Salim Tamari

Under de sjuttio år som gått sedan nakban har palestinier i exil – förs­ta, andra och tredje generationen – vidgat och befäst det bildningsrum som de ärvt från hemlandet. En intellektuell elit har gjort en stor insats för att synliggöra och förklara Palestinas historia och samhällsstruktur. Salim Tamari är sedan flera decennier en tung profil inom denna grupp av kultur­bärare som verkar både internationellt och lokalt. Som professor i sociologi och redaktör för flera palestinska tidskrifter har han utöver sin fasta anställning vid Birzeituniversitet i Palestina (Västbanken) verkat som gästprofessor vid universitet i USA och Europa. Han har en omfattande vetenskaplig publikationslista och anses vara den ledande experten inom sitt fält. I denna essäsamling återkommer han till sitt huvudämne, Palestinas so­ciala historia från mitten av 1800-talet fram till nu. Tamari lyfter fram ett Palestina som vi annars sällan hör talas om: en självklar historisk enhet, etniskt och kulturellt präglad av mångfald, och ekonomiskt av differentiering av handel och industri. Huvudtemat är vad Tamari kallar ”den ofullbordade moderniteten”: konsekvenserna av den politiska utvecklingen som splittrat Palestinas modernitet och försvårat dess övergång till ”normalitet”. Den största delen av boken upptas av porträtt av betydelsefulla profiler i Jerusalems intellektuella krets under 1900-talets första decennier. Trots det lärda och komplexa innehållet med många infallsvinklar är boken fängslande och medryckande skriven, med glimtar av underhållande detaljer trots den underliggande tragiken.

A free open access ebook is available upon publication. Learn more at www.luminosoa.org. Camera Palaestina is a critical exploration of Jerusalemite chronicler Wasif Jawhariyyeh (1904–1972) and his seven photography albums entitled The Illustrated History of Palestine. Jawhariyyeh’s nine hundred images narrate the rich cultural and political milieu of Ottoman and Mandate Palestine. Nassar, Sheehi, and Tamari locate this archive at the juncture between the history of photography in the Arab world and the social history of Palestine. Shedding new light on this foundational period, the authors explore not just major historical events and the development of an urban bourgeois lifestyle but a social field of vision of Palestinian life as exemplified in the Jerusalem community. Tracking the interplay between photographic images, the authors offer evidence of the unbroken field of material, historical, and collective experience from the living past to the living present of Arab Palestine.

This rich history of Palestine in the last decade of the Ottoman Empire reveals the nation emerging as a cultural entity engaged in a vibrant intellectual, political, and social exchange of ideas and initiatives. Employing nuanced ethnography, rare autobiographies, and unpublished maps and photos, The Great War and the Remaking of Palestine discerns a self-consciously modern and secular Palestinian public sphere. New urban sensibilities, schools, monuments, public parks, railways, and roads catalyzed by the Great War and described in detail by Salim Tamari show a world that challenges the politically driven denial of the existence of Palestine as an affective geographic, cultural, political, and economic space.

This rich history of Palestine in the last decade of the Ottoman Empire reveals the nation emerging as a cultural entity engaged in a vibrant intellectual, political, and social exchange of ideas and initiatives. Employing nuanced ethnography, rare autobiographies, and unpublished maps and photos, The Great War and the Remaking of Palestine discerns a self-consciously modern and secular Palestinian public sphere. New urban sensibilities, schools, monuments, public parks, railways, and roads catalyzed by the Great War and described in detail by Salim Tamari show a world that challenges the politically driven denial of the existence of Palestine as an affective geographic, cultural, political, and economic space.

Year of the Locust captures in page-turning detail the end of the Ottoman world and a pivotal moment in Palestinian history. In the diaries of Ihsan Hasan al-Turjman (1893-1917), the first ordinary recruit to describe World War I from the Arab side, we follow the misadventures of an Ottoman soldier stationed in Jerusalem. There he occupied himself by dreaming about his future and using family connections to avoid being sent to the Suez. His diaries draw a unique picture of daily life in the besieged city, bringing into sharp focus its communitarian alleys and obliterated neighborhoods, the ongoing political debates, and, most vividly, the voices from its streets - soldiers, peddlers, prostitutes, and vagabonds. Salim Tamari's indispensable introduction places the diary in its local, regional, and imperial contexts while deftly revising conventional wisdom on the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire.

"Year of the Locust" captures in page-turning detail the end of the Ottoman world and a pivotal moment in Palestinian history. In the diaries of Ihsan Hasan al-Turjman (1893-1917), the first ordinary recruit to describe World War I from the Arab side, we follow the misadventures of an Ottoman soldier stationed in Jerusalem. There he occupied himself by dreaming about his future and using family connections to avoid being sent to the Suez. His diaries draw a unique picture of daily life in the besieged city, bringing into sharp focus its communitarian alleys and obliterated neighborhoods, the ongoing political debates, and, most vividly, the voices from its streets - soldiers, peddlers, prostitutes, and vagabonds. Salim Tamari's indispensable introduction places the diary in its local, regional, and imperial contexts while deftly revising conventional wisdom on the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire.

This groundbreaking book on modern Palestinian culture goes beyond the usual focal point of the 1948 war to address the earlier, formative years. Drawing on previously unavailable biographies of Palestinians (including Palestinian Jews), Salim Tamari offers eleven vignettes of Palestine's cultural life in the momentous first half of the twentieth century. He brings to light the memoirs, diaries, letters, and other writings of six Jerusalem intellectuals whose lives spanned (and defined) the period of 1918-1948: a musician, a teacher, a former aristocrat, a doctor, a Bolshevik revolutionary, and a Jewish novelist. These essays present an integrated cultural history that illuminates a watershed in the modern social history of the Arab East, the formulation of the Arab Enlightenment.