I
When a movement, or a leader, or an ideology triumphs, historians are understandably disposed to look at what went before as the inevitable run-up to this triumph. So it was initially with the study of the French Revolution, Napoleon, and communism, and so it was for many decades with the treatment of nationalism in the Middle East. The precipitous collapse of the Soviet Union over a period of a few years and the ensuing recent reexamination of modern Russian history, however, illustrates another common phenomenon: an equally strong tendency toward strident iconoclasm as soon as a formerly dominant ideology declines. A similar trend is underway in the analysis of nationalism in the Middle East, with writers from Islamic, Marxist and western perspectives vigorously questioning the inevitability, and indeed the importance, of the rise of Middle Eastern nationalisms over the past century or so, now that they seem to be in decline in many parts of the region.
This is perhaps truest of the recent historiography of Arab nationalism.1 This ideology triumphed with the disappearance of the Ottoman Empire, and has been hegemonic for most of the twentieth century throughout the Arab world. Today, however, it is heavily burdened by the weight of its own failure to achieve its objectives and by the degeneration of the regimes which rule and have ruled in its name, and is visibly on the defensive before the dramatic onslaught of Islamic radicalism and the growth of nation-state nationalism. After many decades when the history of the region was composed—both in the Arab world and often elsewhere—in light of the orthodoxies of Arab nationalism, this history is now being rewritten in light of its recent decline.
Unfortunately, much of the revision of the standard version of events is as flawed as the Arabist nationalist canon itself once was. Where the historiography of the modern Middle East generally repeated the assessments by the post-World War I generation of Arab nationalists, who regarded the Ottoman era in Arab history as one of unrelieved gloom, and the Arab leaders hanged for treason by order of an Ottoman Military Court in Aley in 1915 and 1916 as noble martyrs, more recent works take a completely different tack. One example of this about-face can be seen in a 1981 Beirut re-edition of a history written by the Egyptian nationalist leader Muhammad Farid before World War I as a panegyric to the Ottoman state. The reprint includes a new preface noting that this classic corrects false concepts about the Ottoman era which had been generally prevalent, showing the Ottoman Empire in its true light, as a worthy example of an Islamic state.2 Similarly, the Lebanese historian Wajih Kawtharani’s revisionist work Bilad al-sham takes a critical view of the Arab nationalist World War I “martyrs,” reprising the Ottoman government’s view of them at the time of their execution as no more than agents of foreign powers.3
Distortions of the history of the late Ottoman era in the Arab world from an Arabist perspective have thus given way to similarly reductionist Islamist and other anti-Arabist views of more recent periods, which draw on an equally biased set of assumptions for guidance. As a consequence, analysts of modern Arab history who rely on scholarship that uncritically accepts the grandiose self-assessments of the power and pervasiveness of Arab nationalism throughout the twentieth century are incapable of explaining the striking recent ascendancy of Islamic radicalism and nation-state nationalism in many parts of the Arab world, neither of which fits pan-Arab paradigms.
However, the new “revisionism” does little better than did nationalist historiography at portraying the complexity and subtlety of the network of affiliations and loyalties characteristic of most Arabs in the late nineteenth century, when nationalism first began to spread in the Middle East.4 The Ottoman Empire, while far from being an ideal Islamic state, as some recent Islamic-oriented historians would have it, was hardly the den of iniquity portrayed by earlier nationalist historians, Arabs and others. And it was possible for an Arab notable of this era to be both a loyal supporter of the Ottoman state and a fervent believer in Arabism, a possibility excluded by extreme views in both schools.5 Reintroducing some complexity into our portrayal of the politics of pre-World War I Palestine, with its amalgam of local, national, transnational, and religious loyalties, will thus hopefully correct our view not only of the late Ottoman era, but also of succeeding ones. This chapter will do so by examining the lives of two individuals whose careers illustrate this complexity, and will thereby shed light on some of the varied pre-World War I sources of Palestinian identity.
II
The last chapter touched on how the Tanzimat reforms and the intensive state-building activities of Sultan ‘Abd al-Hamid II and the constitutional regime that followed his reign led to sweeping changes in the power and reach of the central government. This consequently led to shifts in the career patterns of notables in the Arab provinces during the last decades of the Ottoman era.6 The change in the power balance in these provinces involved two different processes, if the Palestinian case is typical. The first, starting in the mid-nineteenth century after the end of the Egyptian occupation,7 was the reduction by the state, often through the use of military means, of the influence of powerful families with a base in the Palestinian countryside. These included the Abu Ghosh family in the area west of Jerusalem, the ‘Amr family of Dura in the Hebron district, and the ‘Abd al-Hadi family in the Nablus area.8 The second process, which took place somewhat later, involved the diminution of the dominating position in urban society of notable families in Jerusalem and other cities as a result of major changes in the way the government was structured.9
In the case of Jerusalem, we can find an apt illustration of the power that accrued to local notables under the old system in the career of one of them. This was al-Sayyid Muhammad ‘Ali al-Khalidi (1781–1865), who succeeded his father in the powerful position of ra’is al-kuttab wa na’ib (chief secretary and deputy10) to the qadi of the Jerusalem shari‘a court in 1220/1805. He held this position for most of the sixty years until 1281/1865 with a few interruptions, during which one or another of his sons often held the post.11 As such, he deputized for the qadi in his absence, or during the interim period between the tenure of different qadis, and throughout he presided over the permanent court personnel and the archives of the court.12 Thus, for the better part of three generations he was the senior local official in a court crucial to mediating economic, social, and other power relationships in Jerusalem and much of the surrounding district.13 This gave him much influence in a situation where qadis appointed from Istanbul served for a single year, without developing local attachments or much familiarity with the region.14 Having served at one point as qadi of Erzerum, Muhammad ‘Ali al-Khalidi knew what that job entailed, and presumably preferred remaining in this position in Jerusalem to the vicissitudes of service elsewhere in the imperial religious establishment.
This key post had been held by Muhammad ‘Ali’s great-great-grandfather, al-Shaykh Muhammad San‘allah al-Khalidi (d. 1139/1727),15 for several decades between 1087/1676 and 1134/1722, and by several other members of the family after him, including Muhammad ‘Ali’s father, al-Sayyid ‘Ali, who occupied it for nearly two decades starting in the late eighteenth century. The advantages conferred by holding such a position can be determined from even a cursory examination of the more than 250 hujaj (legal documents and records) originating in the mahkama shar‘iyya and located among the collection of family papers preserved by San‘allah, ‘Ali, Muhammad ‘Ali and their descendants.16 More than 150 of these documents—it is difficult to tell whether they are chancery copies or originals, although the latter is most likely—cover the sixty years during which Muhammad ‘Ali almost continuously held the post of na’ib (about thirty of them refer to the earlier periods during which San‘allah and later ‘Ali held the post). The very fact that so many individuals in a single family could hold such a position, handing it down from father to son, both highlights and helps to explain the autonomy and influence of the provincial notables.17
These 250 documents, dating from the mid-seventeenth century to the early twentieth, are mainly in Arabic, with some in Ottoman Turkish, and cover a wide range of subjects, including legal cases that came before the court, as well as petitions, inheritances, and other matters generated or certified by the court. They seem to have been papers of importance to those who collected them, some of them having to do with family-controlled properties and awqaf, and others concerning important political or social issues of the day. They appear to have served as a personal reference collection for the individual who as ra’is al-kuttab had control over the flow of paper in the court. A long-serving chief secretary was clearly able to keep copies of the documents he considered most important (chancery copies of all documents that passed through the mahkama shar‘iyya were kept in its archives, while another copy of the most important ones was sent on to Istanbul). They were thereupon carefully preserved and handed down in the family,18 giving any of its members who came to hold this post an inestimable advantage in terms both of understanding matters of precedent, and knowledge of important past cases decided in the court.
By the time of Muhammad ‘Ali’s death in 1865, the changes we have been discussing in the structure of provincial government, and consequently in career patterns, were already well under way, and the notables of Jerusalem were actively adjusting to them.19 Muhammad ‘Ali’s eldest son, Yasin (d. 1318/1901), received a traditional Islamic education and followed his father into the ranks of the ‘ulama, serving as ra’is al-kuttab in Jerusalem after his father’s retirement on several occasions, as na’ib in Nablus, and as qadi of Nablus and Tripoli.20 A supporter of the Tanzimat reformers, he was elected as a member of the General Council of the vilayet of Syria from 1867–1875 when the reformer Mehmed Reşid Paşa was Vali, and served as a qadi from 1878–1880 when Midhat Paşa, the father of the Ottoman constitution, became Vali of Syria. After a period in disfavor under ‘Abd al-Hamid, he was elected as a member of the Jerusalem Municipal and Administrative Councils, and was appointed Mayor of Jerusalem in 1898.21 Two of Yasin’s brothers also became ‘ulama, often deputizing for and ultimately succeeding their father in his posts in the Jerusalem shari‘a court, and one served as qadi of Jaffa.
However, the third of Muhammad ‘Ali’s sons, Yusuf Diya’ al-Din Paşa al-Khalidi [Yusuf Diya’] (1842–1906), took a completely different educational and career path, initially without his father’s blessings. Muhammad ‘Ali al-Khalidi was a still vigorous eighty years of age, and was still serving as na’ib and ra’is al-kuttab, when at the age of eighteen his son Yusuf Diya’ went off to study at the Malta Protestant College, after he had received a thorough grounding in the traditional Islamic sciences from his father and his father’s colleagues in the religious establishment of Jerusalem. Yusuf Diya’ stayed in Malta for two years, thus becoming the first in his family to study foreign languages and other modern subjects (which he had begun earlier by attending the British Diocesan Boys School founded in Jerusalem by Bishop Gobat). At the instigation of his older brother Yasin, he went on to study for nearly three years in Istanbul at the Imperial Medical School and then at Robert College, until his father’s death in 1865 interrupted his education and brought him back to Jerusalem to start his career.22
The careers of Yusuf Diya’ and his nephew Ruhi serve to illustrate some of the transformations in the Ottoman system that we have mentioned, and the changes in ideology that went with them. An examination of the lives of these two individuals will show the different elements that constituted the identity of Palestinian notables in this transitional phase of the late Ottoman era, and will hopefully cast some light on issues of identity for others in Palestinian society, who were not part of the notable class, to which they belonged.
The careers of these two men can be summed up briefly. Yusuf Diya’ al-Khalidi was an outspoken liberal member of the first Ottoman Parliament, three times Mayor of Jerusalem, an Ottoman diplomat, an instructor and then a professor at the Imperial-Royal Oriental Academy in Vienna23, and author of several scholarly works, including the first Kurdish-Arabic dictionary (and one of the first examinations of the Kurdish language on modern linguistic principles24). After this long and varied career, he died in Istanbul in 1906. Like Yusuf Diya’, his nephew Ruhi (the second son of Yusuf Diya’s eldest brother Yasin) also first received a traditional Islamic education and then Western schooling; was also an Ottoman diplomat, a prolific author, a modern linguist and a lecturer at a major European university (in his case the Sorbonne); was also an outspoken representative of Jerusalem in the Ottoman Parliament, and also died in Istanbul, barely seven years after his uncle.
Yusuf Diya’ and Ruhi al-Khalidi are broadly representative of the notables of Jerusalem, and to some degree those in the rest of the Arab provinces. Coming from families that had specialized in religious learning and provided ‘ulama to staff the provincial, and occasionally the imperial Ottoman, religious establishment, they are typical of a new generation that shifted to modern educations and government service. This assertion, which is supported by the work of other scholars who have studied them,25 is borne out by examination of the education and careers of many of their contemporaries. A typical example would be Ruhi al-Khalidi’s fellow representative of Jerusalem in the Ottoman parliament, Sa‘id Bey al-Husayni (1878–1945), members of whose family had held the important posts of Hanafi mufti of Jerusalem, shaykh al-haram, and naqib al-ashraf almost continuously since the late seventeenth or early eighteenth century.
The change over time is mirrored in the shift between Sa‘id al-Husayni and his father, Ahmad Rasim al-Husayni (1823–1880), who in some sense straddled this generational divide. Although Ahmad Rasim al-Husayni received a traditional training in fiqh, he went into commerce and became head of the new commercial court of Jerusalem, rather than joining the corps of ‘ulama as had his father and his grandfather, who was Hanafi mufti of Jerusalem at the turn of the nineteenth century. Only later in his career, after the death of the incumbent, did he become naqib al-ashraf. Sa‘id al-Husayni, by way of contrast, received a modern education from the outset, culminating in a time at a school run by the Alliance Israélite sufficient for him to learn Hebrew. He went on to become a government official in Jerusalem, serving as a censor of the Hebrew press, and after being elected Mayor of Jerusalem in 1905, was elected to Parliament in 1908 as a deputy for the Jerusalem district.26 The shifts in education, career, and presumably outlook, leap out from photographs of individuals of different generations during this era, with the fathers shown in traditional ‘ulama garb, and the sons in impeccable western suits.
The men we will focus on are of interest as well because, in addition to their various achievements during active lives of administration, scholarship and politics, each was in touch with leading intellectual figures of the age, both in the Ottoman Empire and the rest of the Islamic world, and in the larger European academic sphere where the organization and systemization of knowledge about “the Orient” was proceeding rapidly. An examination of these figures is thus of more than merely biographical interest, and holds out the prospect of shedding light on the affiliations, loyalties, and outlook of a broad range of individuals prominent during this era, as well as others about whom we may know less, but can reasonably infer conclusions.
III
Yusuf Diya’, the third of al-Sayyid Muhammad ‘Ali al-Khalidi’s five sons, was born in 1842, after his father had already served for decades as the senior local official in the shari‘a court of Jerusalem, and three years after the Hatt i-Şerif of Gulhane had inaugurated the Tanzimat. We have seen that Yusuf Diya’ was the first and only one of eight siblings to obtain a western education.27 By present-day standards, the little more than five years spent in three different western-style schools may seem a modest amount of education, and indeed some Europeans were scornful of his attainments.28 It must be remembered, however, that Yusuf Diya’ had a thorough traditional Islamic education, that the schools he attended were the most advanced ones extant for their time and place, and that in the 1850s and 1860s even in Europe and America schooling had not yet developed into the decades-long odyssey it has since become.
It is tempting to see in this new departure a conscious attempt by a Jerusalem notable family to diversify its options in view of the sweeping changes that were affecting the Empire. However, the existing evidence indicates that it was Yusuf Diya’ himself who sought Western-style education, for reasons he set out in an autobiographical sketch: upon reflection, he found that the Europeans were able to dominate others because of their superior learning, combined with the ignorance of their opponents. Thinking about these matters drove him to seek knowledge, which he initially tried to do in the Egyptian schools established by Muhammad ‘Ali and his successors, to which his father tried but failed to gain him admission. Thereupon, after his father refused to allow him to travel to bilad al-Afranj [the lands of the foreigners] to study, Yusuf Diya’ ran off with a cousin to Malta, where by the intercession of Anglican Bishop Gobat of Jerusalem, he was admitted to the Malta Protestant College. Later, his eldest brother, Yasin, helped him gain admission to the Imperial Medical School in Istanbul.29 Unlike Yusuf Diya’, all of his brothers—the older two, Yasin and ‘Abd al-Rahman, as well as Khalil and Raghib, who were younger than him—received religious educations and followed in their father’s footsteps, and as we saw they eventually served in various posts as members of the Muslim religious establishment in Jerusalem and other parts of the Empire.30
Nevertheless, if a shift from traditional career patterns was what was intended by this change in education, it was eminently successful in the case of Yusuf Diya.’ Through his studies in Jerusalem, Malta, and Istanbul, he learned French, English, and German,31 and knowledge of foreign languages (for which he appears to have had an aptitude) opened up a number of opportunities for him, although the high-level connections his family and class background made possible were instrumental in shaping these opportunities. While in Istanbul as a student at the Imperial Medical Academy and Robert College, Yusuf Diya’ became the protègé of reformist Tanzimat statesmen such as Midhat Paşa and Reşid Paşa, with the latter of whom his older brother Yasin was already on good terms. These powerful men were to prove helpful in advancing Yusuf Diya’s career at the outset, although his associations with them were to hurt him in later decades after they lost power and Sultan ‘Abd al-Hamid II established his absolute rule.
All of this was still in the future when Yusuf Diya’ returned to Jerusalem in 1865, at the height of the implementation of the Tanzimat reforms in the provinces. Yusuf Diya’s return to Jerusalem, occasioned by the death of his father, coincided with the appointment of Reşid Pasha as Vali of Damascus (which during this period briefly included the Jerusalem sancak). In keeping with his life-long belief in the importance of education if Ottoman society were to be transformed, Yusuf Diya’s first activity in Jerusalem was the founding of a state middle school (ruşdiyye) on the premises of an old madrasa, in 1284 (1867–68). Counting perhaps on his older brother Yasin’s connections, Yusuf Diya’ apparently expected to be appointed director of this school, but instead “they brought a Turkish teacher from Istanbul” to take the post. Any disappointment he may have felt at this turn of events was probably assuaged soon afterwards, when he was appointed as Mayor of Jerusalem, in his own words “by the people of Jerusalem and the Turkish Government.”32 He held this post for five years (and on two other occasions later in his career for several more years), and is described in a number of sources as an active mayor. His efforts, supported by Reşid Paşa in Damascus (Jerusalem was not separated from the Damascus vilayet until 1872), included helping to initiate the construction of the first carriage road from Jerusalem to Jaffa, and improving the water supply of the city.33
When his patron, Mehmed Reşid Paşa, returned to Istanbul upon his appointment as Foreign Minister in 1874, Yusuf Diya’ followed him “at the request of the late Grand Vizier, Mehmed Ruşdi Paşa.”34 He first was assigned to the Ministry’s Translation Bureau, and later in the same year obtained an appointment as Ottoman Consul in Poti, a Russian port on the Black Sea. This consular posting to a small, provincial Russian town apparently involved little of the glamour often associated with diplomacy—indeed, his correspondence shows him to have been left considerably poorer as the result of a robbery and by incurring official expenses, for which he had the greatest difficulty in prevailing upon the Foreign Ministry to reimburse him after his patron, Reşid Paşa, lost his post.35 After this assignment in Russia, which ended abruptly after only six months, Yusuf Diya’ traveled to Vienna, spending two months visiting different parts of Russia including Odessa, Kiev, Moscow, and St. Petersburg along the way.36 In Vienna, Mehmed Reşid Paşa was now Ambassador—a clear demotion from Foreign Minister, and a sign that his star was waning. Through his intercession, Yusuf Diya’ nevertheless was able to obtain a post as an instructor of Arabic and Ottoman Turkish at the Imperial-Royal Oriental Academy in Vienna, which he held for eight months before returning to Jerusalem. There, after another short term of office as mayor, he was elected to the Ottoman Parliament in 1877.37
Until this point, Yusuf Diya’ al-Khalidi had been a protege and supporter of the leading Ottoman statesmen of the late Tanzimat era. His achievements—such as initiating the building of the road from Jaffa to Jerusalem—had been in furtherance of their modernizing, reforming program, and had been made possible in part by the support in high places which they were able to provide him, and which was so essential in the Ottoman system (and probably in any system). But upon his election to Parliament at the age of thirty-five, Yusuf Diya’ al-Khalidi came into his own. Educated in the West and acquainted with a number of Western Orientalists, he knew several foreign languages, was relatively widely traveled, and was apparently a public speaker of some skill. Indeed he was described by the American Consul-General in Istanbul as having made “a sensation in the Parliament by his eloquence and boldness,” and by another American diplomat as “the finest orator and ablest debater in the Chamber.”38 He was thus thoroughly conversant with entirely new dimensions of modern politics which some of the older Tanzimat-era statesmen who were architects of the Constitution, and who had been brought up in an earlier tradition, had not mastered.
Having imbibed heavily of liberal ideas, Yusuf Diya’ was an active figure during both sessions of the parliament elected during the brief first Ottoman constitutional period from 1876–1878.39 He proved himself one of the parliament’s strongest supporters of constitutional government, and was an outspoken opponent of the Sultan ‘Abd al-Hamid’s absolutism in his speeches, statements, and letters both inside and outside the parliamentary chamber. Not surprisingly, this prominence did little to endear him to the Sultan, who had no use for liberalism, constitutions, or public speeches. His ire was directed at Yusuf Diya’ in particular, since he had repeatedly attacked specific actions of ‘Abd al-Hamid, once protesting in Parliament against his unconstitutional choice of the President of the Chamber during its first session with the words: “The member of Istanbul, His Excellency Ahmed Vefik Effendi, tells us that he is our President. Who made him so?”40 In February 1878, after suffering through two sessions marked by such parliamentary criticism of his policies and his chosen ministers, the Sultan finally felt strong enough to suspend the constitution and prorogue parliament, thereby instituting thirty years of direct, absolute rule.
As a result of his outspoken opposition to the Sultan’s autocratic predilections, Yusuf Diya’ al-Khalidi was exiled from Istanbul immediately after Parliament was suspended, together with nine other active opposition members of that body, five of whom were from the Syrian provinces. He was described by one source close to the Palace as among the four of these ten “considered most dangerous.”41 Undoubtedly chastened by the way his experience as a deputy had ended, Yusuf Diya’ returned to Jerusalem in April 1878, where he once again took up his duties as mayor, but once more fell foul of the Sultan and his officials. After a clash with the mutasarrif of Jerusalem, Ra’uf Paşa, who was determined to curb the power of both the al-Khalidi and al-Husayni families (but ended up weakening mainly the former42), Yusuf Diya’ was removed from his post in October 1879 and, in what was to become a routine for opponents of the Sultan, went into exile. He left Palestine for Vienna, where he returned to the Imperial Oriental Academy, this time as a Professor of Arabic. In 1880, he published his edition of the poetry of Labid ibn Rabi‘a al-‘Amiri, author of one of the famous pre-Islamic mu‘allaqat.43 Yusuf Diya’ apparently felt secure enough to brave the Sultan’s displeasure, for he returned home soon thereafter, and we find him in 1881 serving as qa’immaqam of Jaffa, where he remained for a number of years, and after that in a number of minor provincial posts.
It was unlikely that this outspoken liberal (he was described by the American Consul General in Istanbul as “almost as liberal as a French Republican”44), a man who throughout his life remained in close touch with foreign scholars and diplomats,45 would ever enjoy the full confidence of a suspicious autocrat such as ‘Abd al-Hamid.46 After the abrupt termination of his parliamentary career he never seems to have done so—even though in 1893 he was raised to the rank of Paşa. It is perhaps no coincidence that his Kurdish-Arabic dictionary, al-Hadiyya al-hamidiyya fil-lugha al-kurdiyya, published in the same year, refers obsequiously to the Sultan’s name in its title, while its introduction includes a reference to the Sultan preceded by a string of complimentary titles so exaggerated as to verge on the sarcastic.47 Notwithstanding this promotion, most of the posts he served in after 1878 were honorific and meaningless, or remote and amounted to internal exile. Thus he was named qa’immaqam of a district in Bitlis vilayet in the mid-1880s and later of other districts at Hasbayya and in Jabal al-Duruz. In 1307/1890, he is listed in the Ottoman state yearbook as heading the Ottoman Embassy in Belgrade, although whether he ever took up this posting is not clear.48 What appeared to be the sole exception to this pattern was a brief appointment in the 1890s as Ambassador in Vienna, a post Yusuf Diya’ was uniquely suited for, but was never allowed to take up.
For most of the last ten years of his life, Yusuf Diya’ was in effect kept in enforced residence in Istanbul by the Sultan, who appointed him to ambassadorships he was not allowed to fill, to a consultative council that never met, and later to another similarly meaningless post, all of this with the objective of preventing him from going abroad, and thereby keeping a potential opponent under surveillance and control. In the late Hamidian period, for an official to travel without permission, especially to Europe (which was not generally given to liberals or others under suspicion like him), was construed as abandoning one’s post—even a meaningless one—and thus equivalent to treason.49 Thus, while he was allowed to visit Jerusalem occasionally and Cairo once during the last few years of his life,50 this cosmopolitan scholar was never again allowed to travel abroad, and was obliged to spend most of his time in the capital.
While in Istanbul, Yusuf Diya’ became a close friend and companion of another virtual prisoner of the Sultan whose ideas were too dangerous to allow him to go free, al-Sayyid Jamal al-Din al-Afghani (Yusuf Diya’ was at his bedside when Jamal al-Din died51). At the same time, through foreign post offices beyond the reach of the Sultan’s spies (notably the Austrian, which he was able to use freely, as a former faculty member at a Hapsburg imperial institution and recipient of a Hapsburg honor52), he was able to keep in contact with friends and colleagues such as the great poet Ahmad Shawqi and Shaykh Muhammad ‘Abdu in Egypt, and with European scholars far and wide. After being allowed by the Ottoman authorities to publish his Kurdish-Arabic dictionary and grammar in 1893, Yusuf Diya’ Paşa never again managed to publish, although a number of apparently complete manuscripts are located among his papers,53 and the fact that he was being held in a gilded cage perhaps inevitably came to affect his health, which gradually began to decline.
His regular letters to his brother and nephew are increasingly full of mention of his failing health toward the end of the century,54 and it is clear that life in Istanbul under the watchful eyes of Abdul Hamid’s spies did not agree with him, notwithstanding the constant reading in several scholarly and literary fields in a number of languages which we know him to have engaged in from the marginal notations in books in his library, and from his extensive correspondence.
Among the highlights of these communications with a variety of European and Middle Eastern scholarly and public figures was Yusuf Diya’ Paşa’s 1899 letter to Theodore Herzl via the medium of Zadok Kahn, the Chief Rabbi of France, mentioned in chapter 2. In this letter, he warned the Zionist leader that while Zionism was “in theory a completely natural and just idea” as a solution to the Jewish problem, and might work elsewhere, Palestine was a part of the Ottoman Empire, was heavily populated by non-Jews, and was venerated by 390 million Christians and 300 million Muslims. He asked: “By what right do the Jews demand it for themselves?” Wealth cannot purchase Palestine, “which can only be taken over by the force of cannons and warships.” He warned that the day would never come “when the Zionists will become masters of this country,” and concluded: “For the sake of God, leave Palestine in peace.”55
Yusuf Diya’ had closely followed the progress of the Zionist enterprise from its earliest days, when as Mayor of Jerusalem and qa’immaqam of Jaffa he had witnessed it from close quarters. While in Vienna in 1875, he wrote two letters to the Jewish Chronicle in London on the Jewish community in Jerusalem, one commenting on an article by the newspaper’s correspondent there, and the other on the visit to Palestine of the Jewish philanthropist Moses Montefiore.56 At some stage in his career he learned some Hebrew, partly out of his interest in what we would today call comparative religion, and partly so as to follow the activities of the Zionist movement. In later years he maintained a correspondence with Zionist leaders such as Norman Bentwich, a few traces of which are preserved among his papers.57
In his enforced residence in Istanbul, one of Yusuf Diya’ Paşa’s greatest consolations was the education of his nephew Ruhi, for whom he had the greatest affection. The aging statesman and scholar clearly saw Ruhi as his spiritual heir (Yusuf Diya’ was married and had a daughter, but no sons), and indeed he left him all his books and papers. Much of the correspondence between the two has survived—mainly Yusuf Diya’s letters to Ruhi—and is marked by a striking warmth and constant encouragement to Ruhi in his studies and in his career, first as a scholar, then as a diplomat.58 Yusuf Diya’ Paşa frequently sent his nephew money, and also helped him with his career by giving him advice and drawing on the many connections in the Ottoman hierarchy that he had developed over a quarter century of service to the state, and that he knew from his own experience were vital to bureaucratic advancement.59
In his old age, stricken by infirmity, and obliged to spend much of his time in Istanbul, Yusuf Diya’ Paşa lost none of his fiery liberal spirit or his hopes for reform, in spite of their frustration for decades by the regime of Sultan ‘Abd al-Hamid, according to observers who knew him well.60 To his death, the man who in his youth had described himself as elected as Mayor of Jerusalem in 1868 by “the people of Jerusalem and the Turkish Government,” always maintained that in spite of the suspension of the Constitution, he continued to hold the Parliamentary seat for Jerusalem. Berating his fellow liberal in the first Parliament, Khalil Ghanem, for writing “ex-Deputé” on his visiting card (his own defiantly described him as Deputy for Jerusalem) Yusuf Diya’ Paşa is reported as saying: “the description of deputy is by the will of the nation and by its election, and only ceases upon the election of another.”61
Two years after the death of Yusuf Diya’ al-Khalidi in 1906 at the age of sixty-four, the officers of the Committee of Union and Progress [CUP] carried out a military coup d’etat that ended the Sultan’s absolute regime and reinstated the 1876 Constitution. In the elections that followed, Ruhi al-Khalidi was elected to the seat representing Jerusalem which, until his death two years earlier, his uncle had staunchly insisted he continued to hold.
IV
Born only twenty-two years after Yusuf Diya’, in 1864, Ruhi al-Khalidi nevertheless came to maturity in a different age than had his uncle, and this affected considerably the educational opportunities open to him. He grew up, in Jerusalem and the other places his father Yasin’s career took his family, at a time when religious education no longer commanded the same prestige it once had, and when the state school system, missionary schools, and modern western education in general were seen as the keys to knowledge and advancement. In spite of his reputation as a reactionary, Sultan ‘Abd al-Hamid II’s three decades of absolute rule witnessed a massive expansion of the modern educational system at every level and in most regions.62 In the vilayet of Beirut, for example, 359 state schools were established between the passage of the 1869 Ottoman Education law and 1914, most of them during the Hamidian period,63 and we saw in chapter 3 that by 1914 there were a total of 98 state schools in Palestine.
Ruhi al-Khalidi went to several of these new state schools, including the ruşdiyye schools in Jerusalem and Tripoli, followed by several years at the Sultaniye school in Beirut (where he graduated at the top of his class in most subjects64). In 1887 he went to Istanbul to undertake the difficult course of study at the prestigious Mekteb-i Mülkiye school, which he completed in 1311/1893 with equal distinction,65 after which he went to France to complete his studies (doing so against the will of his parents, who wanted him to obtain a government job in Palestine). Before studying in state schools, however, Ruhi began his education at traditional religious schools in Jerusalem, and later spent periods of time in such schools in the various places where his father was posted. It is not surprising therefore that in later stages of his education he did so well in the religious subjects which were still an important part of advanced schooling and the training of an Ottoman civil servant. Nor is it surprising that his father, who had received only a traditional religious education, but was a committed reformer, should have seen to it that his son obtained the best of both systems.66
We know the details of Ruhi al-Khalidi’s education both from an autobiographical sketch which he wrote immediately after his election to Parliament in 1908, and from other papers and books of his which have survived.67 Perusal of this material reveals that as a young man of twelve to fifteen he purchased numerous books in Tripoli, Nablus, Beirut, and Jerusalem, indicating his wide-ranging interests in religion, law, languages, literature, and history.68 Among the extant documents is an ijaza in which one of Ruhi’s teachers, al-Hajj Yusuf al-Sadiq al-Imam al-Husayni, the Shafi‘i mufti in Jerusalem, certified that he had successfully completed training in all the classical subjects of the Islamic curriculum, listing as well his various other teachers.69 From a young age, al-Khalidi was evidently well enough versed in Islamic learning that when his uncle ‘Abd al-Rahman took him along on a visit to the Shaykh al-Islam in Istanbul in 1297/1879, he impressed this dignitary sufficiently to cause him bestow on Ruhi the scholarly rank of R’us Brusa, one of the lower grades in the Islamic religious hierarchy of the Ottoman Empire. At the time he received this honor, which nominally entitled him to teach certain religious sciences, Ruhi was only fifteen years old.70
While he was receiving elements of both a secular and a religious education, Ruhi also studied at the Alliance Israélite school in Jerusalem, where he began to learn Hebrew,71 as well as at the Salahiyya school (Ste. Anne) of the Pères Blanches, where he continued the study of French he had begun several years before. During his father’s tenure as qadi in Tripoli, Ruhi al-Khalidi had attended al-Madrasa al-Wataniyya, a private school founded by Shaykh Husayn al-Jisr, mentioned in chapter 3, which taught foreign languages and other modern subjects along the lines first developed by the missionary and state schools. The influential Shaykh Husayn was one of a group of modernizing educators rooted in the reformist salafi religious tradition who had a profound influence on several generations of students in the late Ottoman period.72 A strong supporter of reform of the state apparatus and the extension of its power, we have seen that al-Jisr was a close friend of Ruhi’s father Yasin, and Ruhi became a student at the new Sultaniyya school in Beirut soon after al-Jisr was named to the post of director there.
After successfully completing his studies in Istanbul Ruhi departed for France to study political science in 1893, a departure which was made hastily since the Ottoman secret police had him under surveillance because of his involvement in the circle of Jamal al-Din al-Afghani.73 He had met the shaykh through his uncle Yusuf Diya.’74 After a three-year course in political science, Ruhi al-Khalidi entered the Ecole des Hautes Etudes of the Sorbonne, where he did advanced research in the Islamic field under the French Orientalist Hartwig Derenbourg, who was director of the section devoted to religion. Derenbourg, an acquaintance of Yusuf Diya’ Paşa from the latter’s days at the Oriental Academy in Vienna, seemed to appreciate the breadth of knowledge of the young Ruhi al-Khalidi. In an attestation appended to the young man’s ijaza from Jerusalem Derenbourg noted that he had taken his courses on the Qur’an, on al-Hariri, on Saladin, and on Himyarite inscriptions, noting that “il s’est bien initié aux méthodes européennes sans pour cela rien perdre de sa science orientale, et je souhaite qu’il rapporte dans son pays et qu’il y répand nos procédés et nos habitudes d’enseignement.”75 Derenbourg appointed him a conferencier at the Sorbonne, and used his influence to help Ruhi to advance in the world of European Orientalism.
One of the high points in this regard was his presentation of a paper on the spread of Islam in the modern world to the 1897 Orientalist Congress in Paris, which was later published in both French and Arabic.76 The paper utilized much of the training Ruhi had obtained, both at the Mülkiye and at the Sorbonne, particularly to analyze the statistics on the Muslim populations of the countries of the world, an analysis which constitutes the bulk of the 65-page booklet as it was finally published. He came to the conclusion, based on a careful country-by-country assessment, that the number of Muslims in the world at the time was far larger than the 175–180 million estimate given by most sources. He reports that his figure, of more than 285 million, or one-fifth of the human race, provoked the response from some of those present at the Congress that this was another instance of “Oriental exaggeration.”77 The implied slur apparently spurred Ruhi al-Khalidi to expand his talk for publication with forty-seven pages of statistics on Muslim populations in every country in the world.78
Ruhi al-Khalidi published many books and articles in Arabic and French thereafter, including works on Arabic literature, early Arab scientists, political history and a variety of Islamic subjects.79 Notable among them was his edition of the manuscript of a work of fiqh by a fourteenth-century ancestor of his, Sa‘d al-Din al-Dayri al-Khalidi, which he had found in the Khalidi Library.80 This consisted of an annotated forty-page edition of the text of a treatise on the conditions in which imprisonment is acceptable according to the shari‘a, followed by several heavily annotated biographies of the author, three of them copied from biographical dictionaries in manuscript in Istanbul and Jerusalem.
After his appointment as Ottoman Consul-General in Bordeaux in 1898, al-Khalidi continued to publish, but because of the constraints imposed by his official position (and the regime’s dislike of those who published even the most innocuous materials at home or abroad), he had to do so under the pseudonym of “Maqdisi” [Jerusalemite] with articles appearing in periodicals and newspapers in different parts of the Arabic-speaking world and Europe. During this time, Ruhi Bey al-Khalidi (the title Bey had come with his Consular appointment) married a Frenchwoman, by whom he had a son, continued his activities as a Mason,81 and presumably continued his liberal political activities—which we can conclude by his having a rare copy of the first published rules of the Committee of Union and Progress among his papers.82
The stress laid on the significance of education in the discussion of Yusuf Diya’ and Ruhi al-Khalidi in this chapter deserves explanation. Education was clearly important in the eyes of both men, who devoted a large part of their lives to teaching and scholarship. We can see this in many ways: Yusuf Diya’ begins his Kurdish-Arabic dictionary with a passage on the importance of learning languages and the significance of the great expansion of science, learning and education under ‘Abd al-Hamid: “the educational programs are crowded with subjects, the barriers to learning are breaking down, the rich and poor desire it . . . yes, indeed this is necessary in all civilized countries.”83
Similarly, well over half of Ruhi al-Khalidi’s eight-page autobiographical note cited earlier is devoted to the details of his education,84 and he too laid stress on the importance of knowledge: he relates how during his childhood he saw how knowledgeable about the Holy Land were members of a party of Europeans at Jericho, and contrasted the respect for knowledge and freedom in the West with the ignorance and oppression that prevailed in the East.85
For members of most notable families in the Arab provinces, education was traditionally accorded a high priority, for obvious reasons: it was crucial for maintaining a position in the elite, as well as being central to a fuller understanding of the Islamic religion, and for the sake of knowledge itself. While ambition, the desire for status, and material motives cannot be ignored, love of knowledge should not be underestimated: many members of this class were devoted and serious scholars, who were clearly deeply committed to their research and writing. From his private papers, for example, we can see that Ruhi al-Khalidi, who was in effect a perpetual student, teacher, or scholar for nearly thirty years, until his appointment as Consul-General in Bordeaux in 1898, was sincerely interested in what he studied, taught, and wrote about. He occasionally sought appointments in government service during this period, but at other times turned down good job offers for a chance to study, as when he want off to France in 1893, and for many years seemed as content as had been his uncle Yusuf Diya’ to remain a scholar.
With his election to parliament as a representative of Jerusalem following the 1908 Revolution and his reelection in 1912, Ruhi Bey was once again following the career pattern pioneered by his uncle. He eventually became Vice-President of the Chamber, and was generally considered a staunch member of the governing CUP. Ruhi al-Khalidi came to public attention in Palestine and all over the Arab provinces of the Empire on one notable occasion during his parliamentary career. This occurred when in May 1911 he raised the issue of Zionism in the Chamber, starting the debate mentioned in chapter 2 in which he was supported by his colleague from Jerusalem, Sa‘id al-Husayni, and opposition leader Shukri al-‘Asali, the newly elected deputy from Damascus.86
Ruhi al-Khalidi began his long, prepared speech by noting that as Deputy from Jerusalem, he represented a large number of Jews who had demonstrated their loyalty to the homeland, but that he was against Zionism, which was working to establish a Jewish state (“mamlaka isra’iliyya”) with its capital at Jerusalem, and to take control of Palestine. He discussed the writings and statements of a number of Zionist leaders, showing that their objective was fostering national spirit among the Jews, “in order to create a nation [umma] in Palestine and to colonize the promised land, to which they are returning twenty centuries after they departed from it.”87 Undoubtedly sensitive to the possibility that his remarks could be interpreted as anti-Semitic,88 he concluded by once again affirming that he was warning only of the danger of Zionist settlement in Palestine: “The Jews [al-isra’iliyun] are a great people and the country benefits from their expertise, wealth, schools and knowledge, but they should settle in other parts of the Empire and should acquire Ottoman nationality.”89
Explicit in this speech is the urgent sense that Palestine was in danger from Zionism—in fact the speech exaggerated this danger, by inflating the number of settlers and their achievements—and that it was the obligation of the Empire to help protect this important part of its domains. In spite of the care he took to avoid being misunderstood, some members of parliament took offense at Ruhi’s speech. After Ruhi’s fellow-deputy from Jerusalem, Sa‘id al-Husayni, had risen to support his colleague, arguing that the objective of the Zionists was the creation of a new nationality in Syria, a Jewish CUP deputy from Izmir, Nisim Mazliah, intervened in the debate. He defended the Zionist movement, demanded a government inquiry to show the falseness of some of the accusations made against it, and attacked Ruhi Bey fiercely, asking what was the sin of the Jews if the Torah promised them resurgence and strength? “Ruhi Bey al-Khalidi can burn the Torah, but the Qur’an is there to prove what is in it,” he stated angrily, adding: “I warn him against this seed he has sown in the chamber, for the plant it will produce will not be good. He and his friends wish by their words only to oppose the government. . .”90
The last of the Arab speakers was Shukri al-‘Asali. In the speech already mentioned in chapter 2 (and described in the Damascus newspaper al-Muqtabas in a first-page article as “resonant”) he strongly criticized the activities of the Zionist movement in Palestine, and described at length his fruitless efforts to stop the al-Fula purchase while he was qa’immaqam of Nazareth. Shukri al-‘Asali then accused the Zionist movement of having ambitions beyond Palestine, indeed as far as Mesopotamia, and concluded by urging the passage of legislation he had already proposed limiting Jewish settlement in Palestine.91
There is a major difference in tone between al-‘Asali’s speech and that of Ruhi al-Khalidi, specifically as regards the open hostility to the CUP government of the former (al-‘Asali responded at one point to an interjection by CUP leader Talat Bey with the sarcastic words, “So you say”), and his more exaggerated estimations of the power of the Zionists. But al-‘Asali’s speech was peppered with anecdotes drawn from his own service as a government official in Palestine which illustrated the effects of land settlement on the peasantry, and the high degree of internal organization of the new Jewish colonies. By contrast, the speeches of both Ruhi al-Khalidi and Sa‘id al-Husayni appear to have been drier, more abstract, and more boring.92
We know that Zionism had long been a matter of intense interest to Ruhi al-Khalidi, and that he approached it in the deliberate, scientific fashion which he acquired as a result of his academic training. Ruhi Bey’s notebooks are full of notes, tables, and other data on the Zionist movement, while he had several scrapbooks full of press clippings on the same subject. Both he and his uncle, moreover, owned numerous works on Zionism, Jewish history, the history of anti-Semitism, and related matters. Like his uncle, we have seen that Ruhi Bey was interested enough in this subject to learn some Hebrew, and he too had many Zionist and non-Zionist Jewish acquaintances.93 His 1911 speech is notable for its scholarly references to the history of Palestine and of the Jewish people, amply buttressed with biblical quotations, and by a disquisition on the genesis of Zionism. All of this was more appropriate to a classroom or a published article than to the raucous chamber of the Ottoman parliament. Indeed, as Ruhi was speaking, one deputy interjected, “Mr. Speaker, we are discussing the budget. I beg you, let us not waste time listening to these tales from history!,” and another said, “Let the speaker publish his words in the official gazette and stop wasting our time!”94 Perhaps for these reasons, his speech seems to have had even less impact on his colleagues than that of al-‘Asali, although none of the three Arab speakers seems to have been particularly effective.95
At the time of his death, Ruhi al-Khalidi was finishing a piece of research he seems to have worked on for many years, probably since before he left France in 1908: an analytical study of Zionism, entitled “Zionism or the Zionist Question,” examining the roots of Zionist ideology in ancient and modern Jewish history, and surveying the genesis of the modern Zionist movement.96 Like his speech before Parliament, this 146-page manuscript laid out the threat to both Palestine and the Ottoman Empire which Ruhi al-Khalidi perceived in the Zionist movement. The aim of the Zionist movement, he states, is “to establish a Jewish state in Palestine to which all Jews suffering the persecution called anti-Semitism would emigrate, to create in Palestine a national home (watan) for them alone according to the rules of their nation (milla), and which would be recognized by the civilized nations. ”97
Zionism, Ruhi al-Khalidi argued, grew out of a radically new reading of the Torah, the Talmud, and medieval and modern Jewish writings which calls upon the Jews “to return to Palestine and stresses that worldly and religious happiness consist in possessing Zion and ruling it.”98 In hindsight, these seem perfectly straightforward conclusions, and indeed much of al-Khalidi’s work (like the earlier essay on the subject by Najib Nassar99) is buttressed with sections from a long article on Zionism translated from the Encyclopedia Judaica. But in the context of the public debate of the time in the Ottoman Empire, when these very objectives of the Zionist movement were being strongly denied by its partisans (indeed defenders of Zionism denied them during the debate in the Ottoman parliament in May 1911), these were revolutionary conclusions, although al-Khalidi deliberately stated them in a low-key manner.
Ruhi al-Khalidi was quite aware of the differences within the Zionist movement regarding how to go about achieving its objectives, and noted the fact that most of its leaders now understood that they would have to “colonize Palestine little by little.” He pointed out to his readers that the movement also understood the value of favorable publicity, and was liberal in providing subsidies to journalists and newspapers who supported it. He declared that the Ottoman paper Iqdam, the French-language Istanbul papers Aurore, Orient, and Le Jeune Turc, as well as the Arabic-language papers al-Nasir in Beirut, al-Nafir in Jerusalem, and al-Akhbar in Jaffa, were all subsidized by the Zionist movement in order to provide it with favorable publicity,100 a subject discussed further in chapter 6.
In his analysis, al-Khalidi relied on more than his research in European and Ottoman sources, and his experience in the rough world of Ottoman politics. The last chapter of the work, which consists of a settlement-by-settlement examination of the progress of Zionist colonization throughout Palestine, is clearly based on visits by Ruhi al-Khalidi to many of these settlements. In the wake of what he saw there, as Walid Khalidi points out in his analysis of this work, it is apparent that Ruhi was torn by divided feelings: on the one hand, “he admired the achievements of the Jewish colonists and their modern methods; on the other he was embittered by the backwardness of the Palestinian country-side, and angered by Arabs who sold land and by the middle-men and Ottoman officials who facilitated the purchases.”101
The conclusion to all of this was grim, in Ruhi al-Khalidi’s view. Against the disclaimers that the true objectives of Zionism involved no ill intentions toward the Arab population of Palestine, and against the rosy descriptions by supporters of Zionism of how much good they were doing for Palestine and its people, he set this bleak panorama of what he argued was actually happening in Palestine: “the policy of the Zionists is to provoke the government to repress and debase the influential people in the country, bring about their extinction, and then win over the thinking of the simple peasants, bringing them under their financial power and using them to cultivate their land as they take possession of it, village by village.”102
This work, incomplete though it was, nevertheless appears to be the fullest assessment until that time of what Zionism portended for the Arab population of Palestine. While clearly motivated by a sense of alarm at the danger to the country and its indigenous population posed by the Zionist movement, it is neither alarmist nor extreme in tone, but rather analytical and deliberate. It embodies, moreover, one of the first explicit, overt expressions of the relationship between local patriotism and opposition to Zionism which were to play such a large part in the shaping of Palestinian identity over the rest of the twentieth century. It appears that this manuscript was in the process of being copied for the printer (only a few pages of the first draft remained to be copied from the author’s hand into a clear, double-spaced copy) when in July 1913 Ruhi al-Khalidi traveled to Istanbul, where he suddenly fell sick, and died after an illness of only a few days at the age of forty-nine.103
V
How did these two individuals, whose careers span the last half century of the Ottoman period, reconcile their commitment to the Ottoman framework with other loyalties and affiliations? Among these other allegiances were Islamic solidarity, Arabism, Palestinian patriotism, opposition to Zionism, party political affiliation, local Jerusalem loyalties, and family linkages, as well as a commitment to liberal constitutionalism, administrative reform of the state apparatus, the expansion of education, and the spread of learning.
There is little sign that Yusuf Diya’ and Ruhi al-Khalidi (or colleagues of theirs like Sa‘id al-Husayni) felt that their different loyalties conflicted fundamentally with one another, or with their wholehearted acceptance of an overarching Ottoman political structure. There were naturally conflicts between different commitments, as when Ruhi al-Khalidi’s outspoken criticism of the government’s policy toward Zionism brought down on him the opprobrium of some of his CUP colleagues in Parliament, who accused him and his fellow anti-Zionists of opposition for opposition’s sake, and of fomenting sectarian discord and thereby weakening the Empire. There is no sign, however, that he perceived such an accusation as having any foundation, and he answered his detractors by arguing that his objective in making such criticisms was to strengthen the Empire.104 It is nevertheless possible to discern in the last pages of Ruhi al-Khalidi’s manuscript on Zionism the beginnings of a disenchantment with the CUP, the constitutional government, and perhaps the Empire, because of their dereliction of duty in the face of what he perceived as the deadly menace to Palestine and the Empire posed by Zionism.
For both Yusuf Diya’ and Ruhi al-Khalidi, Arabism, Palestinian patriotism, local Jerusalem loyalties, and Ottomanism were overlapping identities which complemented one another, and could be reconciled when a contradiction between them arose. Schölch cites a letter from Yusuf Diya’ to the German Orientalist Wahrmund in 1878, in which he called Jerusalem his homeland (watani al-Quds al-Sharif), but stressed his loyalty to the Ottoman nation (“milla”) and state.105 That Yusuf Diya’ was an Arabist, in the sense of a cultural nationalist, cannot be doubted: the references, already noted, in his autobiographical sketch of 1875 to “a Turkish teacher from Istanbul” obtaining the post he coveted, and to his election by “the people of Jerusalem and the Turkish government,” are clear signs of his awareness of the ethnic facts of life in the Empire. Moreover, in his 1880 edition of the diwan of the pre-Islamic poet Labid ibn Rabi‘a, Yusuf Diya’ is explicit in expressing his hopes for the revival of the Arabs. After quoting a line of Imru al-Qays’s poetry evocative of past glories (“qif bil-diyar fa hathihi atharuha. . .”), he adds: “However, we have the strong hope that the Arabs will soon recover the place among civilized nations they lost in the centuries of darkness, since this nation [milla], may God protect it, is still numerous, has many kingdoms [mamalik], high ideas and many sources of wealth drawn from its language . . .”106
Nevertheless, there is no hint of a contradiction between such clear expressions of cultural nationalism and their author’s loyalty to the Ottoman framework. Indeed a year after this book was published in Vienna, ‘Abd al-Hamid appointed Yusuf Diya’ qa’immaqam of Jaffa, his first official post since he had angered the Sultan with his speeches before Parliament a few years earlier.
In a later generation, Ruhi al-Khalidi’s Arabism, which like that of his uncle was cultural rather than explicitly political in nature, was no bar to his being one of the leading Arab members of the CUP, in spite of the Turkish nationalist orientation of some of its leaders.107 The key to explaining Ruhi al-Khalidi’s continuing adherence to the CUP when many other Arab leaders—including his ally in the debates on Zionism, Shukri al-‘Asali—were increasingly alienated from it, lies in his agreement with its views on the position and role of the Sultan, and on the need for reform of the state administrative system. Ruhi al-Khalidi, like his uncle and other liberals of their day, was deeply marked by the experience of opposing the autocratic rule of the Sultan for more than three decades.
For these men and others like them, the Ottoman government dominated by the CUP represented the best vehicle for championing constitutionalism and opposing the arbitrary exercise of power, and for carrying out the administrative modernization necessary to restore the strength of the Empire, and to enable it to resist strong external pressures. These were clearly ideas in which they and others of their generation believed deeply. Both had suffered personally from censorship and the arbitrary exercise of power by a near-absolute monarch,108 both were strong supporters of constitutionalism and parliamentary government, and both had spent much of their lives furthering the centralization and modernization of the government apparatus with which the CUP was identified.109 They saw these things as essential if their homeland were to escape falling under foreign control.
For such members of the elite of the Arab provinces of the Empire who had spent their careers in service of the state, their Ottomanism was natural and ingrained. Whether as members of the religious establishment (where many members of notable families still sought preferment, while others moved away from this field),110 or as officials in the modern state bureaucracy, members of this elite looked to the Ottoman state as a barrier against the incursions of aggressive foreign powers with designs on the Arab provinces. Such individuals could be more or less liberal—Sultan ‘Abd al-Hamid had little trouble finding politically conservative members of notable families with a secular modern education to hold key posts in Palestine and other parts of bilad al-sham in the decades after he purged the liberal supporters of Reşid Paşa and Midhat Paşa such as Yusuf Diya’ al-Khalidi in the 1870s and 1880s.111 But as a group, they remained loyal to the Empire and committed to it as a political framework at least until 1914, notwithstanding their differences with a given Sultan, or regime, or government. In this there is little difference between pro-CUP Arab notables and leading Arab political figures who left the CUP and joined the opposition such as Shukri al-‘Asali, Shafiq al-Mu’ayyad, or ‘Abd al-Hamid al-Zahrawi, all parliamentary colleagues of Ruhi al-Khalidi in the 1908–1912 Parliament who were defeated in the “big stick” election of the latter year.112
They found no contradiction between a firm commitment to Ottomanism, and taking pride in their Arab heritage (Ruhi al-Khalidi made a point of stressing that he had delivered the first lecture in Arabic at the Sorbonne),113 defending Palestine against what they perceived as the danger of Zionist colonization, and opposing the government party on this issue. However, if there was one area where a certain dissonance appears in their beliefs some time after the turn of the twentieth century, it was over the issue of Zionism. For Ottoman liberals, and even for others, it had long been possible to accept that many things wrong with the Ottoman system were caused by the absolutism of ‘Abd al-Hamid, or the lingering effects of his reign. But by 1911, and all the more so by the time of Ruhi al-Khalidi’s death in 1913, it must have begun to seem that the problems in Palestine could not be ascribed solely to the ill-effects of the rule of a long-deposed Sultan. The increasingly sharp tone of the Arabic press after 1908 (which we will examine in a later chapter), of the speeches by al-Khalidi, al-Husayni and al-‘Asali in the Ottoman Chamber in May 1911, of Najib Nassar’s 1911 essay on Zionism114, and of Ruhi al-Khalidi’s book on Zionism, with its bitter concluding words about the role of the government in supporting Zionism, all point to the beginnings of a shift in this regard, prompted by local developments in Palestine.
Nevertheless, even while helping to rewrite Islamic, Ottoman and Arab history in ways that were to lay the foundation for modern nationalist interpretations,115 it is apparent that for the most part Ruhi al-Khalidi, Yusuf Diya’ al-Khalidi, and others of their generations and their class before 1914 could still feel that they were operating within a framework flexible enough to contain the incipient contradictions between the various ethnic groups, nationalities, and “imagined communities”116 it encompassed.
Perhaps Ruhi al-Khalidi was fortunate to die when he did, before World War I. The wrenching changes the war brought in its wake shattered this framework, and opened the Middle East to a brave new world of aggressive, assertive new nationalisms. He and others of his generation were nonetheless central in laying the intellectual groundwork for Arabism, Palestinian patriotism, and other ideologies that came into full flower after 1918. Their lives illustrate fully the tapestry of loyalties that constituted identity for them, and illuminate how the various trends that comprised this identity came to evolve in the following decades, and came to have an impact on larger and larger segments of the population. For through the medium of the press, parliamentary politics, and the speedier and broader diffusion of ideas made possible by the expansion of the educational system, their understanding of identity came to be shared with far wider circles of their fellow-citizens than would otherwise have been the case.
The next two chapters will show how this occurred over the issue of Zionism, with chapter 5 exploring the first early clashes between Zionist settlers and Palestinian peasants, and chapter 6 examining how the debate over Zionism played out in the pages of the Arabic-language press in Palestine and elsewhere. In Palestine in particular, what Anderson describes as “print capitalism” thereby helped shape a broad community of interest, an imagined community that came to describe itself as Palestinian, and that saw itself as under threat from Zionism, and from other directions. In this fashion, ideas like those expressed by Ruhi al-Khalidi, Sa‘id al-Husayni, and Shukri al-‘Asali in this chapter, and those of others—peasants, notables, and newspaper editors—whom we will encounter in the next two chapters, were placed before ever wider audiences and gained greater and greater currency.