Palestine A Four Thousand Year History by Nur Masalha

Under the Ottoman Empire (1517‒1917), Palestine was used both as a general term to describe the predominantly Arab Muslim country in the southern Sham region, and as a social and cultural term among the indigenous people of Palestine. By this stage, Muslim-majority Palestine had developed a strong tradition of Arab Islamic jurisprudence, one of the most crucial requirements of any sense of autonomous polity. The long Ottoman period reinforced the already close historic links between Palestine and the al-Sham region, an Arab Islamic geographic term which had been coined during the early Islamic period and referred to the territories of present-day Syria, Palestine, Jordan and southern Turkey, while al-Sham often referred to the specific capital city of Damascus (al-Sham).

Palestine was not an official designation under the Ottomans and some Arabs during this period referred to the area as al-Sham, a term which should not be conflated automatically or exclusively with present-day Syria and the modern myth of Suriyya al-Janubiyyah or, as some Arab intellectuals continue to assert,1 ‘Southern Syria’. The term ‘Southern Syria’ was invented and popularised in 1919‒1920, and was derived from two modern currents: (a) a late 19th century Syrian qawmi (nationalist) ideology; and (b) the circumstances surrounding the formation of the pan-Arab nationalist regime in Damascus headed by Emir Faisal in 1919‒1920 (see below).

Whether or not ‘Southern Syria’ was also related to the ancient Roman designation Syria-Palaestina is not clear, yet the indigenous, shared memories of medieval Arab Islamic Filastin and Byzantine Palaestina were kept alive throughout the Ottoman period both in Palestine and in Europe.

Modernities in Palestine have multiple beginnings and multiple sources.

Although the social and regional roots and markers of modern Palestinian identity are found in the pre-modern period, its distinct modern features evolved gradually, both consciously and unconsciously, from its early beginnings in the 18th century into the 19th and 20th centuries. This evolution was influenced by a range of social and cultural markers including the social memories and cultural heritage of the medieval Arab Muslim province of Jund Filastin (Gerber 1998a, 2008).

Palestine’s strong tradition of Arab Islamic jurisprudence and the roots of the modern social, cultural and geographic consciousness of Filastin as a distinct polity and ‘regional territorially based identity’ can be traced to the works of Khair al‑Din al‑Ramli ( 1585 ,خير الدين الرملي –1671), one of the most extraordinary Palestinian jurists of all times and a prominent 17th century Islamic jurist, public intellectual and writer in Ottoman Palestine (Tucker 2002; Gerber 1998b). Al-Ramli was a native of al-Ramla, and he was named for the town which was for centuries the administrative secular capital of the province of Jund Filastin and a major garrison town in Ottoman Palestine. Al-Ramli was a landowner and farmer in 17th century Palestine, and his descendants, the Khairis, remained wealthy farmers and prominent figures in the town for nearly three centuries until the 1948 Nakba.

During the British Mandatory period, Mustafa Khairi served for four years as qadi and a long-time mayor of al-Ramla, and his family owned the only cinema in the town. In the 17th century Khair al-Din al-Ramli became well known for issuing a collection of fatwas (religious edicts) known as al-Fatawa al-Khairiyyah ( الفتاوى الخيرية ) – compiled into final form in 1670

– that became highly influential in the Sunni Hanafi school of jurisprudence (fiqh) not only in Palestine but throughout the Arab region in the 18th and 19th centuries (Islahi 2008) and his jurisprudence was highly relevant to family waqf, landownership and agrarian relations in Palestine.

Filastin itself had developed a strong tradition of Islamic jurisprudence and one of the founders of the four great Sunni schools of Islamic jurisprudence, Imam al-Shafi’i (767–820 AD), was born in Gaza (Haddad 2007:

189‒190, 193). A brilliant jurist, al-Shafi’i was known to have been authorised to issue fatwas at very young age. In 17th century Palestine al-Fatawa al-Khairiyyah had major practical dimensions and offers a contemporary record of the period, giving a complex view of agrarian relations in Palestine, as al-Ramli was a jurist, farmer and landowner. He is known to have amassed a big library. He also imported a variety of seeds from Egypt and introduced them to the district of al-Ramla (Islahi 2008). Al-Ramli’s terminology and al-Fatawa al-Khairiyyah would also have been known to the administrators of the Sharia Courts in Jerusalem in the 18th and 19th centuries.

The way Khair al-Din al-Ramli, Mujir al-Din al-ʿUlaymi and other leading Palestinian Muslim jurists and writers used the term Filastin to refer to the ‘country’ as Palestine, or to ‘our country’ (biladuna), in the 15th to 17th centuries suggests that the territorial notion of Palestine was still very much alive in Palestinian Muslim social and cultural memory throughout the Mamluk and early Ottoman periods. This also contradicts the unfounded claim that the term Palestine ‘had been entirely forgotten by local Arabs, and that it was brought back to them by Arab Christians in touch with Europe’ (Krämer 2011: 16). Several scholars used the works of Mujir al-Din and al-Ramli (for instance, Tucker 2002; Gerber 1998a, 2008:

50‒51) to trace the pre-modern roots of the emergence of embryonic Palestinian social and territorial consciousness. In Remembering and Imagining Palestine: Identity and Nationalism from the Crusades to the Present Haim Gerber explains:

The term ‘Palestine’ appears later as well. The next writer to use the name ... lived two and half centuries after Mujir al-Din, an independent mufti and legal scholar in al-Ramla in the seventeenth century, who left for posterity a most important collection of fatwas (Islamic legal discussions of questions posed by members of the public). A fatwa is a public document, to be read and used (sometimes in courts) by all sorts of people, probably literate, and it is my understanding that the language employed could not have been invented by the mufti. Nor was Khyar al-Din al-Ramli an obscure personality. Quite the reverse: all legal jurists from Syria and Palestine after the seventeenth century used this material intensively and unquestionably knew every fatwa in it inside out. All this information becomes important if we bear in mind that on several occasions Khayr al-Din al-Ramli calls the country he was living in Palestine, and unquestionably assumes that his readers do likewise. What is even more remarkable is his use of the term ‘’the country’ and even ‘our country’ (biladuna) possibly meaning that he had in mind some sort of a loose community focused around that term. (Gerber 2008: 50; also Gerber 1998a)

The Islamic Fada’il al-Quds (Merits of Jerusalem) literature and the works of Khair al-Din al-Ramli, of al-Ramla-Filastin, and another Palestinian Muslim compatriot and writer in the 17th century, Salih ibn Ahmad al-Tumurtashi (died in c. 1715), of Gaza, in Filastin, give us another dimension to the multi-linear evolution of the concept of Palestine in the course of the late Ottoman period. Al-Tumurtashi wrote during the middle Ottoman period an Islamic Merits of Jerusalem work entitled: The Complete Knowledge in Remembering the Holy Land and its Boundaries and Remembering the Land of Palestine and its Boundaries and al-Sham (Al-Khabar al-Tam for Dhikr al-Ard al-Muqaddasah wa-Hududiha wa-Dhikr Ard Filastin wa-Hududiha wa-Sham) (al-Tumurtashi 1695‒1696; al-Turk 1998; Anabsi 1992; Gerber 2008: 50‒51). Al-Tumurtashi uses the terms Filastin, the land of Palestine (ard Filastin), the people of Palestine (ahl Filastin) the boundaries or borders of Palestine (hudud Filastin, حدود فلسطين ) and memory of Palestine (dhikr Filastin, ذكر فلسطين ) to describe his own country. Al-Tumurtashi does not create new knowledge on Palestine. In his manuscript – of which four copies based on the original manuscript have survived, including two at the Centre for the Revival of Islamic Heritage in Ab-Dis (Jerusalem) and one at the Süleymaniye Library in Istanbul (al-Turk 1998: 2‒4) – he reproduces locally available knowledge and social memories of Arab Islamic Filastin. In the late 17th century al-Tumurtashi uses a 15th century work by another compatriot, Mujir al-Din, Al-Uns al-Jalil bi-Tarikh al-Quds wal-Khalil, in his reconstruction of the boundaries of Filastin, which, according to him and Mujir al-Din, extended from al-‘Arish/Rafah in the south to al-Lajjun (in Marj Ibn ‘Amer) in the north. All this demonstrates that the social, administrative and geographic memories of Palestine among indigenous Palestinians were very much alive in the 17th and 18th centuries. In the 15th‒17th centuries among local Palestinians these centuries of lived and living memories of Islamic Filastin would be far more powerful than the historical memories of Islamic Spain (al-Andalus) among Arabs and Muslims today. These lived memories also show that the term al-Sham did not displace the indigenous, deeply rooted idea of Filastin throughout the Ottoman period. In fact, the two geographical terms coexisted in indigenous Palestinian social and cultural memories, and, for practical purposes, complemented each other.

In Europe the printing press revolution made sure that the Latin term Palaestina and English term Palestine increased their circulation at the time of the European Renaissance. The printing and publication revolution accelerated during the Age of Enlightenment with conscious reference to the classical Greek and Roman heritage in general and the classical heritage of Palestine in particular. It has already been shown that during Europe’s Great Age of Exploration from the end of the 15th century to the 18th century key classical (Greek and Roman) works, which described the geography, topography and ethnography of classical and Late Antiquity Palaestina as a country from Phoenicia in the north to Egypt in the south, were circulated widely in Europe. The famous classicising Christian Byzantine intellectuals, philosophers and theologians of Palaestina Prima (of Gaza, Caesarea Maritima and Ascalon) and the religio-cultural heritage of Palaestina were also of interest to Renaissance authors.

In fact, in early modern European collective memory the name Palestine (both in Latin and European vernaculars) became the most common designation of the country (see, for instance, Plett 2004: 512). The fact that the name Palestine remained the most commonly used throughout the early modern and modern eras is evident in William Shakespeare’s plays.

Syntagma Musicum (Vols. I‒III) was an encyclopaedic work by German musicologist Michael Praetorius (1571–1621), one of the most versatile composers and musical academics of the 17th century. Published in Wittenberg and Wolfenbüttel in three parts between 1614 and 1620, it is one of the most commonly used research sources for music theory of the early modern period (Herbert 2006: 87). Typical of its period, the second volume, De Organographia, describes musical instruments and their use, and refers to early instruments of ‘Palestine, Asia Minor and Greece’ (Vol. II, fol. 4).

Two points are central to modern European mapping of and writing about Palestine:

• Provincia Palaestina remained synonymous with the Christian notion of Terra Santa, or the Holy Land.

• Like the Roman and Byzantine conceptualisation (but unlike the medieval Islamic idea), the conceptualisation of Palestine was always sufficiently wide to include the Galilee and Acre. Indeed, throughout the early and modern periods (especially from the 17th century onwards)

dozens of maps and books were printed and published in Europe (in many languages) under the designation ‘Palestine’ or ‘Map of Palestine’ and in much of this European literature the country of Palestine included Acre and the Galilee. It was this European notion of Palestine which influenced late Ottoman reconceptualisation and the Ottoman military handbook named Filastin Risalesi (see below).