Palestine A Four Thousand Year History by Nur Masalha

The ‘sea versus the mountain’ is a key theme in modern Palestinian poetry, especially the poetry of Mahmoud Darwish, cultural writings and ‘nativist’ geo‑ethnography (see e.g. Tamari 2008: 95‒98; also Furani 2012). Framing this cultural discourse in geo‑political and historical terms, the roots of this idea may go all the way back to ancient and medieval Palestine. Historically, key cities in Palestine were associated with either the sea (Arabic: bahr) or the mountain (Arabic: jabal). The cities of Gaza, ‘Asqalan, Jaffa, Caesarea, Arsuf and Acre were associated with the Mediterranean Sea, while al-Khalil (Jabal al-Khalil), al-Quds (Jabal al-Quds), Nablus (Jabal Nablus) and Safad (Jabal Safad) were all associated with mountains in the Palestine interior.

A significant part of the economy of the mountainous regions of Palestine was the proliferation of thousands of stone quarries and the development of extensive marble and stone quarry industry which supplied the local construction industry with stones and other building materials and exporting marble and quarried white-stones to neighbouring countries.

The social memories of the Palestine stone quarry ( محجر ) was immortalised in Mahmoud Darwish’s 1964 poem: ‘Identity Card’:

Record! I am an Arab.

Employed with fellow workers at a quarry.

I have eight children.

I get them bread.

Garments and books.

from the rocks’.

The marble-producing quarries of Palestine and the white-stone quarries of the Arab province of Jund Filastin under Islam (Gil M. 1997: 230) gave the urban centres of the country (Nablus, al-Quds/Jerusalem, al-Ramla, al-Khalil) their distinctive look as ‘cities of stone’. This stone quarry industry also left a monumental legacy which can be seen in the Dome of the Rock, the 16th century Ottoman Walls of Jerusalem, the 18th century Walls of Acre and the city of Petra (‘rock’), the old capital of the Nabataean Arabs and the province of Palaestina Salutaris under the Byzantines. Furthermore, the construction of monumental mosques, minarets and churches and the economy of Holy Land pilgrimage went hand-in-hand with the economy of stone quarrying and stone masonry. Historically the tradition of holy mountains developed greatly during the Greek, Roman and Byzantine eras; the notion of holy mountains and mountainous cities (Nablus, Jerusalem, al‑Khalil, Safad, Mount Tabor, Mount Gerizim, Mount of Olives, Mount Sinai) versus the relatively more relaxed and secular environment of Palestine coastal cities (Caesarea Maritima, Gaza, ‘Asqalan, Jaffa, Haifa, Acre) played an important role in the construction of district collective religious memory and identity of the country.

The siege and fall of Acre, a chief port and the capital of the Latin Kingdom, took place in 1291 and resulted in the loss of a Crusader stronghold and last Crusader-controlled city in Palestine to the Mamluks. To modern historians fall of Acre was the end of the Crusades, but to contemporary Muslims, the Latin Crusaders’ threat to Palestine and Syria from the Mediterranean Sea persisted. In the post-Crusader era, the Mamluks continued to consolidate the strategic and defensive reorientation of the country towards the Mountain, a policy which began under the Ayyubids.

The decline of Palestine’s coastal towns and the rise of country’s urban hinterland, especially under the Ayyubids and the Mamluks, were also illustrated by the rise Safad in upper Galilee, a town protected by the high Galilean mountains.

Following the recovery of Safad from the Crusaders in 1266, the Mamluks took steps to shift the provincial power in the Galilee from the coastal town of Acre westwards and turn the mountainous town of Safad into the capital of northern Palestine. The fortress town of Safad was renovated and expanded under the Mamluks and served as a regional capital in Palestine for the first time in its history (Luz 2014: 36). Crucially, Safad remained the capital of northern Palestine for several centuries. It all began in 1266 when Bilad al-Sham came under Mamluk rule and this vast region was divided into six large administrative provinces, each called a mamlakat (literally ‘kingdom’) or niabat (‘vice regency’). These provinces were Damascus, Aleppo, Hamat, Tripoli (modern Lebanon), Safad (Palestine), Karak (Transjordan). The head of each province (or mamlakah) bore the title of naib (viceroy, or ‘little Sultan’). Encompassing much of northern Palestine and consisting of ten districts, the Mamlakat Safad ( ,مملكة صفد ‘Kingdom of Safad’) (Tarawneh 1982) included not only modern-day Galilee but also Marj ibn ‘Amer, including the towns of al-Lajjun and Jenin – both of which were at the time considered part of lower Galilee – and other territories which today constitute the southern parts of modern-day Lebanon. When the Ottomans occupied Palestine in the early 16th century they retained many of the administrative characteristics of the previous Mamluk rule (as we as many of the social, economic, religious and legal institutions of the country). However, the Ottomans changed the name of the administrative province of Safad from Mamlakat Safad to sanjak (or pashalik) of Safad (Arabic: Liwa Safad).

Although the Galilee remained a ‘frontier province’ throughout much of the Mamluk and Ottoman periods, after 1266 the new administrative status of Safad brought about urban expansion in the city and the establishment of new buildings, baths, mosques, markets and caravanserais (Drory 2004). The new building programme in the city included the Red Mosque, one of the oldest Mamluk buildings in Palestine still standing today. The building of the mosque in 1276 was attributed to the Sultan Baybars, who ruled the region from 1260 to 1278 and who apparently embarked on a bridge-building programme across Palestine designed to revive its highways and improve its transport system, according to inscriptions above the wooden door at the entrance to the mosque. One of the best known Palestinian judges among the magistrates of Mamluk Palestine was Shams al-Din Muhammad al-ʿUthmani (d. 1378), author of the detailed local history Tarikh Safad, written in 1378, which has survived in only partial form (Drory 2004: 184). Tarikh Safad gives us important information on the villages of the Galilee under the Mamluks and a unique glimpse into the inner workings of the religious and Sufi institutions in the region.