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This book, as most projects do, has a prehistory. It began in a discussion in our kitchen with my mother’s best friend, the late Lebanese novelist Layla Usayran. Having reunited with my mother in the mid-1990s after the Lebanese Civil War had kept them apart, Auntie Layla visited us in Cairo. As she tried—albeit with limited success—to explain to me just what the war had been about, we turned to protest and despotism. I made an offhand remark that maybe our populations, especially in Egypt, didn’t resist and rebel against despotic rule historically because the stakes were too high and they knew better. Little did I know! When I started graduate studies at the American University in Cairo, I was struck to discover so many references to street riots and protests in the Mamluk period. Gradually a project came to develop, not on “Why did they not rebel?” but on “When and how did premodern people of Egypt and Syria protest?” And “What did protest look like before colonialism and modernity?” These questions were asked long before the Arab Spring was on the horizon, indeed in part in the hope that one would live to see such active protest in the political landscape of the region in the spirit of our medieval ancestors, or that one would come to better appreciate what appears as a calm surface. This project officially began in 2003, on the eve of the Second Iraq War and when the streets of the Arab world had begun grumbling, if in somewhat muted voices. It is laid to rest in 2015, well after a revolution and its aftermath.
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