In 1962, Bahiyyidin Barakat found himself embroiled in a legal dispute with his cousins Mustafa and Ali Amin, editors of a leading Egyptian newspaper. The twins had taken their elderly relative to court over the diaries of their mutual great-uncle, the 'father of the Egyptian nation,' Sa'd Zaghlul. The complex case might have been forgotten had it not unfolded at a time when an aggressive public campaign was being waged by the preeminent historian Muhammad Anis to appropriate private papers of public interest. Anis had Nasser's ear and the President decided to settle the cousins' bickering at once by issuing a declaration against 'hoarding documents of national importance'. Soon enough, Anis and other regime-aligned experts were dispatched to seize the diaries. They placed them in the National Archives, the newly-established launch pad for their campaign to 'rewrite Egyptian history'. The precedent-setting decree that Nasser issued would have far reaching consequences for history-writing. Rather than having the desired effect of bringing private papers into the public domain, it inevitably led to their concealment. Families who possessed documents potentially 'nationally important' hoarded them away, fearful that they might be seized. While the Zaghlul family were forced to hand over the documents deemed important by the gatekeepers of Egypt's past, they also managed to retain a great deal more. Spanning 1483 CE to 1962, those documents-genealogies, photographs, financial records, and letters-deemed unimportant remained in the hands of my family. I contend that such archival dregs, or papers of national unimportance, as my title suggests, can unsettle, enrich, and complicate the nationalist narratives carefully curated by state-sponsored historians. Although the Zaghlul family story is atypical it reveals something salient about the relationship between the state and its subjects: one in which the former has appropriated, monitored and narrated history in the name of 'the people' while simultaneously refusing to make it accessible to, or authorable by, them. I suggest that family history-a form of 'public history'-provides a platform for questioning the increasingly invasive laws that regulate relations between Egyptians and their pasts. Recent efforts to open up the national archives-to recover documents relating to the Arab-Israeli conflict, for example-have failed. Instead, I suggest that the ostensibly 'apolitical' work of family history, requiring access to census records, endowment charters, and birth and death certificates might be instrumentalised: to demand a reclamation of our collective pasts.

Naim Cotran (c.1877-1961) was born in the northern coastal city of Acre, Palestine, at that time under Ottoman rule. He began his education at the Syrian Protestant College in Beirut. In 1899, he traveled to Baltimore to continue his medical training at the University of Maryland. Naim returned to Palestine to become one of Acre’s first registered medical doctors. During World War I, he served as a medical official in Omdurman, Sudan, with the Anglo-Egyptian Army. On his return to Palestine, then under British rule (1918-1948), his in-laws gifted Naim an enslaved woman named Sa‘da. Naim and his young wife Aniseh manumitted Sa‘da, but she lived and died with them as their domestic servant. Eight miles northeast of Acre, in a village called Nahr al-Nabi‘a, Naim owned about twenty hectares of land. During the war of 1948, his children and grandchildren took refuge in Lebanon and Egypt. Naim and Aniseh stayed on the land, in an attempt to hold on to Palestine’s shrinking remains. They lost that battle in 1951 and became refugees who lived the last years of their lives in Lebanon. Naim, was my great-grandfather. By sheer coincidence, I encountered Naim in ways that inspired new questions about history and the lived present. On a hot summer day in June 2016, I stumbled upon family papers that I did not know existed. Through his long-forgotten records and photographs, Naim invited me to move beyond the territorial and conceptual confines of Palestine. In the early twentieth century, this vulnerable but determined figure posed for a photograph in Omdurman. With his elaborate moustache, he sat crossed-legged and authoritative, donning the signature pith helmet of the British imperial official. Two Sudanese men stood dutifully at his side. That young man could not have imagined that the British officials he emulated would be the source of his own dispossession. Clearly, Naim believed himself to be culturally and racially superior. His civilizational logic shattered in the wake of dispossession in 1948, but how did it initially take shape and what can it teach us? In this paper, I take up my great-grandfather’s invitation and travel with him to Sudan. Through a focus on Greater Syrians in the Anglo-Egyptian army, I explore the racial hierarchies that made it possible for men like Naim to “pass” as a colonial official. In doing so, I pose questions about subjectivity and historical narration.

Palestinian historian and youth movement organizer Darwish al-Miqdadi (1897-1961) was a ubiquitous yet elusive Pan-Arab figure. Educated at his village kuttab, the Ottoman school, Mission laïque française, Syrian Protestant College in Beirut, and the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität in Berlin, his career as educator and colonial bureaucrat spanned tenures at the Jerusalem Arab College, the Baghdad Teachers Training College, the Syrian University and the Kuwaiti ministry of education. The founder of clubs and associations, among which AUB’s al-‘Urwa al-Wuthqa, Baghdad’s Nadi al-Muthanna and the Arabic Club of Berlin, he also languished like many contemporaries in jail – in his case, at the notorious Nugrat al-Salman prison in Iraq. By leaving traces unnervingly few and far between, Miqdadi, who was my grandfather, enabled three discordant narratives to claim him. One, generated by Zionist propagandists, is intent on casting him as a Farhud perpetrator; the second is evolved by his own family and is committed to memorializing him; the third is a patchy historiographic account of his role in the Pan-Arab movement, in which the significance of his “German career” has been altogether missed. One way of disentangling him is to focus on a spectacularly overlooked aspect of his labours – the production of scholarship against impossible odds. Experiencing exile, dispossession, estrangement and loss, Miqdadi faced, as a nationalist historian, the epistemological and material challenges of a discipline taught in a novel format and on unprecedented scales. Commissioned by his employer Sati‘ al-Husri, the textbooks he authored in Interwar Iraq were direct responses to the dearth in Arabic pedagogical material denounced by Philip Hitti, Miqdadi’s erstwhile professor. Their revisions in Nazi Berlin, contrary to public wisdom, provided cover for scholarly pursuits and professional credentialing. Discarded by posterity as sheer ideological lore, Tarikh al-umma al-arabiyya (5 eds. between 1931 and 1939) and Tarikhuna bi-uslub qisasi (3 eds. between 1935 and 1939) represent nonetheless the first articulations of a didactic history of the Arab nation. They moreover display a conscious textual strategy out of Islamic historiography, as testified by their mobilization of distinct sources and elaboration of a paradigm and theory of world history. Attending to the making of intellectual engagement under duress, this paper probes the intimate “circumstances of the intellectual”, complicating Martin Malia’s typology of social, political and historical pressures. It ponders the methodological and ethical questions raised by a family archive itself retrieved under exacting circumstances.

Deprived of his inheritance to land like many youngest-born sons of peasant descent, Martin Bertrand (1915-2008) eventually fled life as a seminarian in the French High-Alps by enlisting in the Mobile Guard. Drafted at the outbreak of World War II, he was stationed in Casablanca where he led a Moroccan colonial recruit unit of tirailleurs in 1943, before participating in the Battle of Rome, the Provence landing, the liberation of Alsace, and the occupation of Germany. A few years after his return to Morocco, and before the ultimate disbanding of the tirailleur regiment, his unit would deploy to Tourane, Indochina. During each one of his long absences, my grandfather wrote almost daily to his wife Hélène, a “Pied-Noir” from a Spanish settler family in Algeria. Through a reading of these letters and the help of testimonies from relatives, I propose to integrate Bertrand’s experiences into a broader imperial story, one in which France led her armies through her last colonial wars and unhinged both metropolitan and colonial communities in the process. Furthermore, comparing Bertrand’s private words with more official sources like troop morale reports allows for an exploration of the complex social and ethnic hierarchies between French non-commissioned officers and “indigenous” troops. This analysis offers then a glimpse of the configurations of class and identity that military solidarities made possible. By the end of 1944, 9/10th of France’s mobilised soldiers were from North Africa’s contingents. Notwithstanding, Charles de Gaulle and the interior Resistance would showcase the French Forces of the Interior (FFI) in order to convince the Allies of France’s capacity to free herself, keeping the colonial troops out of final operations and victory parades. The frustration and bitterness vis-à-vis the metropolitans, amplified by particularly murderous times in France, translated into Bertrand’s principled refusal to join the FFI, his anxious evocations of his responsibility towards his troops as well as with his frequent and affectionate mentions of his helpful but child-like orderly, Mohammed. To what extent were such paternalistic expressions of loyalty towards “his” tirailleurs the harbingers of a sense of deeper political alienation, or even of “unimagined communities”? Can family pasts, as seen through the lens of micro-history, help historians contribute an approach that is at once more complex and humble towards national, imperial and/or global history?