The debates about colonialism that scholars and analysts launched over five decades ago show no signs of abating. As a MESA 2009 roundtable on the analytical utility of the collaborator- nationalist paradigm has shown, historians continue to struggle to find effective analytical frameworks and tools to think and rethink colonialism. By posing shifts in the interconnected practices of historical content and historigraphic form, this panel-cum roundtable will approach the persistent analytical lacunae in understanding and analyzing the colonial condition in the Middle East.
African historians have provided invaluable insight in their emphasis on the mutually formative character of colonizer-colonized interactions. These historians have challenged and changed perceptions of the colonial condition in part by moving towards case studies of understudied groups and individuals such as colonial intermediaries. European micro-historians have also been using focused case studies to question historiographies of presumably well-understood, essential structures. These scholars examine individuals, not as such, but as formative components of broader social networks. In so doing, they reframe broader analyses rather than simply filling in the blanks they leave behind. Micro-history continues to be experimental work and does not adhere to any singular model. Similarly, the manner and force of the interaction between micro- and macro-history remains an open question.
By drawing on the conceptual and methodological lessons of historians of Africa and Europe, this panel tackles the mutually constitutive relationship of colonizer-colonized and micro- and macro-histories. Four concise, historically specific presentations of biographic, prosopographic, and micro-historical case studies provide material for discussion and debate - first amongst the panelists; then with the audience – on the efficacy, pitfalls, and promises of new approaches to historical content and form.
The panel papers are as instrumental as the panel's two-tiered form for thinking and rethinking Mandatory colonial conditions through a micro/macro-historical lens. Papers include a prosopographic analysis of lower-level relief workers in Mandatory Syria; a biographic study of a Palestinian merchant in the British mandate; a micro-history of a Lebanese member of the French-led Lebanese gendarmerie who challenged his French superiors and (ab)used his colonial state position more than twenty years; and a case study of how two Syrians played the mixed colonial/Syrian court system to their advantage.
Through a new format of combining individual papers with a focused discussion, this panel cum roundtable will explore new ways to think and rethink the colonial condition in the Mandatory period.
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Dr. Cyrus Schayegh
This paper uses a 400-page-thick archival file on Elias Medawwar, who started rising through the ranks of the Lebanese Gendarmerie in 1916 and became Lt. Col. in 1938 , to raise a series of questions about French Mandatory colonial rule.
Throughout his years of service, Medawwar impressed his French superiors with his courage, displayed most brazenly in many raids against bandits in the Bikaa, his intimate knowledge of many terrains and cities, and the air of authority he exuded. These traits earned him several medals - and helped him to advance in the Gendarmerie.
At the same time, he was a serious headache for his superiors. He was ac cussed of smuggling and often fined for disciplinary infractions. Most problematically, several archbishops repeatedly urged Gendarmerie head Colonel Boivin to reprimand Mudawwar for abusing his uniform to propagate Free Masonic ideas; also, he had an incorrigible reputation as a womanizer and frequenter of brothels.
Concerned about Medawar's moral, political, and criminal activities, Boivin kept close tabs on him, tried to placate public opinion and powerful private complaints, and slowed down promotion; but in his internal evaluation reports, he also underlined that the Gendarmerie could not lose him (and that he had very influential friends of his own).
Medawwar's case helps us re-think certain features of Mandatory colonial rule. One concerns tools of rule: while the French-run Gendarmerie implemented French policies, it was easily (ab)used by officers and their friends for personal ends. Far from serving French interests only, colonial state instruments were llicitly and systemically co-opted by social interests. A second question concerns French responsiveness to societal demands. Boivin and his aides assiduously tracked Mudawwar's love life. They feared that an officer's 'immorality' would sully the Gendarmerie and taint French rule; if anything, they were even more worried about arch-bishopal demands. Clearly, in the colonial officials' mind, their rule needed to look moral - perhaps precisely because they did not have the means and will to turn violence into the key tool of rule. Still - problem #3 - ties of dependence on local society needed to be balanced against security needs; and all too often, here, the French depended on one local's knowledge to combat another local.
In sum, Mudawwar's file offers a way of examining the extent, limits, and nature of French colonial power and the manifold ties that folded it into - rather than simply propped it on top of - local society.
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Dr. Sherene Seikaly
The lack of a state, and the weakness of Palestinian institution building, continue to be foregone conclusions in scholarship on British ruled Palestine. Scholars have described early twentieth century Palestinian thought and practice on the notion of the state as either paralyzed by the twin forces of a Zionist emphasis on progress and a British emphasis on tradition on the one hand, or else mute and unable to articulate demands for a state form on the other. Indeed, a tenuous and contradictory relationship to the British colonial government deeply marked the colonial condition for Palestinian political and economic elites. Yet paralysis and muteness do not adequately address the complexities of Palestinian attempts to access state power in the 1930s and 1940s. Indeed this period was a time of intensive Palestinian efforts to formulate national and daily demands in new languages vis-?-vis the colonial government. The archival record reveals that the idea of objectivity and the power of "facts and figures" were central to these new languages.
Drawing on petitions, institutional documents, and memoirs, this paper focuses on the figure of Rashid al-Haj Ibrahim in order to explore Palestinian attempts to access power, forge new understandings of the "objective," and imagine the promise of a state. Writing his autobiography, Defending Haifa and the Problem of Palestine, the former president of the Haifa Arab Chambers of Commerce was at pains to explain that the Palestinians had not idly sat by in the face of national extinction. The Chambers, he wrote, were one of the means he and his cohort had used in their attempts to face down another nationalist enterprise in mandate Palestine, one that was larger and more powerful than theirs. He approached this mission from various perspectives as a landowner, a prominent merchant, a leader of the Islamic Society, a newspaper editor, a member of the pan-Arab Istiqlal Party, a businessman, a banker, and a Chamber activist. Ibrahim, and men like him, who could occupy various seemingly contradictory but nevertheless overlapping social and economic categories, advocated for representation on various governmental bodies where they hoped to build their own institutional capacities. For these Palestinians, the colonial state was the address for crafting national institutions; it was a site of participation and opposition, possibility and exclusion.
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Dr. Benjamin Thomas White
Asma Kanafani died in 1931, nearly twenty years after her husband. A Druze woman from the village of Jaramana near Damascus, Kanafani's legatees were her son, Fakhri, who inherited (directly or indirectly) the bulk of his parents' estate, and her daughters, Fawziyya and 'Atiyya, who received a few gold pounds. The inequitable distribution of the estate sparked a legal battle that lasted for years.
The dispute was fought out in two separate and competing jurisdictions. Fakhri's claim was validated, and confirmed on appeal, by the Druze religious courts for the mandate territories. Fawziyya and 'Atiyya took their case to the Syrian civil courts--which, in matters of personal status, applied sharia law as the 'common law'. Sharia provisions guaranteed female children a fixed share of their deceased parents' estate. The Syrian courts duly found, and confirmed on appeal, that the Kanafani will was invalid, and insisted that their land should be registered under the names of all three children, not under Fakhri's alone. Both sides were engaged in the time-honoured legal tradition of 'forum shopping': selecting the court most likely to return a favourable judgment. But by doing so, they also created the conditions for a seemingly irreconcilable jurisdictional clash between the Druze religious courts and Syria's civil courts, and posed an awkward problem for the French High Commission, in whose archives details of this case are preserved.
The Druze courts were keen to assert their own authority, within the Druze community and against other institutions in the mandate territories. This suited the High Commission, since French policy was to maximize the institutional segregation of Syrians by religious group. But, notwithstanding this policy, the mandate system tended to consolidate nation-state institutions in Syria: two such institutions, the Syrian civil courts, and the ministry that oversaw them, tried to use this case to assert their jurisdiction over all Syrians. The Kanafanis, as Syrians and/or as Druzes, were the objects of these conflicting institutional frameworks that characterized the mandate. But their case shows that those institutions could only function, and acquire the normative status desired for them by Druze religious leaders and French officials on the one hand, and functionaries and politicians within the Syrian state on the other, insofar as individuals like the Kanafani siblings chose to interact with them. A micro-historical focus on the case thus illuminates many larger issues (and contradictions) in the peculiar nature of mandatory rule.
