The Curious Case of the Islamic Journeymen: Questions and Texts toward a Comparative Study of Guilds

Nearly a century after Bernard Lewis’ seminal article, much about craft guilds in Islamic societies remains unknown. Even less is known about journeymen, a stratum of hired workers who were neither apprentices nor master craftsmen. European thought and historiography—especially Marxism, under whose influence much of the works on guilds were written—ascribed to them an essential role in the history of labor and politics. In the Middle East, it is unclear whether such a position existed, when it emerged, whether it was imported, and under what conditions. When journeymen do seem to appear in the sources, it is still difficult to say whether they matched their Western European equivalents in conditions, demographics, aspirations, and political potential. These questions are crucial for comparing guilds, social structures, and life courses across time and space. At the heart of this dossier are six texts, which are also reproduced here in translation. These sources—a contemporary description and five works of historical scholarship written in Arabic, Serbian, Russian, Albanian, and Georgian—remain fundamental studies of guilds in the Middle East, the Caucasus, and Central Asia. The translations thus provide access to non-Anglophone scholarship. The accompanying article analyzes the historiography and puts these sources under scrutiny. It shows the limitations of imposing European models on Islamic guilds, including misinterpretations. Analyzing and contextualizing these interpretations reveals dynamics worth exploring, raises new questions, and revives old debates abandoned prematurely. These include the relationship between religious and craft associations, the management of young and mobile men, and the logic of industrial development in Europe, the Islamic World, and beyond.