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WHEN PARLIAMENTS RULED THE MIDDLE EAST: IRAQ AND SYRIA, 1946-63
Avner Wishnitzer
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021
(xiii + 376 pages) $39.99 (cloth)
Ceyda Karamursel is Lecturer in the Department of History at the University of London School of Oriental and African Studies.
"Man has become urban, sedentary, and refined," Lucien Febvre once wrote, and "what a large place the word 'comfort' has come to occupy in our language, modern comfort in which we take such pride." The word implies a lot, in terms of convenience and material ease: "an indoor temperature independent of the seasons, water ready to flow hot or cold," and most significantly perhaps, "a light turned on or off at the flick of a finger ... as we wish, anytime, anywhere" (Life in Renaissance France, 1977, 3). What was called "comfort" merely a couple of decades ago is now barely noticed, let alone acknowledged as such. The conquest of our world by electricity, which Paul Valery once alluded to as a possibility, has now been realized, turning our lives into, among other things, a very "well-lit box."
It is this systematically illuminated world of ours-and the darkness its perpetual glare has long erased-that is at the core of Avner Wishnitzer's truly admirable newbook, As Night Falls: Eighteenth-Century Ot toman Cities after Dark. As the author notes, questions about light and darkness, that often stem from present-day economic and environmental concerns, have been raised with increasing frequency in the past decades, contributing to a "renewed interest in the history, sociology, geography, and anthropology of the night" (3). Yet most of these studies, including historical ones, focus on the so-called industrialized West, leaving night-time activities and the overall experience of darkness in the rest of the world, including the Ottoman Empire, in total obscurity. As a result, Wishnitzer points out, "a whole range of human activity" in the region, remains unknown (3).
What follows in the pages of As Night Falls is a testimony that the Ottoman cities hardly fell into slumber after dusk and that the night's silence, stillness, and darkness often concealed a splendidly colorful and vibrant-if at times awry-life. Make no mistake, however: it is the author's skill at weaving together his varied sources-which comprise state-produced archival documents, court records,...