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