This rich history of Palestine in the last decade of the Ottoman Empire reveals the nation emerging as a cultural entity engaged in a vibrant intellectual, political, and social exchange of ideas and initiatives. Employing nuanced ethnography, rare autobiographies, and unpublished maps and photos, The Great War and the Remaking of Palestine discerns a self-consciously modern and secular Palestinian public sphere. New urban sensibilities, schools, monuments, public parks, railways, and roads catalyzed by the Great War and described in detail by Salim Tamari show a world that challenges the politically driven denial of the existence of Palestine as an affective geographic, cultural, political, and economic space.
Salim Tamari is Professor of Sociology at Birzeit University, Palestine, Director of the Institute of Jerusalem Studies, and the author of Mountain against the Sea and Year of the Locust.
List of IllustrationsAcknowledgments1 • Introduction: Rafiq Bey’s Public Spectacles2 • Arabs, Turks, and Monkeys: The Ethnography and Cartography of Ottoman Syria3 • The Sweet Aroma of Holy Sewage: Urban Planning and the New Public Sphere in Palestine4 • A “Scientific Expedition” to Gallipoli: The Syrian-Palestinian Intelligentsia Divided5 • Two Faces of Palestinian Orthodoxy: Hellenism, Arabness, and Osmenlilik6 • A Farcical Moment: Narratives of Revolution and Counterrevolution in Nablus7 • Adele Azar’s Notebook: Charity and Feminism8 • Ottoman Modernity and the Biblical GazeNotesBibliographyIndex
"A valuable addition to our knowledge of Palestine in the late Ottoman and early British Mandate periods. . . .The mix of sociological approaches and historical depth is enlightening as evidenced by the themes the essays explore and Tamari’s fine analytical eye."
