Summary
Palestinian writer and memoirist (b. 1887), son of a Nablus textile merchant, whose memoirs Mi’at am filastiniyya (One Hundred Palestinian Years: Memories and Notes) (Damascus, 1984) are a principal source for Chapter 2 of Rediscovering Palestine on the textile trade, and whose compilation from published Arabic sources on Arabs and Arabism is cited in Chapter 1’s notes (Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900, lines 844-1172, lines 1173-1230).
Details
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Darwaza recalled from his father and through his grandfather that the title “merchant” in Nablus mostly referred to owners of textile and cloth shops in Khan al-Tujjar (Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900, lines 1173-1230).
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His account of the annual merchants’ trips to Beirut and Damascus — Suq al-Tawila, the jarrida warehouses, loans with interest, packaging by akkamin workers, and weekly collection by agents in Nablus — illustrates the regional trade’s reorganization in the late nineteenth century (Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900, lines 1285-1365).
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His description of village agents — peasants who bought their Kiswa on credit until the grape, fig, oil, wheat or barley seasons against written IOUs, his father and grandfather holding agents in Hajja, Bayta and Bayt Amrayn — is quoted at length in Chapter 2 (Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900, lines 1366-1491).
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Doumani notes his recollections were independently confirmed in interviews with Hajj Khalil Atireh, Hani Arafat and Najib Arafat (Chapter 2, note 15) (Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900, lines 1492-1686).
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Darwaza recalled in his autobiography that in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries all soap-factory owners lent widely to peasants and small traders and charged 15-35 percent interest, impoverished peasants usually borrowing twice a year against the wheat and olive harvests (Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900, lines 3160-3219).
Related pages
Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900, Arafat family, Khan al-Tujjar, Nablus