Secret History Part 3

And we got a bit of a look at their place in the political hierarchy vis-à-vis the Ottoman state, which, like all pre-democratic states and empires around the world, had an economy whose foundation was the exploitation of peasants, i.e. forcefully stealing a large amount of their produce for the benefit of the ruling class. In this episode, we're going to focus on the relations between the peasants and a new emerging class of exploiters, the Ayan. These were a small class of ultra-wealthy urban elites, who already owned and controlled most of the major commerce and most of the political and religious offices in the Ottoman Arab world, but who, over the course of the 19th century, also end up owning and controlling most of the agricultural land as well, in what is one of the greatest thefts of land in human history, outside of wartime conquest, right up there with the enclosure movement in England.

And this great land theft will help us understand one of the huge, secret, hidden aspects of the origins of the conflict between Zionists and the Arabs of Palestine, especially between the Zionists and the Majority Falahin. Like we mentioned last time, in the 19th century, the Ottomans see themselves really falling behind the West and turning into the Sick Man of Europe. And in order to reverse this relative decline versus their rival empires, they decide to implement various reforms of their economic and political systems to catch up to the rest of Europe.

And this series of reforms are called the Tanzimat. And the Tanzimat is a wide-ranging process, which goes on for almost 40 years, from 1839 to 1876. And part of the motivation to do this comes from an internal desire to modernize and become a more advanced power.

But at the same time, some of these reforms are undertaken under pressure from the other European powers, who want the Ottoman Empire's economy to serve their interests. It's sort of like a combination of the structural adjustment programs in the 1990s that you had in the Third World that were forced on all of these countries by the IMF and the World Bank. But at the same time, it was also the type of independent industrialization programs that you had in countries like China and South Korea, who were seeking to become themselves leading industrial powers.

Now, one aspect of the Tanzimat that is hugely important in terms of the Israel-Palestine conflict, and which does not get anywhere near enough attention, is that they included a vast reform of land ownership to privatize land, and also a political reform which restructured how the state interacted with the peasant majority of the population. In terms of political reforms, before the mid-19th century, the Ottoman state didn't really have much control over the countryside in the region of Palestine. The Ottomans exercised their influence and extracted their taxes via rural elite intermediaries, who were actually the ones who ran the show.

These rural elites were village sheikhs and their families. The countryside was almost like an independent vassal kingdom within the Ottoman Empire, where they paid their taxes, or some of them anyways, and otherwise the government stayed out of their business. In particular, you often hear about the Abu Rosh family, who directly controlled 22 villages, and their influence extended far beyond that.

And they are still an important and powerful family today. Now, the system where the countryside ran itself, and the state got some payments and taxes, but no actual control, that was an acceptable situation to the empire when the economic base of the country was grain and agriculture. But as the Ottomans were trying to transition to a more capitalist-friendly economy, the government needed cash.

And to get that cash, they needed to intervene more directly, and to break the power of the countryside. And this whole reform process was chaotic, and had all sorts of unintended results and consequences. So, for example, at first the Ottomans tried to switch to direct taxation of the peasants, instead of relying on tax farmers and collectors, who took a cut, or else from relying on sheikhs, who would misreport the number of people they had in order to pay less.

But, because the Ottoman state didn't have enough bureaucrats to keep proper accounts and records, this ended up causing an enormous loss of revenue, instead of the enormous gain that they were expecting. And so they switched gears and tried a new approach. They took tax-collecting powers and privileges away from the rural elite entirely, and instead they handed it over to the urban elite, the Ayan class that I've been talking about.

And this, as well as other reforms that we'll look at, especially land reforms, they end up making the urban Ayan stupendously powerful in the Arab Levant. According to scholar James Riley, The power of the sheikhs and the Bedouin chieftains was a challenge to the Ottoman-Tanzimat reform program, adopted in 1839 and gradually implemented, which sought to turn the Ottoman Empire into a modern state on the European model. For this purpose, the authorities had to wrest power away from the sheikhs and invested instead in government-appointed officials.

So in 1864, the office of the village muhtar was established. The muhtar was supposed to supersede the village sheikh as the local representative of government authority. By the early 20th century, the independent power of the peasantry had been broken.

Changes in land tenure brought about by Ottoman government policy, plus the growth of commerce with Europe, benefited the wealthy families of the towns, who became the dominant political force in late Ottoman Palestine. By 1907, villagers were submissive to the city dwellers. Gone forever were the days when Yemeni peasants, led by the Abu Rush clan, controlled the district of Jerusalem and levied tolls and travelers coming to the city.

By the end of the Tanzimat reforms, rural people became almost completely disenfranchised from politics, and they basically had no representation in government whatsoever. Outside of the minor figure of the muhtar, they were bereft of all important political offices and replaced entirely by urbanites from the Ayan class. And when an elected Ottoman parliament was established in the 1870s, most rural people, even their elites, did not even qualify to vote.

This parliament only lasted for two years before the sultan shut it down. But when it was revived in 1908 after the Young Turks revolution that we'll talk about in a future episode, the countryside was still almost totally without representation or franchise. So these reforms increased the power of the state and the urban elite at the expense of the tribes and the rural majority population.

But what really supercharged the power and wealth of the urban elite was the land reform program. Prior to the land reform, most agricultural land was considered to belong to the people, and theoretically held in trust by the sultan. And what that meant in practice is that if you're on agricultural land and you're using it, it's yours.

You keep all the produce and profits from it, you can do whatever you want with it and on it, except you can't sell it. And when you leave, someone else can take it. First come, first serve.

In other words, it's what's called usufruct rights in our Western property systems. But as part of these reforms, the empire wanted to move away from an economy based on peasant exploitation and towards a capitalist exploitation model. Instead of the land belonging to the people, the idea was that the peasants should each own their own land privately, and then they should be able to sell it for cash.

That way, land could have a cash value for loans and for taxation, and it would also enable the sales of land to industrialists who could develop commerce and generate more cash taxes. Basically, it would give everything cash values and make everything easier to trace and control and hopefully generate money for taxation instead of taxing produce. They even made it so that you could buy and sell your shares in the communal musha land that we talked about in the previous episode.

So to make this privatization of land possible, the government decided that everyone had to register their land to get official ownership titles in order to facilitate the process of buying and selling and taxing, etc. Now, like I mentioned earlier, before the advent of the democratic welfare state, peasants around the world basically hated the state because the state was mostly just a giant exploitation machine for the ruling class to steal the product of specifically peasant labor, to milk the peasantry like cows. And it didn't offer much of anything in return.

Like imagine if the government just taxed you one third or one half of your income and gave you absolutely nothing in return. No social programs, no health care, no education. It's kind of like being an American worker in the 21st century.

In the Ottoman case, the state also conscripted the Falaheen's sons into the army to fight wars way off in the Balkans that had nothing to do with them. And even if their sons didn't die in those wars, they still lost their precious labor power for however long they might be gone for. And that might throw the Falaheen into bankruptcy or else force them to hire labor and get deeper and deeper into debt than they already were, or all of the above.

The attitudes of the peasants towards the state was reflected in a popular folk song of the day called Ya Halali Ya Mali. And this was about an urban tax collector who came to collect taxes from the peasants. And while he's going from home to home to take their money, other villagers came in and stole his horse and all his money.

So when he discovers this, he's shouting, my horse, my money, and the song is laughing at him and glorifying the people who took their money back from him and got an extra horse out of it. That's the peasant attitude towards the state. Not just in Palestine or the Arab world, but almost in the entire world.

And actually, as an aside, if you go and Google this song, like I did after hearing about it, you'll find some modern versions of it that sound to me like the meaning has been vacated and changed to a vague, nationalist, anti-occupation theme. Like maybe the original folk version is out there alive somewhere in some rural areas, but I would guess that the original meaning about the hostility of the village versus the urban elite, that this clashes with the nationalist and later Islamist aspirations of many Palestinians since the 1960s, where the city and the country are supposed to be unified. Anyhow, the last thing that most peasants wanted was for the state to have a registry with their names and locations on it so they could get taxed and conscripted to go fight in Serbia.

And given the precarious living of so many peasants, most of them did not want to or even have the money to pay the fees that were associated with land registration. So instead of peasants individually registering their lands, what happened was that the rural and urban elites, the rural sheikhs, and the urban ayaan notable class who acted as patrons to the villagers, all these elites convinced the peasants to let them register all the land under their names. Kenneth Stein in his book, The Land Question in Palestine, tells us that, quote, In particular, the inhabitants of the coastal plain, who were reckoned as the small proprietors of the country and who sometimes practiced the Musha system, strenuously denied that they had any landed property whatsoever, simply to save the cost of title deeds.

Others parted with their property for a nominal sum to landowners. In this way, many fellaheen lost legal control over their patrimony, unquote. And it didn't take much convincing for the fellaheen to let the sheikhs or urban notables register the land in their name, because it was entirely normal and routine for fellaheen to have an elite intermediary between themselves and the government.

Like, most of these people were not even selling their titles to the sheikhs or to the ayaan. They were just giving it to them. And there was no reason for them to ever imagine that they could lose Yusufruk possession of their land.

Land is land. It's not something you can buy and sell. Anymore than you can sell the air or the night sky.

Gershon Shafir points out that the ayaan and rural sheikhs not only duped the peasants into giving them almost all the agricultural land in Palestine for free or for small fees, but they also forged documents and resorted to illegal methods to steal even more land from the Ottoman peasants. Quote. And not being satisfied with these relied on illegal and extra-legal methods as well.

According to historians Stanford Jay and Ezel Kural Shaw. As time went on, the new notables were able to use the law to increase their power, using false documents to prove their claims, extending their rights to include the sale of such properties to others, and maintaining their rights whether or not the lands in question were cultivated to the extent required by law. Unquote.

And this is how one of the biggest land thefts in human history went down. And it had enormous consequences not only for the majority fellaheen of Palestine, but later for the trajectory of Zionism, its character, and its relationship to the majority of the Arab population in Palestine. Historian William Polk, writing in 1957, tells us that, quote.

All contention over Palestine, the inarticulate but ancient peasantry had slipped a rung on the ladder, which was to lead them down into the refugee camps in 1948. Unquote. In the short term, the change in legal status for the peasant, from secure usufruk use of public land to becoming a tenant on private land belonging to a wealthy urbanite or rural sheikh, that didn't change the lives of the fellaheen dramatically.

Instead of remitting taxes to their sheikhs who would give it to the tax collector, they would now pay rents to the owner, which might still be the same sheikh as before, or it might be an elite urban patron that they likely would have had dealings with in the past, and then they would just go on farming and living exactly as before. However, after a generation or so, they started feeling the effects. In the days before the land reforms, the people collecting the taxes and exploiting the peasants on behalf of the state were people from the peasants' own villages that they had strong relationships with, and who depended on the peasants staying solvent for their own continued wealth and status.

And the peasants knew these people personally, and they usually had clan obligations to them, and they were bound by the honor code in their dealings with them. And these rural elites also had to worry about not getting murdered by their fellow villagers. So the level of exploitation was reined in by all of these factors.

But once the rural elites and sheikhs had registered the entire village in their own name, they would often sell it off to the urban elites, the ayan. And then the rural elites would have all of this cash, which would allow them to buy a nice house in one of the towns or cities where all the action was. And then they would move there, and they would start marrying into the local urban elite families.

So the rural elite left the village and graduated to urban elitehood, and you got this merger of rural and urban elites. And now that the fellahin's land was owned by a distant urban landlord or moneylender who had no deep ties to the village, well, these new overlords had no problem or obstacles when it came to squeezing every last drop of life out of the fellahin. The urban elite had only distant formal relations with the peasants.

And quite often, the landlord or moneylenders, they sent in agents to do their business with the fellahin for them, so they didn't even have that minimal human contact with them. Put this together with the growing overpopulation situation, which we talked about last time, which reduced the peasants' options of escape and increased their desperation and thus reduced their bargaining power vis-à-vis the new landlord class enormously. Plus, add on the Ottoman government's reassertion of military control over the countryside over the course of the 19th century.

Well, all this means that the level of exploitation of the fellahin by the urban landlords and moneylenders became more and more ruthless over time. According to Kenneth Stein, the typical fellah paid over two-thirds of his produce in taxes and rents before calculating his expenses and before having to pay the tithe, which was 10% of gross produce, which amounted to almost 35% of net produce. And all of this was before having to pay his loans, which were borrowed at increasingly vampiric interest rates as the 19th century turned into the 20th and the peasants' bargaining power decreased vis-à-vis the urban ayaan.

And you see this lack of bargaining power reflected in the insane rents that varied from 20% to 75% of the gross yields and the scandalous interest rates of 30% to 60% that were common in the late 1800s and early 1900s and also in a whole slew of practices by landlords and loan sharks meant to squeeze every last drop of blood from the fellahin. And things would get much worse as the overpopulation situation increased in coming decades. And just imagine having your rent be a percentage of your income.

Coming soon! AI algorithms determining our rents each month. And like I keep saying, this level of extreme exploitation isn't just some kind of special, evil, oriental exploitation. This is how human beings act, regardless of race or religion or gender.

When one person or group of people has power over another person or group of people and the people with power are not accountable to those subjected to their power via democracy, the people in power will always pursue their own interests regardless of, or at the expense of, the subjected group. That's kind of the fundamental premise of this entire show. If the CEO of Amazon is an American or Japanese or Congolese, when there's a labor surplus, they lower wages as low as possible and make their workers piss in bottles.

When there's a housing shortage, landlords raise rents to bleed everyone to death and cause homeless encampments to spring up all over the city like mushrooms. When you look at how Israel has laid waste to Gaza since October 7, 2023, it's not just because of racism and mystical white supremacy mumbo-jumbo. It's because Israel has much more power than Gaza and Israelis think, for all kinds of reasons, from propaganda to fear to rational calculations, that they'll be safer if they just completely destroy the place and try to push everyone out.

And they can kill untold numbers of people in doing so, and cause all kinds of horrors, because they don't have to suffer the consequences of any of it, and they don't even have to see the consequences of most of it because their media doesn't show it to them. The issue isn't race or culture or nation, it's uneven bargaining power and lack of democracy. Functioning democracy is a check on the imbalance of power between the wealthy and the poor.

Thanks to this Tanzimat land privatization, the urban Ayan end up amassing enormous territories and becoming mega-absentee landlords. By the end of the Tanzimat reforms, 250 families ended up owning 50% of all the private land in Palestine. And this was on top of them owning most of the commerce, religious offices, and now the political offices, thanks to the Tanzimat reforms.

And so, this government reform that was supposed to create a class of American-style, small-holding yeoman farmers who can buy and sell land or borrow from the banks on the value of their land, and it's supposed to stimulate a capitalist economy. Well, instead of that, this reform creates this class of ultra-mega-landlords, and it takes a somewhat independent peasantry and plunges them into a situation of quasi-feudalism, reducing them to the status of milk cows or matrix pods, where they're completely beholden to this extremely powerful elite, whose, quote, "...economic and political power far exceeded that of even the greatest fief-holders at the height of their power." Unquote, according to the Ottoman historians Stanford and Ezel Shaw. And what they mean by this is that the Ayan were already extremely wealthy and powerful before this land-theft process.

They were the biggest commercial traders in the land, and they also had a near-monopoly over all the official positions of government power below the top level that was reserved for Ottoman Turks. And they also monopolized most of the urban high-religious positions, as well as being prominent among the leaders of the professional classes, like the doctors and lawyers. And now, on top of all that, they became the owners of most of the agricultural land in the region, and they were getting rents and debt payments from the captive peasant-majority population.

So they were like the European clergy and nobility and bourgeoisie, the business owners, and the financiers, all wrapped up into one class. So, now that the urban Ayan are coming to the picture, let's talk about patron-client relationships in the pre-industrial Middle East, and all over the world. In the last episode, I talked about the tribal segmented lineage slash balanced opposition system, and how in this form of social organization, the rule is me against my brother, my brother and I against my cousin, my cousin, my brother and I against the outsider.

Everyone is in a state of constant competition, but in the ideal tribal system, all the segments are more or less balanced, and relatively equal in wealth and power, so there's kind of an equilibrium there. And that's what you see in societies where the state is absent or weak. For a classic example, you can read E.E. Evans Pritchard's Ethnography of the Nuer of South Sudan from 1950.

But, in the context of a civilization and state and empire, where you have these huge inequalities of power and wealth, and you have these powerful social and economic predators, and these really low bargaining power potential prey, peasants and urban poor, well, in that context, people without much power need to make alliances outside of their relatively egalitarian horizontal lineage segments in order to survive. They need vertical alliances with wealthy people, so they can get protection from other wealthy people, including the state. And like most of the social institutions that I'm talking about in this series, this is not at all unique to the Middle East or the Ottoman world.

This is very common in pre-democratic stratified societies worldwide. And they also exist, to a lesser extent, in rich democracies as well. In the episode about the Jews of Europe, I gave some anecdotes about the Jewish beggar class, and how they would have audiences with this or that baron.

It could be someone from the mega-wealthy Rothschild or Montefiore or de Hirsch families. And even though European Jewish social structure was very peculiar, these were classic patron-client relationships. And those barons and financiers were patrons for much of the Jewish world across Europe, not just the beggar class.

In a dog-eat-dog society, which all pre-democratic civilizations were, having a more powerful patron, whether it's a baron or a local politician or a local gang leader or whoever it may be, that can make the difference between you being able to live in some level of security or you being prey for every social vulture in your local ecosystem. If you've ever lived in a poor urban neighborhood in the US, everyone is always trying to get something over on you. And you always have to watch your back so you're not getting screwed or mugged or taken advantage of in some way.

So having friends and allies, especially more powerful friends and allies, like gang leaders or local business people or politicians, that's how you keep the predators off your back and onto the scent of more vulnerable targets. Like if you've ever been to New Orleans, when you walk down the streets in New Orleans, especially in poor parts of town, and you walk past someone, everyone always looks at you and says, all right, to each other. All right, all right.

And when I went there, my friend told me, whenever you see anybody, say all right to them. Look them in the eye and say all right. And I thought she was just being weird, but every time I walked by somebody, they would say all right.

And I would say all right. And those people are not just being folksy to you. This is a powerful form of social insurance.

If you don't say all right, what it means is that you don't know the local customs, which means that you're a tourist or from out of town or you're somebody who just moved into town. And that means that you don't have any local friends in town. Because if you did, they would tell you to say all right to everyone that you pass.

And if you don't have any friends in town, that means that you can be robbed or worse without any consequences. Because you don't have a friend or a friend of a friend who could identify the person that robbed you to the police or who could take revenge for you. That's not a patron-client relationship, but it is an example of what life is like in dog-eat-dog societies.

And it's much more so the case in pre-democratic or pre-industrial civilizations, be it the Roman Empire or the Ottoman Empire. In democratic societies, in well-functioning ones at least, the state is in some ways like your patron and your family. And it can defend you from not just muggers, but from all the other predators in capitalist society.

Bosses, landlords, corporations, moneylenders, loan sharks, snake oil salesmen, fraud artists, and every scam artist that you can imagine. In societies with functioning democratic cultures and institutions, you'll also have popular organizations like unions or social clubs, veterans associations, religious groups, these groups that can back you up and stand up for you against all those predatory actors. In our society, with the massive decline of these social organizations, and even of just socializing period, the state will still sometimes act on behalf of the public.

But the state acts less and less on behalf of the public against the predators, and more and more on behalf of the predators against the vulnerable, disorganized public. And that's because in a representative democracy, the state is basically a battleground that reflects the balance of powers of a society. It's a battleground between the public and our organizations, if we have any, versus the well-organized and well-funded institutions and organizations of the wealthy who have armies of full-time staff working 24-7 to convince and bully elected representatives to enact their preferred policies and not ours.

In classical civilizations, it's the tribal system and the patron system which protects you from all these predators, including the state and including the rivals of your particular patron. And while patron-client relationships benefit the weaker people in a society, it's also a big benefit to the patrons. It's a way for powerful people to bolster their own numbers of supporters and their influence, and therefore their own power in relation to their powerful competitors.

We find patron-client relationships all over the world and throughout history. Julius Caesar consolidated his power and was able to get himself declared as dictator for life in Rome in part by making himself a patron of the entire plebeian population of Rome. And he did that by doing things like paying everyone's rent for a year and protecting them from the various predations of the ruling senatorial class when he was consul and also when he was temporary dictator.

In the United States in the 1920s and 1930s, you saw patron-client relationships between urban gangsters and poor people in their neighborhoods, where the gangsters would distribute largesse and goodies and money and food in various ways, and then they would get the support of the population to help protect the gangsters from the police and from the government or also from rival gangsters. And the people would also vote for politicians owned by this or that patron gangster. Imperial and colonial states frequently employed patron-client relationships in order to dominate weaker societies.

And what they do is they find vulnerable and abused minorities in the societies that they want to dominate and exploit. And then they go in and then they genuinely protect those minorities from the existing state or from the general population. And in return, the empires get some kind of local support for intervening in the affairs of the state that they're trying to control.

And they also get a moral excuse for the population at home in the empire for their costly interventions. Oh, we're saving this or that minority. And a classic move is to elevate people from those minorities to positions of power or even turn them into a new ruling class of the society that they're trying to control.

Because now the majority will hate them even more than they did before. And they'll be totally at the mercy of their patron protectors. So they'll just do whatever the empire tells them to do.

And people are aghast that, oh my God, this or that minority became traitors. But that minority is never going to say no to this bargain because they live in a dog-eat-dog world and they have no reason to be loyal to the general majority who prey on them and abuse them because they're weak. They're just following the logic of patron-client relationships.

They just found a mega-giant patron. So imagine if somehow the Soviet Union took over the southern U.S. during the Jim Crow era. And then they made black people into a new ruling class.

Well, you weren't going to have many southern black people in Jim Crow South saying, no way, I'm not going to join these evil Soviets. I'm loyal to America. They'll just be like, finally, it's us instead of them.

And we'll see how this idea has a big role in the Ottoman Empire as the 19th century progresses and later how this dynamic plays in when the British and French take over the Middle East and start running it in their own interests and the giant mess that all this creates going forward. And speaking of democracy, representative democracies often resemble and sort of evolve out of the patron-client model. It's less about ideology and more about I'll bring you these goodies and you keep voting for me and keep me in power and supporting me against my rivals.

But ultimately, patron-client relationships are a substitute for democracy in societies with massive power imbalances and intense competition for resources where there's a lack of social mobility. The less democratic and the more unequal your society is, the more you need patron-client relationships in order to navigate the world and to prevent yourself from being the total bottom of the food chain. So in Palestine and in the rest of the Levant and other parts of the Arab world, when the peasants gave their land titles to the wealthy urban Ayan, they thought that they were just doing regular patron-client politics.

You'll deal with this bureaucracy for me and you'll protect me from the predations of the state and I'll let you be my loan shark and I'll pay you my rents and I'll trade with you at favorable prices and I'll support you over your rivals when you're jockeying for some political office. Unfortunately, as we'll see, this was a huge mistake on the part of the Felahim and one with enormous consequences when the Zionist movement comes to town looking to buy land. So we've seen how the urban Ayan stole much of Palestine's agricultural land and we have a sense of their relationships to the majority of the population as landlords and moneylenders.

But let's talk a bit about who the Ayan were and where their class came from. First of all, Ayan means the notables, the ones everybody knows or notices. You had local notables, people with political office or high religious office or military rankings, people with wealth, and you had what are sometimes called the grand or ultimate Ayan, the ones who were usually the wealthiest people in the most urban areas.

And that's the class that we're talking about, the urban Ayan, the urban notables. Now, if you read left-wing literature, especially Marxist literature from like the PFLP or something, you'll often see the Ayan described as the feudal elite. And while there are some parallels to European feudalism, the Ottoman Empire had a very different system of exploitation of the peasants than medieval Europe did.

So calling it feudal is a bit of a robot zombie term for people who just copy-paste everything that Marx ever said. The Ayan were not a hereditary elite in the legal sense, the way that the nobility were in Europe. Being an Ayan isn't like an official status.

They were just very wealthy people. They were a hereditary elite in the sense that money stays within families over generations in any society, and especially in pre-democratic traditional societies with little class mobility. And the Ayan weren't feudal lords with hereditary domains and serfs.

In the Ottoman system before the Tanzimat, it was the state who owned the land and who exploited the peasants. And you had tax-collecting privileges as an intermediary. And those could be hereditary, but it wasn't usually the urban Ayan who held these, it was the rural Ayan.

Because of the Tanzimat reforms, the urban great Ayan did end up with enormous amounts of land and huge numbers of tenants, but that was very recent. It started in the 1850s, very different from the European lords whose lands belonged to their families for a thousand years, and who had traditional, not capitalist titles to those lands. In the Palestine region, meaning the Jerusalem region mostly because that's where the wealthiest people lived, you had six main families who dominated most of the highest political, religious, and commercial positions.

And especially the top three families, the Hussainis, the Nashashibis, and the Khalidis. The Ayan's level of power increased enormously during the 19th century Tanzimat process, but there were still the Ayan before this. Where did their wealth and status come from originally? Most of the big notable families were descended from people close to Muhammad, the founder of Islam, or else to the early caliphs subsequent to Muhammad, and from the original Arab conquests dating back to the 6th century.

It's a lot like in England, for example, where even today the richest families tend to be descendants of the Norman invaders of 1066. The number one most powerful family was the Hussainis, who were descended from Muhammad's son Hussein, and their ancestors had fought prominently against the crusaders under Saladin. The next biggest family were the Nashashibis, and they were rivals of the Hussainis in Jerusalem politics.

And their origin story is that they had been making bows and arrows for the sultan of the Ottoman Empire since the 15th century. Nashab means arrows. So they're the newcomers of the bunch, only prominent for 400 years or so.

Meanwhile, the Khalidis were descended from the general Khalid ibn al-Walid, who helped originally conquer the Levant under Muhammad. And the civil and sharia court judges of Ottoman Palestine, and many of the scholars, were largely members of this family. And the scholar Rashid Khalidi of Columbia University in New York, who's currently the leading Palestinian historian writing about the conflict in English, he's from this Khalidi family.

You also had the Alamis, who were descended from Muhammad's grandson Hassan, and who fought with Saladin against the crusaders. And you had the Dajani family, who traditionally upkept King David's tomb on Mount Zion. And you had the Nusaybah family, a Muslim family with close ties to the Christians of Palestine.

And they were in charge of the keys of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. From the 1860s and on, when the Ottomans first created the position of mayor of Jerusalem, the mayor was always selected, and later elected, from one of these six families. These were the ultimate grand Ayan families.

But you also had relative Ayan families, more local or regional notables, who were the big shots of their smaller towns or communities. And those included Christian and Jewish notables. And they had a lot of influence and power as well, though nowhere near the power of the big six Muslim families, at least in Palestine.

In other cities in the region, you did have top-level Jewish and Christian Ayan. Like in Damascus, you had the Farhi family, which was an ultra-wealthy family of Jewish financiers and bankers, who were among the top elite, and who held important positions of political office alongside the Muslim Ayan families. You also had an important Farhi minister in the Akre district in Palestine, but he was taken out and murdered by his rivals in the early 1800s.

One thing worth mentioning about the Ayan is that while their wealth as a class came from exploitation of the peasants and from commerce, and they're the plutocrat class, they're also the same class that tended to produce many of the men of letters and the cosmopolitan thinkers and philosophers who were attracted to liberal Enlightenment ideas and scholarship. And even though they were a tiny minority, they're also the people that we know the most about as individuals, simply because they're the ones who produced most of the texts that survived the 1948 war. There was also a small urban middle class in Palestine in the 19th century, made up of some shopkeepers, some small merchants and artisans.

The middle class starts to play a more important role in the 1930s, which is still several decades off. But if you want a bit of a sense of the Arab middle class and of urban life in general in the Levant before modern times, there's an interesting book called The Barber of Damascus by my former teacher Dana Sajdi, which talks about a barber in Damascus, a middle class artisan basically. But he lived in the 18th century, the 1700s, which is before the time that we're covering.

And he was exceptional because we don't have much written from this class, and also because he wrote a historical chronicle, which was a form of writing which had previously only been the purview of the elite ulama, the Muslim clergy and scholars, usually from the elite Ayyan families. So from reading this, you get a sense of his middle class perspectives, watching the rise of the Ayyan class in his time, which is a bit before the period that we're covering here. And it takes place in Damascus, not in Palestine, but Damascus is culturally very close to Palestine, and the book gives you a rare look into the middle class perspectives in the period leading up to the one that we're talking about in the 19th century.

Speaking of cities like Damascus and the urban Ayyan, one thing to note about Palestine in this period, the mid and late 19th century, is that it was something of a backwater in the Levant. And this is true in terms of economics, politics and culture. If you look at the cities in Palestine, they were smaller, more conservative and less cosmopolitan than the geographically and culturally close cities of Beirut, Damascus and Aleppo.

There was less intellectual activity, there was less trade and economic activity, and much of the intellectual activity that was produced tended to be conservative and religious in orientation. And one of the main reasons for this is the Bedouin and tribal control of the region. Until the 1860s, the security situation in most of Palestine was very bad.

Like I mentioned earlier, rural Palestine had been running by itself, free of government interference since the 1600s. So the Bedouin would conduct raids on travelers and traders, and they would even sometimes converge in the thousands on big cities and demand a huge ransom to prevent them from looting and pillaging. So the danger of travel between cities choked off the flow of people, goods and ideas, so that you just couldn't have as much trade or travel as you did in the other more cosmopolitan cities of the Arab Levant.

And this was a similar situation to what you had in Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire. European travelers visiting Palestine in the 19th century would often snobbly remark on how poor the people of Palestine were, and how its once prosperous cities were now dead or stagnant in terms of economic and social activity. They remarked on how large tracts of fertile land that had been heavily populated in biblical times were now uncultivated and sparsely inhabited for fear of Bedouin raids, or how all the roads between towns were crumbling or overgrown with grass from lack of use.

For example, the famous American author Mark Twain visited Palestine in the 1860s, and he wrote about it in his book The Innocence Abroad. Quote, The Holy Land is truly monotonous and uninviting, and there is no sufficient reason for describing it as being otherwise. Of all the lands there are for dismal scenery, I think Palestine must be the prince.

The hills are barren, they are dull of color, they are unpicturesque in shape, the valleys are unsightly deserts fringed with a feeble vegetation that has an expression about it of being sorrowful and despondent. It is a hopeless, dreary, heartbroken land. Palestine sits in sackcloth and ashes.

Over it broods the spell of a curse that has withered its fields and fettered its energies. Renowned Jerusalem itself, the stateliest name in history, has lost its ancient grandeur and has become a pauper village. The riches of Solomon are no longer there to compel the admiration of visiting Oriental queens.

The wonderful temple, which was the pride and glory of Israel, is gone. Palestine is desolate and unlovely. And why should it be otherwise? Can the curse of the deity beautify a land? Unquote.

So you can see here that his remarks are colored with religious prejudice. For Twain, Islam is synonymous with decay, and the poverty of Palestine also represents God's curse for taking away the Holy Land from Europe. Twain continues, Quote, Palestine is no more of the workday world.

It is sacred to poetry and tradition. It is dreamland. The population of Jerusalem is composed of Muslims, Jews, Greeks, Latins, Armenians, Syrians, Copts, Abyssinians, Greek Catholics, and a handful of Protestants.

The nice shades of nationality comprised in the above list, and the languages spoken by them, are altogether too numerous to mention. It seems to me that all the races and colors and tongues of the earth must be represented among the souls that dwell in Jerusalem. Rags, wretchedness, poverty, and dirt, those signs and symbols that indicate the presence of Muslim rule, more surely than the crescent flag itself abound.

Lepers, cripples, the blind, and idiots, assail you at every hand. So it's like Twitter, or Blue Sky, basically. And they know but one language, apparently.

The eternal Bokshish. Jerusalem is mournful and dreary and lifeless. I would not desire to live here.

Unquote. And there are many such observations by many writers. Some of it was likely exaggeration, motivated by the desire for Western intervention.

Like Twain, they would often blame the decline of Palestine on Islam, or else say that it was God's punishment on the Muslims for taking the Holy Land. Or often they would say it was a curse on the Jews for betraying Christ. But whatever their motivations, the reports are consistent enough that it's clear that the decline was real.

And it was a noted contrast to other parts of the Levant, which got very different descriptions from Western visitors. Except about the Bokshish. The status of the region as the Holy Land also fostered a certain conservatism, and a sense of being on guard against Palestine being reconquered by the Europeans like they had been during the Crusades.

And this manifested as a certain hostility to foreigners. As a result, foreign officials were essentially banned from Jerusalem from the end of the Crusades until the 1840s. And for that reason, you didn't have as much global cosmopolitan influence as you had in Aleppo, or Damascus, or Beirut, which were full of traders and diplomats and visitors from all around the world.

Furthermore, as a result of the rural dominance in Palestine since the 1600s, even the urban elite Ayyan class was much more connected to, and under the influence of, traditional tribal social structures and values than the elite classes tended to be in the other major centers of the Levant. According to Rashid Khalidi, "...Palestine, and especially the hilly central Nablus-Jerusalem-Hebron axis, whence came most of the political leaders, was simply less developed economically, and therefore had evolved less socially and politically than had the urban areas of Egypt, Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon during this period. Moreover, even in neighboring Lebanon and Syria, which were most similar to Palestine, political leadership tended to come not from the towns of the relatively isolated hill areas, but rather from the middle and upper classes of the larger and more socially, economically, and politically developed cities of the coast and the interior plains, Beirut, Aleppo, and Damascus.

In Palestine, by way of contrast, Jerusalem, Nablus, and other cities and towns of the hills tended to dominate political life. The implication is that Palestinian politics tended to be most influenced by these hill areas, where religious, clan, family, and parochial perspectives were more prevalent, rather than by the coastal cities, where working class associations, radical urban religious groups, commercial and business concerns, and intellectual and social organizations were most active. And Haledi is referring here to the period from the turn of the century to the 1940s.

So, note that there are no working class associations yet in the 1800s period that we're talking about, and that's because there wasn't much of a working class yet. We're still in a pre-industrial economy in the 1880s. One of the issues that you hear a lot about from the Israeli side about Palestinians is that the idea of Palestinians as a people was something that was invented specifically in order to delegitimize Israel.

According to this narrative, before a certain time, sometimes it's 1922 when the British created the borders of the Mandate of Palestine that modern Palestinians identify as the borders of their homeland, like the necklaces that they often wear, or sometimes it's the 1948 war when 700,000 or so Arabs were expelled and fled from what is now Israel, or sometimes it's the 1960s when the Palestinian Liberation Organization was formed. According to this Israeli narrative, before one of these dates, the Palestinians just considered themselves to be Arabs and part of the Arab nation, or else part of the Syrian nation. The Arabs of Palestine had no special unifying characteristics that would set them apart from the Arabs of Beirut, or Damascus, or Aleppo, or the Hawran or rural Syria, or rural Jordan, etc.

And they certainly had no identity as Palestinians. Now, some of this is true, and some of it is bullshit. Now, how can it be both things at once? Because, like everything else in this series, different classes of people exist.

National identities, in general, were not important in most of the Arab world until just before World War I. Where ideas about the nation did exist, they were almost exclusively an urban phenomenon. And this was very true in Palestine until at least the 1930s, and more universally in the 1960s. Remember in the first episode when we talked about how specific collective identities aren't just natural phenomena, they form, or they're invoked or created for some kind of purpose, to unify people in order to achieve some kind of goal.

In the modern context, national identities usually have something to do with uniting an entire ethnic or geographic group in order to form a state, or else to rally the population of an existing state behind some kind of project by the rulers of that state, like to support some kind of war or colonial project, or sending people to the moon, or whatever it may be. National identity and organization is something that evolves in phases in Palestine. In the 19th century, there wasn't yet much of a need for a national identity among any of the Arabs in the Ottoman Empire, except maybe in Egypt as part of Muhammad Ali's expansion project.

Instead, people identified with more salient collective groups that helped them achieve various political, economic, and social goals in their lives. The family, the hamula, the village, the tribe, all these groups that I explained last time. And then there's social class, religion, sect, city.

Those are the identities that got you things, and that made you the alliances that you needed in order to survive and prosper. And if you were urban and educated, and you traveled around from place to place, you might have more of a sense of identification with your region, including Palestine, but it was certainly not a primary identity. Identity groups formed for practical purposes.

But for the majority of the population, especially the peasant majority, national identity was just not something that had any purpose until at least the 1930s. Because ideas of uniting across class and village and tribal lines had almost no relevance to their lives or experiences. To quote from Alan Doughty's book, Arabs and Jews in Ottoman Palestine.

Quote. In the 19th century, liberal nationalism, the idea that every nation, in the sense of a people, should exercise self-determination in its own nation state, was sweeping Europe, but only beginning to take root elsewhere. In the pre-nationalist Middle East, most inhabitants were identified as Arab in language and culture, but also bore other identities, somewhat equally or more significantly.

Muslim or Christian, clan or tribal kinship, Bedouin, Falaheen or town dweller, Ottoman citizen. There was in particular a strong attachment to one's own locality and kinship group, a fact that made compulsory conscription for the sultan's wars in faraway lands extremely unpopular. There was also some sense of attachment to Palestine, especially Jerusalem, for its religious importance and as an administrative entity expressed in pre-nationalist terms.

Outside observers often remarked, however, on the weak sense of a broader common identity. Elizabeth Anne Finn, who lived in Palestine between 1845 and 1862, while her husband James was the British consul in Jerusalem, complained that the peasants, quote, speak Arabic and call themselves Arabs, but they feel no patriotic attachment for Palestine as a whole. They know and care but little what passes in any other district than their own, unquote.

She referred to them as so-called Arabs, who were in fact, quote, the fragments of distant and even hostile nations, unquote, probably descended from the ancient Canaanites rather than from the Arab conquerors, unquote. And to give her statement some context, the mid-1800s that Finn was writing from was a time of, like, Palestine fever in Europe, especially in England. We saw in the last two episodes that Muhammad Ali Pasha's attempted conquest of the Levant and its aftermath meant that European consuls and other long-term diplomats and businessmen and others were allowed in Palestine for the first time since the Crusades.

And we saw that this immediately launched an early wave of religious Zionism, because Jews from Europe could now go and live in Eretz Yisrael for the first time in centuries. This also launched Christian Zionism, and also an obsession with Palestine in the imagination of the British public. That's why Mark Twain was there, for example.

So to Mrs. Finn, who was expecting some romantic biblical fantasy world, and who was coming from a 19th century Europe where national identity was all that anyone talked about, she was quite disappointed that instead of this great, glorious Arab nation that she was expecting, she was instead encountering all these fractious, competing tribes and villages and hamula that I described in the last episode. People from industrialized countries often think that the lack of national identity implies some kind of lack of political consciousness or of organization. And you'll see this over and over in the histories of the Israel-Palestine conflict from both sides, especially when discussing the peasants.

On the Arab side, for example, when you read stuff about the Arab revolt of the 1930s that we'll talk about later, you'll often read things to the effect of the peasants were brave, but they just didn't have national consciousness, so they couldn't fight effectively. Which is kind of the exact opposite of the truth, as we'll see later. And there's often a paternalistic, condescending attitude towards the sweet but ignorant fellaheen in these accounts.

But this idea that the peasants were without political consciousness is entirely a product of the urban, industrialized people who were writing this nonsense. Like most of us urbanites watching or listening to this, we lead extremely impoverished lives in terms of collective association and organization and real-life social networks. And as a result of this, we think of political consciousness as knowing all of these theories and abstract ideas and belonging to this weird imaginary realm of basically fantasy collectivities of people who don't know each other and don't have any real relations with each other.

We certainly have a lot more information than 19th century peasants had, but we're actually the ones who have extremely low political consciousness. Like, if you didn't have internet or TV, or you didn't interact with a state, you probably wouldn't even know whether you're a Canadian versus an American, because those identities wouldn't mean anything. These identities only really impact your life if you're trying to use the healthcare system, or something having to do with the legal system, or a war or something.

And for people who live in developed, socially atomized countries, politics is mostly just about voting every few years, and sometimes a bit of power struggles at work, or maybe sometimes engaging in labor disputes or complaints via your union, or maybe complaining to your municipal council about your neighbor's lawn is too long, or they need to do something about all the raccoons eating your garbage. But for the Falaheen and other traditional peoples around the world, their lives were and are constantly permeated with politics. Politics means the way that people engage with decision-making in groups.

And if you're a Levantine fella, then you're part of this whole web of overlapping decision-making structures at a level that you engage with constantly. Collective decisions about helping people in need, maintaining family honor, avenging crimes, finding marriage partners, forming alliances with different Hamoula and clans, different villages or Bedouin groups, negotiating land disputes, disputes between family members, making rules about harvesting times and resource use within villages to avoid collective action problems, negotiating agreements with Bedouin for defending against outside incursions, or about protection money agreements, or off-season grazing rights, or deciding how land is distributed, deciding what to sell at the market, to whom, and for how much, deciding how to adapt to changing conditions, how to approach taxes, conscription, male-female relations, everything you can think of. We in industrialized countries are way, way less involved in politics than these peasants were, and than most subsistence-level people are.

And we're kind of like naive children as a result when it comes to politics. Like, look at an American or Canadian or Western European trying to negotiate at a vegetable or fruit market anywhere in the world, and it's usually quite pathetic. They're just getting ripped off.

So, back to Palestine in the 19th century, all of these identities and collectivities were quite profound and organized people's lives in a real way that nationality did not and could not. And even for the 20% or so of the population that were urban, there wasn't much of a use for the nation until just before World War I. And for the Valahin, there's not much use for it until the 1930s. And we'll look at why that happens in upcoming episodes.

So, Palestinian was not an important national identity, but neither was Syrian or Iraqi. And no one today is accusing those nations of being invented, even though they're as artificial as Palestine is. Now, what about identifying with the idea of Palestine as a territorial sort of identity? You'll see a lot of pro-Israel podcasts or social media or articles claim that Palestine wasn't even a real place.

It was basically invented by the British. It was just part of the province of Syria, or the general broader region of Bilad al-Shams, the Greater Land of Syria. And you'll also hear that the Arabs in the region were demanding to be made into part of Syria after the British takeover in 1917, and that they insisted that Palestine was actually called South Syria, not Palestine.

Even historian Zachary Foster, who is an ardent anti-Zionist activist, and he wrote his PhD about the origins of Palestinian identity, he tells us that, quote, The term Palestinian was not used as the standard description of the people of Palestine at any point in history prior to the 20th century, as far as I can tell. Although a Palestinian identity existed in the 10th century in the Arab Middle East, and although the term Palestinian was used occasionally to refer to Hadith transmitters, it's unclear if the usage was widespread. Unquote.

So before the late 1800s, people in what we call Palestine weren't even using the term Palestine very often, never mind identifying with it. In the Arab world, it was used more by people outside of the region to describe it than by the actual people who lived there. And when Foster says that there was a Palestinian identity in the 10th century, it's because he found one Arab speaker from Jerusalem who used the term Palestinian to refer to himself, and some references where Muslims from elsewhere were describing Hadith transmitters as Palestinian.

Foster also notes that the 10th century was a time when Palestine was an actual district, Junfilistine that I talked about last time, in the Abbasid Caliphate. But there was not going to be another specific political division called Palestine until 1917 under the British, so a thousand years later. But just because Palestine was not an identity for a thousand years doesn't mean that people thought of themselves as South Syrians, or that the idea of Palestine was invented just to destroy Israel either.

Regarding the idea that they saw themselves as South Syrians, that whole South Syria idea was a flash in the pan, and it was created for political reasons just like any other collective identity. After World War I, you have a brief period where many of the elite of the Palestine region are insisting that that region should be thought of as South Syria, and they're demanding at these conferences with the European powers that it be joined together with Syria as one country. And I'll go into this in more detail when we get to that time period, but very briefly, the reason that all of a sudden they were calling it Southern Syria was because when the European powers were dividing up the Ottoman Empire after World War I, the elite of the cities and districts that we now think of as the Palestine region, they thought that a tiny little state of Palestine would be weak and pushed around by greater powers.

So they wanted to be part of a more powerful, bigger entity, and Syria was the natural choice since it's part of the same geographic and cultural region. But, the elite dropped the idea of South Syria very quickly because it was clear that due to the French and English division of territories, it just wasn't going to happen. And at that point, most of the elite and middle classes started switching to the idea of Palestine nationalism, with Palestine being the territory that the British had divided up, and also to the idea of greater Arab nationalism, uniting the whole Arab world into one state.

But, Britain's creation of a Palestine with borders in 1917 and 1922 that everyone wears as necklaces, that's not where the Palestine idea is born either. Ironically, while Mrs. Finn, the consul's wife who I quoted earlier, while she was disappointed that the Arabs in Palestine weren't this great unified nation that she was imagining them to be, European Christians like Mrs. Finn, with their fetishization of Palestine, were actually the ones responsible for bringing the idea of Palestine as an identity to the more educated classes of that region. Like I mentioned earlier, once Palestine was open to foreigners because of Muhammad Ali's invasion, Jews immediately started dreaming about coming home to Eretz Yisrael, and Christian Europeans also started having big dreams about the mythical Holy Land, about going there, about allowing the Jews to return there, to bring back the Christian Messiah, and about expanding their empire into the land of Jesus.

Palestine tourism and guidebooks and history books and traveler's journals were a massive fad, and going to Palestine and writing a book about it became a huge industry, like true crime podcasts are today. And when European officials and tourists finally started coming to the Holy Land in significant numbers for the first time since the Crusaders were expelled, they brought with them the idea of Palestine. Zachary Foster writes, "...the European consuls of the 1840s paved the way for the missionary onslaught that followed.

In the second half of the 19th century, German, Russian, British, American, and French missionaries founded hundreds of schools around the region. Increases in rail transport brought 40,000 tourists a year by World War I. These people brought many things to Palestine, including the word Palestinian. Germans, Americans, British, French, and Russian writers had fallen in love with Palestine by the mid-19th century.

They wrote some 6,000 volumes on Palestine by the mid-19th century. William Thompson's 1859 travelogue in "'Southern Palestine and Jerusalem' sold more copies than any other book in the United States, save for the Bible." Gregory Werdebet summarized the situation nicely in 1856. Quote, "...more has been written about the history of Syria, including Palestine, than any other country in the world." Unquote.

And, just as an aside, I've mentioned several times on my show that empires use religion as a means of facilitating the exploitation of peasants and as a means of management of the whole society. And you can see here that the great powers want to gain influence over the Ottoman Empire. And, immediately, as soon as they get the chance, the missionaries come flooding in first, like the front lines of an invading army, founding hundreds of Christian schools to, like, prepare people to accept European domination.

And different flavors of European domination. France, England, and Russia, and different religious sects that represent those countries. In the exact same way, the Ottoman Empire tried to oppose its version of religion on the peasants, to make them accept their domination more readily.

And a couple of empires before the Ottomans, the first Arab conquerors also imposed Islam in the first place to facilitate their social control. And you see these patterns all around the world when it comes to peasants and religion. But back to Foster.

Quote, "...in 1870, foreigners started using the word Palestinian in English, German, and Russian to describe Palestine's inhabitants. It must have seemed natural to them that if the place was called Palestine, the people who lived in it were Palestinians. And since the term Palestine had long existed in Arabic, was used by Arab and Muslim scholars continuously for a millennium, and was also used in day-to-day conversation by some people in Palestine, the word Palestinian, or Filistini, passed seamlessly from English, Russian, and German to Arabic without skipping a beat.

The result was that, by the early 1900s, Arabs in Palestine now saw themselves as Palestinians. Our earliest reference is from James Finn, the British consul in Jerusalem from 1846 to 1863." Unquote. And Foster's example of the earliest reference of the idea of Palestinians is from James Finn's memoir in 1870, where he refers to the people of Palestine as Palestinians a couple of times.

And then Foster gives us the other earliest examples that he could find, one from Americans in 1897, who, quote, clarified that Palestinians could be Jews or Arabs or even Syrians. And you see how the idea of what a Syrian or Palestinian is is pretty confused and amorphous at this time. Zachary Foster continues.

While references to Palestine are difficult to find in the 18th or early 19th centuries, by the second half of the 19th century, the term appears hundreds if not thousands of times in print. By the turn of the 20th century, the word morphed from a solid to liquid, i.e. from a noun to the more malleable adjective Palestinian or Philistine. It could now describe lands, institutions, committees, commissions, journals, customs, plants, languages, sites, events, sanctuaries, temples, churches, printing presses, and books.

Arabs and those writing in Arabic increasingly saw Palestine as part of the natural world order. They also began to describe things in Palestine as Palestinian. Unquote.

And in general, because of the connection to Europe, the idea of Palestine was much more salient to Arab Christians than to Muslims. At least at first. And Arab Christians were using the term and identifying with it far earlier and more strongly than the Muslim majority was.

And of course this is all limited to the urban population. The 80% of the population who are Falaheen and Bedouin have no interest in this idea. Except for the Christian Falaheen, who as we saw last time had much more of a connection to the urban centers than Muslim Falaheen did through their religious networks and also patronage networks.

Another thing that's happening as we approach the 1880s is that dissatisfaction is growing among the middle and upper classes regarding the autocratic nature of Ottoman government. For the educated classes from across the empire, the Tanzimat reforms were not going far enough in terms of modernizing the country in a liberal direction. So in the 1860s, you had groups like the Young Ottomans, which was a society of writers and politicians who were publishing in the press and preaching in mosques and they formed in order to pressure the government to reform in more liberal and democratic directions.

And by democratic, I mean democratic for the urban population, not the countryside. So under pressure from the Young Ottomans and from general elite sentiment, Sultan Abdul Hamid II inaugurates the first Ottoman parliament and constitution in 1876. And this is a very welcome development for the urban and upper classes.

Meanwhile, of course, the majority peasant class isn't involved in Ottoman politics at all at this point, because the Tanzimat had basically severed any input from the countryside. The Ottoman Empire was of course an Islamic caliphate, with Islam as the state religion, despite being a multicultural and multi-religious empire. And where today Islam is associated with monarchical caliphates, emirates, kingdoms, austere and authoritarian fundamentalist movements, and various dictatorships, in the late 19th century, the Ottoman Empire was moving towards more moderate, liberal versions of Islam and towards a certain degree of secularism.

It was common for urban Ottoman Muslims and Arabs to advocate for democracy, justifying their positions on traditional Islamic grounds as much as modernist Enlightenment grounds. In the last episode, I described the male egalitarian tribal pastoralist institutions and traditions, which were very much the sorts of institutions and structures that were the organizing principles of Muhammad and his followers and allies in the early days of Islam. In general, the tribal structure tends to be democratic and egalitarian for male heads of families, but with a skew towards gerontocracy.

So along these lines, Muhammad, the founder of Islam, and his followers made decisions by debate and consensus among the adult men. And the early caliphs, who were both spiritual leaders and heads of the state, they were chosen by the consent of all the male tribesmen, until after the fourth generation of Muslim rulers, when the Umayyad hereditary dynastic caliphate was established in 661 AD. So you had a very strong OG Islamic argument that democracy was Muhammad's preferred way, and so that we should be going back to that in the 19th century.

However, although the Ottoman parliament and constitution were greeted with great excitement and acclaim across urban centers of the empire, these institutions only lasted for two years. Abdul Hamid shuts it all down in 1878, after the Russian-Turkish war, where the Ottomans lose control over Bulgaria and some Balkan provinces. Abdul Hamid saw that the empire was in danger of falling apart.

There were nationalist movements rising up in the European parts of the empire who wanted more independence and even separation. And there were European powers doing everything that they could to carve out more and more pieces of the empire, which was shrinking every few years. So to Abdul Hamid, a parliament with more debate and disagreement, and with different provinces and regions feeling like they had the right to air grievances and make demands, well this was just causing more chaos, and it was a recipe to destabilize the empire further.

Today it was the Bulgarians and Romanians and Greeks, but soon it would be the Armenians and Arabs and everyone else. So Abdul Hamid re-centralizes authority in his own hands, much to the dissatisfaction of the various ethnic groups of the empire, including the Arabs, who were hoping for more autonomy under the new constitution, not less. So from this time, 1878, there are the beginnings of an idea among the educated classes in the Arab world that the Arabs should have more autonomy from the Ottoman Empire to govern their own affairs, and a feeling that the Ottoman government is denying them liberties that they deserve, which other people are getting in Europe, which is economically more advanced while the Ottomans and Arabs stagnate and fall behind.

And there's also the idea that the empire is just not doing a great job of protecting the Arabs from European incursions, with the growing numbers of foreign consuls in Palestine, or else the three-year invasion of Egypt by Napoleon at the beginning of the 19th century, which shocked the Arab world and the empire in general. And of course, educated Arabs are exposed to European ideas of nationalism from news and literature, and from the various Europeans that they're meeting as of the 1840s. So, some people will trace this period as the beginnings of Arab nationalism, though it's more of a proto-nationalism, because there isn't so much a call for separation or autonomy at this point, just a call for more decentralization and democracy within the empire.

And we'll see a huge expression of these ideas of wanting more autonomy among Arabs, Jews, Christians, and others in the Ottoman Empire when we get to the Young Turks Revolution of 1908 in a couple of episodes. But first, next time, we're going to look at what life was like for Jews, and also for Christians in the Ottoman Empire before Zionist immigration starts. We're going to see how they were treated under Ottoman Islamic rule, and how life changed for Jews and Christians and everyone once European consuls were allowed to return to the Holy Land in 1839.

And we'll look at how European powers used Jews and Christians to advance their own interests in the region, and the reactions to this in the Muslim general public. And we'll also look at how Zionism was already growing in Palestine decades before official Zionism, before there was a political program of creating some kind of state in the region. And we'll also see how the Hebrew language was revived in Palestine as a street language after 2,000 years of being dormant, already in the 1850s, organically, and not by any explicit Zionist revival project, which is the opposite of what we learn in the conventional narratives.

Until then, please support me via the links in the show notes. I purposefully don't monetize my channel for a whole bunch of reasons, but I very much rely on your support to do this. So please check the links for one time per episode or monthly support.

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