I
Given its religious importance to Muslims, Christians, and Jews, it is easy to see why Jerusalem should have been a touchstone of identity for all the inhabitants of Palestine in the modern era as in the past. This was true although the ways in which this identity was framed and understood, and its relationship to Jerusalem, changed over time, and did so especially rapidly in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Jerusalem was also important to the inhabitants of Palestine as an administrative center, all the more so after 1874, when it became the capital of an independent sanjaq, which sent one deputy to the parliaments of 1877–78, and three to those of 1908–1918. But Jerusalem was also significant as a center of education, the press and other aspects of intellectual and cultural life. This became even more the case following the restoration of the Ottoman Constitution in 1908, which resulted in a greater degree of public and political freedom than ever before.
Although Jerusalem was important as the capital of the district of southern Palestine, its importance extended far beyond that. Its schools, newspapers, clubs, and political figures had an impact throughout Palestine, even before the country’s British mandate boundaries were established after World War I. This was partly a function of the religious importance of the city, and of the sense we have already examined of Palestine as a unit—albeit in religious terms, as a holy land, rather than in political terms at the outset. But it also drew on the fact that the city was a focus of the interests, aspirations and designs of foreign powers, and of their diplomats, spies, tourists, and businessmen, so that both the Ottoman authorities and the local inhabitants considered Palestine in general and Jerusalem in particular to be under threat from without.
Notwithstanding its undoubted local, regional, and international prominence, Jerusalem has, in the past century or so, not been the first city in Palestine in terms of population and economic importance. Although it was probably the biggest city in Palestine in 1800 and seems to have retained that position until some time in the first half of the twentieth century (when the Jaffa-Tel Aviv urban area overtook it), we have seen that by the eve of World War I, the port cities of Jaffa and Haifa were growing much faster, in keeping with the patterns of urban growth throughout bilad al-sham (the Arabic term for greater Syria, or the lands between the eastern Mediterranean littoral and the desert).1 Increased trade with Europe, the building of new railways for which these ports were terminals, and the consequent stimulation of economic activity in their immediate hinterland, all contributed to their growth, and made them the commercial centers of the country.2 By 1931, according to the second British census of Palestine’s population, the Jaffa-Tel Aviv urban area had a larger population than Jerusalem,3 and as already noted, both Jaffa and Haifa had a larger Arab population than Jerusalem by the end of the mandate period.
While this chapter will focus on cultural and intellectual trends in Jerusalem because of their impact throughout Palestine, it is important nevertheless to recognize that other centers in the country, notably the two main coastal ports, Jaffa and Haifa, but also Nablus, Hebron, Nazareth, and Gaza among others, were important foci of Palestinian cultural and intellectual life, as well as being political, administrative and economic centers.4 Beshara Doumani indeed reminds us that during most of the nineteenth century, “Nablus was Palestine’s principal trade and manufacturing center.”5 Beyond our focus on Jerusalem, we will thus have occasion in this chapter to refer to cultural developments in many of these other cities, particularly Jaffa and Haifa, whose dynamism in so many spheres significantly affected the shaping of Palestinian identity.
There was dynamism and change in Jerusalem as well, however. During the final half century of Ottoman rule in Jerusalem, as elsewhere in the region, a momentous shift took place from a long-standing and stable Islamic system of justice and education, and the traditional intellectual pursuits and ways of thought that went with this system, to Western-based forms in all these domains. In Palestine, this change had its biggest effect in Jerusalem, which had for centuries been the apex of the region’s judicial system, and an educational center drawing scholars from the entire Islamic world. Before this shift took place, the Islamic religious court in Jerusalem, al-mahkama al-shar‘iyya, near the Haram al-Sharif, had been the focus of legal matters, and the venue for mediating many of the most important social, economic and political affairs of Jerusalem and the surrounding districts. At the same time, the religious schools, the madrasas and kuttabs, surrounding the Haram al-Sharif were the venues where those among the city’s Muslim population with access to education received their basic and higher learning. These same institutions were also the scene of the initial stages of training for a career within the Islamic legal, educational, and administrative system which prevailed throughout the Ottoman Empire and beyond. In the shari‘a court, as in the schools and mosques, learned members of a number of prominent urban families held positions of varying prestige, power, and influence, often handing them down from father to son. The next chapter looks at examples of such personal trajectories.
Around the middle of the nineteenth century, the locus of power began to shift dramatically in Jerusalem and other provincial centers throughout the Ottoman Empire. New courts, administering laws based partly on Western models and staffed by personnel trained in Istanbul, were set up, and took over many of the legal tasks of the shari‘a courts, which were gradually restricted to matters of personal status and inheritance. Similarly, secular schools that were open in principle to the entire population were rapidly introduced, and became the path to positions in the new, European-style bureaucracy of the Ottoman state. As a result of these trends, within a few decades the venue for local politics, in Jerusalem and elsewhere, shifted from the courts, schools, and religious institutions the old local elites had always dominated to new arenas governed by a completely different set of rules. Equally important, the new dispensation decisively tipped the balance between the central government and local centers of power in favor of the former. In consequence, the influence of formerly semiautonomous local elites in cities like Jerusalem rapidly became dependent on their relationship with the central authorities.6
Given the material and other resources of these notable families, and their experience in adjusting to the realities of power over the centuries, it should not be surprising that they accommodated rapidly to this shift from a system which had long been in place and from which they had benefited substantially, to a new one, and in doing so largely managed to preserve their standing and influence. Within a generation, most of the same families who had for centuries produced the judges, teachers, officials, and preachers who dominated the old system had secured privileged access to the modern educational institutions which were the path to positions in the new legal, administrative, educational, and political order. Although there they had to compete with others from more humble backgrounds trained like them in the new secular schools, or in the growing number of new schools run by western missionaries, they still retained many of their advantages, as we shall see in the next chapter.
This chapter will trace the changes in the cultural and intellectual life of Jerusalem and other centers in Palestine that resulted from these new circumstances, stressing both the important elements of continuity with the traditional order, and the rapid incorporation of components of the new one. Among the issues it will examine is how an elite whose prestige and position had for centuries been a function of the centrality of religion in public life reacted to the late-nineteenth-century decline in the importance of religion as an organizing principle of government. The chapter will also explore the extent to which cultural and intellectual life in Jerusalem—and by extension in the rest of Palestine—at the end of the Ottoman era was in tune with similar developments elsewhere in the Islamic world, particularly in neighboring Arab regions. It will conclude by assessing how these developments occurring within a relatively restricted circle of the elite in Jerusalem and other centers affected the broader populace in the cities and towns and in the countryside, and thus how these changes contributed to the shaping of identity in Palestine in the late Ottoman period and afterward.
II
During the nearly eight decades between the beginning of the Tanzimat reforms in the Ottoman Empire and the end of World War I, a profound alteration took place in the situation in the Arab provinces.7 This was a function of momentous transformations in the structure and scope of government which resulted from the legal provisions of the Tanzimat, from successful efforts to strengthen the Ottoman central government, and from the intensive state-building activities of Sultan ‘Abd al-Hamid II (1876–1909). These changes were both the culmination of a long-standing drive from within to reform and modernize the Ottoman state, and a response to external pressures which increased as the involvement of the European powers in the Middle East grew apace. We have seen that among the spheres most affected by these sweeping changes were law and education. Both were areas where Arab notables had traditionally held a certain advantage in the Ottoman system (as they had under the Mamelukes and Ayyubids before that), largely because of their command of the Arabic language. Arabic was naturally instrumental in both the mastery of all the branches of the shari‘a, and in education, which before the nineteenth-century reforms was based almost entirely on religion.
Under the rapidly evolving new dispensation of the Tanzimat, education was to a large degree secularized and brought under control of the government, which established a network of new public schools throughout the country, starting with provincial capitals and gradually expanding the system. These schools were modeled in some ways on the foreign missionary institutions whose attractiveness to young students was feared by Ottoman reformers. Unlike these foreign schools, however, the state public schools taught most subjects in Turkish, and laid stress on Ottoman patriotism.8 Many of the numerous remaining private Muslim religious schools followed the lead of government, Western missionary, and private schools in introducing modern methods and teaching foreign languages and other nontraditional subjects, all of this alongside their standard religious curriculum.
As has already been mentioned, Ottoman legal institutions were also transformed during this period, and a new network of law courts was established to administer the growing system of secular, western-influenced laws. This led to the gradual circumscription of the role of the shari‘a courts, which had governed virtually all aspects of dispute-resolution in traditional Islamic societies (and usually also played a much broader role). Although they retained their exclusive control over inheritance and personal status matters such as marriage, divorce, and child-custody, and remained important for the registration and adjudication of many contracts, in other spheres the power of the shari‘a courts fell away. This was particularly true as regards criminal law, much of civil law, and “political cases,” all of which were increasingly dealt with in the new state courts on the basis of the newly drawn up legal code, the Mecelle, which although inspired by the shari‘a, represented a codification of Ottoman law on European lines.9 Consequently, the shari‘a courts retained a role, but it became predominantly a local and parochial one. Increasingly, the new state courts became the locus of influence and prestige in the Ottoman legal system.
Alongside these developments, the rest of the state bureaucracy grew in size and changed radically in composition, absorbing more personnel, notably the many graduates of the expanded and modernized educational system. During the nineteenth century, the creation of a more powerful, pervasive, and thoroughly centralized administrative system, and of an expanded and strengthened army, both benefiting from the greatly improved communications made possible by the introduction of the railway, the steamship, and the telegraph, enabled the central government to extend its authority over broader areas of Ottoman society. These changes enabled the state in addition to exert much firmer control over the farflung provinces, many of which had long enjoyed a great degree of autonomy.
The impact of these measures on the Arab provinces and other remote areas of the Empire during the latter half of the nineteenth century was little short of revolutionary. Earlier, many desert, mountainous, and other outlying districts had been beyond the effective control of the Ottoman government, with such law and order as existed in the hands of local tribal, sectarian, and feudal leaders. Even in such provincial capitals as Damascus, Aleppo, Mosul and Baghdad, where the central government had always retained a significant presence, as well as smaller centers like Jerusalem, Nablus, and Hama, local notables had enjoyed a dominating position in urban society, with their influence often barely mediated by the representatives of the central government. As a result, their freedom of action was great, sometimes shading into overt insubordination, in which they were often joined by military officers and provincial officials.10
However, the new capabilities the development of modern state structures put at the disposal of the Ottoman central authorities during the nineteenth century changed all of this. And with these profound changes in power relationships came changes in ways of thought and career patterns. Under the old Ottoman order, which privileged religious learning, Arab notables were in many cases at the cutting edge of scholarship, and had great prestige because of their mastery of the traditional Islamic sciences. Arabs often reached the highest levels of the Ottoman judicial bureaucracy, serving in positions such as Shaykh al-Islam and Kadiasker, which were the pinnacles of achievement within the Ottoman religious bureaucracy.11 Centers of Islamic learning such as Cairo, Damascus, and Jerusalem were visited by scholars from all over the Islamic world in search of great libraries, respected teachers, and the prestigious ijaza’s, or diplomas, which the latter could confirm on worthy students.
After the Tanzimat, these intellectual pursuits continued, and many Arab provincial notables with an Islamic education continued to enter the Ottoman religious bureaucracy and to rise within it. However, this bureaucracy rapidly ceased to be a locus of power, and Islamic learning gradually ceased to confer prestige and status in society as it once had. Instead members of the educated classes increasingly saw the Western-based study of Islam as the source of true scholarship about Islamic religion and culture. Great prestige came to attach as well to disciplines that had been revolutionized by Western methods in the sciences and mathematics, the social sciences and the humanities, all of which were accessible only in foreign languages, or in translation from these languages into Turkish and Arabic. This in itself was a major change: heretofore, throughout Islamic history, Arabic had been the medium of scholarly interaction in many fields of intellectual endeavor in the Islamic world, notably religion and law, with Persian paramount in literature and belles-lettres, and Turkish in government and military affairs. Suddenly, a new situation obtained; no longer were these three languages of classical Islamic learning those in which the most important intellectual issues of the day were being pursued, but rather French, English, and German. However, not all perceived this immediately.
This situation on the intellectual plane of course changed as the balance of power between the Ottoman Empire and the European states changed, and as the latter encroached ever more aggressively on the Ottoman dominions in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Previously, it had been possible for Arab and other Ottoman notables to look down on Europeans, and to assume that while the latter may have benefited from certain material advances, on the cultural plane they remained inferior objects of contempt. Such an outlook on things Western was rooted in the belief that Islam was the last and most complete of the revealed religions. An example of this traditional attitude can be found in the message sent by the governor of Gaza to the qadi, the military commanders and the notables of Jerusalem, warning them that Napoleon’s army had reached the outskirts of Palestine in January 1799. The language used to describe the French is revealing. They are called: “kuffar al-faransa al-mala‘in, damarrahum Allah ajma‘in” [the cursed French infidels, may God destroy them all].12
This attitude was necessarily modified as the nineteenth century wore on, with Europe’s achievement of a decisive hegemony over the Ottoman Empire, and the attendant shifts in intellectual ascendancy. As members of notable families acquired Western educations or were trained in Western-influenced state, missionary, and private schools, they came to value Western intellectual traditions, which in turn deeply informed the growing number of Arabic- and Turkish-language newspapers and periodicals published in the Ottoman Empire and outside it in the latter decades of the nineteenth century.
The impact of all of these shifts on the plane of culture can be seen clearly in Jerusalem. Thus, a member of one Jerusalem notable family, Yusuf Diya’ al-Khalidi, lamented in the conclusion to his 1880 edition of the verse of the pre-Islamic jahili poet Labid ibn Rabi‘a that not one Arab scholar answered an appeal for help in collecting the poetry of Labid, which he had published in the leading Arabic-language journals of the time, al-Jawa’ib, al-Jinan, and Hadiqat al-Akhbar.13 By contrast, he notes, foreign scholars of Oriental languages had been generous in providing him with material on Labid. Yusuf Diya’ al-Khalidi concludes with the hope that the Arabs would soon regain their former glory, indicating a clear sense of Arab identity on the part of the author. Nevertheless, it is clear that for him and for many of his contemporaries, one would now have to look toward Europe and European science for models of true scholarship, even in the project so central to early Arabism of uncovering and reinterpreting the linguistic and literary roots of Arab culture.
The continuity between more traditional and the newer, European-style scholarship can be seen from an examination of a unique source for understanding cultural life during this period: the holdings of family libraries in Jerusalem. The most important of these in Jerusalem, and the most significant surviving collections of such materials in situ in Palestine, include the al-Aqsa Library, al-Maktaba al-Khalidiyya and al-Maktaba al-Budayriyya. The former, which is the largest, includes three main collections brought together relatively recently: that of the long-established Dar Kutub al-Masjid al-Aqsa, which originated in the manuscript repository of the al-Aqsa Mosque, and which included a valuable collection of old Qur’ans now kept in the adjacent Islamic Museum; part of the library of the renowned eighteenth century scholar, al-Shaykh Muhammad al-Khalili, who was mentioned in the previous chapter; and part of the library of al-Shaykh Khalil al-Khalidi (1863–1941).
Established in 1899 by Hajj Raghib al-Khalidi, but based on family holdings of manuscripts and books that went back for many generations, al-Maktaba al-Khalidiyya was intended to be open to the public, with the aim of encouraging the spread of learning, and reviving interest in the classics of Islamic learning, as well as modern subjects. Although much smaller, in this respect it resembled the Zahiriyya Library in Damascus, whose founder, the prominent salafi Shaykh Tahir al-Jaza’iri, was a collaborator with Hajj Raghib in organizing the Khalidi Library during his period of service as curator of the libraries of the vilayet of Damascus. In this capacity, al-Jaza’iri helped to establish libraries both inside the vilayet—in Damascus, Horns, and Hama—and outside it, in Jerusalem and Tripoli.14
As an example of the continuation of the older forms of Islamic scholarship, published catalogues of the Al-Aqsa Library and the Budayriyya show the continued copying of religious, historical, and literary manuscripts into the nineteenth and even the early twentieth century, well after the time when printed books—primarily editions of the Islamic classics—were first being purchased by the custodians of these institutions. It is clear from an examination of the catalogues of these libraries that traditional Islamic scholarly pursuits still retained at least some of their vitality.15 The manuscripts in al-Maktaba al-Budayriyya, which is located adjacent to the Haram al-Sharif, were mainly collected by Shaykh Muhammad ibn Budayr ibn Hubaysh (d. 1220/1805), and only a few were added after his death. As with the al-Aqsa Library, however, many of these additions are manuscripts copied in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.16 Similar results are emerging from the ongoing cataloging of the more than 1,200 manuscripts of al-Maktaba al-Khalidiyya, which shows both the continued copying of earlier manuscripts and the production of new religious and other texts in manuscript form late into the nineteenth century.17
Also revealing in this context is the appearance of printed editions of classic Islamic texts in these libraries. An examination of the contents of al-Maktaba al-Khalidiyya shows that even while the copying and collection of manuscripts continued, the members of the family whose personal libraries went to make up this collection were also buying copies of the printed texts of the major works of the traditional Islamic sciences.18 In the field of history, for example, the oldest printed edition in this collection is a single copy of the 1274/1857 Cairo edition of Ibn Khaldun’s al-Muqaddima.19 More significantly, the library contains multiple copies of many of the classical Islamic historical texts.20
The significance of the existence of multiple copies of these earliest locally printed editions of major Islamic historical works is clear: several members of the al-Khalidi family considered it important to obtain printed versions of works of which they in many cases owned manuscript copies, in order to benefit from the relatively modern comparative scholarship these new editions represented. This is a typical example of the shift in the intellectual sphere which this period witnessed. Even as some members of this family continued to pursue the traditional religious sciences (the Library contains numerous multiple copies of printed editions of basic reference works in the religious sciences by authors and compilers such as al-Bukhari, Muslim, Qastalani, and al-Tabari, which constitute a considerably larger proportion of its total holdings than the historical works) others were becoming interested in history and other subjects which, although traditional in some respects, were increasingly influenced by Western scholarship and methodologies. This can be seen not only from the large number of standard Islamic history works in new editions, but also from the many works of contemporary European Orientalist scholars in the Library, ranging from Renan, Dozy, Carra de Vaux, Muir, and de Goeje, to E. G. Browne, Margoliouth, E.J. W. Gibb and Massignon.21
Perhaps linked to this renewed interest in Islamic history, whether based on traditional sources or more recent European scholarship, was the sympathy of many ulama’ of this era for the salafi tendency, with its concern for the revival of Islam, a return to the original sources of religion, and the modernization of Islamic societies.22 All of these interests are apparent in the holdings of printed books, periodicals, and pamphlets in the Khalidi Library. We have already noted that one of the most important leaders of the salafi movement in Syria, al-Shaykh Tahir al-Jaza’iri, played an instrumental role in helping to found al-Maktaba al-Khalidiyya, and indeed he was present at its formal opening, as is evidenced by a contemporary photograph.23 Several of al-Jaza’iri’s books, some in multiple copies, are found in the Library, together with many examples of the writings of other salafis such as al-Sayyid Rashid Rida.24
Numerous other Islamic reformers were also close to al-Khalidi family members whose collections went into the Library, notably Muhammad ‘Abdu, one of whose autographed works is in the collection,25 and al-Sayyid Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, whose photo, with a warm autograph to his close friend Yusuf Diya’ al-Khalidi, is in the Library collection.26 Yusuf Diya’s brother, al-Shaykh Yasin, was also a friend of the leading Tripoli salafi shaykh and reformer, Husayn al-Jisr, founder of al-Madrasa al-Wataniyya in Tripoli, whom Yasin met when he was qadi there. Several of al-Jisr’s books are in the Library, some of them in multiple copies.27
Linked to this salafi tendency was a manifest interest in the latest writings of European positivist authors, especially the popularizers among them. One of those who seems to have particularly caught the fancy of the generation that came to maturity in the late Ottoman period was the prolific French writer, Dr. Gustave Le Bon. His books on the development of civilizations, the evolution of peoples, and political psychology found a wide audience in the Middle East, and were translated into Arabic by such leading intellectual figures as Taha Husayn, Ahmad Fathi Zaghlul Pasha, and ‘Abd al-Ghani al-‘Uraisi, and into Turkish by Abdullah Cevdet. It is therefore not surprising to find six of Le Bon’s works in the Khalidi Library, five in translation and one a lavishly bound French-language volume, La Civilisation des Arabes.28 Nor is it surprising to find new bookstores opening in Jerusalem and Jaffa at the end of the Ottoman period, catering to the demand for foreign books, periodicals, and other works in Arabic and foreign languages.29
Notwithstanding this evidence of interest in some kinds of modern scholarship, there were clearly gaps in many fields in the cultural life of Jerusalem. The editor of a Jerusalem newspaper, Sa‘id Jarallah, complained bitterly in 1912 that although “the country of Palestine” (“al-qutr al-filastini”30) had a glorious past and deserved to have its history recorded, “in our libraries we find no good history.” “The land of Palestine” (“ard Filastin”), he went on, was important because it was where Israelite civilization (“al-madaniyya al-isra’iliyya”) existed, where Christianity started, and where the Crusades were fought; it was the first qibla, or direction of prayer, for the Muslims, even before Mecca, and it was the cherished objective of the Arab conquerors in the days of the second caliph, ‘Umar. And yet, he complained, there exists no Arabic-language text on the history of Palestine except translations of European texts, and dated works like al-Uns al-Jalil and the travel account of ‘Abd al-Ghani al-Nabulsi. In conclusion, the author called on Arab scholars to fill this gap, as the writing of history will help to civilize the country, move forward its affairs, and raise up its people, who are ignorant of Palestine’s virtues, although others appreciated them.31
We can read between the lines of this harsh critique some of the public and patriotic purposes which the founders of libraries and other cultural and educational institutions in this period had in mind. Indeed, al-Hajj Raghib al-Khalidi, in his announcement of the founding of the Khalidi Library in 1900, began by stressing the linkage between libraries and culture going back to the era of the Greeks and the early Islamic era, for when “civilization and culture reached the Arabs, they founded libraries and schools.” He affirmed that the spread of knowledge was the basis of progress and prosperity, adding that the Europeans had learned this from the Arabs. This had brought them to their present state of “wealth, happiness and greed for what belongs to other lands,” continued al-Hajj Raghib al-Khalidi, sounding the same note of alarm about European expansion which we saw expressed as early as 1701 in the petition discussed in the previous chapter. He then lamented the deterioration of the great libraries that had been established in Jerusalem in the past, and stressed that he meant the Library he was founding to be an asset to “al-diyar al-maqdisiyya” [meaning here the Jerusalem region, and by implication the holy land], “for whatever we do, it will be hard to match what exists in the way of foreign institutions in these lands.”32
The Khalidi Library was intended, in other words, to help restore the Arabs to prosperity by fostering knowledge, and to enable them to match the powerful cultural establishments created by foreign powers all over the region. Twelve years later, Sa‘id Jarallah called for the Palestinians to write their own history, and not to depend on the narratives of others, since without an appreciation of history, it was impossible to achieve progress, or for the country’s inhabitants to appreciate and therefore defend “the land of Palestine,” which others coveted. For both Jarallah and al-Hajj Raghib al-Khalidi, the development of culture, whether via encouraging the indigenous writing of history or the founding of libraries, was clearly an important element in the preservation of their country, their culture, and by extension their identity, against the external dangers that threatened them.
III
Whatever the importance of such libraries and the activities that went on in them, books and scholarship were restricted to a very limited segment of Palestinian society, the vast majority of whose members were illiterate.33 However, a shift was then underway from this well-established traditional intellectual pattern affecting only a tiny elite to a new one involving larger numbers of people and influenced by European models. The crucial elements in this shift were the development of new social formations, classes, and professional groups, and the impact of major new institutions established after the middle of the century.34
Central among these processes in their effect on society were the expansion of the educational system and the growth of the government bureaucracy. The traditional institutions of Ottoman government, education, and justice had been central elements in urban society in Jerusalem and other centers throughout the first three centuries of Ottoman rule. Not surprisingly, therefore, the new schools, courts, and government offices established during the Tanzimat period were crucial instruments in the transformation of society in terms of the formation of new social strata, professionalization along Western lines, and familiarization of large segments of society with the everyday routines of the modern, Western world.
This was true throughout the cities of bilad al-Sham, but it was particularly the case in Jerusalem, which was a governmental and educational center, and where those other vital engines of change, commerce, and industry, did not grow as fast as in the coastal ports. At the same time, the large numbers of tourists and pilgrims it attracted (more than 20,000 per year on average at the turn of the twentieth century) provided Jerusalem with a significant source of income and also with constant external stimuli. Their impact on the mores, values, and attitudes of Jerusalemites had both positive and negative aspects.35
We have already noted that the new schools founded to teach foreign languages and modern science and mathematics, as well as some traditional subjects, were particularly important in stimulating change, partly because they had an influence far beyond the narrow bounds of the existing traditional elite. Unlike the new courts and administrative institutions, which were in large measure initially filled with personnel brought in from the outside and followed a fixed imperial pattern, the new schools were mainly staffed with local teachers, frequently differed from one locality to another in nature and organization, and were often established as a result of local initiatives. This was not initially true of missionary schools, although they did eventually have local as well as foreign teachers, but it was the case for state schools and for the many private schools that were set up all over the Arab provinces in response to the desire for access to education of those Muslim and Greek Orthodox families wary of the mainly Protestant and Catholic missionary schools, and whose needs could not be met either by existing religious schools or by the rapid expansion of the state system.36
The need for such schools can be seen from figures provided in the Ottoman Salnameh [yearbook] for 1288/1871 for the vilayet of Syria, which at this time included all of Palestine. For a Muslim population of Jerusalem listed as 1,025 households, there were seven schools with 341 students, while the Christian and Jewish populations of 738 and 630 households respectively had between them nineteen schools with a total of 1,242 students.37 There was thus nearly one school place per household for non-Muslims, and only one school place for approximately every three Muslim households. If one assumes similar family sizes per household—an arbitrarily chosen four children per household, for example, half of them of school age—it follows that only about one in seven of the approximately 2,000 school-age Muslim children in Jerusalem would have had access to schools, while nearly half of the more than 2,500 non-Muslim children of school age would have had such access. Moreover, this was the situation in the largest urban center in the country: it was undoubtedly far better than that in other cities and towns, not to speak of the villages.
According to another later source, around the turn of the century there were thirty-five local Christian and missionary schools in Jerusalem with more than 2,200 students and more than 150 teachers.38 Although these statistics are not comparable with the preceding ones, and we have no analogous figures for private Muslim and state schools, several things are clear from this juxtaposition and from such other educational statistics as are available for this period. One is that educational opportunities had expanded greatly in Jerusalem for Christians and others willing to avail themselves of Christian and missionary schools. Another is that in the country as a whole things had improved somewhat by 1914, although only by comparison with the abysmal earlier situation.
According to the standard work on Arab education in mandatory Palestine, by A. L. Tibawi, by 1914 the Ottoman government had established 95 elementary and three secondary public schools throughout Palestine, with a total of 234 teachers and 8,248 pupils, 1,480 of them girls. The secondary schools were located in Jerusalem, Nablus, and Acre. At that time, there were additionally 379 private Muslim schools with 417 teachers and 8,705 pupils (only 131 of whom were girls).39 State schools and private Muslim schools combined thus provided under 17,000 places for a total Arab school age population of about 72,000 in 1914. No pre-1914 figures are available for Christian missionary and private schools in Palestine (although one source puts the number of children in French and Russian schools throughout greater Syria including Palestine in 1914 at nearly 80,00040), but we can obtain an idea of the scale of such schools from the fact that in the 1920–21 academic year they had nearly 12,000 students.41
Although it is clear from these statistics that the Ottoman state established many schools in the decades leading up to 1914 (and indeed founded a higher secondary, or sultani, school in Jerusalem during World War I),42 they also show that there were not enough places in these institutions, or in schools run by Muslim and Christian bodies, to meet the demand for education.43 A number of private schools were eventually set up in Jerusalem and elsewhere to help meet this deficiency. One of them was Rawdat al-Ma‘arif al-Wataniyya al-‘Uthmaniyya al-Islamiyya (or the National Ottoman Islamic School), founded in 1324/1906.44 It was typical of such schools in a number of respects, not only in having been founded by a cleric, Shaykh Muhammad al-Salih, but also in having a number of young men with Western educations from well-known families as teachers of modern subjects: thus we find the names al-‘Alami, Dajani, al-Husayni, and Nuseiba among the teachers, as well as four foreign women who taught languages. The school was also typical in having leading notables as members of its Board of Directors, in this case the Mufti, Muhammad Kamil Effendi al-Husayni, and the Deputy for the city, Sa‘id Bey al-Husayni.
There can be little doubt that this school played the same role in shaping the self-view of its students as did other similar private schools established at about the same time in Beirut, Tripoli, and Damascus by similar notables.45 Tibawi states that Rawdat al-Ma‘arif may have been “the earliest Muslim private school to develop a modern curriculum.”46 The name of the school indicates the different cultural tendencies the school embodied: patriotic, Ottoman and Islamic. In this too it was characteristic of many such schools. Muhammad al-Shanti, the Palestinian editor of the Cairo newspaper al-Iqdam, visited Rawdat al-Ma‘arif as part of a trip to report on public and private schools (and the courts) in Palestine in 1914, and came away positively impressed by it.47 The school, he noted in a long article on the educational and judicial systems in Palestine, had 350 day students, 40 boarders, and 13 teachers, and offered scholarships to 72 of its students. He predicted that this school, where the students were being taught that Zionism was a danger to their country, would be the “foundation stone to build the future of Palestine, and the premier cultural weapon to fight foreign schools and Zionist colonialism.”48 Clearly, the students in Rawdat al-Ma‘arif were being exposed to ideas that were growing in influence in Palestinian society, and that helped to shape their sense of community and their patriotism.
Another school set up along similar modern lines was al-Madrasa al-Dusturiyya (the Constitutional School), founded in 1909 by the noted Jerusalem writer, journalist, and educator Khalil al-Sakakini, a passionate nationalist who enjoyed great public esteem.49 Like Rawdat al-Ma‘arif, al-Sakakini’s school was intended to provide students with an education in the sciences, mathematics, and foreign languages, as well as teaching them a love of the Arabic language and Arab history. In this, it was characteristic of the private educational institutions of the era in inculcating an Arabist consciousness through encouraging love of the national language and literature, and through reimagining what had heretofore been taught as Islamic history as Arab history. Unlike other schools, both al-Sakakini’s collaborators in the project and the students at al-Madrasa al-Dusturiyya were from different religious and social backgrounds. In his own words, “This was the first time in the history of our country that the sons of the different faiths meet in one school on one bench.”50 Here too can be seen the lineaments of the nationalist project, which attempted to elide, ignore, or resolve religious differences, or to bury them in a shared vision of an other. Among those who participated with al-Sakakini in the organization and management of the school, which thrived until the outbreak of World I forced its closing, were Muslims and Christians, including ‘Ali Jarallah, Jamil al-Khalidi (who was also a newspaper editor), and Eftim Mushabbak, all active young educators from Jerusalem.51
A similar response to the growing demands of the population of Jerusalem for more and better education can be seen in the activities of Christian private and missionary schools. Perhaps the best-known such schools in Jerusalem were St. George’s School, founded in 1899 by the Jerusalem and East Mission under the direct control of the Anglican Bishop of Jerusalem,52 and the French Jesuit-run College des Frères, founded in 1875. Typical of the growth of these institutions was the expansion and transformation of the school of the Church Missionary Society (CMS) in 1904 from a free school established about 30 years earlier to teach religion and train missionaries, into a fee-paying preparatory school designed to feed students into the Syrian Protestant College in Beirut (later renamed the American University of Beirut), the most prestigious of the Protestant missionary institutions in the Arab world.
The pamphlet that announces these changes in the structure and syllabus of the CMS school stresses in its introduction that circumstances had changed in the country: “These days in the eyes of the citizens knowledge is given greater importance and its benefits are more appreciated. As a result, parents of every class are more eager to educate their children in the most modern ways, and want the doors to be opened for them to learn foreign languages and science . . .”53 This is a clear expression of the strong demand for education that characterized many sectors of the population of Palestine, and that was to continue through the British Mandate period, when the rural population would pay to finance the building of schools in their own villages.54
Education was clearly a realm where there was profound ferment, growth, and change in the decades leading up to the end of Ottoman rule over Palestine, and afterwards. The impetus for these processes was both external and internal. On the external front, the Ottoman state and foreign powers were engaged in a silent but deadly battle for the minds of future generations. Although foreign missionary education was directed in some measure at the souls of the children affected, there was little doubt either on the part of the European governments, which financially subsidized and/or diplomatically supported such education, or on that of the Ottoman authorities, that questions of allegiance, influence, and ultimately power were also at stake. This could be seen most strikingly in the willingness of the aggressively secular and anti-clerical French Third Republic—which sought to limit the spread of Church-controlled schools inside France—to support religious education outside of France, where it was clear that such schools served as a potent instrument for the extension of French national influence abroad. And in this competition for young hearts and minds in the pre-World War I era, there was nowhere in Palestine, and few places in the Middle East, where the issue was more fiercely joined than in Jerusalem. This was at least in part because Jerusalem was unique as the focus of Western religious interest in the region, as a major consular, pilgrimage and tourist center, and as a symbolic site of importance in registering the competing influence of the great powers.
On the internal front, the improvement of Muslim schools, the founding of other private schools, the rapid expansion of the state system, and the high degree of acceptance of missionary education, increasingly even by Muslims, were a function of the demand from within Palestinian society for more and better educational opportunities for the younger generation. The citation from the CMS pamphlet above indicates that the local population fully recognized the vital importance of education. Another example of this recognition comes from a 1912 editorial in the Jerusalem paper al-Munadi, which faulted the government for not keeping the pledge made in the Constitution of universal free primary education in the local language. “The government has ordered all locally raised money for education to be spent locally,” the writer noted, “but if more money were needed, the numerous awqaf originally founded for educational purposes produced income sufficient to fund as many as three schools.” “Unfortunately,” he added, “some families live off this wealth, and grow lazy, instead of which they should pay half of this income for education.” The editorial concludes: “We still don’t value knowledge enough; the poor and middle classes need education, but the rich teach their children to love power and wealth.”55
There is evidence that some in Palestine and elsewhere in the Ottoman Arab provinces understood that they were pawns in a game between the great powers and the Ottoman state where education was concerned, as in so much else.56 Some actively fought against insidious foreign influences via support for the state educational system, some tried to stay out of this game where possible, for example via the establishment of private schools, while others sent their children to foreign schools, either ignoring, accepting, or welcoming the political implications (which of course were different depending on which foreign power supported a given school: the American schools were seen as the most politically neutral). But in any case, the demand for a modern education was far greater than the number of places available in all the existing schools in Palestine, and many parents were willing to make extraordinary sacrifices to obtain a modern education for their children, especially one involving training in foreign languages, which they increasingly understood was a valuable asset.57
One of the inevitable results of these external pressures, combined with this barely quenched thirst for education, was the growth during the Ottoman period of a fissiparious and divided educational system—in fact, several systems, each using a different syllabus, teaching a different foreign language, and under the control of a different authority. Education retained much of this diversity during the Mandate, in spite of some efforts at standardization. Thus, in the absence of a unified educational system, offering obvious advantages for the uniform socialization of the population, for much of the past century the Palestinians, like others in the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire and its successor states, had to contend with a deeply divided educational sector, which served many interests besides their own. But unlike the peoples of the other Arab countries, which eventually achieved independence and created unified school systems, until the present day the Palestinians have suffered from an educational system that is divided and outside their control. The consequences of this situation for Palestinian self-conceptions and for a unified Palestinian identity have been great, although they were in some measure overcome through phenomena that transcended these divisions, such as a limited number of common elements of the curriculum under both the Ottoman and Mandate systems, and student involvement in nationwide student political activities, as occurred throughout the Mandate period, and came to a peak in 1936, when students playing a leading role in organizing the general strike of that year.
IV
Among the many influences on cultural and intellectual life during the last few decades of Ottoman rule, the press had perhaps the most widespread impact on society. As part of the cultural, educational and linguistic revival known as the nahda, which took place in bilad al-Sham and Egypt in the latter part of the nineteenth century, the daily press, as well as periodicals, flourished. Although much of this journalism was forced abroad by the censorship of the period of Sultan Abdul Hamid II in the years after 1878, it continued to prosper in Egypt, acquiring readers all over the Arabic-speaking world. An ever-growing number of newspapers, magazines, and technical and scientific journals were published there by Egyptian and other Arab writers, bringing their readers daily news as well as the latest trends in European and Islamic thought. After the 1908 revolution restored the Constitution, and with it press freedoms, in the Ottoman Empire, there was a blossoming of the press in bilad al-Sham in particular, with thirty-five new newspapers established in the first year after the reimposition of the Constitution throughout the region, and dozens more thereafter.58 Palestine shared in this expansion of the press,59 which provides us with an invaluable window on the self view of an important segment of society, and the development of ideas about politics, society, and identity.
It has been argued with regard to this period and this region that one cannot deduce too much from the press: we can read what was written in it, but we cannot be sure who was reading it at the time, or what impact it had.60 Whatever the merits of this contention (and they seem limited indeed, inasmuch as this criterion could just as easily be utilized to dismiss many other categories of sources), we can certainly deduce some things if we find how widely distributed a given newspaper or periodical was. Ideally this would mean obtaining circulation figures, and even lists of subscribers, but such luxuries are unfortunately rarely available to the historian of the modern Middle East (although circulation figures for some pre-World War I Jerusalem newspapers do exist61). Nevertheless, we can get some idea of their circulation from the holdings of the major periodicals of the day in a number of private libraries.
What can be deduced in this regard from the three libraries which have been examined in Jerusalem, two of them grouping together at least three separate collections, is clear. In the Khalidi Library, for example, we find copies, usually bound and often multiple, of late Ottoman periodicals, from Ahmad Faris Shidyaq’s al-Jawa’ib, founded in Istanbul in 1860; to Butrus Bustani’s Jinan, founded in Beirut in 1870; to Ya‘qub Sarruf and Faris Nimr’s al-Muqtataf, published in Cairo starting in 1877; to later publications such as Jurji Zeydan’s al-Hilal, founded in Cairo in 1892; al-Sayyid Muhammad Rashid Rida’s al-Manar, founded in Cairo in 1897; and Muhammad Kurd ‘Ali’s al-Muqtabas, founded in Cairo in 1906 and two years later moved to Damascus.62 While each of these periodicals had a different focus—al-Jawa’ib and al-Manar tended to be religious in emphasis, while the other four were more secular in orientation—all attempted to describe and interpret for their readers the latest developments in science and industry, to reassess Islamic and Arab history, and to examine the reasons for the rise of the West and the relative weakness of the Islamic world.
That this collection is not exceptional can be seen from the periodical holdings of the al-Aqsa Library, which contains runs of most of the same publications that are found in the Khalidi Library, like them frequently in fine old leather bindings and often carrying an indication of whom the original owner was. It contains al-Muqtataf from 1880 through the 1920s, al-Hilal from the first issue, also through the 1920s, and runs similar to those in the Khalidi library of al-Manar and al-Muqtabas.63 These holdings in both libraries of the most important of the first Arabic-language periodicals, made up of volumes which largely predate the formation of both of the libraries in question, originated in the private collections of several different Jerusalemites. They constitute evidence of a deep interest on the part of these individuals, and presumably others like them, in the newest writings on Western science, history, and politics, as well as Islam, Arab history, and the politics of the region.64 Having been placed in libraries open to the reading public, moreover, these periodicals were accessible to a wide range of readers. In an announcement of its establishment, the founder of the Khalidi Library explicitly called it a “public library” (maktaba ‘umumiyya).65
Interest in these same subjects can be followed in a different manner in the daily press, which in turn broadcast it to a wider audience than had access to such periodicals. Through serialization in daily newspapers, much of what was published in journals like al-Hilal and al-Muqtabas in particular was accessible to a broader readership, together with the news of the day. One can presume that the information reached an even more extensive audience by word of mouth. Such papers as al-Mufid in Beirut, published by ‘Abd al-Ghani al-‘Uraisi, al-Muqtabas in Damascus (the daily newspaper, with the same name as the periodical, and also published by Muhammad Kurd ‘Ali), al-Karmil, published in Haifa by Najib Nassar, and Tarablus al-Sham, published in Tripoli by Muhammad Kamil al-Buhayri, regularly reproduced articles by leading salafi thinkers, as well as historical, literary, and scientific pieces, in serial form. Like many newspaper and periodical editors of the day, Kurd ‘Ali, Nassar, and al-Buhayri each owned a press that published books by some of these same authors.66 Rashid Rida had the same arrangement in Cairo with the press of his periodical al-Manar.
This practice was also followed by some publishers of newspapers and periodicals in Jerusalem. Two years before he began to publish the newspaper al-Quds in 1908, Jurji Hanania had established a printing press and publishing house.67 Khalil Baydas, publisher of the popular periodical al-Nafa’is al-‘Asriyya, also printed pamphlets and the occasional book (he used the printing presses of Jerusalem’s Dar al-Aytam orphanage). Similarly, Muhammad Hassan al-Budayri, publisher of the short-lived but influential post-war nationalist newspaper Suriyya al-Janubiyya, and his cousin Muhammad Kamil al-Budayri, publisher of its successor as the leading nationalist daily, al-Sabah, used to publish books and pamphlets on the press their papers were printed on, which was located in a room adjacent to the Haram al-Sharif which today houses al-Maktaba al-Budayriyya.68 On balance, however, Jerusalem in the late Ottoman period was too small a market, and too provincial a city, to be a major publishing center.69 Instead, it depended for its intellectual sustenance mainly on the newspapers, periodicals, and book publishers of the cities of the Palestinian coast, especially Filastin in Jaffa and al-Karmil in Haifa, as well as those of the Syrian littoral and interior like Beirut and Damascus, and the major regional centers, Cairo and Istanbul.
Several newspapers were nevertheless published in Jerusalem during this period, although some of them were relatively short-lived. Jurji Hanania noted in a 1913 editorial that the number of papers being published in the city in that year was fewer than when his newspaper, al-Quds, started publishing in 1908, adding that many papers founded after the 1908 revolution had been forced to close, and others to reduce their frequency of publication, including his own. He ascribed this phenomenon to the unwillingness of some subscribers to pay their subscription fees, and the tendency of others to share their copy of the newspaper with “fifty other readers.”70 While helping to explain the limited nature of the Jerusalem market for the daily press, this remark also enables us to get an impression of how widely diffused the material in each issue of a given newspaper might have been, particularly if we take into account oral transmission to a yet broader circle than that of these “other readers.”
Among the main Jerusalem papers were the official al-Quds al-Sharif/Quds Şerif, which appeared irregularly in both Arabic and Turkish; Hanania’s al-Quds; al-Shaykh ‘Ali al-Rimawi’s al-Najah; Iliya Zakka’s al-Nafir, Sa‘id Jarallah’s al-Munadi; Khalil al-Sakakini and Jamil al-Khalidi’s al-Dustur, and Bandali Mushahwar’s Bayt al-Maqdis.71 We can assume that due to the limitations of their printing facilities, the press runs of most daily newspapers in the region were small, and that of the Jerusalem papers even smaller, and that their readership was quite limited (the largest circulation appears to have been that of al-Quds, with 1,50072). Indeed, most newspapers appeared only once, twice, or three times a week, and we know that the size of the newspaper-reading public was severely restricted by widespread illiteracy and poor transportation outside the urban centers.
The small size of the market for “quality” newspapers is the subject of a lament by the editor of al-Munadi, Muhammad al-Maghribi. In an article entitled “The Death of Literature in Palestine” he argues that Arab civilization once reached great heights in Palestine, then declined. It was shameful that “in this country the illiterate are many times the number of the literate, that few go to school, and only hundreds of Arabs buy newspapers.” Moreover, he complained, people buy frivolous publications, rather than literary or scientific ones. Readers of al-Muqtataf, al-Hilal, and al-Muqtabas in the land of Palestine (“fil-bilad al-Filistiniyya”) are counted in the dozens, while the satirical al-Himara and al-Nafa’is al-‘Asriyya have hundreds or thousands of readers.73
Nevertheless, a number of factors have to be weighed against these constraints in measuring the influence of the press in this early period. The first is that newspapers were commonly posted in public places and circulated freely from hand to hand (as the laments of publishers like Hanania over lost revenues demonstrate). The Khalidi Library subscribed to a number of newspapers, as did other libraries, and we can assume that they were available to all those who used these facilities. We know from a number of sources, moreover, that people were accustomed to having the newspapers read aloud to them at home and in public places, so that the low level of literacy, while a barrier to the influence of the press, was not an insurmountable one.74
In addition, people, particularly those living outside the cities, were accustomed to news reaching them after a delay. Thus, news in a paper which reached a distant town or village days late was still devoured eagerly by the reading and listening public. Some newspaper editors realized their potential impact in the countryside, and took advantage of it. The editors of Filastin sent free copies of their paper to the mukhtar of every village in the Jaffa district with more than 100 inhabitants. The objective, they wrote in an editorial, was to “acquaint the fallah with what is happening in the country, and to teach him his rights, in order to prevent those who do not fear God and his prophets from dominating him and stealing his goods.”75 These newspapers were apparently eagerly awaited in the villages, for in the same editorial, ‘Isa and Yusuf al-‘Isa asked those mukhtars with complaints about delays in delivery of the newspaper to direct them to the office of the qa’immaqam of the district, which had agreed to deliver copies via the local gendarmes. There is no indication that any Jerusalem newspaper followed this practice, although some expressed similar populist sentiments.76
There are in addition various indications in the press itself and elsewhere of its growing influence in Palestine and other parts of the Arab world as the twentieth century wore on, particularly in the larger cities. One of them was the tendency of those in authority to close down newspapers when they published articles that offended them, a step which surely would only have been taken because these papers had some effect on their readers and in shaping a newly configured public sphere. As will be shown in chapter 6, one of the most forceful instances of the impact of the Palestinian and Arab press was the role newspapers played in the opposition to the Zionist movement, a fact recognized by both Zionists and Palestinians at the time, and amply demonstrated in the available issues of the pre-1914 Palestinian daily press.
Not all newspapers and periodicals were anti-Zionist. While al-Munadi frequently carried articles attacking the Zionist movement, and the most widely read Palestinian papers, Filastin and al-Karmil, were strongly hostile to Zionism, al-Quds and al-Nafa’is al-‘Asriyya generally took a muted tone on the subject, although they did carry an occasional article disparaging Zionist colonization or critically describing a specific incident involving settlers. The main exception to the general rule was Iliya Zakka’s al-Nafir, which in the words of an Israeli historian of the Palestinian press, “published articles praising Jewish colonization in the country when it received payment for them, but launched attacks on it any time the payments were interrupted.”77
As the Ottoman era drew to a close in Palestine, what can be seen in the press, as in few other sources, is the increasing usage of the terms “Palestine” and “Palestinian,” and a focus on Palestine as a country, of which we have already seen a few instances. The newspaper Filastin was one of the primary venues for this orientation, with its very title evoking the centrality of Palestine in the outlook of its editors. In a characteristic item, which echoed many others published in this period, Filastin analyzed the differing trends at the 1913 Zionist congress, asserting that both of the main tendencies represented there intended to collect as many as possible of the Jews of the world in Palestine. It concluded its report with a poem by al-Shaykh Sulayman al-Taji al-Faruqi entitled “The Zionist Peril,” and the editorial comment: “Do you accept to see our country stolen?”78
Filastin was by no means alone in this orientation, as most other Palestinian papers also referred to Palestine and the Palestinians as their primary concern. We have seen above two examples from al-Munadi, whose masthead bore the words “Giving particular coverage to local news and to study of conditions in Palestine”:79 one article stressed the importance of Palestinians writing the history of Palestine, and the other focused on the decline of culture in Palestine since the classical period, which marked the zenith of Islamic history.80 The authors of both articles assume that Palestine is the central focus of their readers’ loyalty, and evince a strong sense of patriotism and love of country. Noticeably, in neither article is Zionism mentioned, whether directly or indirectly. Even al-Quds, far less polemical or outspoken than most other newspapers of the day regarding Zionism (although its editor criticized Iliyya Zakka for his support of Zionism, and indeed won a court case against him81), constantly referred to Palestine, for example in an article surveying commerce, industry, and agriculture as main means for building up Palestine.82 Indeed, every one of ten issues of al-Quds sampled at random over the period 1909–1913 included articles mentioning Palestine or “our country” (biladuna).
Muhammad al-Shanti, the editor of al-Iqdam whose description of the Rawdat al-Ma‘arif school as the “foundation stone to build the future of Palestine” has already been quoted, neatly summed up the way he understood Palestinian identity as fitting into other identities. In an article warning “Palestinian youth” of the danger of Zionism, al-Shanti declaimed: “Let the country become an Arab, Ottoman country, not a Zionist country” (“wa tisbah al-bilad biladan ‘arabiyya ‘uthmaniyya wa la bilad sihyuniyya”).83 In directing his remarks to “Palestinian youth,” and warning them about the dangers to “their country,” al-Shanti had clearly defined the focus of his concern as Palestine; in stressing the country’s Arab and Ottoman character, he was referring to established elements which were part of Palestinian identity. In expressing these sentiments, he was perhaps more outspoken than some of his journalistic colleagues working in Palestine, as befitted the director of a newspaper published in far-off Cairo, but he otherwise seems to reflect the outlook of most of them—and perhaps also, we may surmise, that of their readers.
V
There were other important centers for cultural and intellectual life in Jerusalem at the end of the Ottoman period, such as political parties and organizations, and religious and social clubs. We can follow some of their activities through the press, and it is clear from even a superficial examination of its coverage of these domains that while Jerusalem was by no means as active a center as were larger cities in the Ottoman Arab provinces, previously unheard of types of political and social organizations there were growing rapidly. Press coverage of politics is particularly important, for it reveals the same orientations regarding identity, and particularly the centrality of the idea of Palestine as the country to which its population belonged, and which belonged to its population.84 Other sources reveal to us the operation of secret societies and political groupings,85 and the workings of private and family endeavors.86
It remains to mention the circles around foreign diplomats, scholars, and missionaries, and the growing institutions of the Jewish yishuv (or the Jewish community) in Palestine, which were clearly the foci of much cultural and intellectual activity in Jerusalem. Of a total Jewish population of Palestine of approximately 60,000 before 1914,87 between 25,000 and 30,000 lived in Jerusalem, where they constituted about half the population.88 Much intellectual and cultural ferment occurred among this relatively large population, as well as among the many European merchants, missionaries, and consular officials posted in Jerusalem. With a number of exceptions, however, it appears that both of these important groups were very largely isolated from most of Palestinian society, as a result of language and religious barriers, and in some cases by choice. They thus had a relatively limited impact on the intellectual and cultural life of most of the Arab inhabitants of Jerusalem (with the important exception of the schools run by Christian missionaries and the Alliance Israélite Universelle, which attracted a number of Christian and Muslim students, especially from the upper classes).89 Some members of the elite were nevertheless influenced in some measure by their contacts with both European missionaries, tourists and diplomats and Jewish residents and settlers in this period, as we will see in a number of cases in the next chapter.
Jerusalem and the rest of Palestine were in a nearly constant process of transition during the last half century of the Ottoman period. As these transformations in government, administration, education, justice, communications, and transportation took place, and as the security situation in the country improved, the population grew, and the economy responded positively to these changes and to the blessings of the last lengthy period of uninterrupted peace in the country’s modern history. As the Ottoman era drew to a close, the first signs of the Palestinian-Zionist conflict which was to consume the country for most of the twentieth century were already apparent, notably in the press and in those parts of the countryside where Zionist settlements founded in the wake of the second aliya (or wave of Jewish immigration to Palestine, 1904–1914) had expanded at the expense of the indigenous peasantry. Nevertheless, only the most prescient contemporary observers would have pointed to this as the issue that would completely dominate the future of Palestine.90 Most others would probably have looked to the momentous changes we have focused on for clues to the future.
In the intellectual realm, much changed during the decades preceding World War I, although some things stayed the same. Under the Tanzimat religion had lost much of its centrality to the processes of governance, and the religious institution was marginalized as a pillar of daily administration of justice and much else.91 However, during the 33-year reign of Sultan ‘Abd al-Hamid II, popular religion was perceived by the Ottoman authorities as a useful tool for establishing legitimacy and justifying their control by appealing to ideas that were widespread and popular among much of the population, although most of the Tanzimat reforms were kept in place.92 On the local level in Jerusalem, this shift back toward religion, albeit in a situation where the religious establishment was robbed of much of the substance of real power it had once enjoyed, meant a shift by the state away from favoring the families, such as the al-Khalidi’s, associated with reform in government and liberal salafi thought in religion, and toward favoring those like the al-Husayni’s with a more conservative political bent, and a greater involvement with popular religion.93 After the 1908 Constitutional Revolution, this trend of state reliance on more conservative notables was temporarily halted, but it was to be resumed during the British mandatory period.
One of the other crucial changes of this period, however, was that these issues of notable infighting were beginning to matter less, as the realms of culture, politics, and government were no longer the exclusive preserve of such families, although they were adept in maintaining much of their old influence in the very different new circumstances. Now, hundreds of educated individuals were needed as teachers, government officials, military officers, journalists, telegraph operators, and railway employees, all relatively well-paid and prestigious professions which either did not exist before the nineteenth century, or had changed and expanded greatly.94 Thus, as we have seen, in Jerusalem around the turn of the century Christian and missionary schools alone employed more than 150 teachers, most of them locals. Elsewhere, the Syrian Protestant College in Beirut in 1912 employed 34 local instructors, exclusive of foreigners, in prestigious, high-paying jobs.95 This massive expansion of opportunities gave ample scope to individuals of both non-notable and non-Muslim backgrounds to achieve status.
At the same time, the economic expansion that half a century of peace, rapid population growth, and improvements in security, communications, and transportation made possible opened up opportunities for many individuals of these and other backgrounds to prosper. As a result, Palestine was in a state of ferment that increased in the years leading up to 1914, a state that was pregnant with possibilities, many of them positive. Its promise was not to last. As the Ottoman era in Palestine ended with the capture of Jerusalem by General Allenby’s troops in December 1917, there passed with it not only sovereign dominion—transferred from one power to another—but also the possibilities of autonomous development for the indigenous population, and of unfettered economic, social, and intellectual interaction between Palestine and other parts of the region. These possibilities would not be replicated for many decades, and indeed are far from being assured today.
In the next chapter, we will examine some of the political, intellectual, and ideological options that appeared to be open at the end of the Ottoman era in Palestine, via a detailed look at the lives of two individuals of this period.