Mecca scholarship governed by the Hashemite Sharifs. In 930, Mecca was attacked and sacked by Qarmatians, a millenarian Ismaili Muslim sect led by Abū-Tāhir Al-Jannābī and centered in eastern Arabia. The Black Death pandemic hit Mecca in 1349. In 1517, the Sharif, Barakat bin Muhammed, acknowledged the supremacy of the Ottoman Caliph but retained a great degree of local autonomy. In 1803 the city was captured by the First Saudi State, which held Mecca until 1813. This was a massive blow to the prestige of the (Turkish) Ottoman Empire, which had exercised sovereignty over the holy city since 1517. The Ottomans
The Country and the City 306). Chapter Eight of "Raymond Williams: Hope and Defeat in the Struggle for Socialism" "A contrast between country and city, as fundamental ways of life, reaches back into classical times." The Country and the City The Country and the City is a book of cultural analysis by Raymond Williams which was first published in 1973. Coming from the Welsh border, a village in the Black Mountains, Raymond Williams found that the images of rural life taught at the University of Cambridge did not match what he had seen. As an academic at Cambridge, he studied and examined the contradiction, along