Applying Digital Methods to the Study of a Late Ottoman City: A Social and Spatial Analysis of Political Partisanship in Gaza

Yuval Ben-Bassat and Johann Buessow

[Draft. July 23, 2019]

Introduction

We are still in the experimental stage when it comes to using digital methods to study the history of the modern Middle East. These methods have been applied to various problems ranging from the edition and ‘close reading’ of single texts to the quantification of large datasets. In this article, we illustrate the way in which computational technology may be applied at a mid-range level between the two extremes of ‘close reading’ and ‘big data’ when investigating the social and spatial relations within a city in the Arab provinces of the Ottoman

Empire. We demonstrate how digital methods can enhance the historian’s toolbox, by providing new capabilities to relate heterogeneous sources to each other (e.g. by overlaying historical maps and aerial photographs). These can help process large quantities of data (e.g. census data and biographical information), can create network visualizations, pinpoint hitherto unidentified locations and thus enable insights that would not have been possible otherwise.

A project on the social history of late Ottoman Gaza between c. 1860 and 1914, carried out in recent years in collaboration with an international group of scholars, combines archival and other primary sources with digital technologies widely available today.1 It has led to new insights and enhanced possibilities for the analysis of social, cultural, spatial and political patterns in the city of Gaza and its region. We presented the first results of this project in an

1 https://gaza.ub.rub.de/gaza. The site presents additional explanations about our methodology and provides access to some results from the project, the database and applications which were developed by the project members in collaboration with experts from the University of Tübingen’s eScience Center and the University of Bochum’s central library. The project was supported by a grant from the German-Israeli Foundation for Scientific Research and Development (grant GIF 1226) and by travel grants from the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD). 1 article that appeared in JESHO in 2018.2 In that article, we discussed how during the late

Ottoman period the city of Gaza was caught up in internal political strife that reached an unusual level of intensity. For example, whereas telegraphic petitions that reached the imperial government in Istanbul from other cities in Ottoman Palestine3 usually dealt with a wide range of topics, petitions from Gaza almost exclusively centered on the issue of who was to act as the city’s mufti, a post that carried extraordinary weight in this city.4 There are several reasons for the severe factionalism that characterized local politics in late Ottoman Gaza. These included the weakness of the Ottoman presence in southern Palestine and the limited control of the administrative council of Jerusalem over the Gaza region. Second, in comparison to other coastal cities in Bilād al-Shām, Gaza was not the scene of considerable development, state investment, or European influx of money and settlers, and largely was left to play by its own rules. Under such conditions, the rising stakes in the local political game resulting from new commercial gains from grain export and Ottoman-British tensions over the border region between Palestine and Egypt, made factionalism particularly strong.

Two coalitions of elite families in Gaza vied for the muftiship and attempted to draw

Istanbul into its internal conflicts. By ‘elite’ or ‘elite families,’ in the framework of this article, we mean local families that enjoyed social prestige and a certain measure of political influence, thanks to a broad portfolio of resources, including state and religious offices, religious authority, scholarly reputations, commercial enterprises and landholding. In the context of the struggle within Gaza’s elite, both the establishment and the opposition factions formed complex relationships with the elite of Jerusalem that dominated Palestine’s politics,

2 Yuval Ben-Bassat and Johann Büssow, “Urban Factionalism in Late Ottoman Gaza, c. 1875-1914: Local Politics and Spatial Divisions,” JESHO 61/4 (Spring 2018), pp. 606-649. 3 The consensual term in research to refer to the region, which later became known as Mandatory Palestine, even though there was no separate entity bearing this name during the Ottoman period. 4 See Yuval Ben-Bassat, Petitioning the Sultan: Protests and Justice in Late Ottoman Palestine (London: I.B. Tauris, 2013), pp. 63-70. 2 as well as with peasants and Bedouins in the city of Gaza and its hinterland. Our article presented the first systematic account of the severe factional strife in Gaza during the period and showed that factionalism was a long-term phenomenon that influenced the city’s morphology.

Since the 1960s, the literature on factionalism in the Middle East has been closely associated with general arguments about the ‘politics of the notables,’ the paramount importance of patronage and the primacy of ‘vertical’ versus ‘horizontal’ social ties. Younger generations of scholars have criticized this view as an elite bias that dominates most contemporary written accounts of local politics that has been adopted too uncritically by many academic historians.5 As James Gelvin observes:

To view the population as putty in the hands of the notability is just as misleading as

viewing the bonds of patronage as the only option available to non-elites in a society

habituated to horizontal as well as vertical linkages. It also flies in the face of evidence.

Non-elites played an active and often autonomous role in sustained [...] mobilizations in

Greater Syria since the first decades of the twentieth century.6

The present article follows this line of thought by exploring the extent to which digital methods can help highlight hitherto neglected non-elite actors in the political field of a city in late Ottoman Bilād al-Shām. Through a felicitous combination of sources and with the support of digital tools, we can assess what kinds of people participated on both sides of the factional divide in one particular round of Gaza’s factional struggle during the early 1890s. To the best

5 See Michael Provence, The Great Syrian Revolt and the Rise of Arab Nationalism (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005), pp. 8, 22; Johann Buessow and Astrid Meier, “Ottoman Corporatism, Eighteenth to Twentieth Centuries: Beyond the State-Society Paradigm in Middle Eastern History,” in Bettina Gräf et al. (eds.), Ways of Knowing Muslim Cultures and Societies: Studies in Honour of Gudrun Krämer (Leiden: Brill, 2018), p. 85. 6 Gelvin, “The ‘Politics of Notables’,” p. 29. 3 of our knowledge, this is the first-ever analysis of the social background of people signing a collective or ‘mass’ petition, which was a common phenomenon throughout Ottoman history.7

Our key sources include telegraphic petitions found in the Ottoman Archives,8 Ottoman census records,9 the major available written sources from the period,10 scholarly works on architecture and inscriptions11 as well as maps12 and aerial photos.13

Our sources make it clear that as elsewhere in the region, extended families formed the backbone of major social networks, and leading families established strongholds in certain areas of the city by buying up houses or constructing new ones in these areas. Specifically in

Gaza, the rival factions coalesced in a bilateral manner, with an establishment faction defending the longtime holders of the muftiship against an opposition faction that tried to replace the incumbent mufti by their candidate.14

7 On mass petitions, see Yuval Ben-Bassat, “Mass Petitions as a Way to Evaluate ‘Public Opinion’ in the Late Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Empire? The Case of Internal Strife among Gaza's Elite,” Turkish Historical Review 4 (2013), pp. 135-152. 8 On telegraphic petitions, see Ben-Bassat, Petitioning the Sultan, pp. 54-7. 9 Ottoman census records of Gaza dating from the 1880s until the end of Ottoman rule are kept in the Israel State Archives in Jerusalem and are fully available online on the Archive’s website. For an introduction, see Jonathan Pagis, Ottoman Population Counts in Palestine, 1875-1918 (Jerusalem: Israel State Archives, 1997) [in Hebrew]. 10 In particular, two works by local scholars: ʿUthmān al-Ṭabbāʿ, Itḥāf al-aʿizza fī tārīkh Ghazza [Presenting the Notables in the History of Gaza], edited by ʿAbd al-Laṭīf Zakī Abū Hāshim, 4 vols. (Gaza: Maktabat al-Yāzijī, 1999). Aḥmad al-Busaysū, Kashf al-niqāb fī bayān aḥwāl baʿḍ sukkān Ghazza wa-baʿḍ min nawāḥīhā min al- aʿrāb (autographed, in private possession, completed in 1315/1897). We thank Khaled Safi for providing us with a copy of this work. Johann Büssow and Khalid Safi are currently translating and annotating this manuscript. The only known Sharia court records from Gaza (covering the years 1273-1277/1857-1861) are analyzed in Abdul-Karim Rafeq [ʿAbd al-Karīm Rāfiq], Ghazza: Dirāsa ʿumrāniyya wa-ijtimāʿiyya wa- iqtiṣādiyya min khilāl al-wathā ʾiq al-sharʿiyya 1273-1277/1857-1861 [Gaza: A Demographic, Social, and Economic Study Based on the Sharia Court Records 1273-77/1857-61] (Damascus and Amman: n.p., 1980). 11 Especially Moshe Sharon, Corpus Inscriptionum Arabicarum Palestinae (CIAP), vol. 4. (Leiden: Brill, 2009); Salim ʿArafat al-Mubayyid, al-Bināyāt al-athariyya al-islāmiyya fī Ghazza wa-qitaʿihā [The Historical Islamic Buildings in Gaza and Its Region] (Cairo: al-Hayʾa al-Miṣriyya al-ʿĀmma li-l-Kitāb, 1995). 12 In particular, the contemporary map by Georg Gatt. See G. Gatt, “Legende zum Plane von Gaza (herausgegeben von H. Guthe),” Zeitschrift des Deutschen Palästina-Vereins 11 (1888), pp. 149-59. This and more digitized historical maps can be found on the project website (https://gaza.ub.rub.de/gaza/?p=map). 13 Photos taken by the Bavarian Aerial Squadron stationed in Palestine during the First World War. They are catalogued as Bildsammlung Palästina (BS-Palästina) at the Bavarian State Archive (BayHStA) in Munich, Germany. 14 On factionalism in the late Ottoman Middle East, see Hourani, “Ottoman Reform,” p. 49; Schatkowski Schilcher, Families in Politics; Jane Hathaway, “A Mediterranean Culture of Factions: Bilateral Factionalism 4

In our previous article, we argued that (1) the severity of this factionalism in Gaza could be attributed to the rising stakes resulting from increasing imperial interventions and economic benefits, and (2) factionalism and urban development interacted with each other, leading to a particular type of spatialized factionalism. Since the publication of this article, we have been able to gain a much more fine-grained view of the case.

In particular, our research questions address two central issues concerning urban politics in this region: the above-mentioned discussion on elite versus commoner actors, and the role of urban neighborhoods.15 What sort of people signed collective petitions to the central government in Istanbul? Was this activity the exclusive pursuit of the elite, or did commoners participate in it as well? Was there perhaps a strategy on the part of the leading notables to ensure a certain representation of certain social categories, such as artisans and agricultural workers? Did the signatories come from specific areas in the city?

Due to the persistence of urban structures in Gaza, despite the upheaval and destruction the

in the Greater Mediterranean Region in the Pre-Modern Era,” in Braudel Revisited: The Mediterranean World, 1600-1800, ed. G. Piterberg, T.F. Ruiz and G. Symcox (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010), pp. 55- 75. For a study of factionalism as a defining feature of Palestinian society during the late Ottoman and Mandatory periods, see S. Tamari, “Factionalism and Class Formation in Recent Palestinian History,” in Studies in the Economic and Social History of Palestine in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, ed. R. Owen (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1982), pp. 177-202. A more detailed discussion of this literature can be found in Ben-Bassat and Büssow, “Urban Factionalism in Late Ottoman Gaza,” pp. 608-609. 15 A classical reference on both questions is Albert Hourani, “Ottoman Reform and the Politics of Notables”, in Beginning of Modernization in the Middle East, eds. William Polk and Richard Chambers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), pp. 41-68. For more detailed studies (mostly focusing on the city of Damascus), see Philip S. Khoury, “Syrian Urban Politics in Transition: The Quarters of Damascus during the French Mandate,” IJMES 16/4 (1984), pp. 507-540, Linda Schatkowski Schilcher, Families in Politics: Damascene Factions and Estates of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (Stuttgart: Steiner, 1985). The question of elite versus commoner actors has sparked critical commentary. See especially Philip S. Khoury, “The Urban Notables Paradigm Revisited,” Revue du monde musulman et de la Méditerranée, vol. 55-56 (1990), pp. 215- 230; James L. Gelvin, “The ‘Politics of Notables’ Forty Years After,” Middle East Studies Association Bulletin 40/1 (2006), pp. 19-29. A third major question in this scholarly debate is that of Ottoman versus local actors. On this topic, see Ehud R. Toledano, “The Emergence of Ottoman-Local Elites (1700–1900): A Framework for Research,” in Moshe Ma’oz and Ilan Pappé (eds.), Middle Eastern Politics and Ideas: A History from Within (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 1997), pp. 145-162. We will also present observations on this question, but our material allows us to draw fewer conclusions here. 5 city experienced in the wake of the First World War and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict since

1948, the general outlines as well as some architectural landmarks of the city during the late

Ottoman period can still be identified with relative ease even today. This, together with the availability of historical maps and aerial photographs, make Gaza a perfect laboratory to apply methods developed for use in geography and archaeology, which are grouped together under the umbrella term of historical GIS (Geographical Information Systems).16

With the help of the University of Tübingen’s eScience Center and recently the library at

Ruhr University Bochum, we created the Gaza Historical Database, an online database that stores information on people and places in Gaza and enables a whole host of analyses that are formulated as interactive queries.

The database was tailor-made for our project to both integrate a body of very rich but heterogeneous sources and to allow for collaborative and simultaneous work by researchers elsewhere in the world. The database integrates data from the sources mentioned above, especially the Ottoman census, the biographical dictionary by ʿUthmān al-Ṭabbāʿ17 and archival material from the Ottoman Archive in Istanbul (the Başbakanlık Osmanlı Arşivi

[BOA]). An interactive digital map serves to identify historical locations to a much greater extent than previously as well as establish the spatial relations between them.18 Our system supports easy data entry, collaborative uploads, user-friendly data search and extraction. It can run various types of analyses, visualize the data, and assemble comprehensive datasets.

More importantly, the database emerged through a continuous dialogue between

16 For an introduction to this field, see Ian Gregory and Paul S. Ell, Historical GIS: Technologies, Methodologies, and Scholarship, second edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). 17 Tabbāʿ, Itḥāf al-aʿizza. 18 https://gaza.ub.rub.de/gaza/?p=map. In addition, the project includes a gazetteer and indices of the families, households and individuals mentioned in the sources, as well as an image gallery with thematically categorized images. We thank Dr. Michael Derntl (Tübingen) for building the database and Dr. Sarah Büssow (Bochum) for designing the image gallery and helping us with the analysis of the census data. 6 database experts and historians. Whenever our historical investigation produced important new questions, our technical support in Tübingen and Bochum allowed us to add features to the system that would help answer these questions. The ability to investigate, to modify and extend our research questions during the study was crucial to the success of this project.

This article begins with a brief examination of the state of the art in digital research methods in the field of Middle Eastern Studies. It then presents the case of Gaza’s networks of petitioners. Next, we attempt to characterize the nature of political partisanship in Gaza, based on textual and cartographic sources. These illustrate how the political division was manifested in the city’s residential patterns. The results are presented in the form of GIS layers. We show how GIS connected to a database can help reconstruct the socio-economic parameters and physical morphology of late Ottoman cities, analyze spatial divisions, and better understand existing networks in a given city.

Digital Methods in Ottoman Studies: Between Close Reading and ‘Big Data’

Historians in general have been relatively slow to adopt GIS as a research tool, despite the increasing availability of high-resolution spatial datasets collected through remote sensing

(RS). In contrast, archaeologists have been using spatial analysis methods and datasets for more than thirty years to map archaeological features, analyze the spatial relationships between settlements and other anthropogenic structures, and understand the environmental context of human activities.19 This approach has also been successfully applied in regions of

19 For example, see Philip Verhagen, “Spatial Analysis in Archaeology: Moving into New Territories,” in C. Siart, M. Forbriger and O Bubenzer (eds.), Digital Geoarchaeology New Techniques for Interdisciplinary Human-Environmental Research (Cham: Springer, 2017), pp. 11-25 (p. 13: “GIS can deal with big data that also have a spatial dimension and in this way help to discern patterns and to simulate theories of human behavior over large areas”). 7 the Middle East to investigate questions of water management,20 local economy21 and travel.22

Some of the hesitation by historians is warranted, since digital technologies have both advantages and disadvantages. While they may help facilitate historians’ command of their sources (e.g. by making primary sources more easily available through digitization, full-text search and markup), they cannot replace the basic operations of historical reconstruction, such as source criticism and the close reading of texts. In addition, building a digital research environment is costly in terms of both time and money and often digital tools such as databases have proven to be inflexible and hard to adapt to the specific needs of a given project. Finally, the question of the best ways to preserve digital research for the future is still unresolved.

Despite these serious drawbacks, in recent years, numerous digital projects have been conducted in various parts of the globe dealing with the history of the Ottoman Empire.23 As

Ottoman historians Chris Gratien, Michael Polczynski and Nir Shafir noted: “GIS and related technologies support the synthetic reconstruction of historical spaces and social relationships, enabling the visualization of patterns within quantitative data sets that may not otherwise be

20 For example, see Michael J. Harrower, “Geographic Information Systems (GIS) Hydrological Modeling in Archaeology: An Example from the Origins of Irrigation in Southwest Arabia (Yemen),” Journal of Archaeological Science 37/7 (2010), pp. 1447-1452. 21 For example, see Isaac I.T. Ullah, “A GIS Method for Assessing the Zone of Human-Environmental Impact around Archaeological Sites: A Test Case from the Late Neolithic of Wadi Ziqlâb, Jordan,” Journal of Archaeological Science 38/3 (2011), pp. 623-632. 22 For example, see Eivind Heldaas Seland, “Camels, Camel Nomadism and the Practicalities of Palmyrene Caravan Trade,” ARAM 27/1&2 (2015), pp. 59-68. 23 For an article suggesting new venues for historians of the Ottoman Empire to incorporate various digital humanities tools in their projects, see Chris Gratien, Michael Polczynski and Nir Shafir, “Digital Frontiers of Ottoman Studies,” Journal of Turkish and Ottoman Studies Association, 1/1-2 (2014), pp. 37-51. The authors write that “The digitization of manuscripts and archival documents allows researchers to approach old sources in new ways. Digital technology also offers novel methods of reading, visualizing, modeling, and mapping historical data. Meanwhile, internet media expand audiences and introduce more flexible and “sensory-rich” platforms for academic production and publication. At the same time, internet communication itself has opened up arenas for rapid and fluid collaboration that is especially well-suited for diverse and disparate topics of study such as the history of the Ottoman Empire.” 8 apparent in primary source material.”24 In practical terms, historian Amy Singer, for example, has led two workshops on the Digital Ottoman Platform (DOP), which brought together scholars from all over the world in an effort to develop a platform which would allow scholars to overcome the language barriers involved in studying the dozens of languages which were used in the Ottoman Empire and the variations across time and space in the different Ottoman provinces.25 Another collaborative project that has made great progress in the past few years is

“Open Jerusalem,” a digital archive created by Vincent Lemire and an international team of researchers in the framework of an ERC grant.26 This large repository makes it possible to access a wealth of documents from various archives in one location; i.e., Jerusalem. However, the corpus compiled by the project consists exclusively of texts and, so far, researchers in the project group have not made use of digital techniques of spatial analysis.

Mustafa Erdem Kabadayı, also in the framework of an ERC grant entitled

“Industrialisation and Urban Growth from the Mid-Nineteenth Century Ottoman Empire to

Contemporary Turkey in a Comparative Perspective, 1850-2000,” is leading a team of scholars primarily based in Turkey whose purpose is to examine occupational structures and urban growth in the late Ottoman Empire and in Turkey. They base their analysis on a large database constructed from various historical sources and connect the results to spatial and geometric data analysis systems. This will serve to respond to complex research questions that have long been debated in academia, and initiate new research agendas in the fields of the economic and social history of the Middle East.27 This project is similar to ours insofar as it

24 Ibid., p. 43. 25 Amy Singer, “Creating a Digital Ottoman Platform (DOP), 8–12 June 2015, Princeton, NJ, School of Historical Studies, Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton University),” Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association 2/2 (2015), pp. 451-456; Amy Singer, “Introducing the Ottoman Gazetteer and OpenOttoman,” Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association, 3/2 (2016), pp. 407-412. 26 http://www.openjerusalem.org. 27 See, for example, a recent lecture by Mustafa Erdem Kabadayı, “New Approaches in Ottoman Studies: 9 involves the mapping of social characteristics and their modifications over time, where researchers apply tools such as least-cost path analysis to model flows of resources. However,

Kabadayı’s team mainly deals with the macro level of the Ottoman Empire and less with the inner workings of cities or other specific localities.

Numerous studies have used GIS to study specific localities during the Ottoman period.28 They often reconstruct specific structures and are able to visualize their shape throughout history, including in 3D virtual images, by basing construction layouts and details on historical documentation. This usually concerns the micro level of particular built structures. Other researchers use GIS to support findings based on a specific kind of Ottoman document such as the taxation cadaster of specific regions.29 Similarly, GIS can be used to evaluate and compare historical maps of a certain region and their content,30 or to study transitions in the rule and characteristics of a given region during a time of regime change.31

Understanding Historical Transport Infrastructure by Using GIS Application,” Orient-Institut Istanbul, 23 May 2018. 28 For instance, see a series of articles on the Dardanelles which is available on the internet by Caner Güney et al. See, for example, Caner Güney and Rahmi N. Çelı̇ k, “Interacting with 17th Century Fortresses on Dardanelles through Web-Based Geo-Visualization”, Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Geoinformatics, University of Gävle 2004. 29 See the lecture by Georgios C. Liakopoulos, “The Contribution of GIS (Geographical Information Systems) to the Historical Geography of Greece in the Light of Ottoman Taxation Cadasters.” The author focuses “on the Early Ottoman Peloponnese, which is explored on the basis of the TT10-1/14662 detailed Taxation Cadastre, compiled in ca. 1460-63 immediately after the conquest of the province… After locating the place-names mentioned, the primary attribute data (number of households, annual revenue, kind of taxes, ethnicity, etc.) are combined with the modern geographical data of the digitalised maps (scale 1:50,000) of the Peloponnese. This cartographic method results in various thematic maps per district and provides a useful tool for the historian.” 30 Noam Levin, Ruth Kark and Emir Galilee, “Maps and the Settlement of Southern Palestine, 1799-1948: An Historical/GIS,” Journal of Historical Geography 36 (2010), pp. 1-18. The authors write that they “reviewed 375 historical maps covering parts or all of the Negev between 1799 and 1948. These historical maps are crucial to the understanding of colonial developments, as well as landscape and settlement processes and the sedentarization of the Bedouin population. We scanned and rectified these maps using geographic information systems (GIS) to enable quantitative analysis of their accuracy, and to reveal new insights into settlement and sedentarization processes.” 31 Rebecca M. Seifried, “Mapping Ottoman-Period Settlement Patterns with Remotely Sensed Imagery, GPS and GIS,” a study which is available on the internet and examines “the transition to Ottoman rule in Mani, using material signatures (i.e., architectural styles, imperial constructions, and settlement patterns). Different elements of the Ottoman-period built landscape are identified in order to determine: 1. The extent to which Mani was integrated within the Ottoman Empire; 2. The nature of this integration; and 3. How this integration changed over time”; see also Isilay Dural, “GIS Learning Tool for Ottoman Empire,” (Unpublished Master’s 10

Yunus Ugur, in what is perhaps the research project the most similar to what we discuss below, recently used GIS technologies to process ‘big data’ to study one city, Edirne, during the second half of the seventeenth century, in particular the enormous amount of data in the avârız tax surveys of this city. It is worth quoting from Ugur’s presentation of his sources at some length since his material bears great resemblance to our main source, the

Ottoman census:32

[T]his information is given on the basis of the mahalle (neighborhood), which provides a practical point of departure for “reading” the Ottoman city. Each register contains approximately 10,000 household heads, with about 10 different attributes listed for each of them. In addition, the data contain some numerical information (e.g., numbers of tax units), although a majority of it is nominal. While some types of nominal data, like religion and gender, comprise only a few possible variants and can thus be analyzed without further classification, others, such as occupation data, contain hundreds, and thus cannot be analyzed without clustering them. In analyzing the data, the distribution of each attribute in the city and its density in an urban space (scaling) can be presented in the form of ratios. One may perform these analyses in the first stage with conventional statistical methods. However, this study attempts for the first time to achieve two further goals: connecting the data types to each other; and highlighting the distinguishing differences among the mahalles using the methods of hierarchical clustering, correspondence analysis, and creating maps by geographic information systems (GIS) applications—none of which is possible with conventional methods.

Our approach coheres with Ugur’s general aim of integrating textual and spatial data as well as with his view that new methods such as GIS can indeed yield new results that exceed what can be achieved by textual and statistical analysis. However, his maps of the ethno-religious makeup of the city and its dramatic changes over a period of 17 years raise doubts as to the possibility of using tax registers as statistical data.33 Similar to what political scientist Cilja

Harders writes with regard to social network analysis methods, it is crucial to define whether

Thesis: San Diego State University, 2014). The latter’s aim is to “provide a geographic computer interactive and user friendly tool that will help students to learn more about Turkey from the Crusades until the end of the growth of the Ottoman Empire. The time period covered is roughly from 1000 AD to 1300 AD.” 32 Yunus Ugur, “Big Data in Ottoman Urban Studies: A Relational Approach to the Archival Data and to Socio- Spatial Analyses of an Early Modern Ottoman City,” Social Sciences 7/59 (2018), pp. 1-12. 33 Ibid., p. 11. 11 we are attempting to apply an empirical-quantitative or a qualitative analysis. As Harders points out, in many cases it is better to speak of a “perspective” or “approach” that complements classical methods.34 We can examine questions that are also treated in contemporary studies on correlations between socio-economic parameters and urban morphology by applying a rigorous mathematical approach,35 but we cannot replicate the same procedure as we lack the same sort of data.

As a result, the data we analyze can hardly be called ‘raw data’ and cannot easily be subjected to mathematical operations. What we believe we can gain from the cautious application of statistical and spatial analysis to historical sources is insights into trends and dynamics that otherwise would remain hidden. One example of this will be discussed below; namely, the social networks and class background of petitioners.

Again, in line with Ugur, we also believe that in many cases, it makes perfect sense to adopt the units used in the historical sources; for example, by taking the urban neighborhood

(mahalle) as the starting point for research. In other cases, we need to cluster the source categories if there are many variants, such as the roughly 150 terms for occupations and the 20 honorific and functional titles indicating social status that we have identified in the Ottoman registers of Gaza.36 In any event, we need to be aware of the fact that our analytical operations are rough approximations and that the hypotheses thus developed need to be tested by further research.

34 Cilja Harders, “Dimensionen des Netzwerkansatzes: Einführend etheoretische Überlegungen,” in Roman Loimeier (ed.), Die islamische Welt als Netzwerk: Möglichkeiten und Grenzen des Netzwerk-Ansatzes im islamischen Kontext (Würzburg: Ergon, 2000), pp. 17-51. 35 See, for example, H. Taubenböck et al. “Integrating Remote Sensing and Social Science: The Correlation of Urban Morphology with Socioeconomic Parameters”, Urban Remote Sensing Join Event, 20-22 May 2009, Shanghai, China, IEEE 2009, pp. 1-7. 36 In this regard, see the discussion of titles in a recent study by Metin Coşgel and Boğaç Ergene, The Economics of Ottoman Justice: Settlement and Trial in the Sharia Courts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), pp. 49-60. 12

Another facet of Ugur’s work that has direct bearing on our project is the fact that digital techniques can grasp the dynamics of a whole city. As Ugur argues, digital techniques such as hierarchical clustering, correspondence analysis, and creating maps by GIS applications are very well suited to a relational approach that aims to understand “all elements in the city [...] as related to each other,” as well as “to lay out the general features” of a city and to see how certain features developed over time. Ugur’s approach constitutes a convenient starting point for our discussion on ways to better understand late Ottoman Gaza’s political life through social and spatial analysis.

The Sources Used in this Study

Before we discuss our methodology and our findings on Gaza’s political partisanship in detail, a brief overview of the main sources on which the database is based is in order.

The Ottoman Census of 1905

The Ottoman census of 1905 was the most comprehensive and accurate census conducted during the four hundred years of Ottoman rule in Palestine. For the first time it included the entire population and not only males who were particularly important for purposes of army recruitment.37 As unique as this source is,38 it needs to be stated that a considerable number of registers are missing, especially for the city of Gaza itself, for which we could identify entries for about 18,000 persons, whereas contemporary estimates are for 20,000-25,000 inhabitants in the beginning of the twentieth century.39 These gaps emerge most clearly in cases where entire families, such as the important Busaysu family,40 or communities, such as the Christian

37 For more information, see Pagis, Ottoman Population Censuses. 38 To date, the registers of the 1905 Ottoman Census are not available for most parts of the Ottoman Empire. 39 Büssow, Hamidian Palestine, p. 111. 40 More on them below. 13 communities, are missing from our registers.

The available census registers for the city of Gaza itself include some 3,000 households divided into four neighborhoods, Daraj, Shajāʿiyya, Zaytūn and Tuffāḥ (Figure 4 below). We do not know the order in which the neighborhood houses were numbered since we do not possess a map or sketch indicating their order, if one ever existed at all. However, we can tell which neighborhood a certain household was located in, and at times we can locate and identify specific houses and locations based on other sources on a map or aerial photo. As of the end of 2018, comprehensive datasets for about 2,400 household heads for the city of Gaza and selected villages in the Gaza subdistrict (kaza) as well as a selection of the available data for a total of 19,000 persons in close to 3,000 locations have been entered to the database.41

The census includes details on each individual in the household, including that person’s the name and name of his or her parents, date of birth, profession, physical attributes, religion, marital status, voting rights, military status, and the like (Fig. 1).

For the purposes of this study, we entered data on every household head in our database, including the full name and occupation. In order to make general statements about specific features, we took samples from the neighborhood of Daraj, the largest and socially most diverse neighborhood in late Ottoman Gaza. For example, we uploaded all the available data on the military status of males (e.g. active service, dismissed, injured) for every tenth household in Daraj. Data on polygyny (i.e. a man married to more than one wife, collected for every tenth of the population of Daraj) provides insights into marriage practices and the prevalence of monogamy versus polygamy in late Ottoman Gaza. We also collected data on skin color and health status (according to the categories employed in the census; e.g., dark,

41 Historians and social scientists have defined households in various ways, according to different research interests. In the context of this article, by household we mean the group of people that the Ottoman census officials registered as living in the same dwelling. 14 brown or white for skin color and visible diseases such as eye diseases, crippled limbs or jaundice) for every fiftieth household head registered in Daraj. This allows for an assessment of whether social status can be correlated with the census data regarding skin color, health and other factors. Finally, following a well-established line of research in economic history, we collected a small sample of birth dates (every twenty-fifth household of Daraj) which might allow for an assessment of numeracy (i.e. the ability to apply simple numerical concepts) as a proxy for the general level of education.42

Figure 1: Sample of a Page from the Ottoman Census of 1905. Source: Pagis, Ottoman Population Counts in Palestine, 1875-1918, p. 237.

42 On the methodology of analyzing numeracy as a proxy for education and human capital formation, see Dorothee Crayen and Joerg Baten, “Global trends in numeracy 1820–1949 and its implications for long-term growth,” Explorations in Economic History 47 (2010), pp. 82-99. 15

The Ottoman Census Register (esas defteri) of 1905: Upper Part: Neighborhood (mahalle), village (karye), street (sokak), number of people in household (mesken), gender, name, profession, names of parents, millet, date and place of birth, physical attributes (size, eye and skin color), marital status, voting rights. Lower Part: Date of recording, military status, updates (vukuʿat): changes of address, marital status, voting rights, military status, comments (mulahazat).

Narrative Sources

The most important local source on Gaza from the period discussed here is ʿUthmān al-

Ṭabbāʿ’s Itḥāf al-aʿizza fi tārīkh Ghazza, a four-volume work that combines prosopographic information on individuals and families with historical and geographic information.43 Ṭabbāʿ was a scholar from Gaza who grew up during the Hamidian period and was educated at al-

Azhar institution in Cairo, where he studied with some of the most famous Sunni Muslim scholars of his time. Upon returning to Gaza in 1902, he worked as a preacher at local mosques in the city and started compiling his monumental work, which he finished in two manuscript volumes in 1330/1911-1912. In his work, focused exclusively on personalities from Gaza, in particular Islamic scholars and merchants.

Maps

Unlike most other cities in Bilād al-Shām at the time, we possess a detailed colored map of

Gaza drawn in 1887 by the Austrian Catholic missionary Georg Gatt (1843-1924) and published a year later.44 Gatt lived in Gaza for many years and acquired intimate knowledge of the city and its people. He moved to Gaza in 1879, where he founded a mission house and a school. At the time the map was published, he had lived in Gaza for eight years and can therefore be regarded as a long-term resident of the city. His map owes much to a British map

43 ʿUthmān al-Ṭabbaʿ, Itḥāf al-aʿizza fī tārīkh Ghazza [Presenting the Notables in the History of Gaza], edited by ʿAbd al-Latif Zaki Abū Hashim, 4 vols. (Gaza: Maktabat al-Yāzijī, 1999). 44 Georg Gatt, “Legende zum Plane von Gaza (herausgegeben von H. Guthe),” Zeitschrift des Deutschen Palästina-Vereins 11 (1888), pp. 149-159. 16 of 1843, as many stylistic similarities suggest.45 Gatt’s map, produced during the time of factionalist struggles in Gaza, is invaluable as it helps reconstruct the buildings and layout of the city, and leads to insights unavailable from other sources. In particular, it provides information not only on public buildings and infrastructure but also on the households of leading Gazan families.

We have no Ottoman maps of Gaza from the end of the nineteenth century and efforts to locate such maps have not been successful. During the British Mandate, several accurate maps of Gaza and its region were prepared which can be used to examine continuities and changes in the city’s development in comparison to the Ottoman era. The British prepared an accurate map of Gaza as early as 1917 when the region was still under Ottoman control, as preparation for their attack on the region (Fig. 6).

Taken together, in the framework of our project, we have used GIS technology to present some 15 maps of Gaza from different periods, ranging from the 1880s to the 1940s in

GIS layers that can be added/subtracted according to need and presented in comparison to a general current-day map of Gaza as well as aerial photos of the city.

Aerial Photos

There are several very good aerial photos of Gaza from the First World War. In particular, we possess scans of high-resolution aerial photos of the region (on glass plates) taken by the

Bavarian Squadron in 1918, after the British had already captured Gaza.46 The photographs are presented in our project as part of the GIS layers. They serve as another way to identify

45 Aldrich, “Special Reconnoissance of Gaza. The Villages of Harrat It Te Fear [Tuffāḥ] and Sejaeah [Shajāʿiyya], by Lieut Aldrich R.E., published by John Weale,” 1843. Source: National Library of Israel (NLI). 46 For more on the aerial photos taken by the Bavarian Squadron in Palestine during WWI, see Nada Atrash, “Mapping Palestine: The Bavarian Air Force WWI Aerial Photography,” Jerusalem Quarterly 56 (2014), pp. 95-106. 17 and visualize various structures within the city. Our database allows us to tag certain items to create custom-made maps of certain urban features (Fig. 7).

Figure 2: A telegraphic mass petition backing mufti al-Ḥusaynī with 123 signatures, 1893 (p. 1 out of 2 pages).

Source: BOA, Y. MTV., 77/140, 10 Nisan 1309, 2pp. The signatures appear at the bottom of p.1 and on p. 2 in its entirety.

18

A Brief History of Gaza’s Political Partisanship, 1876-1898

Members of the Gazan elite47 in the last quarter of the nineteenth century repeatedly submitted mass petitions signed by up to 150 individuals (for an example, see Figure 2). Rival coalitions in the city’s elite petitioned against each other, as will be explained below. In a city with a population somewhere around 20,000, this was a very considerable number. The database we constructed, in particular the Ottoman census, can be used to identify many of the people who signed the dozens of mass petitions (arz-ı mahzar) sent from Gaza, map their ties to each other, and establish network diagrams based on the names of those who signed the petitions.

This helps better understand the complex web of connections in Gaza’s elite and identify the members of each coalition (Figures 3a-3c). In addition, we can locate the residential areas of those who signed the petitions, which makes it possible to chart the spatial divisions in the city as they relate to the population’s social and political alliances and their opponents.

As mentioned above, the crux of the struggle within Gaza’s elite was the heated competition for appointment to the position of the city’s mufti, which by far exceeded the rivalry elsewhere in Bilād al-Shām. The mufti’s position in Gaza was crucial because it controlled religious institutions in the city, including its dozens of mosques, madrasas, and endowments. It thus gave tremendous influence to the appointee, members of his family, and his supporters. In other words, whoever controlled the position of the mufti in Gaza dominated the city’s politics and economy. The reason the muftiship had such exceptional importance in

Gaza, more than in other cities in Ottoman Greater Syria, had to do with the town’s

47 As a pragmatic definition, we consider elite families to be all families described in volume 3 of Ṭabbāʿ’s biographical dictionary Itḥāf as members of Gaza’s elite. For a conceptual framework, see Johann Büssow, Hamidian Palestine: Politics and Society in the District of Jerusalem, 1872-1908 (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2011), pp. 309-397. Ehud Toledano termed this group “Ottoman local elites.” See Toledano, “The Emergence of Ottoman-Local Elites.” 19 geographic location and history, the composition of its society, and its relationships with various outside elements and factors, as discussed above.

The following is a brief account of Gaza’s factionalism, a term referring to dissension between rival sub-groups within a larger social unit over changes in power resources. In contrast to modern political parties, factions tended to be activated only on specific occasions and not as regularly recurring features. However, even a loosely organized faction will need one or more power bases such as a specific institution or a social network. Often, specific locations and buildings also play important roles as places for socializing and recruitment or as symbols of the faction and its leadership. More details can be found in our previous article,48 where we argued that factionalism in Gaza was not only a local affair and that its severity could only be understood through its connection to political struggles at the regional and imperial levels.

We identified four main contexts for Gaza’s factionalism. (1) The first was the struggle for control of the border region between the Ottoman Empire and Egypt that started after the

British occupation of Egypt in 1882.49 (2) Ottoman countermeasures against the perceived

British threat made the Gaza region a particularly sensitive area. Gaza could have been the hub for Ottoman intervention in the area. Yet, apparently, the Ottomans were utterly frustrated by the non-cooperative attitude of the dominant political faction in the city gravitating around the Ḥusaynī family. Under the administration of Mehmed Tevfik Bey (1897-1901), a forceful governor of Jerusalem and a confidant of the Ottoman Sultan Abdülhamid II, Ottoman involvement in the area increased. This included a military intervention in Gaza directed

48 Ben-Bassat and Büssow, “Urban Factionalism in Late Ottoman Gaza.” 49 For more on this issue, see for example Y. Ben-Bassat and Y. Ben-Artzi, “The Collision of Empires as seen from Istanbul: The Border of British-Controlled Egypt and Ottoman Palestine as Reflected in Ottoman Maps,” Journal of Historical Geography 50 (2015), pp. 25-36. 20 against the Ḥusaynī family, the establishment of Beersheba as the seat of a new subdistrict in the northern Negev Desert (Ar. al-Naqab) as well as the construction of a string of frontier settlements and military installations along the border.50 (3) Regional politics led to higher stakes in Gaza’s factional struggle, as Gaza developed into a center of grain exports. Leading families from Jerusalem wanted their share in this profitable business. (4) The personal networks of Gazan notables that included leading personalities and high-ranking Ottoman officials in Jerusalem and Cairo, up to the Khedive of Egypt, provided them with particular political weight and staying power in the face of Ottoman control efforts.

The divided Gazan elite tended to operate on the basis of rival coalitions; i.e., factions, while trying to draw Istanbul into their internal conflicts. The elite maintained complex ties with outside actors, including senior Ottoman officials in Istanbul and Jerusalem, the

Jerusalemite elite that dominated Palestine’s politics, the peasant population within the city and its hinterland, and Bedouin groups that were recruited by the rival factions. Some of the local office holders were apparently associated with Ottoman officials who were not natives of

Palestine, such as the local kaymakam (sub-district governor) or even the more high-ranking mutasarrıf (district governor) of Jerusalem.

The dominant or establishment faction was led by a member of the Ḥusaynī family, who also held the muftiship. Between the mid-1870s and the late 1890s various opposition factions, mostly led by the scholar-cum-businessman Muḥammad Sāqallāh (1812-1896) tried to dislodge them from their dominant position. Since the Ḥusaynīs repeatedly clashed with the

50 Among the major sources for this complex are the minutes of both the Jerusalem District Administrative Council (housed in the Israel State Archives) and the Municipal Council (housed in the Jerusalem Municipal Archive, now available online on Open Jerusalem, https://openjlem.hypotheses.org/). Important evidence on the Ottoman goals and perceptions of the area comes from Ottoman administrative exchanges (e.g. a report to the Grand Vizier’s Office, BOA, BEO, 1082_81116, 1 Şubat 1313 [12 February 1898].)., as well as from the memoirs of Mehmed Tevfik Bey and his wife Naciye Neyal. On the latter two, see Büssow, Hamidian Palestine: 366-367 and passim. 21

Ottoman government, the latter tended to support the anti-Ḥusaynī opposition but without lasting success. An invigorated opposition led by several members of the Shawwā family and the scholar-cum-Sufi shaykh Aḥmad Busaysū (c. 1240/1825-1320/1911) only managed, together with massive support from the Ottoman government, to bring about a decisive change in 1898.

During the late nineteenth century, the up-and-coming Shawwā family and their allies, the Busaysūs, built their own stronghold in Shajāʿiyya, a suburb at a distance from the other elite households that were mainly located in the central Daraj neighborhood (Figure 4).51

During the 1890s, they managed to monopolize the newly created institution of the municipality (belediye) and build a successful counter-faction to that of the Ḥusaynīs. The

Shawwās’ move to Shajāʿiyya marked the beginning of spatial polarization of local politics in

Gaza; political and spatial polarization went hand in hand.

The Petitioners’ Social Networks

A tool to visualize social networks is helpful to gain an overview of the complexes of people and families that gathered to support the exponents of the two factions by signing mass petitions. The software that produced the graphs in the figures automatically arranges the names of the members in the network according to a gravitational model. The more relations a person has, the closer he or she is to the center of the graph.

Figure 3a shows the signatories of the two petitions sent from Gaza to Istanbul by supporters of the Sāqallāh family (1892) and by their opponents who supported the Ḥusaynī family

(1893). These petitions belong to the penultimate stage of the struggle around the muftiship,

51 In this regard it is interesting to consider Philip Khoury’ comments on factionalism in late Ottoman Damascus: “The conflicts associated with factionalism may also have been representative of the very process of class consolidation in which up-and coming families challenged already established families for a place alongside them at the summit of power and influence in Damascus. Conditions were more fluid... in this period of social and political readjustment. See Khoury, “The Urban Notables Paradigm revisited”, p. 222. 22 when Muḥammad Sāqallāh was still leading the opposition and when the Shawwas and

Busaysūs were still supporting the incumbent mufti Muḥammad Ḥanafi al-Ḥusaynī. Some signatories evidence extensive links in the database, which suggests they were gatekeepers; i.e., people who provided access to another important social network. There is no overlap between the two circles of petitioners, but in one case, members of the Shawwā family side with the two different camps. In another case, a Ḥusaynī, ʿAbd al-Qādir al-Ḥusaynī, sided with Sāqallāh, on the basis of considerations that remain to be elucidated.

The pro-Sāqallāh petition was sent on December 8, 1892 to the Sadaret (Grand

Vizier’s Office) in Istanbul. It was signed by 61 people from Gaza. Seven leading elite families: Abū Khaḍra (3), ʿAlamī (3), Ghuṣayn (8), Shaʿt (3), Shawwā (3), as well as two members of the Sāqallāh family itself and the above-mentioned member from the opposing

Ḥusaynī family were represented in this petition. Among the important gatekeepers in this network were ʿAbdallāh Ghuṣayn and Khalīl Abū Khaḍra, who were allies of Yusuf Ziya al-

Khālidī from Jerusalem who was an opponent of the Ḥusaynīs in Gaza. Another was Ramaḍān

Abū Khaḍra who was closely linked to Ṣāliḥ al-Shawwā, the head of the butchers’ guild and one of the individuals behind the Shawwās’ rise to power in Gaza in the second half of the nineteenth century (Figure 3b).

The pro-Ḥusaynī petition bore the names of 123 people from Gaza. It was sent on

April 22, 1893 to back the serving mufti from the Ḥusaynī family. Seven leading elite families are represented in this petition: ʿAlamī (3), ʿArafat (4), Ḥusaynī (1), Makkī (also spelled

Mikkī) (6), Shaʿbān (4) as well as, surprisingly, Busaysū (6, including Shaykh Aḥmad

Busaysū) and Shawwā (6).

23

In 1893, the most prominent members of the Shawwā and Busaysū families still supported the Ḥusaynī faction. The above-mentioned Shaykh Aḥmad Busaysū, for example, figures as an important gatekeeper for the Ḥusaynīs and their faction thanks to the Azhar and

Sufi networks, since according to Gaza’s chronicler ʿUthmān al-Ṭabbāʿ, he personally initiated 20,000 murids and students (Fig. 3c). Nevertheless, the Shawwās and Busaysūs turned against the Ḥusaynīs sometime between 1893 and 1897, broke away from the dominant elite circle and entered into an alliance with the Ottoman imperial government and its most important local representative, the governor of Jerusalem Mehmed Tevfik Bey, who assumed his office in November 1897.52 Shortly after Mehmed Tevfik’s arrival, Shaykh Aḥmad

Busaysū published a manuscript pamphlet entitled Kashf al-Niqāb – “Unveiling”. In this text, the eminent Shaykh proclaimed his loyalty to the Ottoman state, advertised his knowledge of the tribes in the Negev region and the families of Gaza, praised the specific merits of the

Shawwā and Busaysū families and made polemical remarks about others.53 All this evidence taken together may explain why the turnaround of 1898 was successful, which led to the demise of the Ḥusaynīs and the rise of the opposition to power.

The Shawwā-Busaysū connections were based on the teacher-student relationship between Aḥmad Busaysū and ʿAbd al-Muṭallib al-Shawwā (b. 1850/51), a religious scholar who had three sons in the educational sector, as well as on the alliance through marriage of

Aḥmad Busaysū’s mother (the sister of Khalīl al-Shawwā).

52 On Mehmed Tevfik Bey, see David Kushner, “Jerusalem in the Eyes of Three Ottoman Governors at the End of the Hamidian Period,” Middle Eastern Studies 35, pp. 83-102. 53 Busaysū, Kashf al-niqāb. 24

Figure 3a: Network analysis: Two petitions, pro-Sāqallāh (1892, 61 signatures, on the right) and pro-Ḥusaynī (1893, 123 signatures, on the left).

25

Figure 3b: Key Sāqallāh supporters. The house symbol indicates family affiliation.

26

Figure 3c: Key Ḥusaynī supporters

27

Figure 4: Gaza’s Neighborhoods in the Ottoman Census of 1905.

An aerial photo with lines delineating the four neighborhoods to which the city of Gaza was divided in the Ottoman census of 1905: Tuffāḥ, Zaytūn, Shajāʿiyya, and Daraj. The former was the stronghold of the Shawwā family, which emerged toward the end of the nineteenth century as the leaders of the opposition against the Ḥusaynī faction. Shajāʿiyya was a relatively poor neighborhood with a considerable number of newcomers to the city. Daraj was an affluent neighborhood, the stronghold of the Ḥusaynī faction, as well as the residence of several of the more prominent elite families of Gaza (e.g. Sāqallāh, Abū Khadra, and ʿAlamī).

28

Figure 5: Georg Gatt’s Map of Gaza, 1888 (the numbers and captions referring to urban neighborhoods and prominent buildings were added by the authors).

29

Note the spatial separation of Shajāʿiyya in southeastern Gaza from the other neighborhoods to its northwest which served as the basis of polarization between the rival coalitions (“spatialized factionalism”), the city’s division into four main neighborhoods, the existence of elite family strongholds, the agricultural surrounding of Gaza, and the city’s sprawling nature. The map focuses on family assets and their clusters (e.g. houses, trading firms, mosques).

Map Legend

Neighborhoods:

1. Daraj neighborhood (partly designated as “Ḥārat al-Muslimīn” and “Hārat Banī ʿĀmir”, respectively, in Gatt’s map) 2. Shajāʿiyya neighborhood (“Ḥārat al-Sajāʿiyya” in Gatt’s map) 3. Tuffāḥ neighborhood (“al-Tuffen” in Gatt’s map) 4. Zaytūn neighborhood (partly designated as “Ḥārat al-Naṣāra” (the Christian quarter) and “Ḥārat al-Yahūd,” “the Jewish quarter,” respectively, in Gatt’s map)

Assets associated with elite families:

5. Dār [al-Ḥusaynī] al-Muftī 1 6. Dār [al-Ḥusaynī] al-Muftī 2 7. Jāmiʿ al-Sayyid Hāshim (Hāshim Mosque) 8. Dār Sāqallāh 9. Dār Abū Khaḍra 10. Wikālat Abū Khaḍra (Abū Khaḍra trading house) 11. Wikālat Abū Shaʿbān (Abū Shaʿbān trading house) 12. Maṣbanat Abū Shaʿbān (Abū Shaʿbān soap factory) 13. Dār al-ʿAlamī 14. Dār al-Shawwā 15. Ṣāqiyyat Jāmiʿ al-Shawwā (Shawwā Mosque well) 16. Qazdamrī (Tuquz Damūrī) Mosque 17. al-Jāmiʿ al-ʿUmarī al-Kabīr (ʿUmari Mosque)

Public buildings:

18. al-Sūq al-Kabīr 19. Government buildings 20. Municipality

Catholic establishments:

21. Dār al-Latīn (Catholic mission house) with Ḥakūrat al-Latin (garden of the Catholic 30

mission house), Madrasat al-Latīn (Catholic school) and Maqbarat al-Latīn (Catholic cemetery)

Figure 6: British Map of Gaza, 1:7,500, 1917, prepared from aerial photos.

Source: Israel Antiquity Authority (IAA), Map 6169125-032750_001_000026IAA. Note the city’s distance from the sea and the sand dunes separating it from the shore (which in fact prevented Gaza from becoming a full-fledged port city), its agricultural surroundings, the spatial division into multiple neighborhoods, and the city’s sprawling nature.

31

Figure 7: Gaza’s late Ottoman city center with select features. Detail of an aerial photo taken by the Bavarian Squadron, dated May 28, 1918, 12.10 pm.

Source: Bavarian State Archive (BayHStA) BS-Palästina 463, Munich, Germany.

The photograph shows Gaza’s government compound surrounded by a vast plaza (center right), where the Gaza citadel had been. At the bottom, the municipality and the municipal park are visible. The Grand Mosque (center left) shows severe damage from the First World War. To its left is the still unfinished Cemal Pasha Boulevard.

32

Factionalism was a key element in local politics in late Ottoman Greater Syria, and local factions were often precarious and ad-hoc.54 Linda Schatkowski Schilcher, in her study of

Damascus, was the first to research the spatial divisions of urban factions.55 Drawing on

Schatkowski Schilcher’s approach, we started our investigation based on the assumption that faction building is likely to have led to spatial clustering and to the emergence of particular locations as factional power bases. The GIS analysis shows that such divisions did indeed exist in late Ottoman Gaza and influenced the city’s morphology. Schatkowski Schilcher labelled the rivalling Damascene factions according to their relationship with the Ottoman central government as “localists” versus “loyalists”. Büssow found these categories to be valid in his analysis of a Damascene Arabic chronicle of the 1830s.56 In our previous study, we concluded that this distinction did not apply to Gaza, arguing that both the Ḥusaynī and the anti-Ḥusaynī factions maintained close ties with Istanbul.57 However, it remained an open question whether the two factions differed as a function of their degree of Ottomanization. We attempt to answer this question below.

Social Characteristics of Daraj and Shajāʿiyya, the Strongholds of the Ḥusaynīs and Shawwās

The first question we examined was the social characteristics of the neighborhood of Daraj versus Shajāʿiyya, the emerging stronghold of the opposition faction, as reflected in the database. The top 15 occupations we found in the census of Daraj (Fig. 8) are as follows:

82 farmers/cultivators (çiftçi)

38 mule drivers (makareci, ḥammār)

54 Hourani, “Ottoman Reform and the Politics of Notables,” pp. 41-68. 55 Schatkowski Schilcher, Families in Politics. 56 Johann Büssow, “Street Politics in Damascus: Kinship and Other Social Categories as Bases of Political Action, 1830–1841,” The History of the Family 16/2 (2011), pp. 108-125. 57 Ben-Bassat and Büssow, “Urban Factionalism,” pp. 632-633. 33

35 merchants (tüccar, tājir)

34 packers or balers (desteci)

26 shop owners (bakkal, dükkancı)

23 builders (miʿmar)

18 workers (ʿamele)

16 carpenters (dülger, marangöz)

16 scholars (ʿalim)

15 laborers (faʿle)

14 cameleers (deveci)

13 bakers (fırıncı, ekmekçi)

12 carriers (ḥammāl, ʿaṭṭāl)

12 fishmongers (balıkçı)

10 large real estate owners (emlak sahibi)

34

Figure 8: The 15 most frequent occupations in the Daraj neighborhood.

The relatively large proportions of merchants, mule drivers, cameleers, packers, balers and carriers may suggest that the age-old caravan trade still had considerable importance for the economy of this neighborhood. In addition, in Daraj many individuals had honorary titles, which is indicative of the neighborhood’s elite status:

48 Efendis

26 Shaykhs

20 Sayyids

35

17 Aghās

4 Beys

3 Rifʿatlus

3 Faziletlüs

1 Sharīf

1 Hanım

1 Muhtadiyya.

The titles shaykh, sharīf and sayyid indicate religious offices, whereas Bey, Aghā, Faziletlü and Rifʿatlu were reserved for holders of Ottoman administrative positions. Efendi could be used for educated men in both career paths, whereas Hanım and Muhtadiyya were honorifics for women with elevated social status.

Daraj was a very large densely populated neighborhood with a population of c. 9,000 living in 1,086 households (meskens). This amounts to a density of about 28,000 inhabitants / km² as of 1905. The average household consisted of 8.2 people. The picture that emerges is that of an inner city neighborhood characterized by three long-standing economic specializations in Gaza: caravan trade, Islamic scholarship and service to the Ottoman state.

Shajāʿiyya was smaller, with a population of c. 5,000 and a lower density of c. 15,000 inhabitants / km². Here, mainly agricultural professions were listed and only a small number of educated people. The top 15 occupations registered in the census for this neighborhood are as follows:

290 farmers/cultivators (çiftçi)

22 (probably agricultural) workers (çukurcu, literally pit diggers)

14 mule drivers (makareci, ḥammār)

9 carpenters (dülger, marangöz)

8 real estate owners (emlak sahibi)

8 viticulturists (bağcavan) 36

8 blacksmiths (demirci)

7 shop owners, grocers (bakkal, dükkancı)

6 sowers (zurrāʿ)

6 merchants (tüccar, tājir)

6 greengrocers (sebzeci)

5 Qur’an reciters (ḥāfiẓ, hıfz-ı kuran-ı kerim/şerif)

4 scholars (ʿalim)

3 builders (miʿmar)

3 gardeners (bahçıvan).

The high representation of farmers, agricultural workers and gardeners confirms the rural nature of this neighborhood. In addition, there were few people with honorific titles other than the following:

16 Efendis (belonging mostly to the Shawwā family, all living on and around Qazdamrī Street)

7 Shaykhs

6 Sayyids and 1 Aghā.

37

Figure 9: The 15 most frequent occupations in the Shajāʿiyya neighborhood.

The emerging picture is that of a neighborhood where most people were closely connected to agriculture (as suggested by the number of agricultural workers and gardeners), followed by people specializing in simple services to the caravan trade (especially mule drivers and blacksmiths). As we know from maps, street names and information on the local architecture, the small number of individuals and families that we can count among the local elite lived in the northern part of Shajāʿiyya, whereas the neighborhood’s southern part was characterized

38 by small mud-brick dwellings inhabited by cultivators and workers. Two photographs of Daraj and Shajāʿiyya produced around 1858 by the British photographer Francis Frith (1822-1898) provide a vivid impression of the architectural contrast between the stately stone houses of

Daraj and the mud-brick dwellings of Shajāʿiyya (Figures 10 and 11).

39

Figure 10: Daraj neighborhood, c. 1858, photograph by Francis Frith. Original title: “The Old Town, Gaza,” printed in 1862. Source: Wikipedia.

Figure 11. The Judayda neighborhood, c. 1858, photograph by Francis Frith. Judayda (literally “the new”) was the name of the eastern part of the Shajāʿiyya neighborhood. Original title: “Gaza, the New Town,” printed in 1862. Source: Wikipedia.

40

Assets of the Leading Political Families and Their Spatial Layout

The most prominent Gazan elite family, the Ḥusaynīs, had their assets concentrated in the upscale Daraj neighborhood, where they had several large mansions. A street sometimes referred to as the “Mufti’s Lane” (Sibāṭ al-Muftī) connected this area to the Grand Mosque and the government buildings next to it.58 An annual celebration highlighted the Ḥusaynīs’ role as patrons of the Hāshim mosque in Daraj, named after the grandfather of the Prophet. These annual celebrations took place in the week preceding the Prophet’s birthday (al-mawlid al- nabawī) and commemorated the issuing of a decree by the Ottoman Sultan Abdülmecid, which instated Aḥmad Muḥyī al-Dīn al-Ḥusaynī as imām and khaṭīb, prayer leader and preacher, of the mosque. The building was renovated with the help of this Sultan around

1860,59 which gave the Ḥusaynīs Sultanic approval for their status and prestige in Gaza (Fig.

12).

According to the sources, the Busaysūs and the Shawwās were the only elite families with residences in Shajāʿiyya, unlike most of the other families who lived in Daraj. The street connecting the neighborhood to the city hall was called the “Shawwā Street,” indicating the family’s strong position in the neighborhood (Figure 13). The Shawwās’ home base and assets were initially in Tuffāḥ next to the slaughterhouse the family owned. During the mid- nineteenth century, Khalīl al-Shawwā, the leading exponent of the family, built his stronghold in Shajāʿiyya, where he had a grand mansion built and renovated the Qazdamri Mosque60

58 The name Sibat al-Mufti probably refers to the large mansion of the Ḥusaynī (al-Mufti) family nearby. See for example, Mubayyid, al-Bināyāt al-athariyya, pp. 327-28. This thoroughfare between the Sayyid Hāshim Mosque and the city’s Ottoman administrative center is called Al-Wehda Street (Shāriʿ al-Waḥda) today. The British map of 1928 has several names for various segments of the street (from north to south): Ḥārat al-Sayyid Hāshim, Shāriʿ al-Shaykh Faraj, Shāriʿ Abū Ramaḍān, Shariʿ al-Dabbūja. 59 Sharon, CIAP, vol. 4, pp. 33-34. Sharon’s information is based on van Berchem, who mentions 1862 as the date of the mosque’s reconstruction and 1892 as the date of a renovation. 60 Ṭabbāʿ, Itḥāf, vol. 3, p. 251. 41

(later also known as Shawwā mosque).61 Their allies, the Busaysūs, already had a strong presence in this neighborhood.

Our sources do not tell us much about the geographic distribution of the Busaysū family, except that they must have had strong connections to Shajāʿiyya.62 Two details are of interest here. First, Aḥmad Busaysū writes that his family’s founding father Ḥājj Sālim

Busaysū initially lived in the fortress of Khān Yūnus (Khan Yunis), south of Gaza.63 This suggests that this family joined the ranks of the local elite as outsiders and makes it likely that they based themselves in Shajāʿiyya from the beginning and not in the old central neighborhood of Daraj. The second indication for the strong identification of this family with

Shajāʿiyya is al-Ṭabbāʿ’s biography of Shaykh Aḥmad Busaysū (c. 1825-1911).64 Busaysū was born in Shajāʿiyya and after completing his education at Cairo’s Al-Azhar College, he returned to his hometown and was appointed imam, khatib and teacher at the Ibn ʿUthmān mosque in 1296/1878-9. He was able to provide the counter-faction around the Shawwās with a vast network of followers all over the city. Interestingly, the British map of Gaza from 1928 labels the second parallel street south of the Ibn ʿUthmān Mosque, Aḥmad Busaysū’s workplace, as “Zqaq Abū Bseiso” (Zuqāq Abū Busaysū) and we therefore may assume that the family’s main seat was located in this street.

The government compound was located between the Ḥusaynīs stronghold in Daraj and the opposition in Shajāʿiyya. The two main streets leading there from these two neighborhoods were called respectively Sibāṭ al-Muftī and the Shawwā Street. In the

61 Gatt’s map makes indirect reference to this by labelling an adjacent building “Ṣāqiyat Jāmiʿ al-Shawwā,” that is “Shawwā Mosque Well.” 62 Unfortunately, the Busaysū households are not included in the available Ottoman census registers for Gaza. From the extant volumes of the Gaza court records we know that Aḥmad Busaysū’s son Shaʿbān sold a house in Shajāʿiyya in 1858. See Sijill Ghazza (İSAM Istanbul), p. 11. 63 Busaysū, Kashf, p. 45. 64 Ṭabbāʿ, Itḥāf, vol. 4, pp. 296-309. 42 compound’s southern end was the Belediye (municipality),65 which, together with the municipal park constituted the new Ottoman reform-style entrance to the city which was built in the 1890s. Next to it as well as opposite, on the other side of the street, were the municipal gardens planted as the representative entrance to the city. The sebil renovated by Sultan

Abdülhamid II as a Sultanic symbol of governance and involvement in Gaza in the early

1890s was also located opposite the compound. Nearby were two governmental schools, the telegraph and post office, the sharīʿa court, the ammunition/weapons cache, government headquarters (saray), the barracks (kişle), a grain depot (ʿanbar), the governor's residence

(Dār al-Pasha), and other official buildings.66 The Grand Mosque of Gaza was also close by.

Thus, political factionalism was inscribed in the city’s morphology and streets, together with buildings in their vicinity, and formed axes representing the leading families who clustered in specific regions of the city.

65 The Town Hall (Daʾirat al-Baladiyya) is indicated on Gatt’s map of 1888. In his commentary accompanying the map, Gatt also mentioned a municipal clerk as one of his main informants when drawing up the map. See Georg Gatt, “Legende zum Plane von Gaza,” Zeitschrift des Deutschen Palästina-Vereins 11 (1888), pp. 149- 159. 66 See Gatt’s map above. 43

Figures 12-13: Aerial photos of Daraj (top) and Shajāʿiyya (bottom) showing the assets of the Ḥusaynīs and Shawwās/Busaysūs as arrayed along two axes pointing towards Gaza’s government compound from the families’ residences in their respective neighborhoods.

Source: Bavarian State Archive (BayHStA) BS-Palästina 463, Munich, Germany.

44

Regional or Class Rivalry?

The previous sections of this article have shown the imprint of the political struggle in the urban morphology, as documented by the leading families’ considerable investments into urban buildings and urban infrastructure. This occurred at the level of the leading families, the

Ḥusaynīs, Shawwās and Busaysūs. It is still worth inquiring whom their competition mattered

45 to, and which allies or followers signed the two petitions. Did the two factions in fact represent interest groups that rivalled for resources in the city? The remainder of this article examines the extent to which there was a spatial or class aspect to the political struggle in

Gaza, based on the analysis of two petitions from the years 1892 and 1893.

To determine whether the signatories of the two petitions represented specific regions within the city and/or social classes, we cross-referenced their names in our database. This enabled us to identify 40% of the signatories in the case of the pro-Sāqallāh petition and 28% in the case of the pro-Ḥusaynī petition.67 Then we aggregated the occupations in our sample of petitioners into four clusters representing specific social categories: (1) the local elite and notables;68 (2) state officials and white-collar workers;69 (3) merchants and artisans;70 and (4) cultivators and workers.71

Below we present the data associated with the signatories of the two petitions (Figures

14 and 15). This corresponds to a preliminary hypothesis, which needs to be further tested against the results of more petitions from both camps. In particular, our assumptions as to the social class of the signatories is based on the occupations listed for family members.

67 There are several reasons why we could only identify less than half of both groups of petitioners. A number of census registers for Gaza are missing (containing up to 25% percent of the population), incomplete or only contain very generic names of signatories, a general undercount in the census, non-registration of Bedouins, relocation of persons during the 12/13-year period between the petitions and the census of 1905. In addition, some signatories might have been registered in other locations in census registers we have not yet analyzed (e.g. villages in the surroundings). 68 The elite and notable category included those signatories who met at least one the following two criteria: (1) bearers of honorific or functional titles indicating education, important functions and high social prestige (in this sample only Efendi) or (2) important functionaries (scholar/ʿalim, large real estate owners/emlak sahibi, members of Administrative Council/meclis-i kaza). 69 The category of state officials and white collar workers includes the following occupations: official (meʾmur) or scribe (katib) in a government office, imam, muezzin, petition writer (arzuhalcı), school teacher. 70 Merchants and artisans include the following occupations: merchant (tüccar), shop owner (bakkal, dükkancı), builder, carpenter green grocer (sebzeci). 71 The cultivators and workers’ category includes the following occupations: peasant/cultivator (çiftçi), agricultural worker (çukurcu), water carrier (saka), worker/labourer (faʿle). 46

We start with an examination of the regional features. As shown in Figure 14 , the analysis of both petitions reveals broad similarities concerning the residential areas of the petitioners. Both Sāqallāh and Ḥusaynī had supporters in all four neighborhoods of Gaza. In terms of specific streets or sub-neighborhoods, four had petitioners from both parties:

Qazdamrī (in Shajaʿiyya), Rīfī (in Tuffāḥ), Ḥillīs (in Daraj) and ʿAjamī (in Zaytūn) (Figure

16).

Figure 14: Residences of the signatories on the two petitions (percentages rounded off).

Sāqallāh Identified Specific streets mentioned within Indirect Total, including 1892 signatories’ the neighborhood connection to indirect connections neighborhood neighborhood through families Daraj: 18 Dabūyā: 4; Shaykh ʿAyyād: 3; Daraj: 3 21 (68%) Ḥillīs: 2; Rabawī: 1; Shaykh Muḍallaʿ: 1 Shajāʿiyya: 2 Qazdamrī: 2 Shajāʿiyya: 1 3 (10%) Tuffāḥ: 2 Rīfī: 2 Tuffāḥ: 1 3 (10%) Zaytūn: 3 ʿAjamī: 1, Jāmiʿ al-Shamaʿ: 1 Zaytūn: 1 4 (13%) Total 25 6 31 (100%)

Ḥusaynī Identified Specific streets mentioned within Indirect Total, including 1893 signatories’ the neighborhood connection to indirect connections neighborhood neighborhood through families: Daraj: 11 Ḥillīs: 2, al-Shaykh al-Maghribīʿ: Daraj: 32 43 (49%) 2, Abū Midyīn: 1, Abū Shaʿbān: 1; Awzāʿī: 1, Banī ʿĀmir: 1, , al- Jāmiʿ al-Kabīr: 1, Shaykh Faraj: 1, Zakarī: 1 Shajāʿiyya: 5 Qazdamrī: 2, Shaykh ʿAyyād: 1, Shajāʿiyya: 14 19 (22%) Shaykh Tayyār: 1 Tuffāḥ: 3 Rīfī: 3 Tuffāḥ: 3 6 (7%) Zaytūn: 10 ʿAjamī: 4, Shaykh ʿUthmān: 3, Zaytūn: 9 19 (22%) Kātib Awliyāʾ: 1 Total 31 56 87 (100%)

47

Figure 15: Social background of the identified signatories on the two petitions (percentages rounded off).

Total # Total # of Local Elite State Merchants Cultivat Social position of signa- identified & Notables Official & & Artisans ors & unclear tories persons White Workers Collar Workers Sāqallāh 63 25 (40%) 11 (44%) - 5 (20%) 3 (12%) 8 (32%) 1892 Ḥusaynī 123 34 (28%) 8 (24%) 6 (18%) 7 (20%) 4 (12%) 9 (26%) 1893

The Sāqallāh supporters were heavily concentrated in Daraj in that two-thirds of the pro-Sāqallāh signatories whom we could identify resided in Daraj, the old city center, which was home to the Sāqallāh family (see the location of Dār Sāqallāh, the Sāqallāh House in

Figure 5, item 8). There might have been signatories from villages in the surrounding region, but we cannot identify them at this point in time since we have only analyzed a small sample of the registers from the villages.

The Ḥusaynī supporters seem to have been more evenly distributed throughout the city than the Sāqallāh supporters. About one half of the identified signatories came from Daraj, but the two more rural neighborhoods of Shajāʿiyya, and Zaytūn were more heavily represented— both account for 22% of the identified signatories each.

Thus, the factional struggle was not restricted to certain locations alone, but rather engulfed the entire city. However, the Ḥusaynī faction, at this stage, better mirrored the rising importance of the Shajāʿiyya and Zaytūn neigbourhoods than the Sāqallah faction, which was highly concentrated in the old city center of Daraj.

48

Figure 16: Aerial photo of Gaza’s city center with the four hotspots of political mobilization of supporters of both Sāqallāh (1892) and Ḥusaynī (1893).

This brings us to the topic of social class. The combination of the two lists of petitioners and our other sources, especially the Ottoman census, permits us at least a tentative assessment of the social profile of those people who were mobilized by factional politics in the early 1890s

(Fig. 15).

49

To begin with, the signatories of the petitions were exclusively Muslim men. Both lists of petitioners are dominated by a handful of elite families and individual notables.72

Interestingly, only one local elite family is represented in both petitions. This was the

Shawwās, who half a decade later themselves became leaders of a political faction and dislodged the Ḥusaynīs from their dominant position.73 Local elite families accounted for the largest part of the signatories, yet they clearly did not act alone. In both petitions, merchants and artisans represented 20%. Cultivators and workers made up 12% of the signatories.

However, two differences between the rivalling factions should not be overlooked. First, the relative proportion of elite families was markedly lower among the pro-Ḥusaynī petitioners since they accounted for about one quarter (24%) as opposed to almost one-half

(44%) of the pro-Sāqallāh petitioners. Second, in comparison to the Ḥusaynīs, the Sāqallāhs seem to have lacked support among state officials and white collar professionals, while these made up a sizable 18% of the signatories for Ḥusaynī. They included potentially influential figures such as officials in the land registration and tax offices, a professional petition writer

(arzuhalcı), a schoolteacher, an imam and a muezzin. This discrepancy in all probability had to do with the fact that the Sāqallāh family was primarily composed of merchants and artisans,74 with considerably fewer who pursued careers in the Ottoman civil service than among the Ḥusaynīs.75

72 The elite signatories of the pro-Sāqallāh petition of 1892 were ʿUmar al-Shaʿshaʿa, a scholar, and members of three prominent families: Abū Khaḍra, Ghuṣayn and Shawwā. It is noteworthy that the Abū Khaḍras and Shawwās were relative newcomers to the city’s elite, as were the Sāqallāhs themselves. Only the Ghuṣayns could claim a long-standing presence in the city. In the pro-Ḥusaynī petition of 1893, the elite section of signatories consisted of one scholar, ʿAṭā Murād, and members of six prominent families: ʿAlamī, Busaysū, Khazindār, Makkī, Shaʿbān and Shawwā. Of these, only the Shawwās were newcomers to Gaza’s elite. On the families’ histories, see Ṭabbāʿ, Itḥāf, vol. 3. 73 Three family members, Rāghib, Ṣāʾib and Ṣāliḥ al-Shawwā signed the petition for Muḥammad Sāqallāh. Another six family members, ʿAbd al-Muṭallib, ʿAlī, Ḥasan, Muḥammad, Saʿīd and Ṭaha al-Shawwā signed in favor of Ḥusaynī. 74 In fact, Muḥammad Sāqallāh’s career as scholar and administrator was an exception in his family. Tabbāʿ mentions only one family member who was active in scholarship and administration, Muṣṭafā Sāqallāh (d. 50

Thus, during the period covered by the two petitions, 1892-1893, the Ḥusaynī faction seems to have had a clear advantage, not only in terms of size (123 versus 63 petitioners), but also through its better distribution of supporters around the city and better ties within Ottoman officialdom. More specifically, the Ḥusaynī camp had greater appeal to professionals, the new educated middle classes, and the Ottomanized sections of Gaza’s local society whereas the

Sāqallāh camp appears to have been more local and traditional in character.

Nevertheless, it was the Ḥusaynīs who ran into conflict with the Ottoman government.

Our data thus cautions us against applying labels such as “localists” and “loyalists” to the two factions, as did Schatkowski Schilcher with regard to the factions of Damascus, at least at this stage. In fact, it seems likely that it was precisely the tension between the pro-Ottoman outlook of a considerable part of the Ḥusaynī faction and the worsening relations between the

Ḥusaynī leadership and the imperial government that constituted the reason for the break- away by some of them towards the end of the decade, and their subsequent alignment with a new oppositional faction under the leadership of the Shawwās and Busaysūs.

Our evidence rules out the possibility that the petitions reflect a struggle between collectives defined by regional or class-based identities; for example, people from marginalized neighborhoods struggling for political participation. However, it leads us to the assumption that the new educated middle classes, namely, professionals and people with a pro-Ottoman outlook, formed an interest group within the Ḥusaynī faction that eventually

1314/1896-7), a director of the Islamic charitable endowments (al-awqāf al-maẓbūṭa) in Gaza (Ṭabbāʿ, Itḥāf, 3:221). There seems to have been no scholar of note from the Sāqallāh family after his death in 1896. The occupations listed in the 1905 census for members of the Sāqallāh family are: mechanic or engine driver (makinist), merchant (tüccar), shoemaker (kunduraci) and worker (ʿamele). 75 Occupations of members of the Ḥusaynī family mentioned in the 1905 census include scholar (ʿālim), student (talebe-yi ulūm), apprentice or pupil (çırak, şagırd), scribe (kātib, probably state official), mayor (belediye reʾisi), member of administrative council (meclis idare aʿzası), administrative head of the descendants of the Prophet Muhammad (naqīb al-ashrāf), preacher (dāʿī, khaṭīb). In addition, three family members are registered with the note “Turkish skills” (Türkçe okur yazar / Türkçe tekellüm eder). 51 found itself at odds with their leadership. More petitions from this period need to be analyzed to determine the extent to which this pattern can be generalized.

Conclusion

The city of Gaza with its relatively rich documentation proved to be a very good test case for probing the political life of a mid-sized city of late Ottoman Bilād al-Shām. With regard to the practice of petitioning, our findings suggest that the signatories in the collective petitions under review were not recruited ad hoc but represented deeply entrenched political factions.

Petitioning was not an exclusive pursuit of the urban elite. On the contrary, Gaza’s two political factions drew support from a broad range of social categories and in both cases a majority of the signatories were non-elite. Was there, perhaps, a strategy on the part of the leading notables to ensure the representation of certain social categories, such as artisans and agricultural workers? The almost equal percentages of artisans and agricultural workers among the signatories of the petitions makes this seem likely. However, only an analysis of more petitions would enable us to better determine whether this was a coincidence or whether it points to a general pattern. Political activity was not confined to specific areas in the city. As we have seen, signatories were found throughout the city. However, more than two thirds of the Saqallah supporters came from the Daraj neighborhood, while the signatories of the pro-

Husayni petition were more evenly distributed.

Digital technology was crucial in helping us tackle these questions, as it allowed us to organize diverse pieces of evidence (e.g. Ottoman census data, Tabbāʿ’s Arabic biographical dictionary, maps and aerial photographs), process statistical data (e.g. social network data) and finally visualize social networks (figs. 3, a-c). Perhaps even more importantly, in a

52 number of instances this novel presentation sensitized us to hitherto overlooked aspects of our case. For example, it was only through the combination of GIS layers that we understood how the leading households of our two factions built two strongholds in the city and used buildings and street naming to communicate their social standing and their political ambitions. Only through the comparison of GIS layers were we able to map out historically important sub- neighborhoods and to identify four of them as political hotspots (Fig. 16). Only through our network visualization tool were we able to discern key gatekeepers among the supporters of the two factions (Figs. 3b and 3c). Finally, the online database allowed collaborators based in various countries of the Middle East, Europe and America to edit the data simultaneously and maintain a continuous dialogue about our research problems.

Another advantage of this database is that it also helps us better understand the biases of each of the sources by comparing them to the Ottoman census of 1905 and contemporary maps. A case in point is the role of potters and pottery in late Ottoman Gaza. Gazan potteryware was carefully documented by the missionary Georg Gatt. Both Gatt’s map of

1887 and the British map of 1928 show that a whole sub-neighborhood in the northern part of the Daraj neighborhood called Ḥārat al-Fawākhir (Potters’ Street/Neighborhood) was dominated by pottery workshops. For unknown reasons, however, the Ottoman officials who carried out the census chose not to include potters among the 150 or so different occupations that they recorded in the city, a point that also deserves further research.

Our project not only helped to gain a better understanding of the limitations of our sources, but also of the digital tools we used. To begin with, they mainly make sense as an

“add on” to the historian’s toolbox. It would be fruitless to start studying a place through maps and aerial photographs, census records and social network analysis without a solid grounding

53 in the local languages or the historical and cultural developments that provide context and meaning to this sort of data. Secondly, only few working steps can be automatized and most of the present study required time-consuming manual work, such as deciphering handwritten documents and counting entries. For example, the statistics of the signatories’ occupations

(Fig. 15) had to be compiled manually and a simple Excel spreadsheet proved handier for this task than the relational database. The relatively high costs of the method in terms of time and money and the need to constantly coordinate the activities of the collaborating academics from various disciplines also need to be included among its shortcomings.

Our database made it possible to identify the majority of the signatories in petitions to Istanbul and to reconstruct their households and personal networks. The interactive map allowed us to localize a good part of these households and other assets and to understand the extent to which political polarization inscribed itself into the urban tissue. For example, the symbolism of architecture and urban structures, such as the role of mosques as family strongholds came clearly to the fore. These include the ʿUmari and Hāshim mosques as Ḥusaynī strongholds, as compared to the ʿUthmān and Qazdamrī (Taqizdamurī) mosques as strongholds of the

Shawwās, the naming of streets such as Sibāṭ al-Muftī or the Shawwā Street, and the location and role played by public spaces such as the municipal garden. By patronage over mosques and street naming, each party constructed a symbolic axis connecting its stronghold and the governmental compound, which they were aiming to control.

More specifically, our methodology enabled us, for the first time, to put two central features of the debate around the “politics of the notables” to an empirical test; i.e., the relative importance of elite actors and urban neighborhoods. Several patterns emerged. Large elite

54 families were the backbone of political mobilization. The leading households of these families tended to reside close to one another, and they used their professional and economic networks to exert an influence on the Ottoman government. In so doing, they mobilized a socially diverse followership. It is important to note that in contrast to the frequent assumption in older scholarship that Middle Eastern cities were politically fragmented along the lines of neighborhood divisions, the factionalist politics of Gaza engulfed the entire city and mobilized people from practically all parts of the city and from a wide variety of social strata.

Neighborhoods, however, were important units of urban self-organization and the rival factions apparently made efforts to have the most important neighborhoods represented among their ranks. Particular sub-neighborhoods such as Ḥillīs (in Daraj) and ʿAjamī (in Zaytūn) appear to have been hotspots of political activity, judging from the number of people from these sub-neighborhoods who signed the petitions for both camps.

By exploiting the available sources, we were able to make actors visible in urban politics that would otherwise have remained anonymous. This concerns the notables’ family members as well as commoners such as ordinary merchants, artisans, farmers (çiftçis) or workers

(çukurcus) who supported the cause of the pro-Ḥusaynī establishment faction and their contenders. After we fed the database with a critical amount of information, we were able to take a decisive step beyond our earlier analysis of Gaza’s factionalism. With all due caution regarding the slim statistical basis of our findings to date, it seems safe to argue that it was not class competition that fueled the political conflict between the Sāqallāh and the Ḥusaynī camp around 1892. The petitioners for both camps show a similar social profile, with equal proportions of non-elite actors (peasants and workers, merchants and artisans). However, the constituency of the Sāqallāh camp was smaller and dominated by other elite families. The

55

Ḥusaynīs could rely on almost the same support from elite families, more non-elite supporters, and—crucially—Ottoman officials and white-collar professionals who can be grouped together under the label of the “new educated middle classes”.

We hypothesize that there must have been a growing tension arising from the Ottoman orientation of a sizable proportion of the pro-Ḥusaynī faction and the inability of the Ḥusaynī leadership to improve its relations with the imperial government. It may well be possible that the success of the renewed opposition under the leadership of the Shawwā family, some five years later, rested on their ability to mobilize this sector of the population to their cause. Their ally, Shaykh Aḥmad Busaysū, verbalized their pro-Ottoman vision in his timely 1897 pamphlet Kashf al-Niqāb. However, we still cannot determine whether the fact that the

Shawwā and Busaysū families established their residential and political stronghold in the lower-status suburb of Shajʿiyya indeed represented a populist strategy to increase its support from subaltern groups, as we hypothesized in our earlier article. Further analysis of documents from the late 1890s will be needed to assess to what extent these middle class Ottomanized individuals indeed reverted to the Shawwā faction in subsequent years and to what extent the

Shawwā faction included more members of subaltern groups or had a special stronghold in

Shajaʿiyya. Another intriguing question that must remain open for the time being is to what extent the Sufi networks of Shaykh Aḥmad Busaysū contributed to the strength of this new political movement.

Thus, overall, the methodology suggested here can serve as a model for studying other

Ottoman cities in Greater Syria and beyond at the time, and potentially enable a whole range

56 of comparative studies. In the words of Abraham Marcus on eighteenth-century Aleppo, this city’s features

[W]ere hardly unique to this single community, which formed but a fragment of a larger

world sharing much in common. They capture, in a general way, the nature of urban

society in the contemporary Middle East, and more specifically the Arab lands.

Obviously, on a more specific level, experiences varied even among Arab cities of

comparable stature. The precise social makeup of the elites, the alignment of political

forces, and the relations with the central government took different forms and shaped

different political histories despite the participation in a common state and political

culture.76

This observation again highlights the potential of “mid-range questions;” i.e., research questions situated between traditional close reading and the “big data” approach. These questions can now be tackled with reasonable effort. Once we have more tools that can be shared and adapted to individual needs, more researchers will be able to engage in such endeavors.

76 Abraham Marcus, The Middle East on the Eve of Modernity: Aleppo in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), p. 335. 57

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Sources

SharīʿaCourt Records Sijill Ghazza (İSAM Istanbul), 1857-1861

Maps Palestine Exploration Fund, Map of Western Palestine in 26 sheets: from surveys conducted for the Committee of the Palestine Exploration Fund by Lieutenants C.R. Conder and H.H. Kitchener, R.E., between 1872 and 1877. 1880. London: Committee of the Palestine Exploration Fund. British Map of Gaza, 1:7,500, 1917, prepared from aerial photos. Israel Antiquity Authority (IAA), Map 6169125-032750_001_000026IAA.

Aerial Photos Bavarian State Archive (BayHStA) BS-Palästina 463, Munich, Germany.

Narrative Sources Busaysū, Aḥmad Sālim, Kashf al-niqāb fī bāyān aḥwāl baʿḍ sukkān Ghazza wa-baʿḍ nawāḥīhā min al-aʿrāb [Unveiling the situation of some inhabitants of Gaza and of some of the Bedouin groups in its surroundings], Arabic autograph manuscript, dated 29 Rajab 1315 AH/24 December 1897. al-Ṭabbaʿ, ʿUthmān. 1999. Itḥāf al-aʿizza fī tārīkh Ghazza [Presenting the Notables in the History of Gaza], edited by ʿAbd al-Latif Zaki Abū Hashim, 4 vols. Gaza: Maktabat al- Yāzijī.

Archival Material Israel State Archive (ISA) The Ottoman Census Register of Gaza (esas defteri) of 1905, Nüfus 240-283, 436-446 The Ottoman Archive, Istanbul (Başbakanlık Osmanlı Arşivi [BOA]) HR. TO., 398/53, 26 Teşrin-i sani 1308 [8 December 1892]. Y. MTV., 77/140, 10 Nisan 1309 [22 April 1893].

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