Россия и Арабский мир: к 200-летию профессора Санкт-Петербургского университета Шейха ат-Тантави (1810–1861)

211 advancing German economic interests in the Ottoman Empire. To this end, in October 1915 the Association opened an office in Berlin with the aim of pro- viding up-to-date information to German businessmen on matters relevant to their activity, which would further their business interests in the Orient. In this context, a journal was founded to publish facts and figures about the Ot- toman economy. Its articles were aimed at broadening the knowledge and understanding of German investors regarding Ottoman economics, politics and culture. Refutation of the Paradigm Indisputably, the predominant paradigm and its variant have become part of the main narrative of the economic history of the Ottoman Empire in the long 19th century. This narrative is shared by historians from various schools of thought. It is therefore not surprising that the paradigm is to be found in academic textbooks, entries in professional encyclopedias, and books written by historians for a wide readership. 1 Yet, along with the con- tinued influence of the paradigm, there has been a new development in recent decades. From the 1970s onward, an increasing number of studies have been published pointing to the important role played by Ottoman Muslims in commerce, including foreign trade, and finance in various regions of Anato- lia, the Fertile Crescent, the Arabian Peninsula and the Sudan. In the wake of scattered studies referring to the Muslim tujjār, published in the 1970s, 2 a veritable tide of publications on this subject has appeared from the 1980s until the present. 3 In the past thirty years, some fifty studies have been pub- 1 See, e.g., Indzhikian Oganes Grigor’evich, Burzhuaziia osmanskoi imperii, Yerevan: Academy of Science of Armenian SSR, 1977, pp. 157, 159; Kireev Nikolai Gavrilovich, Razvitie kapitlizma v Turtsii: K kritike teorii “smeshannoi ekonomiki,” Moscow: Nauka, 1982, pp. 87-88; Charles Issawi, An Economic History of the Middle East and North Africa, New York: Columbia University Press, 1982, p. 89; Albert Hourani, A History of the Arab Peoples, London: Faber and Faber, 1992, pp. 286-87; Bernard Lewis, The Middle East: 2000 Years of History from the Rise of Christianity to the Present Day, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1995, p. 293. 2 See, for example, Hanna Batatu, The Old Social Classes and the Revolu- tionary Movements of Iraq, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978, pp. 266- 81, 289-93. 3 See, e.g., Bağış, Ibid.; Leila Tarazi Fawaz, Merchants and Migrants in Nine- teenth-Century Beirut, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983, pp. 95-97; Michael Field, The Merchants: The Big Business Families of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States, Woodstock: Overlook Press, 1985, pp. 21-24; Gad G. Gilbar,