Summary
Shaykh Yusuf Jarrar, mutasallim of Jenin District (sanjaq) and leader of the Jarrar clan camp, whose 1799 poem exhorting Jabal Nablus’s leaders to unite against the French besieging Acre opens Doumani’s Chapter 1, “The Meanings of Autonomy” (Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900, lines 367-409).
Details
- The poem, in twenty-one verses (NIMR 1:210-211), praises the Tuqan, Nimr, Rayyan, Qasim, Jayyusi, At’ut, Hajj Muhammad, Ghazi, Jaradat and Abd al-Hadi families in that order, casts the danger as a threat to Islam and to women, and stresses local identification: “Oh! you Nabulsis…advance together on Acre” (Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900, lines 367-380).
- Not once does the poem mention Ottoman rule, the sultan or serving the empire, although its author and the other leaders had been inundated with firmans announcing the invasion and calling for soldiers and money; the letters’ origin is left as coming “from afar” (Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900, lines 367-380).
- Doumani reads the poem as a constructed version of reality: by initiating the call to action Shaykh Yusuf projected himself as first among equals, and as leader of the faction opposing the Tuqan family’s centralization drive he celebrated political decentralization and advanced unity through cultural solidarity and local identification rather than political hegemony (Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900, lines 381-409).
Related pages
Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900, Jarrar clan, Jabal Nablus