This paper analyzes the dream narratives and the strategy of dream-sharing among key figures in the Arabian Peninsula during World War I. I argue that alongside the political negotiations, battles, and propaganda that characterized the Arab Revolt which was launched by the Amir of Mecca in 1916 with British support, dream narratives represented another “front” as enemies and allies of the Amir debated the direction and legitimacy of the region’s future. This project builds on existing scholarship that has shifted our attention away from a focus on the political consequences of the war and towards analyses of its social and ideological effects. Concerning the ideological competition, anxieties of British influence over Husayn and the Holy Cities of Mecca and Medina were frequently expressed by Husayn’s critics and supporters like. These anxieties focused on debates about the future of the Caliphate if the Ottoman empire collapsed. Would the Ottoman Sultan continue to hold this globally recognized privilege, or would, as some Arab Muslim theologians advocated, an Arab claim the mantle of authority? While these questions were debated and propagandized in Arabic newspapers and journals, an unexamined dimension of this debate was the role of dream narratives by key figures in the Arabian Peninsula. Dreams, while highly personal, hint at common cultural and social turmoils; and in the history of the Islamic world, they represented a strategic rhetorical tool. This paper examines a dream premonition reported by Rashid Rida, an Islamist thinker from Cairo and supporter of the Arab Revolt while performing the 1916 pilgrimage; a recurring dream of Abdulaziz ibn Sa‘ud that he shared with British representatives in 1917; and a dream that Fahreddin Pasha, the Ottoman commander in Medina, described in 1918 as he refused to surrender the city to Husayn’s forces. By analyzing these dreams in terms of their narratives, contexts, and audiences, it becomes possible to trace the mix of religious anxieties in the region and how key actors made sense of their present to advocate for their future designs.

In this paper, I focus on a dream about poetry and politics. I look at pomes about dreams as connected to numerous and overlapping modern movements of Arabic literary and cultural renewal, which animated several Arab public spheres from the second half of the nineteenth century until the Second World War, and whose writers were interested in political theory, historical progress, and scientific innovation. These movements, I suggest, generated a new spatial thinking about modernity, reality and the afterlife. To do so, I present a close reading of a long poem written by Iraqi intellectual Jamil Sidqi al-Zahawi (1863-1936), Revolution in Hell (Thawra fi’l jahim, 1931). Zahawi was a fervent supporter of positivism, Darwinism and social Darwinism, and celebrated the role of science in the modern world in his works of poetry and prose, which circulated in Arabic and Ottoman journals in several regional languages (such as Arabic, Persian, Turkish and Kurdish). In Revolution in Hell, Zahawi depicts how he dreamt about a lengthy visit to underworld, where he meets Darwin, Hegel, Buchner, Spencer, Fichte, Huxley, Spinoza, Newton, Holbach, Renan, Rousseau, Voltaire, Zarathustra, al-Kindi, Ibn Sina, Ibn Rushd, Abu Nuwas, Omar Khayyam (amongst others), as well as Dante and Abu ‘Ala al-Ma‘arri. Together, they devise modern machinery that allows them to conquer the Heavens. In my analysis of the poem, I reflect on the ways in which it captures many of contemporary narratives about the power of the science and explore how Zahawi subverts religious imagery related to Islamic cosmology in order to create a new understanding of a modern and new world. The presentation of these politics as a dream, however, subverts their radicalism. I further argue that the translation of both scientific and literary works into Middle Eastern languages enabled this conceptual and spatial shift with respect to Islamic cosmology.

The genre of the Arabic short story is often traced to several different roots. Yet, one of these origins can be evaluated as a genre of its own right—a genre of dream narratives (ru’ya). In Baghdad during the 1910s, several Muslim and Christian Arab intellectuals portrayed their hopes and fears for the future encapsulated within fictional prose dream narratives. While written in Arabic, they were composed in an environment that could not imagine a world without the Ottoman Empire. Moreover, while the goals of these texts were forward-looking, as dreams and visions imply, and some of these texts were even of a separatist nature, this paper argues that the spirit of these Iraqi ru’ya narratives should be examined within the Ottoman context. My paper will identify the earlier Ottoman Turkish roots of this genre, Namik Kemal’s Rüya ("The Dream"), written while in exile in Chios in 1873 but only posthumously published in 1908. Ottoman-Iraqi Ma‘ruf al-Rusafi translated Namik Kemal’s Rüya into Arabic, and the dream narrative was published in Baghdad shortly thereafter. By linking to Namik Kemal and pointing to intra-imperial translation efforts to generate cultural production, I will demonstrate the Ottoman origins of this genre. Once Namik Kemal’s translated Rüya was printed in Baghdad, other writers began modifying the dream narrative genre in the Ottoman-Iraqi press. These writers of different confessional backgrounds created patriotic visions and built worlds set in dreamscapes in order to improve upon the current structures of state and society in the Ottoman Empire for Arab imperial citizens. I will analyze the themes raised in the dream narratives, such as Arabism, the nature of kingship, and morality, contrasting them to the disposition and the governance of the Ottoman Committee for Union and Progress (CUP).

This paper focuses on Palestinian Utopias, a small yet distinct strand inside the vast corpus of Palestinian political thought in the 20th century. I show that during the1930s and 1940s, utopian writing emerged as a common form among Arab men of letters to articulate an Arab and distinctively Palestinian future. I will discuss four published works and archival material, all of which stand on the border between literature and political thought. The first work I focus on is Ru?yay, (My Vision), a short utopian novel by historian ?Arif al-?Arif, published in 1943. In the novel al-?Arif narrates in great detail his imaginative, science-fiction style journey to a futuristic Arab Empire in the third millennium CE. A second work is a booklet by author and translator Qustantin Thiyuduri, Filastin wa-Mustaqbaluha, (The Future of Palestine, 1930). Thiyuduri proposed a unique vision of Palestine as a bi-national state for Arabs and Jews. The third work is a political booklet by Antun Ya?kub al-A?ma, an eccentric and relatively unknown author from Bethlehem, who offered to turn Palestine into "The Esperanto State". I add to this corpus the better-known novel Mudhakkirat Dajajah (Memoirs of a Hen, 1943), by Ishaq Musa al-Husayni. Mudhakkirat Dajajah tells the tale of a benevolent hen that preaches peace and harmony in the face of expulsion from the chicken coop. To complete the picture, I use archival material to understand the background of the authors and to explore the possibility that they knew of each other’s works, and wrote variations of one another’s ideas, as part of their belonging to a Palestinian republic of letters. Ultimately, my argument is that these works shed new light on early Palestinian political thought, since they are a demonstration of ideological, clear, and explicit answers to burning questions for Palestinians of the Mandate period. Among these questions are: What should be the nature of the regime of post-mandatory Palestine? What would be the basis of sovereignty in the country? And how were the settlers that were already inside Palestine and demanded ownership of the land for themselves to be naturalized?