G. UK. soch., p. 352.

⁴³ Ashrafyan K., Z. UK. soch., p. 188.

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