Summary
A young Ottoman official who, with Muhammad Bahjat, was ordered in 1916 to gather materials for a general “guide book” on the southern half of Beirut province and instead investigated the population’s socioeconomic conditions and political attitudes; their two-month tour of Jabal Nablus, beginning with Salfit, is a principal source for Chapter 4 of Rediscovering Palestine on peasant complaints against Nabulsi moneylenders (Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900, lines 3160-3219).
Details
- Tamimi was himself a Nabulsi: when a Dayr Istiya peasant advised “wash after you shake hands with a Nabulsi,” he rejoined that he saw no need to condemn all the city’s inhabitants for the oppression of a few “moneyed people” (Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900, lines 3160-3219).
- Their written report’s first recommendation for alleviating peasant poverty, misery and disease in a year of war and famine was the need to eradicate the oppressive and usurious practices of Nabulsi notables over the countryside, reporting annual interest rates of 60 to 70 percent (Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900, lines 3160-3219).
- Doumani qualifies both authors as modern nationalists, typical young “modernist” Committee for Union and Progress supporters, whose blanket condemnation of wealthy Nabulsis as a selfish, oppressive, conservative, shortsighted and close-minded elite had as its counterpart their description of peasants as primitive, ignorant, dirty and superstitious (Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900, lines 3160-3219).
- Concluding their Salfit visit, Tamimi and Bahjat wrote: “Of course, the Salfitis are ignorant of the sacred patriotic [symbols] such as the flag, the nation, and sacrifice. The government in their eyes is nothing but subdistrict administrators and a number of police…and a door that does not answer the complaints of the people” (Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900, lines 3340-3372).
- During their 1916-1917 tour they also recorded a Dayr Istiya peasant’s saying that “the Nabulsis have set brother against brother” and Salfit peasants’ account that Nabulsis had sown the seeds of discord and appropriated all they had (Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900, lines 3280-3339).
Related pages
Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900, Muhammad Bahjat, Jabal Nablus, Salam