In this final chapter, the related questions of the true French state and the role that empire played in conceding this legitimacy come full circle. At the head of the French Provisional Government, de Gaulle was rapidly renegotiating imperial relationships. Empire, much as it was in 1940, was a symbol of global power, sovereignty and legitimacy. In this context, the French aerial and ground bombardment of Damascus (29–30 May) was a reminder of the quotidian existence of imperial violence. It was undertaken to quell rising nationalist unrest and assert French demands for the conclusion of a preferential treaty prior to conceding independence.

However, nationalist forces in Syria and Lebanon consolidated international support for their independence demands. The San Francisco Conference was the perfect venue for condemning French barbarity. The language of the Atlantic Charter, as well as American and Soviet anti-imperial rhetoric, grounded the legitimacy and the moral basis of nationalist demands. Britain, in its role as proxy protector to the Levant states, had to act to preserve its own credibility as Middle East peacekeeper, or peace enforcer. This chapter closes under the shadow of impending Franco-British evacuations from Syria and Lebanon and the longer spectre of imperial withdrawals.

The Sultanate's political economy evolved continuously. Since the regime presided over an imperial union of territories that differed in their topography and ecology, the process of evolution in these regions exhibited contrasting patterns of change. Agriculture in the Nile Valley manifested procedures unlike crop raising or animal husbandry along the Syrian coast, upland valleys or semi-arid outback of the Syrian Sahel. Commodities imported from South or East Asia transited from ports in Yemen or Western Arabia through entrepôts on the Upper Nile to Alexandria, where they were transferred to European carriers that conveyed them to destinations on the Mediterranean north shore and beyond. Agents in each of these stages answered to differing sponsors, aligned their conduct of business with local politics and extracted revenues at levels fluctuating within the mechanisms that governed inter-regional trade throughout this period. Domestic commerce in both urban and rural settings dealt in the exchange of commodities produced locally in a workshop milieu. Control over (and profiteering from) marketing of lucrative staples that funneled revenues to the regime, such as spices, textiles or sugar, became a principal objective of governmental authority, with results that enhanced the Sultanate’s fisc in the short term but compromised its competitive position in the longue durée. These issues are considered from the perspective of agriculture or animal husbandry in Egypt and Syria, the varying extent of control exercised over them by the bureaucracy, interregional trade and its manipulation by the Sultanate over time, the domestic commercial economy, and finally the overt expropriation or clandestine extraction on which the regime relied as licit sources of revenuediminished in the Sultanate’s final century.

“A text that revolutionised the Shāfiʿī school of law” is the best way to characterise the law book Minhāj, the central subject of this chapter. Soon after it was written in Damascus in the thirteenth century, it acquired an immense popularity among Shāfiʿī jurists, to the extent that no other text of the school ever achieved. In the following centuries, it not only influenced but also framed the very ways in which they discoursed about their school. It inspired generations of jurists in their legal-textual praxis, leading to the production of a copious amount of commentaries, supercommentaries, abridgements, poetic renderings, etc., and that continues to today. Its story presents an interesting phenomenon in the histories of Islamic law, law and Islam at large. This chapter explores its inception and trajectories. It asks why so many jurists engaged with the text and what made it so idiosyncratic that it influenced the textual discourses of such a large community across centuries. Embedded in the larger commentarial mode of juridical advancements of the time, it argues that Nawawī codified the school’s diverse opinions while synthesising the existing divisions. His own detailed engagements with the broader textual corpus of the school in his other works provided material for him to bring out a concise, comprehensive and coherent work that would address larger pedagogical and juridical requirements.

Relations with Assyria dominated from the tenth to the late seventh century. Marduk’s reputation was tarnished as Babylon lost power. Tribes of Chaldeans and Arameans moved into the Sealand, where some settled, becoming literate and powerful. Iron gradually replaced bronze. Fine stone carving continued. Warlike Assyrian kings venerated Babylon, incorporated its gods into their pantheon, and treated the city separately from the rest of Babylonia; but Assyria and Babylon clashed east of the Tigris at Der. Chaldeans intermittently took the throne. Tiglath-pileser III, the first Assyrian king to become king of Babylon, took part in the New Year festival; Sargon II, the second, deposed a Chaldean and deported many disloyal groups, but invested in the city. When Sennacherib ruled Assyria, various rulers of Babylon and interference from Elam ended when he sacked Babylon, which remained kingless for seven years. His patricidal son Esarhaddon made some restitution. At his early death, Esarhaddon’s elder son took the throne, dominated by his younger son, Ashurbanipal, whose library at Nineveh included many Babylonian texts. Betrayed by his brother under Elamite influence, Ashurbanipal sacked Babylon. Royal records end, and three subsequent kings are poorly attested. Nabopolassar, a Babylonian general working in the Assyrian army, defected and took the throne of Babylon.

This chapter is a testimony from the perspective of the writer and novelist Dima Wannous, Sa’dallah Wannous’ daughter, as a young girl as she recalls the final days she spent with her father more than twenty years ago in Damascus when he encouraged her to be whatever she wanted to be. Wannous paints an elegant verbal portrait of herself as a child raised by a literary parent in a world of books.

This chapter looks at the use of "Israel" terminology and its relationship to eschatology in the Dead Sea Scrolls, focusing on the sectarian scrolls. The chapter argues that the Yaḥad understand the exile as ongoing—even those in the land remain in exile, while the returns of Ezra-Nehemiah and the Second Temple are inadequate or worse. They understand Israel's restoration as contingent on a return to virtue and obedience—which they believe has begun with their own group's divinely initiated return to proper halakhic practices. The Yaḥad therefore present themselves as the vanguard of the restoration of all Israel, which includes the return of the northern tribes remaining in exile and the elimination of the disobedient among their Jewish contemporaries. They represent their separation from their contemporaries as having visibly rejoined the rest of Israel in exile, where their obedience serves as a atonement for the rest of Israel—atonement the Second Temple could not manage—thereby initiating the restoration of all Israel.