Souq level of municipal administration. The Muhtasib was responsible for supervising business practices and collecting taxes for a given souq while the Arif are the overseers for a specific trade. Shopping at a souq or market place is part of daily life throughout much of the Middle East. Prices are commonly set by bargaining, also known as haggling, between buyers and sellers. In the 18th and 19th centuries, as Europeans began to conquer parts of North Africa and the Levant, an interest in Middle Eastern culture and architecture began to flourish. This interest spawned a genre of literary works and paintings
Souq African traditional markets. Other spellings of this word involving the letter "Q" (sooq, souq, so'oq...) were likely developed using English and thus refer to Western Asian/Arab traditional markets, as British colonialism was present there during the 19th and 20th centuries. In Modern Standard Arabic the term "al-sooq" refers to markets in both the physical sense and the abstract economic sense (e.g., an Arabic-speaker would speak of the "sooq" in the old city as well as the "sooq" for oil, and would call the concept of the free market السوق الحرّ "as-sūq al-ḥurr"). In northern Morocco, the Spanish corruption "socco" is