Palestine A Four Thousand Year History by Nur Masalha

Historians tend to conflate Arabisation processes in Palestine with the establishment of Arabic as the lingua franca for Palestine and the Near East. In fact, Arabisation and Islamisation in Palestine and the transformations of religious communities of the country – including the three Palestine provinces: Prima, Secunda and Tertia – were distinct historical processes and should not be automatically conflated or synchronised.

Historically, Arabisation processes in greater Palestine (including the existence of Arabic-speaking Palestinian Christians) long preceded Islamisation processes in the country, although the establishment of Arabic as the lingua franca of Palestine went hand in hand with the Islamisation of the country.

As we have already seen, over the course of the Iron Age II (1000–6000

BC) the trading cities of old Philistia (Gaza, Jaffa, ‘Aphek, Ekron, Ashdod, Ascalon) created a flourishing integrated south in Palestine by working closely with Arab traders and sailors. The Arabs were powerful traders who linked the distant trade from India and Asia to the Eastern Mediterranean region via the Red Sea, Nabataea, southern Palestine and the seaports of Philistia. This integrated south was maintained under the Assyrian and Persian empires and in the 5th century BC Herodotus describes in detail the presence of Arabs in southern Palestine. A century later, the Nabataean Arabs, who flourished on international trade and local agriculture, began to dominate the Naqab/Negev from the 4th century BC onwards and founded several Palestinian villages and towns, some of which survived until the Palestinian Nakba of 1948.

Al-Khalasa, a Palestinian Muslim village located 23 kilometres south-west of the city of Beershiba and depopulated by Israel in 1948, was founded by the Nabataean Arabs in the early 4th century using the Arabic name ‘al-Khalus’, and the town became part of the Nabataean Arab incense route. The Greco-Roman historian and geographer Ptolemy identifies it as a town in Idumaea. In the late Roman period it grew to become the principal town of the western Roman Arabia Petraea province.

Under the Byzantines the Palaestina Tertia town became known as ‘Elusa’, preserving the Arabic name. It also served as an administrative centre in the Naqab desert and was the home of one of three classical schools of rhetoric in Byzantine Palaestina. Under Arab Islam the town continued to function as a major urban centre and became known by its modern Arabic name al-Khalasa, but was abandoned sometime during the late Mamluk period in the 15th century CE. It was repopulated by Palestinian Bedouins in the early 20th century. After the destruction of the Arab village in 1948 the Israelis renamed it Haluza (Hebrew: ‘pioneer’), a Hebrew-sounding name based on the Arabic toponym ‘al-Khalus’; and more recently UNESCO declared the archaeological site a World Heritage Site, ironically due to its historic importance but, in fact, without acknowledging the centrality of the site to the twenty-four centuries of Arab history and heritage in Palestine.

In early Islam, the combination of strategic-military and administrative considerations for the creation of the four, and later five, Muslim ajnads (provinces) system in Bilad al-Sham were influenced by the previous Byzantine strategic configuration of the region. The origins of the ajnad system of Bilad al-Sham under Islam are in dispute. However, Irfan Shahid (1986) sees a Byzantine origin for this system. The provinces, or ajnad, retained civil and administrative responsibilities for their surrounding districts, including the raising of taxes (Walmsley 2000: 273). The Arab governors of the five ajnad (sing. jund) of al-Sham region, Damascus, Filastin, al-Urdun, Hims and Qinnasrin, were called amirs and, in one case, the Governor (wali) of Jund Filastin, Suleiman ibn ‘Abd al-Malik, became the Umayyad Caliph in 715.

Palestine had been brought fully within the Islamic Caliphate in 637‒638.

In the Islamic theory of governance, a Caliph was a supreme ruler who was chosen by the community to be a successor to the Prophet Muhammad. As political leader of the entire Muslim community, the Caliph was provided with an Islamic reference framework defined by the Quran and the Hadith (the sayings and actions of the Prophet Muhammad) and was obliged to govern through shura (consultation, deliberation, advice). The shura, a Quranic principle, created a space that enabled the Islamic traditions to negotiate social pluralism and inter-cultural exchanges throughout the vast Islamic empire. In practice, however, many Caliphs were hereditary rulers and they were only as strong as their armies and political alliances made them. The founders of the Umayyad dynasty were also acutely aware of the power/knowledge nexus, to echo Michel Foucault’s famous paradigm.

They were powerful, shrewd and pragmatic Caliphs and sought administrative advice, political shura, scientific knowledge and technological expertise from their Muslim and non-Muslim subjects alike. With the flexibility of the Islamic tradition firmly established, in 661 AD the Umayyad Caliphs took over the Islamic state and made Damascus the capital of the vast Islamic empire.

Material, economic, religious and political evidence shows that under the Umayyad Marwanid Caliphs,1 who succeeded in expanding the Islamic empire to an unprecedented size, the two provinces (ajnad) of Dimashq and Filastin were treated as core provinces ( أجناد ) of a vast empire, for reasons of religious dogma mixed with realpolitik. After all, Palestine was more strategically important and more tightly controlled by the Umayyad rulers than the deserts of Arabia, as indeed was Syria, so that the centrality and importance of Palestine and Syria under the Umayyad Marwanid Caliphs remained paramount. It also helped the process of homogenisation and Arabisation of the large empire that the peasants of Palestine spoke a local version of Aramaic, a dialect much closer to Arabic than any other language but Hebrew, which had largely been extinct for centuries, so the gradual but steady move to Arabic as the official lingua franca in Palestine and the Near East was neither difficult nor protracted.

Moreover, the Umayyad Marwanid revolution and extraordinary shrewdness and innovation also resulted in the construction by the Umayyad Marwanid Caliphs of a system of exquisite and large palaces in Jerusalem, al-Ramla, near Jericho and near Tiberias which give us a glimpse into the centrality of Palestine within this vast Islamic empire. The reforming Marwanid ruler ‘Abd al-Malik ibn Marwan (r. 685‒705 AD)

is credited with the transformation of Jerusalem, the construction of the Dome of the Rock in the city and the currency reforms, as well as the establishment of Arabic as the official language of the Islamic Caliphate (Ochsenwald and Fisher 2004: 57). For the first six decades of Islam in Palestine, prior to ‘Abd al-Malik’s linguistic and administrative reforms, much of the local government’s work in Palestine was recorded in Koine Greek and many prominent positions in the country were held by Christians, some of whom belonged to families that had served in Byzantine administrations. The linguistic revolution which began with ‘Abd al-Malik ibn Marwan and was maintained by subsequent Marwanid Caliphs meant that Arabic became the lingua franca not only of Palestine but the Islamic empire, which, at the time, included more than 30 per cent of the world’s population. The linguistic revolution and having Arabic as the single lingua franca for tens of millions of people from Spain to Central Asa was also central to the expansion of global trade under Muslim rule. Throughout the Middle Ages, as in ancient times, regional and distant trade remained a key source for the prosperity of a strategically located Palestine.

Arabic and the Arabisation of Palestine added more cultural layers to Palestine’s already rich and complex identity. The Arabisation of Palestine benefited from the fact that the predominantly Palestinian Christian peasantry spoke a Palestinian dialect of Aramaic, a Semitic language closely related to Arabic. However, if under the Romans and Byzantines Koine Greek was the elite language of Palestine and the Levant and Hellenisation was closely associated with cosmopolitanism and high culture, under Islam literary Arabic and Arabisation became a vehicle for globalisation. Literary Arabic and translation into Arabic became closely associated with scientific inquiry and cultural innovation, expanding international trade and cosmopolitanism.

Furthermore, Byzantine Palestine had been bedevilled by deep class cleavages reflected in linguistic divisions. If speaking Greek was a key marker of metropolitan and urban elite identity and speaking Aramaic was a key marker of identity for ordinary people and Palestinian peasantry in Christian-majority Byzantine Palaestina, Arabic and Arabisation encouraged egalitarianism in Palestine and became key markers of identity for both urban elites and the increasingly Arabised Palestinian peasantry.

Under Islam, the metropolises of Damascus, Baghdad and Cairo stood out as imperial centres, but their trade and strategic linkages through overland and sea routes tied them to an archipelago of hinterland cities in al-Sham and Palestine and the whole al-Sham region, including al-Ramla, Gaza, ‘Asqalan, al-Lajjun, al-Quds, Nablus, Acre and Tiberias. Naturally Arabisation and Islamisation followed trade and political power, and this cultural and linguistic transformation of Palestine was promoted actively and assiduously after the Arab Islamic conquest of Palestine. Islamisation processes in the country followed suit. Filastin became part of the Arab Islamic state following the Battle of Yarmuk (636 AD) in the course the Muslim conquest of Syria and Palestine.

Although the Arab Islamic military conquest of Palestine took place in 638 AD, the practical Islamisation of Palestine was a gradual but radical process which went on for many generations. There is also some evidence of the mass conversion by Samaritans to Islam in Palestine in the course of the early Muslim period (see Levy-Rubin 2000). However, the powerful Arab Muslim impact on Palestine has continued for nearly 1400 years, to the present time. The profound religious, social, cultural and linguistic transformation of the country under Islam is evident throughout the land.

But the gradual processes of Arabisation, homogenisation and Islamisation of the country, from a largely Aramaic-speaking majority Christian country to a predominantly Arabic-speaking Muslim majority, and from one monotheistic religion to another – as well as from one Semitic language to another closely related one – was less traumatic culturally and socially less painful than the sudden conversion of a pagan society into a monotheistic polity.

The archaeological evidence on the early history of Islam in Palestine debunks the common perception and insidious myth that the Muslim conquest of Palestine in the 7th century caused a decline in the number of localities and the overall prosperity of the country (Magness 2003: 1‒3).

On the contrary, the Muslim Arabs ushered in a period of prosperity and religious toleration and religious and cultural autonomy for Christian and Jewish religious communities (Arabic: millah) in Palestine and permitted the previous administrative organisation to continue (The Encyclopaedia of Islam 1965, Vol. II: 911). The Islamic states, like the Roman and Byzantine empires, also applied a patron‒client system in Palestine and this patronage system allowed the emergence of a degree of local autonomy and powerful urban elites.

For largely defensive military-strategic reasons greater Palestine under Islam was reconfigured and reconstituted from two of the ‘Three Palestines’ of the Byzantines (Blankinship 1994). This military-strategic reconfiguration and reorganisation was also reflected in the actual naming of the country: Jund Filastin, the ‘administrative/military province of Palestine’. This reconfiguration was also aimed at addressing some of the fundamental weaknesses of the Byzantine strategic thinking for defending the ‘Three Palestines’ and other regions in Syria. The Byzantine military was headquartered in the coastal city of Caesarea Maritima and relied extensively on the Ghassanid Arab allies of the hinterland who had effectively controlled Palaestina Secunda and Palaestina Tertia. The Muslim Arab commanders, while still using many Ghassanid Christian troops in Muslim armies, preferred to rely on Muslim commanders.

Reducing Jund Filastin from the original Three to ‘Two Palestines’ (Palaestina Prima and Palaestina Tertia) also made sense in military-strategic terms.

The administrative reorganisation of Palestine during early Islam meant that Byzantine greater Palestine became a combination of a relatively large Jund Filastin province and a small Jund al-Urdun (Jordan province). Governed from Tiberias in Galilee, Jund al-Urdun should not be equated with modern-day Jordan. With the consolidation of Arab Muslim rule in Palestine and the Levant in the mid-7th century, the region was divided into Filastin, al-Urdun and Dimashq (Damascus)

and the Arabs (like the Romans) opted for a decentralised administration.

During the Umayyad period (661‒750 AD) the al-Sham region was divided into junds or military/administrative provinces. Jund Filastin was organised soon after the Muslim conquest of Palestine in the 630s. The Umayyads adapted many of the Byzantine toponymic, monetary and administrative traditions and this process of adaptation was evident in many aspects of the province of Jund Filastin.