André Raymond, who passed away at his home in Aix-en-Provence on 18 February 2011, leaves an international legacy in Middle East studies. Born in 1925 in Montargis, a small town situated about seventy-five miles south of Paris, Monsieur Raymond, as he was known to his numerous students and to younger scholars in Europe, Russia, the Middle East, the Far East, and North America, taught for many years at the University of Provence and, after his retirement, in the United States.
After completing his studies in general history at the Sorbonne and obtaining his agrégation in 1947, André Raymond taught secondary school in Tunis, at the Lycée Carnot from 1947 to 1949, then, upon his request, from 1949 to 1951 at the Collège Sadiki, the famous secondary school founded before the French protectorate by Khayr al-Din Pasha. He asked for this transfer because he wished to teach in an institution whose student body reflected the diversity of the local population. It was during these years teaching in Tunis that he first cultivated an interest in Arab societies and their histories.
Beginning in 1951, André Raymond studied with the great French North Africanist Charles-André Julien, whose works contradicted the received wisdom about the European colonial enterprise and had an enormous professional and moral impact on Raymond. The same year, he was accepted, on Julien's recommendation, to the newly created St. Antony's College, Oxford. There, he completed a PhD in 1954 under the direction of the eminent historian Albert Hourani, with a thesis on “British Policy towards Tunis (1830–1881).” As a mark of respect for his erstwhile advisee, Hourani in 1990 published a retrospective of Raymond's work in the Revue des Mondes Musulmans et de la Méditerranée (vols. 55–56, pp. 18–33).
Already in 1953, Raymond had been appointed a junior researcher at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique. He spent the following year in Damascus at the Institut Français d'Études Arabes de Damas (IFEAD), and 1955 at the Institut Français d'Archéologie Orientale (IFAO) in Cairo. He was a faculty member at the University of Tunis from 1957 to 1959 and from 1959 to 1966 headed the Department of Arab Studies at the University of Bordeaux before becoming the deputy director (1966–69) and then director (1969–75) of IFEAD. During his years at IFEAD, he often gave lectures at the University of Damascus on the importance of archival sources for the writing of economic and social history. In 1972, he defended his thèse d'État at the University of Paris I, a work that would ultimately mark a turning point in the social and economic history of the Ottoman provinces. In 1975, he moved to the University of Provence in Aix, where he remained until his retirement in 1989. From 1984 to 1986, he directed the Centre de Recherches et d'Études sur les Sociétés Méditerranéennes (CRESM) in Aix-en-Provence. In 1986, upon CNRS’ request to regroup the study of the Arab world within a single institution in Aix, he founded the Institut de Recherches et d'Études sur le Monde Arabe et Musulman (IREMAM), which he directed until his retirement. In 1987, he created the Association Française pour l'Étude du Monde Arabe et Musulman (AFEMAM) and from 1987 to 1990 he held the vice-presidency of the newly created Institut du Monde Arabe (IMA) in Paris.
Raymond's sojourn at Oxford in the 1950s allowed him to complement his classic French training with cutting-edge training in the historiography of the Ottoman Arab provinces. The influence of Hourani's enduring paradigm of the politics of local notables can be seen in one of his earlier articles, “Une ‘revolution’ au Caire sous les Mamelouks: la crise du 1123/1711,” which appeared in Annales Islamologiques, IFAO's journal, in 1966 (vol. 6, pp. 95–120). Here, he used several Arabic chronicles of Egypt to analyze the notorious “civil war” triggered by the machinations of the ambitious janissary başodabaşı Ifranj Ahmed.
This article, as important as it is, is something of a methodological outlier in Raymond's oeuvre. What he is best known for, and the approach that he pioneered, is the mapping of urban topography on the basis of Arabic archival sources, above all the registers of Muslim law courts, and using this topography as a window onto the vast array of urban social history. This approach reaches its apogee in Raymond's magnum opus, the end result of his thèse d'État: the two-volume Artisans et commerçants au Caire au XVIIIe siècle, published by IFEAD in 1973–74, republished by IFAO in 1999, and translated into Arabic in 2005 by Nasser Ibrahim with the help of a grant from Egypt's Supreme Council of Culture. (Monsieur Raymond often regretted that this work was never translated into English.) This tour de force uses shariʿa court registers, including the exhaustive probate inventories of the Qisma ʿAskariyya, to shed light on a staggering array of urban operations and populations, including weights and measures, circulating currencies, craft organizations, overseas merchants, the military cadres, customs, market regulation, shipping, and housing. Always careful to give credit to his predecessors and colleagues, Raymond noted in interviews and conversations that his interest in court records was inspired by Jean Deny's Sommaire des archives turques du Caire (Cairo: IFAO, 1930), as well as by Stanford Shaw's publications on Ottoman Egypt, based on the central Ottoman archives, in the late 1950s and early 1960s. In a broader context, Artisans et commerçants is analogous to S.D. Goitein's exploitation of documents from the Cairo Geniza to explicate the medieval eastern Mediterranean while bearing more than a passing resemblance to the work of the Annales school in probing the material culture of French society both at and well below the elite level—although Raymond himself insisted, in a well-known interview with Nancy Gallagher, that he was not an Annaliste but that Annaliste approaches, and an emphasis on social and economic history more generally, were de rigueur for the times.Footnote 1
This “faux-Annaliste” topographical approach has yielded results in more specific contexts as well. Raymond was one of the first scholars to affirm that, contrary to the tired Arab nationalist stereotype of a stifling, 400-year “Turkish yoke,” the Ottoman period was a productive one for Arab metropolises, none more so than Cairo. Raymond's micro-studies of the proliferation of public baths and the relocation of tanneries in Cairo and other major Arab cities (“Les bains publics au Caire à la fin du XVIII siècle,” Annales Islamologiques 7 [1967]: 129–50; and “Le déplacement des tanneries à Alep, au Caire et à Tunis à l'époque ottomane: un ‘indicateur’ de croissance urbaine,” Revue d'Histoire Maghrébine 7–8 [1977]: 192–200), and of elite neighborhoods in Cairo (“Essai de géographie des quartiers de résidence aristocratique au Caire au XVIII siècle,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 6 [1963]: 58–103) offer literally concrete evidence that the population of these cities grew substantially between 1517 and 1798, despite the ravages of the economic crisis of the late 18th century. These broader trends are showcased in what is arguably Raymond's most accessible and widely cited book, Grands villes arabes à l'époque ottomane (Paris: Sindbad, 1985), a slightly abridged English version of which was published as The Great Arab Cities in the 16th-18th Centuries: An Introduction (New York: New York University Press, 1984).
Raymond also contributed to the overturning of the “Islamic city” paradigm, a process spearheaded by Hourani and others, by pointing out, for example, that the so-called “courtyard house,” far from reflecting “Muslim” ideals of privacy, gender segregation, and so on, was an ancient Mediterranean type, determined largely by climatic considerations and dating at least to the Roman Empire. In a short book focusing on Cairo, Le Caire des Janissaires: l'apogée de la ville ottomane sous Abd al-Rahmân Katkhudâ (Paris: CNRS, 1995), he delineated the evolution of the city's Ottoman-era architecture, identifying the culmination of this process in the distinctive style associated with the ambitious building projects of the grandee ʿAbd al-Rahman Kethüda al-Qazdağlı (d. 1776), whose commissions still dot Cairo today. This revisionist approach to urban history, shared by a number of his colleagues, culminated in the collection The City in the Islamic World (Leiden: Brill, 2008), coedited with Renata Holod and Attilio Petruccioli under the general editorship of Salma K. Jayyusi.
Toward the end of his life, Raymond returned to his interest in Tunis, the city where he had launched his academic career. Tunis sous les Mouradites: la ville et ses habitants au XVIIe siècle (Belvédère, Tunis: Cérès Éditions, 2006) provides a compact and, as usual, lucid account of not only the city but the province during an understudied era, the century preceding the rise of the Husaynid dynasty. His sources here include Arabic chronicles, French travel and diplomatic accounts, and Tunisian and French archival documents. Given that this is essentially a valedictory contribution based to a considerable extent on research conducted some years previously, the cogency of his conclusions is striking; they hold their own impressively against new research on Tunis.
André Raymond will unquestionably remain a vibrant and influential intellectual force among those who study the Arab and Islamic world. Moreover, his professional and personal generosity, despite several personal tragedies, and his encouraging, indeed joyful, words will continue to inspire all those who had the good fortune to know him.
