Summary
Town south of Amman on the ancient King’s Highway, famous for its Crusader castle, where Niqula Khoury’s father was appointed priest and the family lived from autumn 1899 until the 1910 revolt — twelve years Khoury calls the happiest of the family’s life (‘The House of the Priest’: A Palestinian Life (1885-1954), PDF p.90-91, p.103).
Details
- The editors’ note: Karak was often ruled from Nablus during the Ottoman period (providing sanctuary in 1834 to rebels against Ibrahim Pasha’s occupation of southern Syria), was long dominated by the Majali family, originally from Hebron, and only in 1893, after decades of raid and counter-raid, did the Ottoman state reimpose its authority there; for Khoury’s father to move there was a shift from one Ottoman town to another, not across an international border (PDF p.90).
- The family travelled four days on the backs of beasts to reach Karak in autumn 1899 and were showered with gifts of wheat, flour, margarine, ghee and bulgur; Khoury was 14, Yaqub 11, Khalil eight, Bulos five and Aziza six months old (PDF p.90-91).
- Its school was rather well organized, unlike Birzeit’s; the teacher Qustandi Salah gave Khoury private lessons preparing him for the Jerusalem seminary, and Khoury later became the school’s principal with his brothers Yaqub and Khalil teaching under him, the school becoming better known than the government school (PDF p.91, p.94-95).
- Karak was almost a place of exile for Arab and Turkish officials who were supporters of freedom, and held a secret branch of the Committee of Union and Progress (PDF p.95-97).
Related pages
‘The House of the Priest’: A Palestinian Life (1885-1954), Niqula Khoury, Karak Revolt (1910), Committee of Union and Progress