Palestine A Four Thousand Year History by Nur Masalha

Reading the history of modern Palestine through the eyes of the indigenous people can shift the emphasis away from hegemonic Ottoman, British and Zionist gaze and chronologies and provide new indigenous perspectives.

Modern (new) Acre can be a case study of this perspective. This beautiful and iconic capital of al-ʿUmar’s state rose from the ashes to become one the most important modern Palestinian urban centres for nearly two centuries. This was less to do with imperial Ottoman calculations or the ‘Ottoman heritage’, and more the result of sheer indigenous determination and self-definition.

However, by the end of the 19th century Acre’s standing had declined to the advantage of the nearby coastal town of Haifa, as new powerful steam engines were developed in the West, powering bigger ships; new trade routes were opened up and the coast of Palestine became part of the regular route of the major European steamship companies (Seikaly 2002b: 97).

With the rise of anti-colonialist Palestinian nationalism, the emergence of new approaches to people’s history and the decline of elite narratives, al-ʿUmar has emerged as a ‘nationalist’ hero among Palestinians today (Joudah 1987, 2015). Yet al-ʿUmar’s self-governing entity should be seen within the context of his age; clearly his aims were dynastic not nationalist:

Anxious to ‘prove’ a historical basis for Palestinian Independence, Palestinians often refer to the effort of the Palestinian leader Dhaher al-Umar to wrest control of much of Palestine from the Ottomans in the late eighteenth century … But to attribute these challenges to ‘national, territorially-based consciousness’ is an altogether different and murky issue. (Abu Lughod 1988: 203)

Nevertheless, al-ʿUmar’s emergence from a relatively humble background from ‘within Palestine’, his effective leadership, his popularity among the Palestinian peasantry for getting rid of the oppressive Ottoman Iltizam system – at least under his rule – his spectacular military successes, his effective resistance to Ottoman imperial direct rule in Palestine and his religiously tolerant policies towards Christians, Jews, Druze and Shiites all combined to give him a mythical status among Palestinians. Real and imagined, al-ʿUmar provided a role model for modern Palestinians.

However, Palestinian national consciousness, as opposed to 18th century early modernities in Palestine, is a late Ottoman development and there is no historical evidence that a nationalist Palestinian ideology existed at the time of, or was developed by, al-ʿUmar. Evidently the ‘nationalist’ myth of Dhahir al-ʿUmar as the founder of the first modern ‘Palestinian national state’ is far more powerful and inspiring than the actual context of this powerful leader and his age. Yet the historical legacy of his self-fashioned and self-governing Palestinian entity and the lasting impact of its policies on modern Palestine are undeniable.

Also, crucially, for much of the 18th century the Galilee-based autonomous regimes of al-ʿUmar and al-Jazzar, with their close trade links and military alliances with European powers, Russia, Britain and France in particular, politically and physically linked the Galilee with the entire Palestinian coast from Lebanon to Gaza under a Palestine-based single administration. From the perspective of viewing Palestine as a single geo-political entity, the impact of this historic legacy of the 18th century would soon become evident in the way new representations of Palestine evolved in the 19th century.

European influences on the ‘modernising’ and enlightened administration of Dhaher al-ʿUmar were much in evidence. These early modernisation efforts were facilitated by the fact the conservative religious authority in the country, which rested with the muftis in the cities of Palestine, was always subordinate to the political authority. Italian antiquarian, scientist and traveller Giovanni Filippo Mariti, who arrived in Acre in 1760 and resided in the French quarter for two years, writes in Travels Through Cyprus, Syria, and Palestine about the influence of European ideas on the capital of Dhaher al-ʿUmar, Acre. He describes the swift response of the Governor of Acre to the then raging plague which was affecting not only Palestine but also Egypt and Syria. Large and small epidemics (occasionally combined with famine) had been a recurrent feature of medieval Palestine with devastating effects in terms of the high death toll in the country. Small epidemics also occurred in the Mediterranean port cities of Palestine during the First and Second World War. Yet in 1760 the enlightened al-ʿUmar acted decisively, brushing aside religious superstitions and imposing precautionary measures including a strict quarantine in Acre and measures affecting traders entering and leaving the city; these measures helped to minimise the effect of the epidemic on the crowded city and saved many lives:

The governor of Acre checked the progress of this plague, by giving the inhabitants the means of withdrawing from its ravages; and these means, though contrary to the dogmas of the Mohametan religion, were eagerly embraced. The Europeans became their models; and the governor, after deriving them from every necessary information, shut himself up, after their example, together with his numerous family. The Muphti [mufti, top religious judge of Acre] alone, born the protector of the Mohametan law, cannot imitate a conduct which that law condemns. Instead of shutting himself up with silence in a prudent confinement, he thundered forth against this new method; reproached the governor for his conduct … The governor, however, only laughed at this pious folly of the Muphti and sent a detachment of soldiers to impose a fine on him of two hundred and fifty sequins.6

(Mariti 1792: 200‒201, 203‒204)

Al-ʿUmar, like Muhammad ‘Ali of Egypt (1769–1849) and unlike the Palestinian Ottoman urban elites of Nablus and Jerusalem, was a rulebreaker and a ruler-maker, not a rule-taker, These urban elites were in a subordinate state of affairs where the power dynamic put them at a position of less influence, authority and significance than their imperial Ottoman ‘rule-maker’. By contrast, al-ʿUmar’s effectively independent regime was created in direct opposition and as a challenge to the authority of the Ottoman rule in Palestine, while nominally acknowledging the legitimacy of the Ottoman Caliph. Al-ʿUmar’s authority operated within the context of Islamic legitimacy and power and Islamic history of Palestine produced a variety of notions of power, authority and legitimacy. Al-ʿUmar’s state has been referred to by its detractors as a sheikhdom, while the late Albert Hourani referred to it as a ‘little kingdom’ (cited in Joudeh 2015), but it would be more appropriate to describe it as a sovereign ‘frontier state’ in most of Palestine for over a quarter of a century. However, it could be described as an emirate within the wider historical Islamic context of power and legitimacy. Historically an emirate was a geo-political entity or state that was ruled by a Muslim emir, sultan, sheikh, military commander, governor or prince. Etymologically emirate or amirate (Arabic: imarah) is the administration of territorial entity of an emir. The Arabic term could also imply principality. Under Islam, and until recently, emirates were a common form of governance and actual statehood. The variety of emirates included the famous Emirate of Córdoba, which was an independent state in Andalusia between 756 and 929, with Córdoba as its capital. Initially acknowledging the legitimacy of the Umayyad Caliphs in Damascus, in fact the Emirate of Córdoba not only grew in direct opposition to the Abbasid state and rejection of the Abbasid Caliphs in Baghdad, but also evolved and transformed itself into the Caliphate of Córdoba. With its capital in Córdoba, this state existed from 929 to 1031 and was at the time one of the most developed countries in the world. Also in Andalusia, the Emirate of Granada (also known as the Nasrid Kingdom of Granada; Spanish: Reino Nazarí de Granada), was established in 1248 and aligned with the Christian Kingdom of Castile, and remained a tributary state for the next 250 years. It was the last state in the Iberian Peninsula to be ruled by Muslims. Several centuries later, at the height of al-ʿUmar’s power in Palestine in the mid-18th century, Kuwait became an emirate in the 1750s, headed by the Shaykh of Kuwait. In the late 19th century the Emirate of Kuwait became a British protectorate and it has since evolved into a modern state. Had al-ʿUmar’s state survived the death of its founder in 1775 and persisted well into the 19th century, today the modern history of Palestine would be read and written with the eyes of the indigenous people of Palestine, rather than through Ottoman, British or Zionist perspectives.

The lasting impact of al-ʿUmar’s dawlah qutriyyah and al-Jazzar’s powerful autonomous regime on both European and late Ottoman thinking as well as on the modern Palestinian psyche and memories can hardly be overstated. In the mid-18th century al-ʿUmar shifted the centre of power in Galilee from Safad (and the Liwa of Safad) to Acre, a town which al-ʿUmar transformed into one of the biggest, wealthiest and most well-fortified cities of the al-Sham region. It is hardly a coincidence, therefore, that in 1799 Napoleon Bonaparte sought but failed to conquer the city. Seventy years later, in the early 1870s – as we shall see in chapter nine – the Ottomans reorganised Palestine and created the sanjak of Acre as one of three administrative regions in the country. For nearly five centuries from 1266 until the early 18th century, Safad was the capital of the Galilee and after 1517 the Ottomans confirmed its administrative position in Galilee by creating the administrative sanjak of Safad. In view of the fact that the Safad had dominated the Galilee and northern Palestine for centuries under both the Mamluks and Ottomans, the creation of the sanjak of Acre in the late Ottoman period should also be counted as one the lasting legacies of 18th century Palestine under al-ʿUmar and al-Jazzar for the late Ottoman perception, and administrative reorganisation, of Palestine.

Above all, al-ʿUmar’s powerful regime provided an alternative model to the intermediary (patron‒client) elite politics of Palestine and to the family-oriented, fiercely competitive and deeply fractious urban elite politics which bedevilled both late Ottoman and Mandatory Palestine until 1948.