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The suq al-musiqiyyin (the musicians' market) in Cairo refers to the social space of popular-class (sha'bi) urban music, the live music played at weddings but also at mulids (Sufi saint's festival). This is a vernacular genre that is defined in a distinctive realm of musical training, social affiliations, and professional practices. These musicians of the suq have developed a specific urban subculture concentrated in a few cafés of Muhammad 'Ali Street. However, these musicians are quite stigmatized by the rest of Cairo inhabitants as a group of outsiders with very low social status. Their presentation of musical styles or cultural promotions, results in the “folklorization” of rural music and the stigmatization of urban music and of popular-class musicians in general. It is this struggle for collective survival, recognition, and markets in a spatially fragmented and class-segmented city that this chapter discusses.

The Lanes and Pooles moved once more and again further north after their two years in Harat al-Sakkayin. Their new house was in Suq al-Qawadis, a section of the long street that runs from the Citadel, curves past Bab Zuweila, and extends into the favored western part of town where Suq al- Qawadis was located. It was a major thoroughfare. The houses to the north, interspersed with gardens of palm and fruit trees that grew profusely in western Cairo, were much lower leaving Lane's house open to the air. A prevailing northwestern breeze almost always arose in the evenings to be caught by the malqaf on the roof and funneled through the rooms below, bringing welcome relief even on sweltering summer evenings. It projected over the street with windows on the front and sides; a divan ran the length of the northern wall.

The Khan al-Khalili is located in the heart of the historic city of Cairo. Though it changed extensively in the 19th and 20th centuries, it is considered the oldest market in Cairo and a symbolic place that widely became known through the eponymous novel by Mahfouz. Despite its reputation as merely a collection of shops selling trinkets to tourists, this chapter demonstrates that it also exists as a vibrant marketplace for the residents of Cairo. A tour of the market, presented as an archetype of an oriental market, is a main attraction for tourists. Composed of a thousand shops facing the street mostly dedicated to sales, the Khan is a dense commercial area where goldsmiths and jewelers dominate. Activities that were formerly present are today increasing, as are new bazaars. At the crossroads of districts specializing in various types of production and sales, the Khan is also a showcase of the trends and evolution of the old districts of Cairo, of competition and the dynamics of economic activities, and their numerous translations in the metamorphosis of the urban landscape.

This chapter traces the development of the Suq in Damascus from the coming of Islam to the advent of modernity (7th to 19th century). It focuses on the urban and architectural characters of the suq and analyzes the changes in its layout, form and significance over time. The Damascus suq was not a variant on the ideal type of the “Islamic City” but a dynamic cultural artifact responsive primarily to its changing economic and political circumstances.

The prominence of suqs in the cityscape of the Old City of Damascus reflects their socio-political and economic importance to the viability of the city. Built in strategic places and near centers of power, their construction also indexed the power hierarchy of the city and struggle over the control of public space. Yet it was the social actors that made these public spaces meaningful through their daily use. Suq al-Hamidiya endures as an important destination since it not only demonstrates these qualities of the suq but has the added importance of demonstrating the process of urban change as a result of modernization. Built during a time of socio-political and economic transformation in the city it continues to reference the process of urban change in the city.

Chapter 1 situates the book's study within a broad historical context by investigating how—after a long period of decline from the eleventh to fifteenth centuries—the slave trade was reintegrated into Tunisian foreign commerce after the Ottoman occupation of Tunisia in 1574.

This chapter presents new results of the excavations and surveys at Adam, Central Oman. The funerary landscape of the Early Bronze Age (3rd millennium BC) is characterized by collective burials in tower-tombs located on the crests and then large collective multi-compartment graves. From the beginning of the Middle Bronze Age (2nd millennium BC), a complete change is observed: the Wadi Suq graveyards show an important concentration of single burials in new forms of tombs (cists and cairns), all of which are located on the plain. Using the graveyards of Adam as an example, these two practices are compared in order to understand the evolution, continuity, and change of settlement patterns, material culture and society in the "longue durée."

Early Islamic marketplaces have been studied almost exclusively for their art historical and architectural values, by Maxime Rodinson in the preface of El señor del zoco en España, while their functioning and process of development have not yet been fully elucidated. It is also believed that marketplaces in early Islam functioned as their late antique predecessors, with apparently nothing bequeathed from pre-Islamic Arabia, where dedicated spaces for trade were extremely rare. This chapter considers what happened to urban marketplaces in the Near East after the Muslim conquests, to look at the fate of the late antique legacy under the new Arab masters—a people with contrasting indigenous commercial traditions—in the context of new power dynamics from 700 to 950. It explores the ways in which early medieval marketplaces differed from the late antique past, and the role they played in the agrarian society of early Islam.