This presentation intends to explore the re(production) of ethnoreligious and political difference in Syria under the French mandate by looking at conflicts over and through land. In modern-Syria, or in any nation-state, land issue is intertwined with claims of sovereignty, economic/political power, the governing of socio-political order, and the formation of various sectarian/nationalist imaginations. Similarly, ideas about cultural and political difference have been bound up with political and economic projects of difference-making, an aspect which is underestimated by social historians working on property and law as well as sectarianism. This presentation will delve into the debates on land and land conflicts, and demonstrate the ways in which they are played out in the politics of cultural and political difference in two different regions in French-Syria: Hawran, a rural frontier region in the southwest with a mixed land tenure system and a relatively homogenous population; and Aleppo, a mixed urban centre with a wide rural hinterland and huge number of refugees in the north.

The reconstruction of Beirut’s city center after a devastating war (1975-1989) involved the nation in long debates and struggles for years in the 1990s. Solidere, the real-estate company that was in charge of reconstruction, was to buy out all rights-holders (owners, tenants) and compensate them in company-shares. The plan was met with criticism from rights-holders, architects, and planners. However, with considerable political backing, Solidere proceeded, expropriating most right-holders. Unbeknown to many, one of the few who was able to retain assets was the Directorate General of Islamic Waqfs (endowments). This presentation examines the successful mobilization against the expropriation of the Islamic waqfs in the city-center, based on their inalienability in Islamic law. I argue that the success of the mobilization of the Sunni Muslim community in the preservation of the waqfs as opposed to the failure of mobilization around the right to the city (through a rights-holders’ association and lawsuits) mobilized publics as Sunnis and thus further instantiated the Sunni Muslim community as a political sect reproducing in the process a cornerstone of the Lebanese political order.

After a terrible winter in 1910-1911, nomads living in the Jazira region—stretching between the Tigris and the Euphrates at the foot of the Anatolian plateau—wished to settle. When members of the Ottoman parliament discussed the appropriation of funds for this initiative, however, bitter opposition broke out. What had seemed a simple matter was anything but, as deputies argued over which province ought to receive funding for the settlement of groups that regularly moved around. Most significantly, deputies insinuated that a conspiracy was afoot. By settling a group of Arab nomads in the largely non-Arab province of Diyarbakir, deputies charged, the Ottoman state was destroying the Arab district of Dayr al-Zur while strengthening Diyarbakir. In response to these charges, the minister of the interior, Halil, lamented, “Is it now that we are inventing such things, even though Arabness or Turkishness never existed in the six-hundred year history of this state?” The episode thus underscored shifting notions of citizenship entangled with the allocation of property to nomadic groups, and, as Halil’s words remind us, many people presented these dynamics as novel. Relying on Ottoman archival materials related to the settlement campaign of 1911 as well as parliamentary records of the debates, the paper makes two interventions in the historiography. First, it suggests how the question of property as it related to the sedentarization of nomads catalyzed debates about ethnicity in the late Ottoman Empire. In doing so, the paper reveals a political economy of identity in which the end of the movement of nomads coincided with broader claims about their membership in an ethnic community. This relationship stands in contrast to the vast and important literature on citizenship and identity in the late Ottoman and post-Ottoman period that emphasizes the cultural imagination and discursive construction of these dynamics. Second, the paper complicates the notion that borders and ethnic identity only began to matter after the end of the Ottoman Empire. Instead, the paper exposes how a political economy of agrarian development rendered these questions pertinent before the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire.