Palestine in the Nineteenth Century

Library (no. 963 in the catalogue) sources, and its members may be written by a certain Muhammad put forth confidently as the direct Scholars, Chroniclers, ibn `Abd al-Rahman ibn `Abd ancestors of the modern family. al-`Aziz al-Khalidi who, as we can The series begins with Shams deduce from internal evidence, lived al-Din Muhammad ibn `Abdullah in the mid-eleventh century, and al-`Absi al-Dayri al-Maqdisi who and most probably before the Crusader was born in Jerusalem around 1343 occupation of the city in 1099. We and died there on November 2, know that this occupation caused 1424. His father was a merchant, a mass exodus from Jerusalem, originally from a Nablus district Archivists scattering its families in all called al-Dayr. Encouraged by directions. A family tradition has it his father, Muhammad studied in A History of the Khalidis that the Khalidis sought refuge in Jerusalem, , and the village of Dayr `Uthman, in the and then became a Hanafite mufti province of Nablus and returned to of Jerusalem and a distinguished Jerusalem after recaptured scholar and teacher. the city on October 2, 1187. When Two of Muhammad’s five sons they came back, they were known achieved the same renown as as Dayris or Dayri/Khalidis, but this their father: Sa`d al-Din Sa`d who remains a mere possibility because it was born in Jerusalem in 1367 is unattested in the sources. he history of families is a and died in Cairo in 1463 and notoriously difficult subject. In the The third stage in the premodern succeeded his father both as chief Arabic-Islamic world, in particular, period is best attested in the judge of the empire and as rector the attachment to genealogy has By Tarif Khalidi been so deep that it has overcome the strictures of the Qur’an and Arabic manuscript. Prophetic Hadith. In numerous Arab homes from Morocco to Iraq, one will find a prominently displayedT family tree that allegedly traces descent from some eponymous hero of the Golden Age. But why is the subject notoriously difficult? Because the stronger a family’s attachment to a time and a place, the more determined it is to construct and, by constructing, to invent a history of belonging. The family tree is, of course, the most common way to display such belonging, but it can in no way be regarded as certain proof of lineage unless each branch of that tree and each bird on that branch are attested elsewhere in histories, biographies, or court documents. The tree by itself is no proof. This must be posited as a caveat before we begin this step-by-step sketch of the Khalidi family history. The Khalidis assert that they are descendants of Khalid ibn al-Walid, a towering conqueror of early Islam, a Meccan aristocrat, and an eleventh- hour Muslim who retained in many of his character traits something of the rebelliousness of the pre-Islamic period, its attachment to freedom, its epic spirit. Did he die childless, as many early and modern accounts claim? Well, not quite. Al-Qaysarani al-Khalidi, a poet from Aleppo who died in 1153, traced his ancestry back to Khalid. This is mentioned in a famous biographical dictionary of the thirteenth century. All we can say at this point is that the claim to descent from Khalid was alive and well in the twelfth century. What is the earliest attested mention of someone called al-Khalidi in Jerusalem? It occurs in a manuscript on jurisprudence in the Khalidiyya

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From the sixteenth until the judges, jurists, and scholars whose eighteenth century, the family lives impacted the political life of supplied all rectors of the Madrasa their age. Farisiyya in Jerusalem, appointed The first was Musa Shafiq (d. 1831), by an edict issued by the sultan grandson of Sun`allah mentioned in . They also seem to above. Musa Shafiq rose in the have monopolized the offices of judiciary ranks of the Ottoman chief clerk of the Shari`a Court Empire until he became Judge of in Jerusalem and deputy judge of Medina, a prestigious appointment, the city right until the end of the given the city’s sanctity in Muslim nineteenth century. The family was culture. He then became Kaziasker, Ottoman in sentiment until the very a chief military judge of Anatolia end of Ottoman rule in 1917. and the second-highest judiciary The eighteenth and nineteenth post in the empire, and ex officio centuries were particularly rich in member of the Imperial Council. prominent sons and daughters of On July 17, 1798, he addressed the family, now numbering perhaps an open letter to the notables of a few hundred. Among them, two Palestine, informing them of the women played crucial roles, the first fall of Alexandria to Napoleon and in establishing the core collection warning them that the ultimate goal of manuscripts (MSS) and the of those “accursed French” was second in housing that collection the conquest of Jerusalem. Musa in the Mamluk mausoleum, the Shafiq must, of course, have seen site of the Khalidi since Napoleon’s expedition as a latter- 1900: Tarafanda Khanum joined her day crusade. Exactly one hundred husband, Muhammad Sun`allah, years later, other Khalidis publicly in establishing around 260 MSS warned of the dangers of Zionism. as a pious endowment or Raghib Khalidi, founder of the library, here photographed later in his life as judge. , dated February 4, 1787. About a hundred years later, Khadijah Khanum of the Khaniqah. The second son, Dayris continued to fulfill the same left a considerable sum Burhan al-Din Ibrahim, was born functions both in Jerusalem and of money in her will to in Jerusalem in 1407 and died in elsewhere in the . refurbish the mausoleum and Cairo in 1471. This father and two It is almost certain that the Dayris house its collection, a task sons were the first in a long line of became Dayri-Khalidis in the accomplished by her son, notables in a scholarly Jerusalem mid-seventeenth century, at a time Hajj Raghib, in 1900. dynasty that has remained unbroken when many families of notables Scholars do not generally and well attested in the biographical throughout the Arab world stretched dictionaries and court records until lead “exciting” lives. Hence, their lineages back to distinguished in selecting to highlight the the present day. Their lineage back to ancestors. The reasons are not the Khalidis of the eleventh century following four nineteenth- entirely clear but may have been century biographies, I chose is unattested, but their connection related to a surge of Arab proto- with the long line of judges, muftis, national sentiments among these and scholars who followed is city notables that need further richly documented. Many of these investigation, feelings that in any descendants had careers in both case were never entirely absent from A page from one of the rarest and Cairo and Jerusalem, and when the oldest Khalidiyya manuscripts, consciousness and explain the later depicting the battle of Hittin and Ottomans replaced the Mamluks as appeal of Arab nationalism. celebrating Salaheddin Ayyoubi’s overlords of Syria and , the victory over the Crusaders. 26 THIS WEEK IN PALESTINE 27 Palestine in the Nineteenth Century

The second Khalidi in this list is Muhammad-`Ali (d. 1864), a nephew of Musa Shafiq, who succeeded his father as chief clerk of the Shari`a Court and deputy judge of Jerusalem. During the Russian- Ottoman war of 1828–29, an edict arrived from Istanbul ordering the execution of the Greek Orthodox patriarch and his clergy. Relations between the family and the Christian communities had always been cordial, so, at a great risk to himself, Muhammad-`Ali disobeyed the imperial order and hid the patriarch and his clergy in a cave near the Bab al-`Amud (Gate of the Column, also

known as Damascus Gate). When The scholar, chronicler, and traveler Khalil Khalidi. the war ended, everyone applauded Bab al-Silsila. his action. In appreciation, a large portrait in oil still hangs outside the office of the patriarch of Jerusalem. qada in the Bitlis region, and later of Sultani) in Istanbul. Having graduated The third is Yusuf Dia Pasha Khalidi other qadas), where he composed with flying colors, he immediately Musa Shafiq’s other intervention in (d. 1906), son of Muhammad-`Ali. the very first Kurdish-Arabic was offered judicial posts in politics came 28 years later when He was probably the first in the dictionary. He was the first mayor Palestine – which he adamantly as Kaziasker of Anatolia he issued a family to receive both a traditional of Jerusalem (1867–1873) and the refused, insisting against strong legal opinion (fatwa) which permitted Islamic and a European education. deputy for Jerusalem in the first parental objections (especially those the Sultan Mahmud II to abolish the Joining the Ottoman civil service, Ottoman Parliament (1876–1878). of his doting mother) on completing Janissary Corps and form a modern he rose to become governor of Yusuf Dia was a reformer and his education in Europe. So he finally army in 1826. Anatolian Kurdistan (qaimaqam of a constitutionalist and a friend of the ended up in what was to become celebrated Muslim reformer Jamal Sciences Po (the Paris Institute The original tombstone of one of the fourteenth-century Mamluk princes buried in the library courtyard. al-Din al-Afghani. He also taught of Political Studies) where as an for some years as a lecturer at the impoverished student, he studied University of Vienna, where he edited European history and international the Diwan by Labid, a major pre- relations. Ruhi was also active in Islamic poet. His correspondence Orientalist circles, and his critique with Theodor Herzl and his warnings of Orientalist discourse in several of against Zionist colonization in his writings is arguably among the Palestine are well-known to modern earliest attempts by an Arab writer to historians of Palestine. come to grips with the Orientalists. The fourth Khalidi in this list is Ruhi He was appointed consul general (1864–1913), a nephew of Yusuf Dia of the Ottoman Empire in Bordeaux and in many ways his disciple. Like (1898–1908), returned to Jerusalem his uncle, he received his elementary after the 1908 Revolution, was religious education in Jerusalem elected deputy for Jerusalem in the and supplemented this with a more Ottoman Parliament, and eventually “modern” education; he studied became its deputy speaker. in Tripoli, , and finally at the Ruhi was a prolific author on an prestigious Sultani College (Mekteb astonishingly wide spectrum of 28 THIS WEEK IN PALESTINE 29 Palestine in the Nineteenth Century topics: comparative literature, international relations, history, chemistry, century. These yearbooks provide eighteenth- to nineteenth-century linguistics, and the geography and ethnography of the Muslim world. His work social, economic, and agricultural Ottoman era for visiting scholars. All entitled Zionism is the first field study of Zionist colonization in Palestine. His information about the provinces, these buildings are part of the Khalidi collected works, presently (2021) being edited, will help establish him as a including the names of Ottoman family endowment (waqf dhurri) in leading light of the Arab Nahda, or Awakening, of the nineteenth century. officials. the . After 1967, Al-Khalidiyya, like so many other Arab/Muslim properties, was threatened with confiscation by the Israeli authorities and surrounding settlers. The prolonged and relentless attempts to take it over continued for many years but were resisted strenuously by local family members and other family members in the diaspora.

For more information on Al-Khalidiyya, please visit www.khalidilibrary.org/en.

Tarif Khalidi is the Shaykh Zayid Professor Emeritus of Arabic and Islamic studies at the American University of Beirut. Previously, he was the Sir Thomas Adams’s Professor of Arabic and a fellow of King’s College, Cambridge. Born in Jerusalem, he now lives in Beirut, .

Khalidi Library façade. Photo courtesy of Jack Persekian.

The Khalidi Library The Khalidiyya MS holdings consist The Khalidiyya is a complex of The Khalidi Library (Al- of approximately 1,200 titles, the three buildings on both sides of Tariq Khalidiyya), established in Jerusalem oldest of which is about 1,000 years Bab al-Silsilah. Its principal building in 1900 by Haj Raghib al-Khalidi (d. old, whereas its printed collection is a thirteenth-century Mamluk 1951), is the first Arab includes around 5,500 volumes building – the second-oldest Mamluk established by a private initiative of mostly of nineteenth-century building in Jerusalem – that contains in Palestine. It is located in the Old vintage books. In addition, there is a mihrab (prayer niche) and the City of Jerusalem on Tariq (Street) a massive archival corpus of family remains of Khawarizmian emir Bab al-Silsilah, around 150 yards papers going back to the early warriors who in the twelfth to away from Bab al-Silsilah, one of the eighteenth century. thirteenth centuries participated in the recovery of Jerusalem from main gates to Al-Haram al-Sharif. The library also contains the annual Exhibition about the Khalidi Library. Photo by Al-Khalidiyya contains the largest yearbooks from the Ottoman Empire the Crusaders. In addition, it has Aline Khoury. private collection of Arabic provinces (known as Salname) that a fifteenth-century Mamluk annex manuscripts in Palestine and one of were published in the last half of that contains the library’s printed the world’s largest such collections. the nineteenth and early twentieth holdings and quarters from the

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