Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Cleansing the cosmopolitan city: historicism, journalism and the Arab nation in the post-Ottoman eastern Mediterranean

2005; Routledge; Volume: 30; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/030710242000337260

1470-1200

Keith David Watenpaugh,

Middle East Politics and Society

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes *Author's note: portions of this article are drawn in part from my book, Being Modern in the Middle East: Revolution, Nationalism, Colonialism and the Arab Middle Class (Princeton, 2006). Research for this work was underwritten by a grant from the Social Science Research Council. All translations from Arabic, Ottoman Turkish and French are my own. I thank Hasan Kayalı, Philip Khoury and Heghnar Zeitlian Watenpaugh for constructive readings of draft versions. 1The earliest account of the Arab Revolt I have been able to find in Aleppo is an Arab Bureau tract published in Cairo in 1916, Anonymous, Thawrat al-cArab: muqaddimatuha, asbabuha, natai'juha (The Arab Revolt: Its Origins, Causes and Results) (Cairo, 1916). The author is listed as a member of the ‘Arab Society’. The condition of the paper and the name of a Hama publishing house, Abu al-Fida’, on the binding suggest that it may be a reprint from the period of union with Egypt. Regardless, the text in some form may have shaped the version published in Halab. 2 Halab (Aleppo), 18 April 1919. 3 ibid. 4George Antonius, The Arab Awakening: The Story of the Arab Nationalist Movement (London, 1938). On Antonius, see William Cleveland, ‘The Arab nationalism of George Antonius reconsidered’ in Israel Gershoni and James Jankowski (eds), Rethinking Nationalism in the Arab Middle East (New York, 1997), 65–86. 5 Halab (Aleppo), 21 April 1919. 6 ibid. 7 ibid., 24 April 1919. 8 ibid. 9The Committee of Union and Progress, members of which were commonly referred to as the ‘Young Turks’, was a revolutionary party that had used the opportunity of turn-of-the-century civil disorder in the Ottoman Empire's Balkan provinces to bring about the revolution of 1908. On the Unionists and their relations with provincial centres like Aleppo, see Aykut Kansu, The Revolution of 1908 in Turkey (Leiden, 1997); also Erik J. Zürcher, Turkey: A Modern History (London, 1993). 10 ibid. This good Turk/bad Turk dichotomy appears most visibly in Zeine Zeine, Arab–Turkish Relations and the Emergence of Arab Nationalism (Beirut, 1958), especially chap. 5. 11 ibid. 12 Halab (Aleppo), 3 June 1919. 13Lowell Thomas, With Lawrence in Arabia (New York, 1924), a book that has been reprinted at least nine times and in several languages in the last sixty years. On the film's continuing impact on Middle East studies see, Steven C. Caton, Lawrence of Arabia: A Film's Anthropology (Los Angeles, 1999). Also T. E. Lawrence's Revolt in the Desert (New York, 1927), a best-seller of the late 1920s, and his Seven Pillars of Wisdom (Garden City, N.Y., 1935). Also, Elizabeth MacCallum, The Nationalist Crusade in Syria (New York, 1928); Stephen H. Longrigg, Syria and Lebanon under French Mandate (Oxford, 1958). The trope of Turkification has become a standard feature of most Arabic historiography of the period. Examples include, c Ali Sultan, Tarikh Suriyya 1908–1918 (History of Syria: 1908–1918 ) (Damascus, 1987); Tawfiq Biru, Al-carab wa al-turk fi al-ahd al-dusturi al-cuthmani (Arab and Turk in the Era of the Ottoman Constitution) (Cairo, 1960); cAbdallah Yurki Hallaq, Al-thawrat al-suriyya al-kubra fi rubc qarn 1918–1945 (The Great Syrian Revolts in the Quarter Century 1918–1945 ) (Aleppo, 1990). 14For alternative versions of this same period see the local Aleppine accounts in Fathallah Qastun, ‘Aleppo: yesterday, today and tomorrow’, al-Shucala, ii, 5 (1921); Kamil al-Ghazzi, Kitab nahr al-dhahab fi tarikh Halab (The River of Gold in the History of Aleppo), 2nd edn, 3 vols, ed. by Shawqi Sha‘th and Mahmud Fakhuri (Aleppo, 1991–3) [original edn, Aleppo, 1923–6]; and Raghib al-Tabbakh, I‘lam al-nubala’ bi-tarikh Halab al-shahba’ (Information on the Notables in the history of Aleppo the Gray), 2nd edn, 7 vols and index vol., ed. by Muhammad Kamal (Aleppo, 1988–92) [original edn, Aleppo, 1923–6]. In none of these accounts does the term ‘Arab Revolt’ appear; Qastun especially saw the Arab kingdom as just another moment in a ‘a nightmare of unprecedented terror’ that had lasted for much of the previous two decades. For recent and persuasive revisions of this period see Hasan Kayalı, Arabs and Young Turks: Ottomanism, Arabism and Islamism in the Ottoman Empire (Los Angeles, 1997); James Gelvin, Divided Loyalties: Nationalism and Mass Politics in Syria at the Close of Empire (Berkeley, 1998); for the political outlines of the period see Philip Khoury, Urban Notables and Arab Nationalism: The Politics of Damascus (Cambridge, 1983) and his Syria and the French Mandate: The Politics of Arab Nationalism 1920–1945 (Princeton, 1987). 15An eyewitness account of the chaos and state of civil war in the aftermath of the British occupation and the transition to French control is E. Stanley Kerr, The Lions of Marash (Albany, 1973). 16On Aleppo's geo-political links with global trade routes, see Heinz Gaube and Eugen Wirth, Aleppo. Historische und geographische Beiträge zur baulichen Gestaltung, zur sozialen Organisation und zur wirtschaftlichen Dynamik einer vorderasiatischen Fernhandelsmetropole. Tübinger Atlas des Vorderen Orients, Beihefte, Reihe B, no. 58 (Wiesbaden, 1984). 17See Walter P. Zenner, A Global Community: The Jews from Aleppo, Syria (Detroit, 2000). The writings of the Aleppine Sephardic rabbi, Jacob Saul Dwek, Derekh Emuna (Aleppo, 1913/14) provide a first-hand account of the history of the community in the first years of the twentieth century. 18On the lives of Aleppine Armenians before the Armenian genocide of 1915, see Artawazd Siwrmeian, Patmut'iwn Halepi Hayots' (History of the Armenians of Aleppo), 3 vols, vol. 3: 1355–1908 (Paris, 1950); Ina Baghdiantz McCabe, The Shah's Silk for Europe's Silver: The Eurasian Trade of the Julfa Armenians in Safavid Iran and India (Atlanta, 1999). 19Bruce Masters, The Origins of Western Economic Dominance in the Middle East: Mercantilism and the Islamic Economy in Aleppo, 1600–1750 (New York, 1988). See especially chap. 3, ‘Merchant diasporas and trading “nations” ’, 72–109; also Edhem Elden, Daniel Goffman and Bruce Masters, The Ottoman City Between East and West: Aleppo, Izmir and Istanbul (London, 1999). 20 ibid. On the échelles and their local connections and interlocutors or Beratlılar, see François Charles-Roux, Les Échelles de Syrie et de Palestine au XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 1928); see also Ralph Davis, Aleppo in Devonshire Square (London, 1967); Alexander Russell, The Natural History of Aleppo (London, 1794), 2 vols; Masters, Origins, op. cit. 21 Sâlnâme (Aleppo: 1321 [1903]), 219. 22 Sâlnâme (Aleppo: 1321 [1903]), ‘Population figures of the city of Aleppo extracted from the census data of the Ministry of Population’, 241. On the politics of Armenian resettlement/assimilation see my ‘Colonial co-operation and the Survivors' Bargain – the case of the post-genocide Armenian community of Syria under French mandate’ in Peter Sluglett et al. (eds), The British and French Mandates in Comparative Perspective (Leiden, 2004). 23The phrase is Benedict Anderson's: Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism, revised edn (London, 1991), 4–81 passim. 24Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge, 1985); see also Daniel J. Sherman, The Construction of Memory in Interwar France (Chicago, 1999). 25See especially Ranajit Guha, Dominance without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India (Cambridge, 1997), 184–8, and Partha Chatterjee's reading of Tarinicharan Chattopadhay's mid-nineteenth-century history of ‘India’, Bharatbarser itihas. Chatterjee sees in Tarinicharan's periodization an internalization of European historiographical technique. Partha Chaterjee, The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton, 1993), 94–6. 26The term is Homi Bhaba's: ‘The work of hegemony is itself the process of iteration and differentiation. It depends on the production of alternative or antagonistic images that are always produced side by side and in competition with each other. It is this side-by-side nature, this partial presence, or metonymy of antagonism, and its effective significations, that give meaning … to a politics of struggle as the struggle of identifications', in The Location of Culture (London, 1994), 29. 27J. Gelvin, ‘Popular Mobilization and the Foundations of Mass Politics in Syria, 1918–1920’ (Ph.D., Harvard University, 1991), 71. 28Saliha Fellache, ‘al-cAsima, organe politique-etude du journal officiel du gouvernement du Fayçal entre février 1919 et août 1920’, MA thesis, University of Bordeaux, iii, 1994. 29Khoury, Urban, 147–8. 30 ibid. 31 ibid. 32An example of the expansion of discussions of national identity in local public discourse is an article entitled ‘Are we Turks despite ourselves: this is the result of inaction’, in which the editor of the newspaper al-Taqaddum (Progress), Shukri Kanaydir, responded to a claim made in the bilingual newspaper Lisân-ı Ahâlî/ Lisan al-Ahali (Voice of the People) that Aleppo was not an Arab city, but rather an Ottoman city, by claiming that his Aleppo was indeed ‘Arab’, that state employees were the only Turks in the city, and that no more than 1 per cent of the total population spoke Turkish. In a strange turn, this paper that had tended to oppose the political activism of the Sunni Muslim notability embraced them as Arabs as well: ‘While we could say that the Mudarris, Jabiri, cAdli and the other ancient Aleppine families are Turks … most of them have lived a long time in Arabia and today their language is Arabic’; see al-Taqaddum (Aleppo), 13 February 1913. 33 Halab (Aleppo), 5 May 1919. 34 ibid., 12 December 1918. 35On 26 February 1919 a mob attacked several buildings and shanties housing Armenian refugees to the north and west of the city. Two hours later nearly a hundred Armenians lay dead; British and Arab army troops wounded or killed about fifty of the attackers. The crowd's anger, European observers claimed, grew out of resentment against the French-supported Armenian legionnaires whom the French had organized into armed military units. United Kingdom, Public Record Office, Foreign Office 371/4179 E 39672/2117/44. General Headquarters Egypt to War Office, 3 March 1919. 36 Halab (Aleppo), 27 February 1919. 37 ibid., 7 March 1919. 38 ibid., 31 July 1919. 39 ibid., 18 June 1919. 40 ibid. 41 ibid., 29 October 1919. 42For a measure of the degree to which the patois of Aleppo had been interpenetrated by various languages, primarily Ottoman Turkish, Armenian and Kurdish, see the multi-volume work by Khayr al-Din al-Asadi, Masucat Halab (Encyclopedia of Aleppo), 8 vols (Aleppo, n.d.). Both this work and the nineteenth-century diary of Na'um Bakhkhash, Yawmiyyat Halab (Aleppo Diary), 3 vols (Aleppo, 1990), detail the use of a vibrant and useful colloquial Aleppine Arabic. 43See Filib di Tarazi (Philippe de Tarazi), Tarikh al-sahafa al-carabiyya (History of Arabic Journalism), 4 vols (Beirut, 1933) and Suhayl Malathi, al-Tibaca wa al-sahafa fi Halab (Printing and Journalism in Aleppo) (Damascus, 1996). 44William Cleveland's biography of Faysal's Minister of Education, Sati c al-Husri, makes this abundantly clear: The Making of an Arab Nationalist: Ottomanism and Arabism in the Life and Thought of Satic al-Husri (Austin, 1971). Al-Husri, grew up speaking Turkish and then, as an adult, learned Arabic. 45 Halab, 29 October 1919. 46Anderson, op. cit., 7. 47 Halab, 2 January 1919. 48 ibid. 49 ibid., 6 January 1919. 50Chatterjee, Fragments, op. cit., 102. 51See Anderson, op. cit., especially chap. 2, ‘Cultural roots’, 9–36. 52Gustave Le Bon, La Civilisation des Arabes (Paris, 1884). On Le Bon's broader influence in Egypt, consult Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt (Los Angeles, 1991), 123–4. 53 Halab (Aleppo), 22 October 1919. 54See, for example, the entry in the last pre-revolutionary Sâlnâme for Aleppo, Sâlnâme-yi Vilayeti Halep (Ottoman Yearbook for Aleppo) (Aleppo, 1908), 17–21. 55The salient example of this phenomenon is Mikha'il b. Antun al-Saqqal al-Halabi's nineteenth-century two-volume manuscript (1852–1938). The first volume, Tara'if al-nadim fi tarikh Halab al-qadim (Rare Pleasantries in the Ancient History of Aleppo) takes the city's history to the birth of Christ, and the second volume, Lata'if al-hadith fi tarikh Halab al-hadith (Sweet Conversations in the Modern History of Aleppo) carries the story until his present in pre-war Aleppo. 56See E. Hobsbawn, Nations and Nationalism Since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge, 1990). 57 Halab (Aleppo), 20 March 1919. 58 ibid. 59 Halab (Aleppo), 13 January 1919. 60 ibid. 61The progress of the peace talks in Paris had become stalled as Lloyd George and Clemenceau locked horns over the settlement of conflicting British and French imperialist claims on the Middle East. Wilson, fearing that the conflict would pit Britain's ally, Faysal, against the small French presence in the region, proposed a commission be sent to gauge local opinion in the contested areas, primarily inland Syria and Palestine. French and British diplomats bowed to Wilson because of the president's unparalleled prestige – though they objected, contending that public opinion did not exist in the region. France and Britain withdrew their delegates from the commission prior to its departure, signalling their support for the pre-war arrangements of the Sykes–Picot agreement. However, the American commissioners, Charles Crane (a friend of President Wilson and a millionaire contributor to the Democratic party whose family had made their money manufacturing toilet bowls) and Henry King (the president of Oberlin College) arrived in the region in June 1919. Longrigg, op. cit., 89. 62 Halab (Aleppo), 21 April 1919. 63 ibid. 64 Halab (Aleppo), 23 June 1919. 65 ibid. 66 ibid. 67 Halab (Aleppo), 18 July 1919. The day following the commission's arrival, Halab published the schedule of its planned meetings. In the early morning the commission members were to meet the administrative council, followed in half-hour time blocks by the qadi, the mufti and leading culama’. Delegations from the various non-Muslim religious communities of the city, Greek Catholic, Protestant, Armenian, Syrian Catholic, Chaldean and, late in the afternoon, a group of Muslim women filled subsequent half-hour slots. The following day they received the mayor, the administrative council, notables, guildsmen, farmers, tribal shaykhs, sufis, and members of the Arab Club and its youth wing. Such a breakdown of society may represent an American comprehension of late Ottoman social structure, possibly mediated by the commission's advisor Howard Bliss, President of the American University of Beirut. 68The Syrian National Congress was a meeting of ‘delegates’ from the cities of ‘Syria’ which included several men from Aleppo. At a meeting held on 15 June 1919 electors of the second degree from the last Ottoman election had met and chosen Sacdallah al-Jabiri, the younger brother of Ottoman deputy, Jâbirî zâde Nafic pasha, Shaykh Riza Rifaci, Muhammad effendi al-Mudarris (the son of Mudarris zâde Fuad), and two Christian delegates, Salim Janbart and Théodore al-Antaki, to represent Aleppo. Rural delegates included members of the large landholding families of Hananu, Kikhiya, Qudsi and Marcashli. Meeting in Damascus, the delegates outlined a response to the King–Crane Commission that served as the basis for orthodox Syrian nationalism in the remainder of the interwar period. Animated by two concerns – first, that the region was slated for division according to the Sykes–Picot agreement, and second, that France would become the dominant power in some of its parts – the delegates articulated a series of resolutions comprehensible in the dominant language of nationalism. The ten-part declaration that the congress issued (1 July 1919) embraced the Wilsonian definition of the post-war world. See Khoury, Urban Notables, op. cit., 88. 69 al-Nahda (The Awakening) (Aleppo), 24 July 1919. 70Fu'ad al-cAyntabi with Najwa cUthman, Halab fi mi'at cam (One Hundred Years of Aleppo), 3 vols (Aleppo, 1993), ii, 203–4. 71See my ‘Middle-class modernity and the persistence of the politics of notables in interwar Syria’, The International Journal of Middle East Studies, xxxv (2003), 257–86. On the politics of notables, see Khoury, Mandate, op. cit., 13: ‘A relatively high degree of social and religious uniformity and cohesion in urban society itself allowed the urban upper class to pose successfully as a “natural” leadership. In a sense, its domination of urban society was “legitimized” because a high proportion of the population in each town – a population that, despite the dramatic changes of the era, was still very much attached to its traditional religious beliefs, cultural practices, and customs – identified the defenders of the faith and guardians of culture as well as the providers of vital goods and services with the local upper class.’ The term ‘natural’ leadership in this passage is drawn from the seminal work of Albert Hourani in his ‘Ottoman reform and the politics of notables’ in William R. Polk and Richard L. Chambers (eds), Beginnings of Modernization in the Middle East (Chicago, 1968), 41–68. On the rise of acyan and derebeyler in the Ottoman period see Halil Inalcık's ‘Centralization and decentralization in Ottoman administration’ in Thomas Naff and Roger Owen (eds), Studies in Eighteenth Century Islamic History (Carbondale, 1977), 27–52. 72 Halab (Aleppo), 21 July 1919. 73 ibid. 74Before World War I, the term ‘Syria’, a Latin word of classical origin, applied in late Ottoman parlance only to the province of Damascus, sometimes called Süriye Vilayeti. More commonly, it was known as Şham Vilayeti. In medieval Arabic geographies there exists a region called Biled al-Sham, the Land of Shem. For Aleppines, while they may have been in the Bilad al-Sham, as defined by these geographers, there is no evidence that they identified as Shami, ‘of Sham’. Shami only meant Damascene, al-Asadi, 5:19. If proverbs can be considered evidence of commonly held beliefs, then for Aleppines, Damascenes, known in the local dialect as Shawwam, were held in very low regard. See Yusuf Qushaqji, al-Amthal al-shacbiyya al-halabiyya (Popular Aleppine Sayings), 2 vols (Aleppo, 1984). 75On this Ottoman resistance, remembered in canonical accounts of Turkish history as the ‘War for Turkish Independence’, see Zürcher, op. cit., 144; Feroz Ahmad, The Making of Modern Turkey (London, 1993), 48. 76On the political transformation of Faysal upon his return from Paris see Khoury, Urban, op. cit., 89–91. 77 Halab (Aleppo), 18 March 1920. 78 ibid. 79 Halab (Aleppo), 25 March 1920. 80 Halab (Aleppo), 19 March 1920. 81 ibid. Emphasis mine. 82Khoury, Urban Notables, op. cit., 91. 83 Halab (Aleppo), 19 March 1920. The phrase was itself part of the nomenclature of the British post-war government of the region which they referred to as Occupied Enemy Territory Administration–Turkey (OETA–T). 84See Gelvin's discussion of the origins of this phrase, Divided, op. cit., 181–6. 85A page one New York Times headline of 15 April 1920 exclaimed: ‘Americans besieged in two Turkish towns; their flag defied; French move to rescue’. While the Times editors focused on the American element of the story, it certainly shows that information travelled perpetually and with ease the 125 km from the front lines to Aleppo. Yet on the day information about the siege of the American compound in cAyntab reached the city, Halab chose to lead the edition with an exposition of post-war instability in Germany. The edition also contains a rare glimpse of Mustafa Kemal (later Atatürk), though the statement merely makes mention of his dismissal as inspector general by the Allied-controlled Ottoman government in Istanbul and the demand that he break off relations with a shadowy ‘nationalist movement’: Halab (Aleppo), 8 April 1920. No further references to this movement or to Mustafa Kemal appeared in the paper in the additional three months during which it was still under the control of the Arab government. Only a strict censorship regime can account for the lack of coverage of the ongoing conflict in the north. The few remaining copies of other papers in the city at the time confirm this conclusion. Al-Taqaddum, a paper that tended to cover the local Christian community, and was subsidized by the French, ceased in late 1919 to cover it. This silence suggests that to do otherwise could have resulted in an official sanction of some kind. A silence about these events exists even today in much of Syrian Arab nationalist historiography. 86 Halab (Aleppo), 12 July 1920. 87Unlike the occupation of Damascus, which was preceded by a violent encounter between French, French colonial and Arab troops (the Battle of Maysalun), French troops were merely transferred from the ceasefire line in Cilicia to the precincts of Aleppo. While the countryside around Aleppo was far from quiet, ‘They [the French Troops] were received with outward calm, and in places with expressions of welcome of which by no means all were insincere’: Longrigg, op. cit., 104; Gelvin, Divided, op. cit., 135. 88 Halab (Aleppo), 4 August 1920. 89An instructive analogy is the ‘Andalus syndrome’, a sense of loss experienced by Muslims in post-independence India. Sudhir Kakar concludes, ‘For many sensitive members of the [Muslim] community – including some of its writers, scholars, and artists – this loss of Muslim power and glory is explicitly mourned’: The Colors of Violence: Cultural Identities, Religion, and Conflict (Chicago, 1996), 130.