Notes on the Notables
Beyond the Silken Curtain - Bartley C. Crum
Page 165: It was instructive to meet Katie Antonius, widow of George Antonius, author of The Arab Awakening, who had been the outstanding interpreter of Islam to the Western world. I lunched with Mrs. Antonius in the residence of the Mufti, where she was then living - at that time he was still in France - and learned that she had two great obsessions: Communism and Zionism. Germany, she felt, had been wronged. She did not conceal her sympathy with the German cause. It was obvious that she, like so many other intellectuals of the Middle East, had little faith in the democratic processes. Easterners had been brought up to distrust the masses and they had no faith in the common man. The Mufti, she said, was misunderstood and would yet prove himself a great leader. When I met her, she was busy grooming Albert Hourani, a brilliant young Syrian who later testifed before us, to succeed her husband as an Arab spokesman. Hourani had been born in Manchester, England, and educated at Oxford, where, by an interesting coincidence, he had once been a student of Dick Crossman.
The Modern Middle East Reader - Hourani et al
III The Construction of Nationalist Ideologies and Politics to the 1950s
Mary C. Wilson
The march of new groups - workers and state school students - and old ones to the tune of nationalism played by the urban notables eventually destroyed the structure of notable politics. Ted Swedenburg adds one of these old groups, peasants, to the mix of forces and interests that came to be arrayed against the urban notables. In his telling, the end of the politics of notables was foreshadowed by the 1936-39 rebellion in Palestine when an 'alliance of peasants, workers, and radical elements of the middle class … challenged a'yan (notable) leadership of the nationalist movement and threatened the bases of mercantile-landlord dominance*.
Swedenburg traces a pattern of increasing urban dominance over the economic and cultural lives of Palestinian peasants for a century before the rebellion, owing to changes emanating from the Ottoman state and to 'the conditions of peripheral capitalism*. This was accomplished in spite of peasant resistance: foot-dragging, banditry, and flight. Dominance, disguised by the ties of paternalism and patronage, characterized the relationship between urban notables and peasants into the period of the British mandate, of growing Jewish settlement under Britain's aegis, and of the rise of Arab nationalism.
During the mandate the failure of urban notables to achieve their own national goals undermined their position. The practices and interests of peasants - 'the refusal to pay taxes, the moratorium on debts, the heavy contributions levied against the wealthy' - shaped the rebellion of 1936- 39 and challenged the urban notables as it challenged British rule. It represented, in other words 'a congealing of nationalism, religious revivalism, and class consciousness*. The rebellion was eventually put down by a massive commitment of British troops. This bespeaks, in Swedenburg's analysis, not the failure of a 'backward' peasantry, but the success of a professional and technologically superior force.
A History of Modern Palestine - Ilan-Pappé
Life in urban Palestine, and not just the economy, was affected by history. Some of Palestine's towns, such as Jerusalem and Hebron, had a long and ancient history, while others, such as Haifa, were newer. History mattered because it was a factor in the life of the a'ayan, Palestine's urban nobility. An elite family had a genealogy stretching back to the days of early Islam, with such a family tree more likely to be found in the old towns. The Muslim elite consisted of families that owed their position both to such ancient familial connections, and also to the good relationship they main- tained with the ruling powers.15 Before the Ottoman reforms, these fam- ilies conducted a political life described by the late Albert Hourani as the 'politics of notables'.16 This term explains the success of certain families in the Arab world in maintaining their position as the urban social elite. Nobility was gained by the double legitimacy granted to these families by their own society and the central authority in Istanbul. Their high stand- ing led the Ottomans, who had avoided direct rule as much as possible, to entrust these notables with important positions within the provinces. This required negotiation and balancing skills, which became the essence of the 'politics of notables'. During the Ottoman period, their tactics formed the ethical and political code of urban society in the Arab world, and remained so during the years leading to the emergence of local nationalism and even- tually of independence. The key to the notables' success was moderation, a virtue that safeguarded their high rank throughout the political dramas of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a time when the area became an arena for colonialist competition and when insurgent local rulers tried to implement their dreams of independence and sovereignty. As in the rural areas, urban society was governed by religion as well as by history.
1948, Benny Morris
Through the Mandate years the a'yan themselves were badly split. The leading Jerusalem notable families-the Khatibs, Khalidis, Husseinis, Nashashibis, Nusseibehs, and Budeiris-had been vying for positions of leadership, with their attendant prestige, economic benefit, and social and political power, through the Ottoman centuries. In the 1920s these rivalries were reinforced by nationalist political considerations connected to the relations with the new Mandate authority and the challenge of Zionism. At the start of the Mandate, the Husseinis emerged as the country's most powerful urban clan. Musa Kazim al-Hussein, the mayor of Jerusalem, served as chairman of the Palestine Arab Executive, the national movement's leadership body until 1934, and Haj Amin al-Hussein was appointed by the British as Jerusalem's grand mufti (1921) and head of the country's Supreme Muslim Council (1922), subsequently emerging as the head of the Arab Higher Committee (AHC) and the leader of the Palestinian Arab national movement.
An Opposition (muaridun) emerged, rallying around another of the notable Jerusalem families, the Nashashibis. Through the 1920s and 1930s (and, more subtly, during the 1940s), the Opposition struggled against Hussein dominance, occasionally backing this or that British measure or proposal and assisting the Mandate government, covertly or overtly, and even occasionally receiving material support from the Jewish Agency for Palestine, the emergent "government" of the Yishuv, the Jewish community in Palestine. Each clan was supported by other notable clans and elements of the rural and urban masses (often a function of each clan's economic interests and holdings). For form's sake, the vying coalitions of clans set up "political parties." But in reality, what characterized Arab Palestine during the Mandate was a feudal "two-party" system with the Husseinis pitted against the Opposition. It was a struggle for power and its benefits, not an ideological clash, though the Husseinis, almost from the start, painted their opponents as collaborators with British rule and soft on Zionism. The Nashashibis, though also ultimately desirous of political independence for Palestine under Arab rule, appeared to be more "moderate" than the Husseinis, whom the British and Zionists branded as "extremists." Throughout the Mandate, the leading Arab families, including Husseinis and Opposition figures, sold land to the Zionists, despite their nationalist professions. Jewish landholding increased between 1920 and 1947 from about 456,000 dunams to about 1.4 million dunams. The main brake on Jewish land purchases, at least during the 1920s and 1930s, was lack of funds, not any Arab indisposition to sell.19 Moreover, hundreds of Arabs collaborated with the Zionist intelligence agencies.20
Ottoman Reform and the Politics of Notables - Albert Hourani
102
The associations of craftsmen still existed, and
there is some evidence that they had more autonomy in Syria at least than in
Cairo or Istanbul: for what it is worth, Iliya Qudsi speaks of the shaykhs of the
Damascene crafts as being elected by the members," and it seems that in
Jerusalem the sbaykbs were drawn from the poorer sbarifs and under the
control of the naqib. The Janissaries also, although formally dissolved in the
1820s, continued to be an important political force for at least another
generation. They were largely responsible for the rising of 1854 in Mosul,
and they were reported to be still meeting secretly in Aleppo in 1860. There
was perhaps greater popular discontent to build on than before. The coming
in of European textiles led to a rapid decline of local crafts: raw materials
which had previously been manufactured for a wide market in Aleppo or
Damascus were now exported to the factories of western Europe. The
number of looms fell sharply: in Aleppo, from 10,000 to 4,000 at most during
the 1850s. This meant a decline in the prosperity of the artisans and of the
merchants whose work was bound up with theirs: a decline the more sharply
felt because at the same time a new merchant class was rising to deal with the
trade with Europe, and this class tended not be drawn from the local Muslim
population. In Damascus, it is true, some Muslim merchants held their own
even in the European trade. But in Baghdad it was Jewish and Armenian
merchants who prospered; in Aleppo, local Jews and Christians and Europeans;
in Beirut, local Christians; in Jidda, Europeans as against the Hadrami
merchants.
Again, in spite of efforts the Ottoman control of the Syrian and Iraqi countryside was to remain limited and precarious until much later. It gradually spread over the more accessible plains, but in the hills some degree of autonomy continued, and the power of the Beduin chiefs remained as it was. As late as the 1850s indeed, when in Egypt the process of sedentarization was well under way, the opposite process was still taking place in some parts of Syria, and peasants were abandoning their lands to the pastoral nomads. The traditional connection of the urban a'yan with the mountain or Beduin chiefs could still therefore play a role in the politics of the cities. In some ways indeed the influence of the notables was even strengthened in the first phase of the tanzimat. The Ottoman governors needed them more than before. A governor was sent, usually for a short period, to a city he did not know, with a small number of officials to help him, no organized police force or gendarmerie, and inadequate armed forces. He was sent not simply to carry on as before, but to apply a new reforming policy which was bound to arouse opposition. In these circumstances, he could only rule with the help of the local notables: without their local knowledge and their credit with the population he could scarcely hope, for example, to raise conscripts or new taxes. Some at least of the new governors moreover were men out of Ottoman Reform and the Politics of Notables 103 sympathy with the reforms and for that reason exiled by the central govern ment to posts in different provinces. It was no doubt for these reasons that, with the acquiescence of the government, the local maflis in most provincial centres came to be controlled by the notables. The majlis included several Muslim notables either appointed by the governor or in some sense elected, as well as the qadi and the mufti and perhaps the naqib ex officio. All the consular reports agree that, at least until the 1860s, this local Muslim element dominated the maflis. The Jewish and Christian members, who had played an active part during the Egyptian occupation, were reduced to silence, and in one way or another the a'yan were able to do as they wanted with the Turkish officials.
Not only were the notables needed more by the government, their interven tion was also more sought after by the population in its dealings with the government Conscription, new legal codes, new methods of assessing and collecting taxes, the establishment of garrisons or government offices in smaller towns, the attempt to weaken or destroy the local autonomies, all meant that more than ever before the population was brought into connection with the government and the notables could play their traditional role of intermediaries. This strengthened their control over the city, and extended it over the countryside. Notables became 'patrons' of villages, and this was one of the ways in which they came to establish their claims to ownership over them. They also created useful alliances with country notables. In Lebanon, for example, the abolition of the princedom meant that the government in Beirut and Damascus could intervene more than before. Different families or factions in the mountain began to find powerful friends and supporters in the provincial capitals: it was in this period for example that the connection between Druze chiefs of the Shuf and Muslim notables of Beirut grew up. The destruction of the Kurdish principalities had similar effects. Disaffected Kurdish chiefs like Badr Khan formed alliances with discontented urban notables in Mosul; some of the Kurdish ruling families, like that of Baban, themselves settled in Baghdad, became urban notables, but from the city still had a certain influence over their former territories. In those territories, their place as local leaders was taken by the hereditary shaykbs of religious orders, like the Barzanji shaykbs of the Qadiri order and the Naqshbandi shaykbs of Barzan; these too had connections through their orders with the religious aristocracy of the cities.