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“Palestine” and Other Territorial Concepts in the 17th Century

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 January 2009

Haim Gerber
Haim Gerber
Affiliation:
Haim Gerber is Professor, Department of Islamic Studies, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem 91905, Israel.
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Extract

It is a well-known anachronism of historians to treat areas within the Ottoman Empire (Egypt, Syria) as if they had a meaningful existence of their own in the prenationalist period. There is no question that before the appearance of nationalism in the later part of the 19th century the major political community was Islam, whose actual political manifestation was the Ottoman state. It is assumed that as a consequence, no other form of collective identity could exist at the time. The received wisdom on this issue may be expressed by one study of Arab nationalism which claimed:“None of the [Arab] new states was commensurate with a political community. Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Transjordan, Palestine—these names derived from geography or classical history.” Yet it is possible that the debate over these issues is not yet over. One is entitled, for example, to doubt whether we know enough in social psychology to determine that the human mind is so simple that it cannot accommodate multi-faceted phenomena such as double identity, both in terms of regional Egyptian nationalism, for example, and all-inclusive Arab identity. Dichotomization makes for sharper and more impressive arguments, but sometimes it can be pushed too far and thus rendered misleading. In line with this last consideration, the argument of this paper is that though the all-inclusive identity of Middle Eastern Muslims under the Ottomans was Islamic and Ottoman first, territorial identities existed beneath them and that these territorial communities are commensurate with the modern Middle Eastern states.

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Articles
Information
International Journal of Middle East Studies , Volume 30 , Issue 4 , November 1998 , pp. 563 - 572
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1998

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References

Notes

1 See Abou-El-Haj's criticism of Iraqi and other qutri (regional) historians, who are said to have distorted the reality that under the Ottomans no Iraq or Syria in the social sense really existed: Abou-El-Haj, R. A., “The Social Uses of the Past: Recent Arab Historiography of Ottoman Rule,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 14 (1982): 185–201.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2 Kramer, Martin,“Arab Nationalism: Mistaken Identity,” Daedalus 122 (1993): 179.Google Scholar

3 Al-Fatāwā al-Khayriyya li-Nafʿ al-Bariyya, 2 vols. (Istanbul: Matbaa-i Uthmaniyye, A.H. 1311).Google Scholar

4 For his biography, see al-Muhibbī, Muhammad Amin, Khulā sat al-āthār ft aʿyān al-qarn al-hādiʿashar (Cairo: Al-Matbaʿa Al-Wahhābiyya, A.H. 1284), II: 134–39.Google Scholar For studies based on his fatwa collection, see Motzki, H., “Muslimischen kinderehen in Palästina während des 17. Jahrhunderts. Fatawas als Quellen zur Socialgeschichte,” Die Welt des Islam 27 (1987): 82–90;Google Scholar Ihsan ʿAbbas, “Ḫair al-Din al-Ramli's Fatāwā : A New Light on the Life on Palestine in the Eleventh/Seventeenth Century,” in Die islamische Welt zwischen Mitlelalter und Neuzeit, ed. Haarman, U. and Bachman, P. (Beirut: American University of Beirut, 1979), 1–19;Google ScholarGerber, Haim, “Rigidity Versus Openness in Late-Classical Islamic Law: The Case of the Seventeenth-Century Palestinian Muft‛ Khayr al-Dīn al-Ramlī,” Islamic Law and Society 5 (1998).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5 The history of iftāʾ, or fatwa-giving, in Islam shows that before the Ottoman period muftis were usually private individuals, unconnected with the government and working at the request of private individuals. This situation changed radically under the Ottomans, when muftis became employees of the government. In not being engaged by the government, Khayr al-Din was an exception in his time. The best short account that helps place the career of al-Ramli in its Islamic context is Masud, M. K., Messick, B., and Powers, D. S., “Muftis, Fatwas, and Islamic Legal Interpretation,” in Islamic Legal Interpretation: Muftis and their Fatwās, ed. Massud, M. K., Messick, B., and Powers, D. S. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), 3–32.Google Scholar

6 A1-Ramli, 11:184–85.

7 Muhibbi says of him that his fatwas were highly respected by the bedouins of the area, who usually did not think much of the shariʿa. He also mentions that both highly placed ulama and men of state flocked to his native town to study with him and accept an ijāza (authorization document) bearing his name. Even if MuhibbI exaggerates, the important point for this study is the social reputation of the mufti rather than any objective “fact.” See al-Muhibbi, Khulasat al-āthār, 11:134 ff.

8 The influence of Ibn ʿĀbidIn can, for example, be realized from Ahmed, K. N., The Muslim Law of Divorce (Islamabad: The Islamic Research Institute, 1972).Google Scholar

9 Muhammad Amin ibn ʿĀbidin, Al-ʿUqūd al-Durriyya fi Tanqih al-Fatāwā al-Hamidiyya (Bulaq: al-Matbaca al-cAmira, A.H. 1300), 2:76–77.

10 A1-Ramlī, 11:178.

11 Ibid., 1:76.

12 Ibid., 11:185–86.

13 Ibid., 209.

14 Ibid., 153.

15 Ibid., 22–23, 188.

16 Ibid., 1:180.

17 Ibid., 11:74.

18 Ibid., 38–39, 117.

19 Ibid., 158–59.

20 Ibid., 1:234.

21 Ibid., 11:103–4.

22 The way he handled these topics will be analyzed in another study.

23 Sourdel, D., s.v., “Filastin,” The Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd ed. (hereafter EI2);Google ScholarElad, A., “Two Identical Inscriptions from Jund Filastin from the Reign of the ʿAbbāsid Caliph al-Muqtadir,” Journal of the Economic History of the Orient 35 (1992): 344 ff.Google Scholar

24 Porath, Y., The Emergence of the Palestinian-Arab National Movement, 1918–1929 (London: Frank Cass, 1974), 4 ff.Google Scholar

25 Doumani, Beshara, Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700–1900 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995), 261Google Scholar, n. 1: “It is doubtful whether the name Palestine was commonly used by the native population to refer to a specific territory or nation before the late nineteenth century.”

26 On the administrative division of Palestine in the period under study, Sourdel, s.v., “Filastin,” EI2; Dror Zeʾevi, An Ottoman Century: The District of Jerusalem in the 1600s (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), 11.Google Scholar

27 See Heyd, Uriel, Ottoman Documents on Palestine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1960)Google Scholar; Cohen, Amnon, Palestine in the 18th Century (Jerusalem: Magness Press, 1973), Zeʾevi, An Ottoman Century.Google Scholar

28 Porath, Emergence, 5.

29 Elad, “Two Identical Inscriptions,” 335.

30 Al-Ramli, I, 86. Text: Fi rajul min qarya min qurā Filastin tashājara maʿa zawjatihi fa-khālafa bi-ʾt-talāq thalāthan annahu mā yaʾti mithl hadhʾ ʾl-yawm min al-ʿām al-qābil wa anā fi mithl hādhihi ʾl-bilad fahal idhā sāfara ʿan musammā Filastin kamā idha kāna fi ʿUyūun al-Tujjār aw ʿAkkā mathalan ft dhālika al-yawm yabirru fi yamīnihi am lā.

31 A1-Ramli, 1:191.

32 Ibid., 11:240: ʿAla anna kull wāhid min al-qurūsh bi-thalāthin qifʿa wa-kull qifʿa bi-ʿashara min al-fulūs al-musammā bi-'l-judad kamā fi istilāh ahl Filastin.

33 Ibid., 233: Fi rajul Misri nazata bi-qarya min qurā Filastin.

34 MS British Library, OR 7255, f. 19b. Text: Mesele: cami diar-i Arab arz-i mukaddesedenmidir yoksa hudud-u muayyeni varmίdίr ve arz mukaddesenin sair araziden farki varmίdίr? Elcevab: Mutlakā diyär-i şamiyya arz-i mukaddesedir derler Beyt-i Makdis ve Halab ve sair nevahi-i Dimask andandir baziler hemen Arihadir derler baziler[i] Dimask ve Filastindir derler. Ebü Süud. An interesting territorial term that surfaces in this fatwa is diyar-i Arab as a clear reference to all the lands inhabited by the “Arabs” of the “Middle East,” where the reference to Arabs is clearly not to bedouins but to the modern sense of the term.

35 Ibn ʿĀbidin, Al-ʿUqūd al-Durriyya, 1:12.

36 Al-Ramlī, 1:178.

37 Alladin, Bakri, “Deux Fatwa-s du şayh Abd al-Ġani al-Nabulusi (1143/1731),” Bulletin d'Éludes Orientates 39 (1987): 30.Google Scholar

38 Celebi, Evliya, Evliya Celebi Seyahatnamesi (Istanbul: Devlet Matbaasi, 1935), IX:243, 245, 450, 463,521.Google Scholar

39 Çelebi, , Evliya Çelebi Seyahatnamesi, IX:450. The noteworthy point here is the term arz to denote land in a quasi-political sense. It is interesting that the same Evliya Çelebi reproduces an Ayyubid inscription from Jerusalem, dated 619/1213–14, which situates the building in arz Filastīn, thereby avoiding the formal jund and opting for the more popular “land.” See Evliya Celebi, Evliya Tshelebi's Travels in Palestine (1648–50), trans, (from the original Topkap1 Saray MS) St. H. Stephan (Jerusalem: Ariel Publishing House, 1980), 67. (The work was originally published in six installments in the Quarterly of the Department of Antiquities of Palestine, 1935–42).Google Scholar

40 Transcribed by Ghalib ʿAnabsi, in a master's degree thesis (Tel Aviv, 1992). The treatises were originally used in Sadan, J., “Le tombeau de Moïse à Jericho et à Damas,” Revue des Etudes lslamiques 99 (1981): 60–99.Google Scholar

4 Ibid., 111 ff.

42 Surprisingly, when talking about “country,” Bernard Lewis talks only about the term watan, while in the context of Palestinian nationalism bilād seems to have occupied a more central place. See Lewis, Bernard, Islam and the West (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 166–73Google Scholar. There is also no mention of bilād in any pre-modern Islamic or Middle Eastern context by Ayalon, Ami, Language and Change in the Arab Middle East (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 18. (Bilād was used only to relate in various ways to European political entities.)Google Scholar

43 Cf. Lewis, Islam and the West, 167.

44 Al-Ramlī, 11:184–85.

45 Ibid., 1:21.

46 Ibid., 107–8.

47 Ibid., 3.

48 Ibid., 11:233.

49 Ibid., 1:48–49.

50 In one other fatwa there is reference to al-awqāf al-misriyya wa-ʾl-awqāf al-rūmiyya. See ibid., 179–80.

51 For example, al-Muhibbī, KhulāŞat al-āthār, 11:41.

52 Ibid., 156. On the same page, we find also al-bilād al-Rūmiyya. See also ibid., 174, 274; ibid., IV:394–95.

53 A1-Ramlī, 11:35. On the social division between Qays and Yaman in Palestine in this period, see Hoexter, M., “The Role of the Qays and Yaman Factions in Local Political Divisions: Jabal Nablus Compared with Judean Hills in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century,” Asian and African Studies 9 (1973): 251–304.Google Scholar

54 A1-Ramli, 1:96; ibid., 11:154.

55 Examples: ibid., 11:118; ibid., 1:38.

56 Ibid., 1:7.

57 Heyd, Ottoman Documents on Palestine, 39, 50, 92.

58 A1-Ramli, 1:87.

59 Sivan, E., Arab Political Myths (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1997), chap. 3.Google Scholar

60 As is made clear, for example, by Cohen, Palestine in the 18th Century, passim.

61 See further Gerber, “Khayr al-Dīn al-Ramli,” passim.