Preface

This book attempts to write the inhabitants of Palestine into history. Using the documents they generated during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, I have tried to make their society and its inner workings come alive by listening to their voices and by gazing at the world through their eyes. This book also seeks to make a small contribution to a rethinking of Ottoman history by foregrounding the dynamics of provincial life in the vast Ottoman interior, especially the role of merchants and peasants in the shaping of urban-rural relations.

Considering that the historiography of Palestine is dominated by nationalist discourses on both sides of the Palestinian-Israeli divide, and that these discourses are built on the premise of a sharp discontinuity from the past caused by outside intervention, there is no shortage of assumptions to be revised and new issues to introduce. This book calls for a rediscovery of Ottoman Palestine by drawing attention to long-term processes and by highlighting the agency of the inhabitants in the molding of their own history.

The first, formative period of research, 1986–1988, was made possible by an International Doctoral Research Fellowship granted by the Joint Committee on the Near and Middle East of the Social Science Research Council and the American Council of Learned Societies, with funds provided by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. The University of Pennsylvania Research Foundation funded further forays into the archives in 1991. Much of the writing was done in 1993 while I was on leave from the University of Pennsylvania School of Arts and Sciences.

I owe a special debt of gratitude to the employees of the Nablus Islamic Court who shared their crowded office with me, for there was no separate room for researchers. Nazih al-Sayih’s calm authority, humor, and sensitivity made the court feel like home and kept us focused despite the all-too-frequent distractions of nearby gunfire and the biting wafts of tear gas that seeped through the windows. Jawwad Imran, always with a smile in his heart, shared his desk with me six hours a day, six days a week, for more than two and a half years. All answered my never-ending questions and posed a few of their own.

A network of people helped me gain access to private family papers. The late Ihsan Nimr, whenever he was asked to share his extensive collection of private family papers, always referred researchers to his book instead. Husam al-Sharif, in addition to kindling my interest in soap factories, arranged for me to photocopy this collection, thus making it publicly accessible for the first time. When Lubna Abd al-Hadi showed me a loosely bound collection of old papers, neither she nor I could have imagined that I would spend years examining what turned out to be the remarkably rich records of the Nablus Advisory Council (majlis al-shura). Hajj Khalil Atireh, Adala Atireh, Saba Arafat, and Naseer Arafat are but a few of the many people who made it possible for me to tap into the collective memory of Nabulsis by facilitating my access to people, places, and papers.

Judith Tucker introduced me to the world of court records and the field of social history. As a graduate student I also learned from (and was humbled by) the rigorous scholarly work of Hanna Batatu, and I sharpened my theoretical tools with the help of Hisham Sharabi. Notes on an earlier version of the manuscript by Roger Owen, Edmund Burke III, and Ken Cuno considerably strengthened the final product, as did the valuable comments of Leila Fawaz, Zachary Lockman, Abdul-Karim Rafeq, Linda Schilcher, Bruce Masters, David Ludden, Lee Cassanelli, Salim Tamari, and Joe Stork. Andrew Todd prepared the city and regional maps of Jabal Nablus, and Bridget O’Rourke designed the family tree (Plate 5). That this book has seen the light of day is due largely to the love, patience, and support of Ismat Atireh.