Books by Dana Sajdi
"This book is about a barber, Shihab al-Din Ahmad Ibn Budayr, who shaved and coiffed, and probabl... more "This book is about a barber, Shihab al-Din Ahmad Ibn Budayr, who shaved and coiffed, and probably circumcised and healed, in Damascus in the 18th century. The barber may have been a "nobody," but he wrote a history book, a record of the events that took place in his city during his lifetime. Dana Sajdi investigates the significance of this book, and in examining the life and work of Ibn Budayr, uncovers the emergence of a larger trend of history writing by unusual authors—people outside the learned establishment—and a new phenomenon: nouveau literacy.
The Barber of Damascus offers the first full-length microhistory of an individual commoner in Ottoman and Islamic history. Contributing to Ottoman popular history, Arabic historiography, and the little-studied cultural history of the 18th century Levant, the volume also examines the reception of the barber's book a century later to explore connections between the 18th and the late 19th centuries and illuminates new paths leading to the Nahda, the Arab Renaissance."
Edited Books by Dana Sajdi
Book Chapter and Journal Articles by Dana Sajdi
Journal of Arabic Literature, 2022
Journal of Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association, 2021
This essay argues for treating early modern Arabic literary and historical traditions as a unifie... more This essay argues for treating early modern Arabic literary and historical traditions as a unified cultural phenomenon in space. In proposing the consideration of the spatial around the text, such as the physical location of its production and consumption, and within the text, such as the place of formulaic speech and poetry in literary and historical works, we would be able to bring out the material, the sonic, and the corporeal through which we could construct vivid images of past social reality and
arrive at clearer conceptions of communal identity and individual practice
History and Theory, 2019
Disconnected from the original place and time of Islam and its own glorious early-Islamic history... more Disconnected from the original place and time of Islam and its own glorious early-Islamic history, medieval Damascus felt like a temporally and spatially distant city. Through participating in newer hadith practices that facilitated the compression of time, Damascene scholars were able to diminish temporal distance to be closer to the Prophet. They also devised new spatial descriptions that enabled them to redefine space so that it could be easily occupied and revalued. Having inherited traditions of both the later hadith practices and the newer spatial discourses, the sixteenth-century Damascene scholar, Shams al-Din Ibn Tulun (d. 1546) combines them to provide chronotopic solutions to address personal and collective voids precipitated by Damascene distance, which were further intensified by the new Ottoman condition. Ibn Tulun locates the Prophet in the crevices of Damascus and allows himself and the Damascenes to be the exclusive cultivators and preservers of a local "iconographical" effort to conjure up the Prophet.
New Perspectives on Ibn `Asakir in Islamic Historiography, 2017
The paper visits prose topographies/cityscapes of Damascus as a continuous genre launched by Ibn ... more The paper visits prose topographies/cityscapes of Damascus as a continuous genre launched by Ibn Asakir's History of Damascus in the 12th Century
By the Pen and What They Write, 2017
On orality and the written in Arabo-Islamic scholarship.
This essay is about the global spatial imaginaries of seven chroniclers from the Ottoman Levant (... more This essay is about the global spatial imaginaries of seven chroniclers from the Ottoman Levant (Bilād al-Shām/Syria and Palestine) in the eighteenth century. While being unified in an Arabic-speaking Levantine identity, on the one hand, and conscious of their Ottoman affiliation, on the other, the authors came from decidedly different social, religious, and occupational backgrounds. Given the unity and diversity of the backgrounds of the authors, this essay examines the consequent tensions found in each author’s spatial vision. By plotting and juxtaposing these authors’ horizons into maps and graphs, both the differing and overlapping concepts of geographical identities are visualized. In a pre-national age, when the state’s intervention in creating a territory-bounded identity was minimal, did eighteenth-century Ottoman Levantines live in the same world?
The Translator: Studies in Intercultural Communication, Jan 1, 2009
Ottoman Tulips, Ottoman Coffee: Leisure and Lifestyles in the Eighteenth Century, 2008
MIT Electronic Journal of Middle East Studies, Jan 1, 2003
“Transforming Loss into Beauty”: Essays on Arabic Literature and Culture in Memory of Magda Al-Nowaihi, 2008
Hosting the Stranger: Between Religions, 2011
Historians of the Ottoman Empire
Historians of the Ottoman Empire
Encyclopaedia Iranica, 2003
Unpublished Ph. D. dissertation. Columbia …, Jan 1, 2002
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Books by Dana Sajdi
The Barber of Damascus offers the first full-length microhistory of an individual commoner in Ottoman and Islamic history. Contributing to Ottoman popular history, Arabic historiography, and the little-studied cultural history of the 18th century Levant, the volume also examines the reception of the barber's book a century later to explore connections between the 18th and the late 19th centuries and illuminates new paths leading to the Nahda, the Arab Renaissance."
Edited Books by Dana Sajdi
Book Chapter and Journal Articles by Dana Sajdi
arrive at clearer conceptions of communal identity and individual practice
The Barber of Damascus offers the first full-length microhistory of an individual commoner in Ottoman and Islamic history. Contributing to Ottoman popular history, Arabic historiography, and the little-studied cultural history of the 18th century Levant, the volume also examines the reception of the barber's book a century later to explore connections between the 18th and the late 19th centuries and illuminates new paths leading to the Nahda, the Arab Renaissance."
arrive at clearer conceptions of communal identity and individual practice