CCAS 2014 Summer/Fall Newsletter

CCAS

newsletter

Center for Contemporary Arab Studies

Georgetown University

ccas.georgetown.edu

Summer-Fall 2014

INSIDE

2 Letter from the Director

3 MAAS News: Class of 2014 graduates 4 Faculty and Staff News

Publication: New Occasional Paper co-branded with Georgetown University Press coming soon

5 Board Member Feature: Ali al-Shihabi

6 Feature Article: Dr. Saleh Abdel Jawad on Palestinian support for the Ottomans during WWI (continued from cover)

9 Interview with MAAS alumna Dr. Judith Mendehlson Rood on Ottoman law 10 Faculty Showcase: Dr. Charles Anderson on the Palestinian ‘Great Revolt’

14 Summarizing “The New Middle East: The First World War 100 Years Later” 15 Educational Outreach: Susan Douglass on curriculum for study of the Mediterranean

16 Faculty Feature: Dr. Saleh Abdel Jawad on growing up in Palestine and carrying out his research

“People Love the Turks, but Some Preferred the British”

American Colony (Jerusalem): Photo Department/Library of Congress

12 Public Events: Children’s rights in Palestine, methods of anthropology in North Africa, and America’s military presence in the Gulf

Many Palestinian Arabs showed continuing loyalty to the Ottoman army during World War I, despite British military successes.

By Saleh Abdel Jawad

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War I and its aftermath led to dramatic geopolitical changes throughout the Middle East and more particularly in the Fertile Crescent. The impact the war made is still observable 100 years later, not only in the continuous conflict in Palestine, but also in the emergence of the nation state there and in the debates that followed over modernization, democracy, and reform. orld

continued on page 6

‫ﻣﺮﻛﺰ اﻟﺪراﺳﺎت اﻟﻌﺮﺑﻴﺔ اﳌﻌﺎﺻﺮة‬

LETTER FROM THE DIRECTOR: OSAMA ABI-MERSHED Dear friends of the CCAS,

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CCAS colleagues, board members, faculty, and staff, for their support and efforts in making 20132014 a successful and rewarding year in terms of academic initiatives and development. I am pleased to report that with their assistance and thanks to the sponsorship of our generous donors, we established three new academic endowments at the CCAS in the past year: the American Druze Foundation research fund in minority and Arab studies, the Sheikh Abdullah Saleh Kamel distinguished lecture fund, and the Kuwait America Foundation graduate scholarship fund. We also renewed our Qatar Postdoctoral fellowship with the State of Qatar, and welcomed our Andrew Carnegie Foundation Centennial Fellows for the year: Saleh Abdel Jawad Hamayel, professor of history and political science and former Dean of Faculty of Law and Public Administration at Birzeit University; and Lahouari Addi from the Centre National de Recherche en Anthropologie Sociale et Culturelle in Oran and the Institut d'Études Politiques at the University of Lyon. The presence of our visiting fellows and scholars enhances the intellectual profile of the CCAS, and I thank them all for their generous and invigorating contributions to the academic life of our Center.

In the course of 2013-2014, the CCAS continued to grow its collaborative initiatives with local and international partners.

We co-sponsored with the Georgetown Institute for Global History a lecture series on “The New Middle East: The First World War 100 Years Later”, and co-hosted the NEH summer workshop and seminar for university teachers on “World War I in the Middle East and North Africa.” We also joined forces with the American University of Beirut in strengthening academic exchanges with Peking University, organized a joint conference with Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service in Qatar on religious and secular trends in the Arab world, participated in workshops organized by SFS-Q’s Center for International and Regional Studies on Social Currents in North Africa, and start by thanking my

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held with the Maghreb Center a roundtable on political transitions in North Africa.

As always, I take greatest pleasure in noting the important accomplishments of my colleagues during the year and in congratulating them on their continued success.

Fida Adely was awarded the 2013 Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies Book Award for her Gendered Paradoxes: Educating Jordanian Women in Nation, Faith, and Progress (Chicago, 2012). Joseph Sassoon’s book, Saddam Hussein’s Ba’th Party: Inside an Authoritarian Regime (Cambridge, 2012), was awarded the 2013 British-Kuwait Friendship Society Book Prize in Middle Eastern Studies. Rochelle Davis edited with Mimi Kirk a volume titled Palestine and the Palestinians in the 21st Century (Indiana, 2013).

I am also delighted to announce the publication of the long-anticipated memoirs of our friend and board member Amb. Clovis Maksoud, Min zawāya al-dhākira: Mahattāt rihla fī qitār al-‘urūba (Arab Scientific Publishers, 2014), and I take the opportunity to applaud and commend him for this very impressive achievement.

Finally, I am pleased to introduce our newest staff member, Susan Douglass, who stepped flawlessly into her new responsibilities as coordinator of educational outreach at a most taxing period. Susan comes to CCAS with profound professional experience in, and years of personal dedication to, educational outreach, and in August, she will organize a workshop on “Integrating the Mediterranean into World History: Approaches and New Teaching Resources.”

While I am thrilled to welcome Susan to the Center, I also wish to give thanks to her predecessor, Zeina Azzam. Zeina was with CCAS for nearly two decades, during which she crafted and maintained the exceptional reputation of our educational outreach program. As the auspicious addition of Susan demonstrates, the Center remains steadfast in its commitment to sustaining Zeina’s excellent legacy. On behalf of all of us at CCAS, I wish her the very best in her future endeavors. 

Center for Contemporary Arab Studies - Georgetown University

CCAS

newsletter

CCAS Newsletter is published twice a year by the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, a component of the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University

Core Faculty

Osama W. Abi-Mershed Associate Professor; Director; Center for Contemporary Arab Studies Fida J. Adely Associate Professor Marwa Daoudy Assistant Professor Rochelle A. Davis Associate Professor; Director; Master of Arts in Arab Studies Program Daniel Neep Assistant Professor Joseph Sassoon Visiting Professor Judith Tucker Professor

Affiliated Faculty

Mustafa Aksakal Associate Professor Belkacem Baccouche Visiting Instructor Elliott Colla Associate Professor; Chair; Arabic and Islamic Studies Department Noura Erakat Adjunct Assistant Professor Bassam Haddad Adjunct Professor and ASJ Editor Yvonne Y. Haddad Professor; Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding Noureddine Jebnoun Adjunct Assistant Professor

Staff

Rania Kiblawi Associate Director Brenda Bickett Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies Bibliographer Susan Douglass K-14 Educational Outreach Coordinator Steven Gertz Multimedia and Publications Editor Kelli Harris Academic Program Coordinator Liliane Salimi (until May 2014) Grants and Program Scholarship Administrator Elisabeth Sexton (until April 2014) Public Affairs Coordinator Courtney Smith (until May 2014) Grant Administrator

MAAS NEWS

Mabrūk, MAAS Class of 2014!

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n Friday, May 16, 2014, CCAS congratulated 25 students on their graduation from the Master of Arts in Arab Studies program with an after-ceremony reception. As Prof. Judith Tucker did before her, Dr. Rochelle Davis introduced students individually by reading sections of their applications to the program and asking the graduates to guess who wrote which statements. Dr. Davis then went on to summarize the students’ pursuits and accomplishments during their programs and what they intend to do following graduation.

Students are listed by alphabetical order, along with their thesis topics, if they had one.

Sarah Ali Sarah Almuhairi Grace Benton Hannah Beswick Adelaide M. Bryan Zachary Cuyler - “Building the Earth: Labor Politics, Technopolitics, and Tapline in Lebanon, 1950-1964”

CCAS

Kevin Davis - “From Collective Memory to Nationalism: Historical Remembrance in Aden” Nicholas Dutkiewicz Mustafa Enes Esen

Benan Grams

Michael Hendrix

Eisaku Ikegami (expected August 2014) Sally Jastrzebska (December 2013) Sean Lane

Xiaoyue Li - “Illness as Discourse: Medical Welfare of Egyptian Labor in an Age of Liberalism and Progress” Woongki Min

Sarah Mousa - “The People Want to Topple the System: An Alternative Narrative of the Arab Uprisings” Reena Nadler - “Framing Protest: A Social Movement Analysis of the Jordanian

Muslim Brotherhood and the Moroccan Justice and Development Party in the 2011 Arab Uprisings” Alberto Ramos Ashley Ross

Gavin Schalliol

Alex Schank - “Developing Renaissance: Nahda Discourse in Jordanian Humanities Textbooks” Kristin Smith

Isabella Snyder

Sydney Upchurch (expected August 2014)

‫مركز الدراسات العربية املعاصرة – جامعة جورجتاون‬

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FACULTY NEWS Carnegie Fellow Saleh Abdel Jawad gave a keynote lecture at the ADC National Convention (June 12-15, 2014) on Palestine during the late Ottoman period, a subject which he has been researching at Georgetown during the 2013-2014 academic year.

Associate Professor Mustafa Aksakal published “The Ottoman Empire” in The Cambridge History of the First World War, volume 1 (2014), 459-478.

Associate Professor Elliott Colla published “The Military-Literary Complex” in Jadaliyya (July 8, 2014): http://www.jadaliyya. com/pages/index/18384/the-military-literary-complex Adjunct Assistant Professor Noura Erakat was interviewed on Al Jazeera network about the most recent conflict in Israel/Palestine, and Jadaliyya posted the interview: http://www. jadaliyya.com/pages/index/18337/jadaliyyaco-editor-noura-erakat-responds-to-israel Professor Yvonne Haddad published “Between a Rock and a Hard Place: Anglicans in Palestine/Israel and Christian-Muslim Relations,” Anglican Theological Review (January 1, 2014), 109-131; and with Nazir Nader Harb “Post 9-11: Making Islam an American Religion,” Religions 5:2 (2014), 477-501.

Adjunct Assistant Professor Noureddine Jebnoun published “Tunisia at the Crossroads: An Interview with Sheikh Rachid alGhannouchi,” Alwalid Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding Occasional Paper, April 2014; “Changing Security Dynamics in North Africa and Western Sahel Region,”Portuguese Journal of International Affairs, Spring/Summer 2014; “In the Shadow of Power: Civil-Military Relations and the Tunisian Popular Uprising,” The Journal of North African Studies 19:3 (May 2014): 296-316; and “Security and the Tunisian Constitution,” Middle East Institute, February 18, 2014.

Visiting Professor Joseph Sassoon published “Iraq: Tackling Corruption and Sectarianism Is More Critical than the Outcome of Elections,” Wilson Center’s Viewpoint Series, March 5, 2014; and “The Iraqi Ba’th Party Preparatory School and the “Cultural” Courses of the Branches,” Middle Eastern Studies (2014) 50:1, 27-42.

Producer at Facebook in California, while in May, Grant Administrator Courtney Smith left to go work for AMIDEAST as a Contracts and Grants Officer. Grants and Program Scholarship Administrator Liliane Salimi also resigned her job in May, intending to return to her native France. And in August, Multimedia and Publications Editor Steven Gertz will be resigning his position to begin a PhD program in Theological and Religious Studies at Georgetown University, concentrating in Islam and Christianity. The Center thanks the staff for their service, and wishes them success in their future endeavors.

On a happier note, in June the Center hired Susan Douglass as its new Outreach Coordinator, filling a position that has remained vacant since Zeina Azzam left it to take a job at the Qatar Foundation. Susan comes to her position with decades of experience in educational outreach, and has already been busy planning a workshop for teachers on the Mediterranean that will take place in August (see page 15).

STAFF NEWS The staff of CCAS underwent a great deal of transition over the spring of 2014. In April, Public Affairs Coordinator Elisabeth Sexton left CCAS to take a job as an Associate

Julia Clancy-Smith

PUBLICATIONS

Of Seas, Coasts, and Interiors: Historical Reflection on the Tunisian Revolutions

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CAS IS PROUD TO ANNOUNCE the coming publication of a new peer-reviewed Occasional Paper by Julia Clancy-Smith, a professor of history at the University of Arizona. The paper will become available in September or early October 2014, and will feature the impact of European colonialism and tourism on Tunisia leading up to the Jasmine revolution of 2011. A hard copy of the paper will be available from CCAS, while Georgetown University Press will publish a “digital short” on its website and additional platforms. Watch the Publications section of the CCAS website for updates.

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Center for Contemporary Arab Studies - Georgetown University

Center for Contemporary Arab Studies

BOARD MEMBER FEATURE

Entertaining the “Outlandish”

New CCAS Board member Ali al-Shihabi challenges the status quo in how academics and political analysts think about Arab politics.

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CCAS’s newest board members, Mr. Ali al-Shihabi, recently published his first book, Arabian War Games, a work of political fiction focused on the Arab–Israeli conflict and on Gulf Arab–Iranian tensions. CCAS decided to interview him about his book and learn what he hopes to accomplish through it.

by their fertile and surprisingly perceptive imaginations of the future. We should encourage and promote such work in the field of political science to stretch and widen the scope of our political analyses. But that can only be done if mainstream academia starts to recognize fiction as a “respectable” endeavor.

What led you to write this work, and why did you choose the genre of fiction to discuss your ideas?

Talk a bit about your book. Through the venue of fiction, what projections about the Middle East do you make, and why?

ne of

I decided to write Arabian War Games primarily because I enjoy the study of history and politics (in fact, it is a passion of mine). So, I took a break from “work” to indulge in that passion.

I also wanted to raise some issues that are ignored by mainstream political analysts. I believe that the current range of “accepted” possible future scenarios for the region is too narrow and tends to avoid the “outlandish,” even though history invariably produces outlandish outcomes. This is due to what I see as a structural lack of imagination in an industry that inhibits imaginative thinking. This, in the case of the Middle East, results in the failure to explore potentially “uncomfortable” risks facing the region, like further ethnic cleansing in Palestine or an Iranian takeover of the Persian Gulf.

Ali al-Shihabi

What do you think would spur more creative thinking among academics and political analysts?

We need to encourage analysts to go beyond the consensus opinion and avoid linear forecasting that makes only slight variations to the status quo. Even if such forecasts turn out to be completely off the mark, they will still be valuable in helping policy makers think “outside the box.” They will also help people make more robust contingency plans. Here I think fiction should be allocated a more respectable slot and not be relegated to the margins of political thought. Today we look back at the work of Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, and others and are amazed

Well, I consider the possibility that Israel will finally “solve” its Palestinian problem by finishing the job of ethnically cleansing Israel/Palestine of its Arabs. Today everybody goes on about the “peace process” and bemoans its ongoing failure, yet nobody wants to tread on the uncomfortable fact that a “democratic” Zionist/Jewish state is fundamentally incompatible with a large Arab (voting) minority. The risk of further ethnic cleansing is always brushed away as “inconceivable” in this day and age. I want to show that it is not inconceivable but is, in fact, possible.

The same goes for Iran’s ambitions in the Persian Gulf.

Accepted wisdom is that America will “never” allow Iran to become the Gulf hegemon and that the 1990 liberation of Kuwait proved that as fact. The point I make is that the Iranians are not only much smarter than Saddam but have also learned from his mistakes. In addition, the United States of today is not the United States of 1990, then flush with a cold war “victory.” An additional, extremely dangerous development is the outbreak of sectarianism in the region, which has given the Iranians opportunity to overtly and covertly achieve their objectives.

How likely do you think it is that any of these scenarios might play out as you suggest?

While these scenarios are unlikely, they are not impossible. I think they warrant closer scrutiny—and that is what my book attempts to do.

‫مركز الدراسات العربية املعاصرة – جامعة جورجتاون‬

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FEATURE ARTICLE PALESTINE continued from cover

A global event such as World War I needs to be studied comparatively. While Western historians of WWI have at their disposal an oversupply of sources and research about the war, Arab historiography of the war is far behind western and Turkish work. The fact is that WWI remains even today poorly attended in the historical literature, not only as a result of both limited source material and the continued impact of nationalism on “historiographical imagination,” but also because historians are censored by the state. As Rogan and Shlaim wrote in the War for Palestine: History plays a fundamental role in state formation, in legitimizing the origins of the state and its political system, in the Middle East as elsewhere. Governments in the region enjoy many direct and indirect powers over the writing of history. … School texts in history are the preserve of the state. Most universities in the Middle East are state-run and…[funded]. National historical associations and government printing presses serve as filters to weed out … unauthorized histories and to disseminate statesanctioned truths. As promotion within the historical establishment is closely linked to adherence to the official line, historians have had little incentive to engage in critical history writing.

Some Palestinian Muslims (like Shaykh As’ad al-Shukairi pictured here in 1910) served in the Ottoman parliament and army.

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Center for Contemporary Arab Studies - Georgetown University

By characterizing Ottoman rule as backward and oppressive, Arab nationalists gave credence to the Israeli narrative. perceived the ailing empire as stagnant and backward.

They also wanted to find a pretext to dismantle the empire. By focusing on how oppressive and backward the Ottomans were, they tried to justify the disintegration of the Ottoman empire, which was eventually achieved through the application of the Sykes-Picot agreement.

As for other historians, Zionists felt that the existence of the Ottoman Empire in Palestine would be an obstacle to the creation of the Jewish state, and the slogan among their leaders became “The Turk Must Go.” Arab nationalist historians sought to justify an alliance with Britain during the First World War by portraying Arabs as a nation that yearned for independence and freedom from the “yoke” of the Turks. Marxist historians, with their focus on the idea of Oriental despotism, necessarily saw the Ottoman Empire as a backward and unjust entity. And the Turkish Ataturkist view, wanting to justify Mustafa Ataturk’s disengagement with the Arabs and Islam, portrayed the Arabs as a people that had stabbed them in the back.

In one critical respect, the Arab nationalist, Zionist, Marxist, Turkish Ataturkist, and Western narratives of Ottoman rule converge—that is, the claim that only an external intervention by a stronger power could achieve the liberation of the Arabs. The greatest irony here is that by characterizing Ottoman rule as backward and oppressive, Arab nationalists gave credence to the Israeli narrative emphasizing the backwardness of Palestine before the arrival of Zionist settlers.

Using Oral Sources to Re-Examine History

Writing the history of WWI based on traditional written sources is difficult. This is not only because most Palestinian written heritage was destroyed or expropriated in the 1948 war, but because Palestinian culture was fundamentally oral in nature at the time, and the generations that lived during the war have now passed away. However, I have been able to use oral interviews that I conducted

Institute for Palestine Studies

Needless to say, democracy, freedom of expression, and the practice of debate is a necessary condition for the advancement and success of historical research.

Another problem is that the history of the war in Arab and Palestinian historiography has been presented primarily from the perspective of the urban nationalist elite. The nature of this line of argument recalls Philip Khoury’s warning that we avoid making nationalist ideals “the sole measure of historical agency in the twentieth-century Arab world.” My work tries to balance this bias with a counter-narrative, which gives Palestinian peasants their voice at this stage of history. I do this not only because they are an “ordinary people without history,” but because the Palestinian villager is the heart and soul of the nation

and the incubator of Palestinian nationalism.

To understand this counter-narrative, however, one must first understand the dominant ones. Most Western historians at the time of the war viewed the Ottoman Empire through the lens of “modernization theory,” which

during the late 1980s and early 1990s with people who lived during the war to reconstruct some of the sentiments Palestinians held toward the Ottoman army.

The old Chinese saying that “one stroke of a quill pen is better than a thousand memories” reminds us that as important as oral histories are, they are in many ways inherently troublesome. Memory can be unreliable, and the capacity to recall details may fade or be distorted, especially after the passage of many years. Interviewers may also be biased in their questions, clearly preferring one answer over another and thereby distorting the record.

When the imperfect process of recall is further embedded in a highly ideologized context, the credibility of oral testimonies may be even more problematic.

Palestinians themselves were and are aware of these challenges. In fact, the Birzeit Research Center Review was the first to publish a paper by Ted Swedenberg in 1986 on the problems of Palestinian oral history. Since the 1980s, historical works on Palestine that depend on oral sources have improved in their credibility.

Zionist Colony

Institute for Palestine Studies

What the Interviewees Said

I have chosen to focus my research particularly on the village of El-Bireh, located near Ramallah and Jerusalem in what is today the West Bank. Shortly after the British occupation of Palestine in 1917, the new British Mandate authorities exiled the most important two peasant leaders of El-Bireh, Rashid al-Ali (Al-Qur‘an) and Amer Muhammad al-Amer (Al-Tawil) to Egypt. Despite the defeat of the Ottomans, Amer and Rashid al-Ali continued to show allegiance to the old Ottoman authority and rejected the authority of Ronald Storrs, the new British governor of Jerusalem. According to Ratib Da‘as, “when the English governor entered El-Bireh, [he] summoned the mukhtars Rashid al-Ali and Amer and asked them, ‘How do you see life [under the British in comparison to under the Ottomans]?’ They told him that ‘the shoe of the Ottoman soldier is more honorable than the head of King George.’ So he exiled them to Camp Fayed in Egypt.”

Ahmed al-Shemseh, who was age 95 when I interviewed him in June 1995, was 17 when the British occupied the village of El-Bireh. “The whole population was with the Turks,” he said. “Of course, all of us were siding with the Turks when the British entered.” He, like others, affirms that the two El-Bireh leaders were exiled from Palestine for their deeds, and said that when the British governor Storrs called all the mukhtars of area to meet him in El-Bireh, Storrs asked them who hated the Turks and loved the English. “All of them bowed their heads and were silent, [including] all the mukhtars of our town

and the entire district. Only Rashid al-Ali raised his finger. When Storrs asked him to approach, Rashid al-Ali said that he hated the English and loved the Turks. When Storrs asked him why, he replied “because of my religion, my culture, [and] my principles. You are our enemies; how can I love you?” Storrs then proceeded to pat Rashid al-Ali’s on the back and thank him.

In both accounts, the position of Rashid al-Ali was incongruent with the British and Arab nationalist narratives that espoused the notion that all Arabs hated the Ottoman Turks and revolted against them with their allies. Yet Rashid al-Ali’s position was arguably more in line with the feelings of the Muslim peasant majority in Palestine at that time.

As the map above demonstrates, the Jewish presence in Ottoman Palestine prior to World War I was indeed tiny compared to the Arab population.

This was to change radically under the British mandate.

‫مركز الدراسات العربية املعاصرة – جامعة جورجتاون‬

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viewed Rashed Haj Rashed Abdullah Da’oud, age 98, in his house in the village of Beit Daqo (near Ramallah). Rayan records him as saying: The Ottoman Caliphate represents Muslims, whether they are Arabs or Turks. After the eruption of the First World War, the British pushed Sharif Hussein to revolt and promised him Arab independence, but they mainly cheated him. All the population was with the Ottoman Empire, but when the British Army came, people were starving; we couldn’t even find orange peels. Our women used to go to the khans to search for barley grains in animal dung, which they dried and ground for food. The British distributed food, and some of the Arabs followed their interests. They loved Britain because it gave them power, prestige, and employment.

Despite Arab Christian support for the British, some Christians still served in the Ottoman military. Khalil Raad (left), a famous Palestinian Protestant photographer from Jerusalem, and Khalil Jawhariyyah (right), brother of a noted Orthodox connoisseur, appear here in their Ottoman army uniforms during World War I.

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Center for Contemporary Arab Studies - Georgetown University

Despite considerable excellent research published lately by many serious scholars on the field in the West (such as Elizabeth Thompson, Linda Schilcher, Mustafa Aksakal, and Salim Tamari), the old anti-Ottoman narrative remains powerful in the historical consciousness of the Arab world. This is especially true in Arab literature and television, which are widely disseminated and instrumental to the process of creating a collective memory. Such examples include the Palestinian Ibrahim Nasrallah’s novel ‘The white horses’, the Iraqi ‘Ali Badr’s ‘The naked banquet’, and the Jordanian Suliman Qawab‘a’s novel ‘Seferbarlik and poverty’.

My research reveals an enduring loyalty for the Ottomans among non-elite Palestinians before and during the war. There is not enough data to explain fully the enduring loyalty of the “ordinary people”; however, what seems obvious from the oral interviews I conducted is that Islam, which was a main component of the Ottoman identity, was a rallying point for this solidarity and loyalty.

Having said this, I do not wish to be misunderstood as being nostalgic for the old vanished Ottoman rule in Palestine; the emergence and use in recent years of the controversial term “New Ottomans” makes my argument even more prone to such a misunderstanding. Rather, my primary purpose in this research is to deconstruct the old dominant narrative and offer a counter-narrative that will contribute to academic debate, though obviously it may have political implications as well. 

Dr. Saleh Abdel Jawad was a 2013-2014 Andrew Carnegie Centennial Fellow at the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies. He has a PhD in political science from Paris XNanterre University and is the former Dean of Faculty of Law and Public Administration at Birzeit University.

Institute for Palestine Studies

Other interviews reinforced this sense of loyalty to the Ottomans. Sheikh Hammam was 90 years old when I interviewed him on July 26, 1995, in his son’s house. He cried when he spoke of the departure of the last Ottoman soldiers from ElBireh, saying that “the Ottoman state represents al-khilafa al-Islamiyya [Islamic caliphate]. Turkish soldiers were very religious … [and] their conduct was good, even when it came to food. During the war, Turkish soldiers had only beans and water. Despite this, they were feeding themselves and giving food to the people. British soldiers were not used to distributing food, but after they left their encampment, we used to find a lot of cans they had left behind and even arms. There was plenty and they abandoned it. Honestly, people love the Turks.

But some preferred the British for their personal interests.”

Prof. Khalil Athamneh, interviewed on July 17, 2006, during a meeting in the Ramallah branch of the Institute of Palestine Studies, noted that his grandmother had told him his grandfather died in jihad, this despite the fact that he died on the Russian front. “From his military formation, only three returned and the rest died. The man saw himself as a part of the Ottoman community.” Professor Samir Awad, a political scientist at Birzeit University, said that his grandfather fought with the Ottomans in different places, including Gallipoli, and told him that just as he “fought for a bygone homeland [the Ottoman state], you fight for a new homeland. I am his grandson, and he felt the defeat in WWI was a rupture and that our struggle today was a continuation.”

My findings from interviews I have conducted have been in various ways confirmed by other researchers. On October 20, 1995, for example, my student Sharhbeil Rayan inter-

Why I Write

Revisiting the Ottoman Legacy An interview with Judith Mendelsohn Rood

What was so attractive about the Ottoman Empire that many Palestinians would not have welcomed the British invasion during the First World War?

reform movement in 1878 in the face of European support of nationalist movements in the Balkans. By emphasizing the Caliphate as a Muslim territory (rather than focusing on justice for all of his subjects), he proceeded to pursue an eliminationist policy against the Armenians, culminating in the genocide of the Christians in Anatolia. By the 1890s, Christian Arabs were well aware of these massacres, and loyalty to the Ottomans waned. At the same time this was happening, intense Protestant humanitarian and missionary activity in Palestine made at least some Arab Christians more favorable towards the British as their protectors.

Muslim peasants in particular supported the Ottoman caliphate because it represented justice to them. Shari‘a represented not just religious law, but also the qanun, or administrative justice, of the Ottoman Empire. Many scholars of Islamic law today do not appreciate the administrative side to the legal code that prevented the Ottomans from becoming a kind of Salafist, literalist regime. During the classical period of Ottoman rule in the Arab provinces, an Ottoman subject—the ra‘iya (Muslim, Jewish, or Christian taxpayers)—of the sul- Let’s bring this up to the present day. How can Ottoman tan could petition the government in the capital and have a studies shed light on the modern Middle East? reasonable expectation that his or her grievance would be fairly addressed.

I think what’s especially interesting is to examine notions of Now, it is true that many Muslims were not comfortable Islamic law today in light of the jurisprudence of the Ottoman with the Tanzimat reforms between 1839 and 1878 that aimed Empire, which is the subject of my book. Qanun was such at gradually equalizing relaan important part of law under the tions between religious comOttomans, and today we no longer munities in the Ottoman emhave it; rather, neo-Islamic law as Many scholars of Islamic law pire. However, internal legal it has developed in the late twentoday do not appreciate the reform was still much prefertieth and early twenty-first centuable to invasion by non-Musadministrative side to the legal ries has not existed since the early lim states or empires. In the Kharijites. A literalist reading of code that prevented the Ottominds of the peasants, foreign shari‘a was just not part of how invaders had no legitimacy, mans from becoming a kind of the Ottoman Empire worked— and therefore Muslim peasants and in fact, the Ottomans crushed Salafist, literalist regime. experiencing British occupathe Wahhabi movement in Arabia tion considered the Ottomans in the early nineteenth century. It defenders of Islam. The 1830s-era court documents I read in most certainly would not have recognized as legitimate the Jerusalem for my dissertation showed that the peasants and bloodbath in which jihadis in Syria and Iraq are currently enurban notables supported the Caliphate long before the Brit- gaged as they call for shari‘a law.  ish ever set foot in Palestine.

As Dr. Abdel Jawad suggested in his article, not all Palestinian Arabs wanted to continue with Ottoman rule.

Talk a bit about Arab Christian support for the British.

How did this develop?

The last Ottoman caliph, Sultan Abdul Hamid II, changed the course of Ottoman history when he aborted the constitutional

Dr. Judith Mendelsohn Rood is a professor of History and Middle Eastern Studies at Biola University and the author of Sacred Law in the Holy City: The Khedival Challenge to the Ottomans as seen from Jerusalem, 1829-1841 (Brill, 2004). She holds a PhD in Modern Middle East History from the University of Chicago and a MA in Arab Studies from Georgetown University.

‫مركز الدراسات العربية املعاصرة – جامعة جورجتاون‬

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FACULTY SHOWCASE

“The Great Revolt,” the United States, and the Question of Palestine Palestinians fought for independence and statehood a decade before Israel’s formation, but the American superpower did not share their vision for the region’s future.

By Charles Anderson

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October 1938, amid the protracted Palestinian the most sustained anti-colonial insurrection in the Arab uprising against British rule and Zionism known as “the world during the interwar period – and the growing inGreat Revolt” (1936-39), one of the insurgents’ most volvement of the US in the Palestine question. Because it important commanders, ‘Arif ‘Abd al-Raziq, addressed a largely took the form of a peasant rebellion and because pointed letter to US president Franklin Delano Roosevelt. it was eventually suppressed—after a deployment of BritProtesting against the increasing partisanship of the United ish forces second in size only to the garrison in India (a States in favor of Zionism, ‘Abd al-Raziq pointed to what country some 250 times as populous)—the revolt has ofrebels perceived as a contradiction between the ideals and ten been dismissed as a disorderly and chaotic failure. Yet policies of the United States, noting that “during the great such a view obscures more than it reveals about both the war [World War I], when there historical moment of the upriswere but a few thousand Jews in The revolt forestalled the ing and its place in the developPalestine, it was America which ment of the conflict over Palescreation of a Jewish state proclaimed the principle of self tine. determination, but to-day Amer- until 1948, but it ultimately The revolt began in 1936 with ica is resolving to stifle this spira six-month general strike by did great injury to the Pales- the Palestinians that was called it [the Palestinian revolt] seeking… liberty.” The letter also tinians’ political aspirations. to demand, among other things, rejected the principle of Eurothe termination of Jewish impean tutelage embedded in the Mandates imposed over the migration, which, after Hitler’s ascent to power in GerLevant and Iraq after World War I, which, in partnership many in 1933, had surged and was rapidly altering the with the League of Nations, gave Britain and France rule demography of the country. Although urban politicians over those lands under the pretext that their peoples were and elites have been credited with leadership of the rebeing prepared by the colonial powers for future indepen- volt, the uprising was the result of social transformations dence. Abjuring notions that an uncivilized or semi-barba- within Palestinian society, including the erosion of elite rous “East” required guidance from a benevolent “West,” authority and the increasing mobilization of youth, work‘Abd al-Raziq declared that “we do not fight because we ers, and peasants during the first half of the 1930s. It was love war, but because we have beheld your abominable these popular social forces that compelled the Arab elite purpose, seeking to rob from us Palestine, our home.” He to abandon its quiescent course of fruitless diplomacy and went on to remonstrate that the Palestinians were wrong- to join the popular resistance. The strike quickly gave rise fully being made to a pay a heavy price for the crisis of to an insurgency that the British regime proved unable to European Jewry, and he challenged Roosevelt to open “the extinguish, leading it to respond with collective punishwide portals of America unto those on whom you take such ments—fines, home demolitions, and punitive raids on compassion, for Palestine is very small and cannot provide villages and urban centers—in hopes of deterring poputhe solution to the Jewish problem.” lar support. The first phase of the revolt ended with an ‘Abd al-Raziq’s unanswered letter to President Roos- inconclusive truce, but the British unwittingly rekindled evelt is suggestive of both the evolving set of institutions the uprising the following year after the Peel Commission, that underpinned and organized the Palestinian revolt— sent to reassess official policy, proposed the partition of n late

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Center for Contemporary Arab Studies - Georgetown University

© Universal Images Group / SuperStock

British soldiers escort a column of Palestinian detainees along a rural road during the Great Revolt.

Palestine into a Jewish state and an Arab entity (called a “state”) that was to be annexed to Transjordan.

During its second phase, from fall 1937 on, the rebellion increasingly modeled itself as a state-in-the-making. Rebels and their backers erected an independent judicial system, collected taxes from the Arab public, organized intelligence networks, conscripted young men to fight or aid the military campaign, established a variety of local administrative bodies that regulated economic and social life, and—as ‘Abd al-Raziq’s letter demonstrates—made forays into the realm of high diplomacy. Like the revolt itself, the process of state formation was largely initiated and propelled from below by peasant cadres, rebel commanders, and their urban and rural supporters. As the rebellion gained strength in 1938, it effectively took over large areas of the country and circumscribed British authority to a few locations.

For a brief time, the rebels imagined that they might defeat the British and Zionism and preside over an independent Arab Palestine, but this was not to be. The appeasement of Hitler at Munich in September 1938 enabled the British to double their troop strength in Palestine and to escalate the counterinsurgency effort. Using an assortment of ever more aggressive collective punishments, including movement controls, threats to food security, and the temporary incarceration of entire villages in open air cages, colonial forces broke the back of the rebellion.

The revolt bore mixed results for the Palestinians. It succeeded in preventing partition and forestalled the creation of a Jewish majority and state in Palestine until 1948. On the other hand, Palestinian society was left in deep disarray, with thousands killed, imprisoned, or exiled. Less commonly known, the revolt also catalyzed a growing role for the US in the Palestine question that ultimately did

great injury to the Palestinians’ political aspirations and collective future. As the British government tempered its support for Zionism and made limited concessions to the Palestinians (such as restrictions on Jewish immigration) in the wake of the revolt, the Zionist movement sought and found a new great power patron in the US government.

Both the office of the president and Congress moved increasingly into the Zionist camp, opposing the Arab quest for sovereignty. While at one point during the revolt Roosevelt secretly suggested removing the Palestinians from their homeland and resettling them elsewhere, it was the proposal to partition Palestine that captured American policymakers’ imaginations.

Alongside occasional Western calls for the mass eviction of the Palestinians and support for Jewish sovereignty throughout Palestine, the idea of partition was resurrected in the 1940s. In part because the Zionist movement had long cultivated powerful allies in American political circles and the press, the Arab majority of Palestine was all but invisible and politically dismissed within the US Consequently, in 1947 the US pushed resolution 181, endorsing partition through the UN, which in turn triggered the 1948 war. The Great Revolt had brought the US firmly into alignment with the Zionist cause, and a decade after the Palestinians had fought tooth and nail to resist the loss and division of their homeland, US backing for partition helped usher in triumph for the supporters of a Jewish state and tragedy for the Palestinians. 

Dr. Charles Anderson was a Jamal Daniel Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies during 2013-2014.

‫مركز الدراسات العربية املعاصرة – جامعة جورجتاون‬

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PUBLIC EVENTS

Spring 2014 Public Events Children’s rights in Palestine, anthropologies of North African Islam, and the US military presence in the Gulf

The Mood of Capital: Corruption Perception in Ben Ali’s Tunisia February 19, 2014 Hannes Baumann, a Jamal Daniel Fellow

Charles Anderson

Popular State Formation During “The Great Revolt” in Palestine (1936-39), or, How Peasant Rebels Almost Overthrew British Rule January 29, 2014 Jamal Daniel Post-Doctoral Fellow Charles Anderson gave a lecture on popular state

formation during “the Great Revolt” in Palestine from 1936 to 1939. He began by noting that the Great Revolt has often been depicted as a disorderly and chaotic failure and, more damningly, as a catalyst for the Palestinians’ catastrophic defeat a decade later in 1948.

However, Dr. Anderson presented an alternative reading of primary sources that examined how the rebels pushed the British Mandate to the verge of collapse. He contended that the vigor of the Palestinian insurgency owed not only to its popular character and wide appeal among peasants, youth, and workers, but to the development of a vibrant organizational infrastructure that underpinned the uprising.

By exploring the significance of key rebel institutions and the dynamics of popular state formation, Dr. Anderson argues for a new understanding of this pivotal moment in Palestinian history and the history of the Mandate. (For more on this, see his article on pages 10-11.)

The Globalization of Defense-Industrial Manufacturing and the New Middle East Military Complex: A Look at Egypt, Jordan, and the UAE February 26, 2014 Associate Director Shana Marshall of the

Institute for Middle East Studies at George Washington University discussed how governments and national militaries in the Middle East are playing an increasingly sophisticated role in the global defense industry. Since the 1990s, Western military and defense industrial firms have set up ventures in the Middle East that have exceeded parallel industries in other parts of the developing world. Dr. Marshall argued that defense firms are no longer just in the business of selling weapons but are also helping to diversify the economies of the governments to which they are contracted and further industrial development there.

Center for Contemporary Arab Studies - Georgetown University

Brad Parker and Sulieman Mleahat

Human Rights and Children’s Rights in Palestine: Legal, Developmental, and Educational Perspectives March 27, 2014 Sulieman Mleahat, ANERA’s education program manager, and Brad Parker, an advocacy

officer and attorney for Defense for Children International Palestine (DCIP), spoke about the challenges facing children in Palestine today. Mr. Mleahat addressed the poor state of education among children in Palestine and about how food insecurity is taking a toll on children particularly in Gaza but also in various locations in the West Bank. He called on the Palestinian Ministry of Education to improve its policies and increase the number of educational programs available to children.

For his part, Mr. Parker spoke about the violations of international law currently being carried out by Israeli soldiers against Palestinian children: arresting children twelve or older without warrants, interrogating them without offering them legal counsel, and imprisoning them on “evidence” procured by the arresting soldiers and forced from the children. He noted that military law has far fewer protections for the accused than does civil law and that children often plead guilty in the hopes that the sentence will be lighter than if they tried to fight it. Mr. Parker said that DCIP has created a unit to document such violations, and lawyers in the organization are now entering Palestinian schools to inform students what their rights are if they are arrested.

CCAS

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for the Study of the Levant, lectured on how international corruption indicators missed the corruption of the Ben Ali regime, and he addressed the debate about the usefulness and limitations of corruption indices. Dr. Baumann noted that prior to the fall of President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali, Tunisian economic management received gushing reviews from groups like the IMF and World Bank. The “Jasmine Revolution” however has shattered Ben Ali’s clean image, showing how the president and the Trabelsi clan of his wife Leila had enriched themselves on the back of the country’s business success. (For more on this, see CCAS’s online interview with Dr. Baumann: http://ccas.georgetown.edu/ story/1242747432582.html)

while Gellner sought to “explain” North African Islam by “gazing” at it, Geertz sought to “understand” it by “observing” it.

Social Change - Social Media: Dialectic Implications of Technology in Times of Revolution April 22, 2014 Miriyam Aouragh, a Leverhulme Fellow at Lahouari Addi

Clifford Geertz and Ernest Gellner on North Africa and Islam: A Comparative Approach April 9, 2014

CCAS Andrew Carnegie Centennial Fellow Lahouari Addi delivered a lecture comparing the methodologies of anthropologists Ernest Gellner and Clifford Geertz during their study of Islam in Morocco during the 1950s and 1960s, respectively. Dr. Addi observed that Gellner witnessed the end of the French protectorate and the beginning of Moroccan independence and so focused his research on the development of the nation state. Notably, Gellner proposed that the modern state would replace the tribe, and that the ‘ulama’ would help to usher in the modern era. For his part, Geertz did not subscribe to Gellner’s ideas (nor the logical positivism that Gellner espoused), but rather viewed society as a composite of relationships and responses. He emphasized that research needed to be rooted in interviews with people and not focus on categories and ideas, as Gellner had done.

Dr. Addi summed up his talk by saying that

the Communication and Media Research Institute at the University of Westminster in London, spoke about the “dialectic implications” of technology as observed over the course of (and response to) the Arab uprisings. She noted that most researchers of the Arab uprisings focus on how those resisting authoritarian regimes made use of the Internet, but she said that regimes like Syria’s have increasingly engaged in counter-revolutionary activity on the Internet, and that more work needs to be done on this. Dr. Aouragh concluded by reflecting on the dialectic of online and offline activism, observing that there must be an organic connection with what is happening on the street in order for online activism to remain relevant.

Miriyam Aouragh

Toby Jones

Energy and America’s Long War in the Middle East May 12, 2014 Toby Jones, an associate professor of his-

tory at Rutgers University, reviewed the history of America’s military presence in the Gulf, focusing much of his lecture on the US’s role in the Iran-Iraq war during which American naval presence in the Gulf expanded dramatically. He observed that the US has come to equate threats to energy with threats to the American navy, but he questioned the need for the US’s continued presence in the Gulf, positing that oil is not the security issue that it is commonly thought to be. He also raised questions about what it means to be “dependent” and what “security” entails. As the first professor to be invited by CCAS’s Master of Arts in Arab Studies student body, Dr. Jones attracted a substantial number of students to his lecture, and they were able to question him about his ideas following his presentation. The Center intends to make student-invited lectures an annual event.

SAVE THE DATE

Tuesday September 16, 2014

Kareema Khoury Annual Distinguished Lecture “Thinking Through ‘Tradition’ About Politics in Egypt Today”

he left off, exploring the idea theoretically and in Islamic discourse, and will take up various questions generated by the idea of tradition and apply them to political developments in Egypt since the January 25, 2011 uprising.

CCAS

On September 16, 2014, Professor Talal Asad (CUNY) will revisit his formative 1985 lecture “The Idea of an Anthropology of Islam,” in which an attempt was made to take the idea of tradition seriously. Prof. Asad will pick up where

‫مركز الدراسات العربية املعاصرة – جامعة جورجتاون‬

13

PUBLIC EVENTS Lecture Series on

“The New Middle East: The First World War 100 Years Later”

PUBLIC LECTURE SERIES AND WORKSHOPS 2013-2014

The New Middle East: The First World War 100 Years Later

L. Carl Brown Princeton University, Garrett Professor

by Jeff Reger

Emeritus in Foreign Affairs, Professor Emeritus of Near Eastern Studies

T

The Middle Eastern Dimension of World War One:

A Century of History and Historiography

his past academic year, the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies sponsored and organized along with the Georgetown Institute for Global History a lecture series on “The New Middle East: The First World War 100 Years Later.”

Thursday, September 26, 2013 6:00 p.m.

Intercultural Center (ICC) Auditorium This series of lectures and workshops is hosted by the Georgetown Institute for Global History and the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies. For questions please contact Elisabeth Sexton, Public Affairs Coordinator, at ccasevents@georgetown. edu or (202) 687-6215.

• L. Carl Brown, emeritus professor of history at Princeton University, kicked off the year-long series on September 26, 2013, with a thorough review of innovative, new scholarship on “The Middle Eastern Dimension of World War I: A Century of History and Historiography.” Dr. Brown drew attention to the many gaps of scholarship in the assessment of the war’s impact on the region, from Iran to Morocco.

• On October 27, Assistant Professor at Tulane University Yigit Akin presented his research on the Ottoman home front. His talk “‘They’re Gathered Up to Die!’: Popular Perceptions of the First World War in the Ottoman Empire” examined petitions and oral histories of the war collected during the first few years of the Turkish republic.

• Najwa al-Qattan, Associate Professor at Loyola Marymount University, spoke on November 14 about the memory of the war and famine in Syrian and Lebanese literature and theater. Her presentation “Remembering the Great War in Syria and Lebanon: Everything, Including the Plague” explored the language with which the scourge of hunger of the war years was later retold.

Issam Nassar

• On March 6, 2014, Associate Professor at Illinois State University Issam Nassar examined and questioned visual sources as historical documents in “Photographing the First World War in the Middle East: The Suez Campaign in Palestine, 1915.” Dr. Nassar focused especially on a photo album produced during the war that is now held at the Library of Congress.

• CCAS Andrew Carnegie Centennial Fellow Saleh Abdel Jawad wrapped up the lecture series for the academic year on April 14 by calling into question commonly held views of “Palestinian Perceptions of Ottomans during World War I.” Working from oral histories and interviews, he argued that the vast majority of Palestinians supported the Ottoman state both before and during the war (see lead article).

Also, during the month of July 2014, CCAS and the Department of History co-hosted a Summer Seminar for University Teachers on “World War I in the Middle East and North Africa.” The fourweek seminar was generously funded by The National Endowment for the Humanities and directed by Professors Mustafa Aksakal and Elizabeth Thompson. It brought together sixteen university faculty from across the country and abroad on the centennial anniversary to reassess the social and political impact of the war from the Mashriq to the Maghrib. 

Jeff Reger is a PhD student in Middle Eastern and North African history at Georgetown University.

CCAS

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Center for Contemporary Arab Studies - Georgetown University

EDUCATIONAL OUTREACH

Re-Imagining the Mediterranean … for K-14 Teachers

By Susan Douglass

W

hile CCAS was hosting its 2013 symposium “The Mediterranean Re-Imagined,” I began working as Deputy Project Director and Curriculum Specialist on a K-14 curriculum project with a grant from the British Council’s and Social Science Research Council’s “Our Shared Past” initiative. Out of this project came a set of six teaching modules, Our Shared Past in the Mediterranean: A World History Curriculum Project for Educators, which was launched in February 2014 as a free, online resource at http://mediterraneansharedpast.org. The project was led by Dr. Peter Mandaville of the Ali Vural Ak Center for Global Islamic Studies at George Mason University in collaboration with a team of distinguished Mediterranean historians—some of whom also presented at the Georgetown symposium—and involved specialists in pedagogy from the US, Europe, Turkey, and North Africa as well as experienced world history curriculum developers.

While the Mediterranean has been a central feature in both western civilization and world history courses, students’ exposure to the region has often been limited to classical antiquity and has seldom been viewed in its global historical context. After the fall of Rome and the rise of Islam, study of the Mediterranean in world history textbooks has been characterized by north/south and east/ west dichotomies. After textbooks tell the story of Europeans rounding the continent of Africa and crossing the Atlantic, the Mediterranean has tended to slip from view altogether, giving way in the modern period to the elastic concept of the Middle East.

In contrast, Our Shared Past in the Mediterranean introduces primary and secondary-source readings, maps, and images that connect the region to historical processes like the movement of plants and animals, the development of languages and scripts, and technologies such as metallurgy, weaving, and horse riding. Intellectual, religious,

technological, commercial, and artistic exchanges illustrate the connected histories of the region rather than perpetuating simplistic ideas of civilizational rupture. Lessons on imperial expansion and conflict, commercial rivalry across the seas, and industries such as silk textiles, glass- and metal-wares illuminate the continuing importance of the region even after the Atlantic and the Indian Oceans became important arenas of trade and imperial rivalry.

Historian Edmund Burke III, who contributed to both the Georgetown and George Mason projects, guided the curriculum developers in highlighting the importance of environmental factors in limiting industrial and agricultural growth in the region. The modules provide teachers with the resources for exploring liberal reform movements as a regional phenomenon—a topic that textbooks often skirt in favor of tracing inexorable decline in the southern and eastern Mediterranean. Julia Clancy-Smith, another scholar common to both projects, lent her expertise on the intense movement of people and ideas across and within Mediterranean

cities and corridors during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. For the period after World War II, the curriculum modules feature the Cold War in the region, its connections with de-colonization struggles, and the nonAligned Movement. Continuing the theme of movement, the curriculum explores phenomena such as urbanization, labor migration, and popular culture along with environmental and economic impacts such as the damming of rivers and the rise of the petroleum economy.

Like world historical scholarship, world history at the high school and community college level is beginning to integrate seascapes into the usual survey of landmasses.

Our Shared Past in the Mediterranean lesson modules, together with the upcoming CCAS summer institute “Integrating the Mediterranean into World History: Approaches and New Teaching Resources,” (August 11-15, 2014) will give teachers new perspectives on an old and familiar region.

Susan Douglass is the Educational Outreach Coordinator for the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies.

‫مركز الدراسات العربية املعاصرة – جامعة جورجتاون‬

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FACULTY FEATURE

INTERVIEW with

SALEH ABDEL JAWAD Tell us something about your personal background and how you came to specialize in the Arab/Israeli conflict and the Palestinian nationalist movement.

I was born in 1952 in Al-Bireh, which is a neighboring city of Ramallah. My father was the mayor of Al-Bireh before the Israeli occupation, and my school friends were from a refugee camp. These classmates lived in muddy slums, as they were the children of peasants who lost their lands and also their identity during the nakba in 1948. I saw their parents each month receiving rations from UNRWA, standing in long lines and sometimes fighting with one another. I was very affected by this.

Then my town was occupied. When the war erupted on June 5, 1967, I thought that life would continue as normal—that we’d ‘have our breakfast’ in Tel Aviv.

But instead the Israelis ‘took their breakfast’ in our town. Some of my neighbors were killed by Israeli airplanes, and the town was bombarded by heavy artillery. I had never seen such airplanes, using their heavy machinery and guns. This was the most traumatic moment in my life and one that continues to influence it to this day.

Talk a bit about your research on Palestine and what led you to your current project.

I was involved in the Palestinian resistance movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Later in 1983 when I began my PhD focusing on Fatah, I discovered that much of what was written about the resistance contradicted my experience. Written sources glorified Fatah and its military ex-

ploits, but in fact, I observed a great deal of inefficiency and corruption in the movement as early as 1968. This gap between my experience and the official reports led me to become more critical of written sources and narratives. One of my professors told me that I needed to do fieldwork and to interview people who lived through the events I was studying if I wanted to correct the historical record.

So when I decided to do some research about the last five years of Ottoman rule in Palestine (1914-1918) I knew I wanted to collect information from people who lived under Ottoman rule and avoid those whose memories were shaped retroactively by the British or by Arab nationalists.

Much of your argument relies on oral sources, and in your article, you noted the challenges inherent to using such sources. Can you elaborate on how one goes about verifying the accuracy of oral sources?

At its best, oral history is not an alternative to written history but something that complements the written sources. For example, Nafez Nazzal, a Palestinian who got his PhD at Georgetown in 1974, wrote a dissertation from oral sources on the Palestinian exodus from Galilee that was then published as a book by the Institute for Palestine Studies in Beirut in 1979. When Nazzal’s book was published, no one took it seriously, but later on, Israelis began to publish books about the nakba based on the Israeli archives that confirmed what Nazzal’s oral sources were saying. In other words, the archives corrobo-

rated the oral sources, thereby increasing their reliability.

Your conclusion that Islam was a rallying point for those Palestinians who remained loyal to the Ottoman empire while Arab Christians were more supportive of the British seems to divide political loyalties along religious lines. Were there other factors that divided Palestinians over the Ottomans?

Certainly education played a part in dividing people. Most of the Muslims who lived in the countryside were not learned, while Christians were culturally and politically influenced by missionary schools (American, French, and Russian). Also, poor people especially suffered during the war because of the British blockade. So most of these people remained pro-Ottoman.

However, it is true that until that time, religion was the main identifier for people. We should not make the mistake of applying to the Ottoman Empire the paradigm of the secular nation state. In Jordan, in Christian areas, and in Ramallah, there were fights over whom to support.

When the British soldiers entered towns, it is said that some Christians would throw rice and greet them while some Muslims would throw stones. This is not to say that Muslims and Christians did not get along but rather that they tended to have different political loyalties. The difficulty is trying to figure out how many Muslims supported the Ottomans and how many Christians opposed them. Maybe we’ll never have the answer.  CCAS

An online version of this newsletter is available on CCAS’s website: http://ccas.georgetown.edu/ 16

Center for Contemporary Arab Studies - Georgetown University