[Auto-generated transcript. Edits may have been applied for clarity.] My book. Prophecies of Reason. Reason as as Eugene said about, um, somebody he's also worked a lot on, uh, behind the shop.
Um, who lived through most of the 19th century in what is then Ottoman Syria.
So, um, Syria, Lebanon as of today.
Um, he also spent some time in Egypt. Um, he's born in the 1800s and dies in 1888.
Um, and I suppose the money sort of way into, uh, his life or the reason why I became interested in his, his life was,
um, to do with a kind of problem that we have in addressing the the 19th century in historical scholarship.
That's. Reading some kinds of accounts of the 19th century Arab world and particularly, you know, like Germany and Egypt.
One can see this is the origin point of, uh, tendencies like, um,
secularism or the idea of a secular society, um, new engagement with, um, modern science, uh,
the idea of a kind of public sphere, uh, which is multi-religious with different sets of people can,
can debate, um, that sort of not the image, if you like, of the 19th century.
On the other hand, it's also the century of modern style sectarian violence, things like, um,
the famous 1860 massacre of Christians in Damascus, um, by a large crowd of uh, um, Muslims, which Eugene has just published a book about.
Um, uh, and also of the rise of, you know, religious revivalist movements, um, Christian, uh, Jewish, also Muslim, you know, uh,
early Salafi movement and things like that that are defining religious identities, often in rather harder and more clearly bounded ways.
So there's a bit of a paradox in how do we see the 19th century as embodying,
you know, the beginnings of both of these tendencies in their modern form.
And I found, you know, mentioned the chocolate helps us.
I hope to answer some of those questions, because he belongs in the sense to the history of both of these tendencies.
So very briefly, he is born in 1800.
He grows up, um, as a Greek Catholic, Roman Catholic in, uh, the former the capital of the Emirate of Mount Lebanon.
His family is very close to the ruling shabby, uh, family, the, uh, Amir Bashir have um.
And at the age of 17, he travels to Egypt, to the port town of, uh, Damietta.
Um, and. Encounters basically two things, one of which is the plague, um,
which comes to town regularly in the spring and remains for many months into the, uh, into the summer.
Um, and poses a problem to everybody and to me because, you know, it's killing many people.
You have that at its height to 100 funeral processions leaving the town every day.
Um, but people react in different ways. And the, the wealthy Christians that's become the shock is living along.
Most go into a kind of lockdown, uh, conflicts actually, I call it what you call lockdown.
Um, to hide away from, uh, the plague. And so these sort of quarantine regulations, um,
other people would resort more to prayer or indeed to magical means of warding off the plague doctors,
uh, uncertain and, you know, divided on what the best way is to deal with it.
And so one can see through this example in particular, plague, you know, different ideas of what one should do about these problems in one's life,
whether religious or medical or magical, kind of rubbing up against each other and the problems of what to believe.
What? Why don't you think about this? That this gives rise to the other thing that may come a shock, uh, encounters in,
uh, Damietta is a set of writings translated from European languages into Arabic.
The first time that, um, modern science of the kind that's written after Isaac Newton or, um, the enlightenment thought of, uh, French deists,
people like Voltaire and Volant is available in Arabic,
and this is the result of a particular translation movement which is based in that city of doom.
Yup. Um, and through reading this and through other experiences that he has in, um, Damietta, Midtum a shopkeeper loses his faith.
Um, he decides that all of the religious faiths that are available to him in Egypt or Syria at the time, uh,
false colours should out on up and, um, that we should instead act according to the natural light which has been planted in us by God.
So he adopted deist position. Um, not publicly.
He remains, for public purposes, a Greek Catholic.
Um, and then he goes back to Mount Lebanon and he lives there, um, for, uh, the next part of his life,
he, uh, becomes an advisor and chancellor to a set of the local rulers and,
uh, towns because by and by the time, um, he becomes a great polymath,
he teaches himself a whole range of different disciplines, from music to mathematics.
Um, and, you know, medicine. He falls ill, he decides to teach himself medicine.
So, um, because he doesn't trust the other doctors, you know?
Um, so he has this great faith in his own ability to, um, you know, think his way to the end of any problem he's presented with.
Then in the 1840s.
Well, the 1830s and then the 1840s, there's there's a new set of problems which present themselves because there's new political changes.
In addition, an invasion by the army of the governor of Egypt, Um Ali Persia,
and then a European intervention to get him out, uh, and restore Ottoman power.
And through all of these political changes, um, Mithun Michalka, he's very involved in the local politics.
He works with the Egyptians. He then works closely with, uh, the British.
And he's negotiating, in a sense, parts of the ending of the old order of the submissives and those sort of political forces in, uh, in,
in Mount Lebanon, um, and in one of the sort of outcomes of this is the emergence of a new form of sectarian politics and sectarian violence.
Um, in 1841, in Mount Lebanon, there's a conflict between Maronite and Druze Christians in the in the course of this,
um, his own family home is burned down in their squabbling.
Uh, one of his brothers is killed. Um, the rest of the family flee to safety with him in Damascus.
And this I think him very deeply. And it's not coincidental that it's a few years after that,
that he begins becoming interested in religious ideas once again, instead of simply being a deist,
he begins to take seriously writings which have been translated into Arabic by Protestant
missionaries who've come from America to the Eastern Mediterranean in the 1820s,
particularly, uh, rather peculiar book, uh, by a man named Alexander Keith,
who's a Church of Scotland minister, um, which purports to show that the Bible is true based on archaeology.
So he reads this stuff, he becomes, then meets and becomes a close friend of one of the American missionaries, a man named Eli Smith,
um, in the town of Speyer, which is where he spends a large part of his life and where a group of people have become Protestants.
Recently, um, and as a result of this, uh, eventually in 1848, decides to become,
for public purposes, a Protestant, um, so goes through a formal sort of open conversion process,
leaves his Greek Catholic community, and he then engages in a very bitter polemic with, um,
the head of that community that he's just leaving the patriarch, um, blacksmiths Muslim.
Um, but he is adopted this new Protestant position in a sense, because I think he, um.
He sees it as a rational religion. He sees it as a form of religion that can be rationally justified.
And he retains that position for the rest of his life. Um, he lives through and survives the massacres of 1860 and provides, um,
one of the most vivid, probably the most vivid testimony to, um, that that set of events.
Um, he writes his memoirs in 1873. He dies in 1888.
You know, as a respected, um, member of the, uh, Damascene community under the, you know, new style, uh, Tansy met Ottoman Empire.
But in many ways, looking back still to the shabby emirate of of his youth.
So through all of this, this theme of reason, a lot is very central to me.
And I think that in a sense, um, so, you know, to conclude,
can provide us with one of these clues to, um, what's going on, uh, between these two tendencies,
if you like to, um, secularity on the one hand and religious identitarian ism on the other in the 19th century,
because, you know, he belongs to both of these. He's massively interested in science and reason and, um, thinking his way to the end of a problem.
He's adopted as a figure of the author by later sort of publicises that like George's day.
Then, on the other hand, he's very much a religious activist.
He's also central to shaping a Protestant community in Syria and takes attacking Catholicism in particular very seriously.
Um, so, you know, but both to both of these projects, reason is central for him.
And I think one can see him as part of a shift towards, um, a new style of religious debate that emerges by the late 19th century in Arabic,
in which it becomes very important to justify whatever it is one believes in terms of reason, um, and that can lead in rather different directions.
One can say, okay, I'm going to judge all of these different religious faith according to the light of reason and stand outside of them all,
and this can lead to a secular position. On the other hand, if you place yourself within one of these faith.
One has to then rationally justify that as against other positions.
And this means getting rid of all of the things which can be seen as superstitious, inconsistent,
ambiguous, um, and coming up with a more sharply bounded sense of what one's religion is.
And so that in a sense, is how I would, you know, relate Michaelmas chocolate to the general problem that I began with.
But there's very many other aspects of his life and, you know, weird and wonderful details that we can also discuss.
And great. And they're all documented for you here, Prophet of Reason, because you really have only just scratched the surface.
But that was the point, a taste point. We'll come back and questions for more detail.
Could we beg you to describe a little more about what you got up to?
Well, you don't have to beg me, except I do have to apologise for my voice, and I hope I can, um.
I hope you can hear me at the back. And if it gives out, that will just give more time to my colleagues.
Um. It's always a pleasure to speak here in my alma mater.
And I want to start by saying that literally my entire career, I've been thinking about the study of biography,
although for most of that it's been the study of biography as a genre.
And when I say literally, I mean going back to my undergraduate honours thesis on Maisie Edda um and her biographies of other women's lives,
which Albert Hourani read. And that's what led him to urge me to come to Saint Anthony.
So, um, so I've really been interested in that, and particularly the question of how feminists use biography.
And this is something not, of course, specific to the Arab world.
I mean, women in, in many societies have used biographies of earlier women to try to counter the way
in which women's lives and life stories and accomplishments have been suppressed.
So I've been very interested in that. Um, and I've written a lot about it.
And that led me to Zainab for because she was very important in this.
Her best known work is a monumental, um, biographical Dictionary of World Women in Arabic, published in 1895, in Cairo.
My previous book, um, was a book history of that book.
So, as you can tell, I'm I'm rather obsessed with this woman, having now written two monographs on her.
So, um, I but I then went on and I wanted to work more on her because she is such a fascinating figure.
Um, she was really I see her is very unusual among feminist and gender activists in the late 19th century.
She was she her work came from a very deep, very explicit, um, Muslim believer perspective.
And within that,
she uses that perspective to really mount a thoroughgoing critique of patriarchy and to have a much more anti essentialist view of gender,
um, much less focussed on sort of natural gender roles than was true of of most people writing on gender in the late 19th.
Century. And so what I do in the book, it's an intellectual biography.
I spend a lot of, um, a lot of it really looking closely at her works.
So her essays in the press in the 1890s, which covered everything from social justice to marriage,
um, to, um, the question of natural gender and, and other topics, girls education.
And I do that by really trying to place her in a community of writers,
not all of whom when I say community, that and the community can be antagonistic, um, as well as friendly.
So I look closely at the way that she was engaged in various public debates.
And within that, I also try to look at some some other writers who were actually not very who were somewhat well known at the time,
but are not the writers that we remember now. Um, I also have chapters on her two novels, which are both historical novels and her play.
She was the first woman, as far as we know, as far as I know, any way to have written, uh, to have her name on a play that was published.
There may have been others that women published anonymously.
Um, and in that chapter, I try to imagine the relationship between, um,
women and theatre in the 1890s because it was not women didn't necessarily have access to the theatre.
So I try to look at all these different kinds of writing.
Now, as a person, who was she? Um, fascinating.
And when I read Peter's book, I was so India's because you have so much information on Mishawaka,
and I have a very different situation than the San Antonio Bears. So she was born.
And here the problems start. She was born sometime between 1846 and 1860, in the town of two men in Jebel Amel in the south of Lebanon.
And different sources, um, you know, support these different dates.
I tend to think, um, it was she was probably born in the late 1840s, early 1850s.
But, you know, I'm not sure because I have no real evidence.
And that's that's a generation 1846 to 1860.
And it makes a huge difference in terms of her relationships with people whose dates we do know and with whom she was closely, um, engaged.
Um, so she was born there. She spent her childhood in the, um, the the castle, uh, in to nine, um, the seat of the local feudal ruler.
And this is also fascinating. And and her first novel, which came out in 1899, is actually based on the story, um, of that family.
But she changes it, um, for her own, I think, political purposes.
So I look very closely at the history and then what she does to it in the novel.
Um, at some point she emigrated to Egypt.
Again, there are many stories about that, including one that she married an Egyptian army man and immigrated from Lebanon to Egypt.
The problem with that is that there is no Egyptian husband in evidence when she gets to Egypt.
So I actually don't believe that story. And I think probably it's an indication of the fact that people just could not
believe that a woman would immigrate unless she was following her husband,
you know? So I think some of the stories about her life, um, have to do with people's attempts to explain things that don't seem very explicable.
Um, so she she's in Egypt, she wrote I won't again, I won't go into all the details.
I can certainly go into the more if you if you wish. At one point she went to Damascus, um, to marry a man.
They'd had a correspondence, they'd never seen each other. And one of the possibly apocryphal stories is that she gets to Damascus,
and they both discover that the photographs they sent each other were from a much younger age.
Um, she also discovered that he had either 2 or 3, um, other wives, which he had sort of forgotten to tell her about.
And the marriage did not last, um, a very long time, although apparently the main one of the I don't want to say the men,
but one of the reasons for that is that she just she missed the intellectual life of Cairo, and she missed the Cairo newspapers.
Um, so she came back to Egypt and was still did some writing.
But then the last she died in 1914. For the last several years, um, she suffered from eye disease and was not very active,
although there are certain spots, but and I will probably end with this.
There is one source. Um, my only real archival source on Salem photos are the informant reports.
Words that she did for best help me.
Um, in the period sort of 1905 to 1907. These are absolutely fascinating.
They are in the archives in Durham. The others held me archives.
I want to do more writing on those. What's fascinating is that here she is, a woman.
She was hired to basically to go and hang out with her friends in elite homes, the other women,
and she transcribes their conversations, or at least her the person she wants the regime to have.
And it's completely fascinating. I mean, for one thing, it shows that women were not at all isolated from politics.
They knew exactly what was going on. Um, Zina Handler, in writing to, I guess, help me or someone close to him.
Um, wanting to justify hiring xenophobes said she said, listen, I think she can be of use to us.
She can go into these homes. After all, husbands tell their wives everything.
And she really she really pulls out this information.
Now, for a feminist biographer of a feminist.
This is quite difficult material. Um.
She's nasty. She lies to people. She uses the concept of girls education cynically.
That's what hurt me the most. Um, she she participates in basically, um, getting a journalist thrown into jail.
Um, you know, this is not nice. And I reading this just like saying if you do this to me.
Um, but it's but it does humanise her. You know, it really, again, shows us the the complications of a life, the messiness of a life.
And also, I think sometimes we sometimes maybe forget is the way that people change as they get older.
And maybe they have new needs, new, um, agendas, new loyalties.
We do know that she was, um, she was quite poor after her brother died.
Her brother was a lawyer in Cairo. He died in 1894.
Um, you know, she was single, and I think partly she did this probably because she needed money.
I think also that she wanted to be involved. And somehow this was this was something.
And I also trace that, you know, into sort of 1900.
Um, as things are becoming harder and harder in term as Egyptians are losing even more and more hope about the Egyptians,
about the English leaving, about the end of the British occupation.
Um. She becomes a more hardline nationalist, and the nationalism tends to subsume her feminism a bit.
So I try to to trace that as well.
So, you know, it's just fascinating dealing with the complexity of the human being and trying to think about her role in history,
but of course, also how her history shaped her and how it shapes our thinking now.
So thank you. Thank you Marilyn. And again, Career and Communities of Zina was another community of impossible friends.
Yes. So yeah, thank you very much. So, um, first of all, it's wonderful being back at Oxford.
So thank you, Eugene, and everyone who organised this.
Um, it's wonderful also to see my former professors,
but also to see my former students from AOB who are now doing that, PhDs, um, here at Oxford and at Cambridge.
All right. So, um, my book tells the story of this really extraordinary circle of friends in Jerusalem who came together across religious lines,
so across Christianity, Islam and Judaism before 1948.
And, um, my book consists of two parts.
So the first part, um, I go back to I try to reconstruct in fragments what brought them together, what made their friendship possible.
And then the second part, um, I look at the afterlives of that friendship.
So what happened to them? And what happened to their friendship after 1948?
Um, and I like to think that my book is as much about the present as it is about the past.
Because, as we all know very well, this past 1948, the Nakba is not past its ongoing and Nakba, and it's an ongoing Nakba.
And, um, I felt when I was writing this book.
So it took me quite a while. Um, I felt it was an urgency, really, to telling the story because the individual lives are being lost,
not only because they are all, uh, what he called.
He's the only one who's still alive who turned 99, uh, this summer.
He's a gentleman on the left. Um, not only because of that,
but also because their lives are really being erased against the background of current ideologies in the Middle East and elsewhere,
also in Europe, maybe in the UK.
It's not as bad as in Germany, but I believe also here it is a problem that we have these ideologies of one people, one religion and one language.
Uh, so I felt there was an urgency to telling their story.
But certainly this urgency has increased since October 7th.
And the horrors, um, we are witnessing in Gaza, in Lebanon and, uh, elsewhere.
Uh, since now I use the word story because for me, it was very important to tell a story.
So I tried to liberate myself and also to encourage my students to do that from this academic straitjacket.
My book still has way too many footnotes, because at the same time,
I felt it was important to document everything carefully because there is such a battle over narratives when it comes to Israel Palestine.
Um, but for me, it was very important to tell a story.
And, um, I, uh, drew a lot of inspiration also from colleagues in creative writing, because I think we do need more storytelling, because, uh,
stories connect us across time and space as human beings,
and because stories give names and faces to a history that all too often has been reduced to numbers.
Um, and I try to. So I'm also very fascinated, um, uh, uh, obsessed a bit with life writing, with biography.
But I really try to bridge biography, which is more closely linked to literary studies, um, with micro history.
Um, so to link literature and to social sciences.
Uh, so to use this group portrait, if you want, as a lens to try to teach myself to understand better,
but also to shed light on a larger context, which is the.
Palestinian conflict. Right. Maybe I'll just say a few words about my protagonist.
So many of you in this room, I assume, are familiar with some of them.
Let me start with the one person that maybe he and the UK people are not so familiar with, which is Wolfgang Hildesheim.
He's seated in the middle, uh, of this portrait.
He was born in 1916, uh, in Hamburg, in the city that I grew up in.
Um, and he left, uh, he was born into a German Jewish family,
and he left Germany as a teenager with his parents and his sister, uh, in 1933, when the Nazis came to power.
First to London, his father, uh, negotiated with Unilever to open a factory in Haifa.
And then from London they went to, uh, Palestine.
And when he first arrived in 33 and Palestine, he was really very much moving in the German Zionist circles of his parents.
His parents were really convinced, uh, Zionists, um.
But then when he obtained a passport. This is.
So it's a whole issue of passport. Maybe we can come back to that later.
Is very intriguing also. So in 37 he obtained a Palestinian passport, um, which was issued by the British Mandate.
He immediately left, uh, went back to London to study graphic design.
But then with the outbreak of World War Two, he returned to Jerusalem.
And having lived in London in the golden 30s, maybe we can say, I don't know.
Before World War Two it was very cosmopolitan.
Uh, coming back then to Jerusalem,
he took a distance from the German Zionist circles of his parents and moved in British and Palestinian Arab circles.
And this is when he met Walid Halliday and Gibran Ibrahim Jabbar, who are seated at the far end of this portrait.
Uh, well, it was a pipe in his mouth and zebra, um, a pipe in his hand.
Um, I'm I'm sure some of you are familiar with by him.
Deborah. He later became a really, uh, well-known figure in modern Arabic literature.
Translated Shakespeare. Also painted, was an art critic, literature critic, and so on.
Well, Israeli, the great, um, Palestinian historian and public intellectual who co-founded the Institute for Palestine Studies,
which has branches today in Beirut and Washington, DC.
So, um, these people up, these three men are, uh, pretty well known.
Uh, Wolfgang Simon became very well known in post, uh, war German literature.
He returned, actually, to Europe, first to London and then to Germany in 46, convinced that his place is in Europe and not in Palestine.
Um, maybe I'll say more about that later.
So, uh, just very briefly. So he returned to London, tried to establish himself as a graphic artist in London.
Um, but that was difficult. So he had to earn some money.
He heard that the US embassy was looking for translators.
Interpreters. Uh, so he applied for a job.
He got it. And this is how he returned to Germany with the allies.
And then he worked as an interpreter in the Nuremberg trials and decided to stay in Germany.
And then he got involved with, uh, the so-called, uh, Gropius in on Third City, which is a very important literary group.
Günter Grass in a book land and so on, and started to write in German late 50s.
He was very fed up with Germany, thinking that Germany's going fascist again and left for Switzerland.
And this is where he remained until he passed away in the 90s.
Um, now, I'm not going to say more about Jabbar and Walid, but let me very briefly say something about the two women.
Uh, so, like many other women the world over.
They did not leave any publications behind.
And thus also it was very difficult to find out more about their lives.
Uh, I was very lucky that, um, uh,
Wally Kolody trusted me and gave me access to his personal archive and also to the unpublished, uh, memoirs of his wife.
Uh, in Russia. So, Russia. Salam is from a big Lebanese family who championed which championed, uh, women's emancipation and Arab nationalism.
And, um, she later married Walid.
And much later in the 80s, she wrote her memoirs.
So that helped me to really, uh, find out more about her life.
Sally Case. Uh, unfortunately, I wasn't that lucky.
And this is why also, I do not devote a chapter to Sally in my book, and we can talk more about this also.
Maybe, um, later. What do we do when we are confronted with gaps and silences in the archive?
Do we try to use our imagination to fill these gaps, or do we mark them as gaps?
How do we deal with that? Um.
All right, um, a few words about, um, the archives.
So I'm telling this story.
Um, really? Um, if you want, I try to.
To let the archive guide me. Right.
So I draw on a lot of unpublished material, as I mentioned, memoirs, photographs, letters.
Um. Um, but certainly this also means that sometimes it's a bit like a puzzle, right?
Because you find bits and pieces and then you are putting that together.
And also there are a lot of surprises. So here I was in Beirut working about this group of friends in Jerusalem.
But then the archive sent me back to Germany, to the UK, to the US, because Palestinian archives are as dispersed as Palestinians, um, themselves.
Um, all right. Maybe let me fast forward a little bit and say, um, now go back and fast forward.
So, uh, in addition to these two parts, my book has a prologue and an epilogue and the prologue,
I open my book with the King David Hotel bombing in 1946 for two reasons.
First, because this group of friends used to come together at the bar of the King David Hotel for drinks.
So this is where they used to meet regularly.
This is one of the reasons, and the last time they came together was actually the day before that bombing,
which was a terrorist attack carried out by the Irgun.
Um, and symbolically speaking, we can say that it was that bombing that made their friendship impossible.
Now, let me fast forward to my epilogue. So in my epilogue, I look at a belated correspondence between Russia and.
Wolfgang. So in Jerusalem, it was actually Wolfgang and Salih who were known as a couple.
But Russia seems to also have had a crush on Wolfgang because they all had a crush on each other.
It was fairly, uh. I mean, there are some juicy stories in my book as well.
Um, so it's, I mean, the 40s, early 40s in Jerusalem, a lot was possible, not only friendship.
So, um, yeah. So apparently she had a crush on Wolfgang back then and, um, in the 80s.
So 40 years later, after she and her husband Walid had left Beirut after 82, um, with um, 43 alien invasion and Sabra and Shatila massacres and so on.
She finds herself in the US and she starts writing her memoirs.
So those memoirs, which remain unpublished.
And, uh, when she was writing her memoirs, she reached out to Wolfgang and started this really amazing correspondence,
which I found more or less by accident in the archives.
Uh, Wolfgang's Archives, which was at the Academy of Arts in Berlin.
Um, so in this this belated correspondence, it's it's really, uh, moving, touching to see how they reconnect.
Right. And I'll just leave you now with the last letter.
In the last letter that is preserved in the archives.
Wolfgang writes to Russia that he and his wife, uh, Sylvia, that they would like to become Arabs.
But he doesn't know. He's saying. But how does one go about that?
And it took me a while. So this is in the 80s, right?
People change their messy contradictions. Uh, Wolfgang also didn't remain anti-Zionist all his life.
In 1967, unfortunately, he defended very much, um, Israel and this idea that it was fighting for its very existence and blah,
blah, blah, which we know the New Historians um, Slam is here that this is right, um, that this is not true.
So, um, uh, but in the 80s, he became, again, critical, uh.
Israeli politics critical of Israel.
And so when he writes it, he and his wife would like to become Arabs.
I had some problems really understanding first what he meant by that.
But then I read it in constellation, which something else which he wrote about his boss in Jerusalem.
He was working for the Palestine Information Office, which was kind of the British Ministry of Information at the time,
putting up exhibitions and so on, um, uh, across Palestine.
And his boss, um, Christopher Holm, who later worked for the BBC.
They became very close friends later, and at one point Wolfgang said, yes,
one could be friends or one could become friends when the colonial constellation was over.
So why? What does he mean with we would like to become Arabs?
I think what he want is saying that would like to become local, integrated into the Arab world.
But we see that this is impossible as long as this colonial constellation remains intact.
And let me just end with a few words on my book title.
So the title is borrowed from, uh, Mahmoud Darwish and his Rita poems.
And I like this idea of an impossible love or an impossible friendship,
because certainly, at least in English and Arabic doesn't really make sense like that.
But in English, the possibility of that impossible friendship is inscribed in the very word impossible.
So yeah, let me end with that. And then maybe we can go back to also some of the, uh, characters.
I like to call them my famous fight. So, uh, maybe we can go back, um, to them, uh, in the discussion.
Thank you, Sonia, and thank you all for giving us such, um, an enticing taste of your books.
And there's so much to pick out of even the small sampling you've given us.
But I going to pick up on something you've said. So, yeah, about what one does with the gaps in your documentation.
And I'm going to jump right over you,
because one of the things that's fun about your books is that you're able to write men and women into history in a way which,
uh, is all too often not done.
And so much of the history has been a history of men.
Now, Peter, you're probably guilty of that in the three books we have for us.
And I wonder what that says about the place of women in the Damascus or the Syria of Machakos time and of his life.
So where are the women in the Vishakha book?
Where are the women? I mean, they're not very present. I mean, I admit it.
And certainly this is you know, Michelle Malhotra is quite unique, as we've said.
But, you know, the amount of documentation that one can find about him for somebody in Syria of the 19th century.
But she's a man.
And, you know, one can't find for a woman, even a prominent woman like they for was one has, you know, a story with many, many more holes in it.
And the women in Machakos life, I mean, in a lot of the records that one has,
the more public records, they're even more absent than they are in my book.
So, again, you know, to go back to this question of sources, one has become a shock.
But writing his own autobiography, one has his religious polemics,
one has his correspondence with Eli Smith, his great friend, the American missionary, and has,
you know, traces of him in all sorts of other archives and descriptions of him and,
you know, bits and pieces of annotations and manuscripts and so on.
It was only towards the very end of the project that I managed to get in touch with the descendants of the family,
um, who had preserved a family archive in Damascus, which they then took abroad out of Damascus a few years ago.
Three suitcases? No. And among this one has mission massacres.
Um, private notes on family affairs, um, where he has written in the flyleaf of a book accounts of important life,
important moments in the lives of himself and members of the family.
And it was only when I found these that I could get, for instance, the original baptismal name of his wife,
who is referred to as a shopper, you know, lady or, you know, sort of honorific title in all of these public facing accounts.
And in his record of his marriage, he has her as Elizabeth a little.
Well, um, and it's the first time I found that, you know, and so it's even that level of information to find, you know, is, is is difficult.
And who was kind of who was Elizabeth? She was the daughter of another, um, you know, Greek Catholic.
In Damascus. Um, and she married Michael Michalka when she was at a very young age.
How young? 11, I think. Yeah.
And he was in his 30s. mid-Thirties. This was not uncommon.
His son, um, in the next generation, uh, had a similar, you know, age gap at the time, at the time of marriage.
And again, you know, what does one do with the bits of information that one finds about this?
There's a comment in, um, a book by another missionary later on, women of the Islands by Henry Harris Jessup saying, talking to me from a shotgun.
So. And him commenting on the fact that they used to marry at such a young age with these age gaps.
He said, well, you know, we have to train our wives to look after us.
You know, they they don't know how to look after us properly unless we have, uh, you know,
raised them up in the tradition of doing this from from being very young girls, this kind of thing.
Um, and again, there are, there are these not only gaps, but rather alienating things about the characters the one encounters.
Um, there's there's rather little about, you know, um, other female characters in history as well, unfortunately.
But I wanted you to go to the background of his marriage because it was something that came out of your book.
I certainly never saw references in his personal writings that I had access to.
And, you know, it's quite extraordinary to see him marrying someone so young.
He he sounds practically like a Trump Cabinet nominee. Thank you.
Audience. Yeah, but she she doesn't.
It's not that that she doesn't play a role, you know, or have independent views of her own because she never becomes a Protestant.
She's strongly opposed to the idea of him becoming a Protestant. I think she remains a Catholic.
And there's a later letter, one of the few places she does turn up in his correspondence with, um, Eli Smith is when he's saying,
well, she's trying to turn our son against me by, um, you know, convincing him not to be so favourable to Protestantism.
So I need to send him away to your mission school to get him out of his mother's influence.
So what that household was like, I don't know, but that's the thing one doesn't know behind the doors of the household.
But I'm going to say one thing you said, Peter, which is that, you know, this complicates to life.
You find out these details and you realise that there are some things about people that maybe you don't like.
And that comes right back to your explanation of, of, of I was and I want to come back to the question about her opposition to girls education,
and I'm wondering whether that was in any way linked to Cosima.
Mean. And the debates going on the end of the 19th century. Did I miss?
So, no. That's fine. That's a it's a good question. She was not opposed to girls education.
She uses this at a moment in 1906.
I think it is in order to try to she uses it cynically.
I wouldn't it's not necessarily opposed to it. She uses it in order to try to get another woman involved in this by network, the spider.
Well, informant network, I should say. Yeah. More of the videos.
Um, yeah. Yeah.
So she's trying to get other women involved, and, um, she entices this woman by sort of saying, oh, we're thinking of setting up a school.
Can you come to a meeting? So it's not. I don't want to say it's an opposition.
I may have I may have, um, put it badly.
No, you did say so, but it's but it's, um, you know, but she's she's using a concept, but she's really interesting on education.
She's definitely not against it, but she does not,
at least not very often and not very loudly go into the journalist discourse that
was so important and so grounding for arguments about girls education at the time.
That is, you know, the standard argument was we've got to have girls schools because we have to teach girls how to become good wives and mothers.
Um, which kind of links into what you were just saying about Elisabetta?
Um, and, you know, there was a strong focus on domestic arts or, and also, you know, okay.
Yes, you need to teach girls to read because they're going to need to do, you know, they're going to need to do some reading.
You need to teach them elementary math so that they can do the household budget.
But it was very instrumentalist. Um, now, of course, girls could use that for other purposes.
So, you know, it's it's a, it's one of these things. But, um, but she, she did not for Wes did not emphasise the maternal East.
I mean, I think, you know, one of the things that one has to do when writing a biography or any history really is also listen to the silences.
You know what? What did she not say?
And so in terms of education, I think she was she was quite canny about what she said, but she wasn't at all against, against it.
Well, keeping the focus on women in our histories, you know, I wonder, Sonya,
whether you would have chosen the five people who were the focus of your group biography,
were it not for this photograph, and specifically you were saying that for one of the two women in the photograph.
You have such a gap in the documentation. You've got so much material, you've got your diaries.
And so, you know, it's quite an interesting lens to bring as you want to frame a study,
but maybe it's just unfortunate that the one woman's in the picture,
and that there would have been another friend for whom you would have had better documentation.
Possibly. This said, I think it is actually important also to mark the gap.
So okay, to have a woman there and to have her picture.
And everyone I interviewed, I interviewed quite a lot of old man.
I have to say, um, they always pointed out that, you know, she's so good looking and I don't know what, so.
But it was really difficult to find out more about her.
But I eventually did. Um, and sometimes I think maybe I should have written a very short chapter, but she does pop up in the other chapters.
Definitely.
Um, so I feel it's a bit like, you know, um, you have a spotlight on certain characters, and then when it comes to her, she's a bit more in the dark.
Um, but she's still there and, um.
Um, yeah. So I think, um, it's important.
I agree with, uh, what Marilyn said to, um, uh, give a place also to those silences.
I actually think it adds something quite ambiguous and enticing to the group biography to have one who is a bit mysterious in that way,
for whom you don't have complete information.
And, um, of the three of our panellists, of course, you're the only one who's had the privilege to talk with one of your subjects.
And I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit more about your engagement with Valises charity,
his role in opening up Russia's writings of world to you, in the sense he really helped you make this project, realise this project.
So yeah, when I uh so first of all, I should say that I started working on Jabra because I worked on him for my PhD,
and I always felt that that was the weakest chapter.
My supervisor seems to agree, so I wanted to go back to him and, um, started working on him.
And then how, you know, sometimes things happen by accident.
So I ran into my colleague, uh, Tariq Khalid on campus.
He asked me, what are you working on? I told him Jabra, he was excited.
Told me you should meet my half brother Walid. Uh, he was friends with him in Jerusalem.
So next time, when it comes to Beirut, I meet Walid, and Walid tells me.
Yes, we were this very close group of friends and he tells me about Wolfgang and so on.
I honestly wasn't really familiar with, uh, Wolfgang.
I might even zone. He's quite well known, as I said earlier, in post-war German language literature.
So then when I was on sabbatical later in Berlin for a year, I went to check out those archives of Wolfgang Hymer in Berlin.
And this is where I found really amazing material,
beautiful letters that Jabra sent to Wolfgang in the early 50s when he was on a scholarship in Harvard,
trying to reach out after 48 to his friend, also telling him what happened to him in 48.
Um, and I found those letters between Russia and Wolfgang, and then I got in touch again with, uh, Walid and, uh, I think he.
So I went to see him a number of times afterwards in, in the US, um, and with the idea to interview him.
But then, I mean, you know what he did? He's not, like, the kind of person you can go and interview.
Right. So those interviews and I describes it a bit in my book, um, kind of turned into private tutorials.
Right. That's a format he was, uh, familiar with since he was in Oxford.
So, uh, and I was, uh, very grateful.
So I had these private tutorials. He was teaching me, uh, about the history of, uh, Palestine.
Um, so I think, um, through Walid also, I became friends with this group of friends.
Right. And he, I would say, became not only my tutor, my professor, but also, um, uh, a friend.
And he trusted me, I think, because he saw also that, that I had already done some archival research before coming to him,
and he was actually also very happy and grateful because he's also.
Writing. I mean I think he's he finished now his his own, uh memoirs and I was able to help him quite a bit with information about his friends.
Right. So things he didn't know about Wolfgang. Uh, but also in the archives, um, at a job, for example, I found a lot of material.
Uh, so. Tim. Um, Salaam. This son of Uppsala, um, uh, who is Russia's brother, uh, gave the archives of his father and grandfather to a job.
Uh, so they had lots of family photographs.
And among those photographs, I also found a number of pictures, also of Walid as a young boy and so on.
Um, so, um, yes, uh, archival research really.
I got a bit obsessed also with that.
And with my friends, I was really living day and night with them, uh, especially during Covid when I finished writing my book.
Um, so, um, yes, archival research takes you places like you travel.
Um, uh, it's it's a journey. And, um, yeah, you make a lot of friends also with archivists, but sometimes also with people you interview.
Well, you're lucky having that opportunity to actually meet and talk with one of the subjects of your I mean,
basically historical research you talk about, well, how did these Oxford experiences, they ended, what, 68 years ago with the Suez Crisis,
and he resigned his post in protest here at the Faculty of War Studies.
As it was done. I'm going to end with one that I'd like the three of you to talk about.
And then I promise, audience, I am going to open up to you. Um, because at the heart of your books are community.
And rupture. You talk about communities, Maryland, you know, you talk about the break with the Greek Catholic community and obviously, 1948,
the number scatters this community in ways that they could not have anticipated when they first forged their friendship.
So I wonder if you could talk a little bit about community and rupture in the histories that you've written.
And let's start with you, Maryland. We'll come back this way. Sure.
Um, you know, I think I think one thing that all of our books do, if I may, um, presume and you can of course,
disagree with me, is that we really break up the notion that, um, that Sonia referred to, uh, this sort of,
you know, a community defined as X, a community defined as why it's often in the Middle East, you know,
these, um, these these assumptions about communities that are defined according to religious origin.
And one of the things that's really interesting to me about Saint Louis is that now, as I said,
she is very much speaking from within a, a perspective as a believer and drawing on Islamic sources in her work.
However, she also worked with um, women of other backgrounds.
And I have a chapter on um as the the first women's magazine, the first magazine in Arabic,
1890 to Alexandria, um, that was edited by women, and it was specifically for a female audience.
And I see that journal. It's usually been ascribed to sort of one woman's initiative.
I see it as a collective project.
And the reason I'm mentioning it is that it was, you know, it was Muslim, Christian, Jewish women, um, women from Ottoman Syria and from Egypt.
Um, it was a community of a different sort and a kind of associational, um, attempt and associational project across kind of boundaries.
And so I think, um, I think that all of our work shows these, these kind of communities that might not be expected, um,
or that one might not necessarily know about until looking closely at the lives of some of these people who were involved.
But then rupture comes in not necessarily with this particular group, but, you know, as I said, I mean, for Liz,
as time went on, she got angry or about, um, as did many others about what was going on with the British occupation.
She was also very angry.
She she has a couple of articles where she very, um, sharply rebukes the elite men of Egypt for, you know, laziness and hypocrisy.
Basically, she says, you know, you're not doing enough. You're not doing what you should be doing for this, for this nation.
Um, and I suspect that that, you know, that caused some splits, but then other kinds of community.
One thing that I've learned more about due to another archive, um, another press archive,
since publishing the book, you know, this is always your nightmare, right? You know, you publish the book, it's done.
And then you're you find this great source and you're like, oh, my God.
Um, I found out that her brother was actually quite important in Masonic circles in Cairo,
which is fascinating because for Wes, her family, you know, they were really identified with the nationalists.
Um, and with that, she, she published articles in elsewhere.
Um, and, and here her brother Mohammed is like Shaheen Makarios, his right hand man, and he was a major supporter of the British.
So, you know, then you you start having to really think about what is community mean.
And of course, there's just so much we don't know because we only have the writings.
We don't we can't listen to the conversations. So, um, I don't know if that it does.
Bridge building. Bridge burning is a fascinating elements of our complex individuals and the communities in which they lived.
Peter. Yeah, I mean, it's very much a theme.
I mean, there is, I suppose early on in the Shawcross story, there is one of these rather sort of lost communities, which is the young men,
mainly Greek Catholic men in terms of their sort of formal religious affiliation, but who are like him, attracted to deist ideas.
And they're discussing Voltaire and Volney, you know, um, in, in Damietta,
probably in one of these kind of, you know, you can Michael is overlooking the Nile.
Um, and these are young men in their teens and 20s, you know, trying out these new ideas and,
um, pushing the boundaries of what you can believe, um, and, and think and again, you know,
it's perhaps a sort of counter community like that that makes you think, well, you know,
what are these boxes into which we put people in this case, religious boxes, um, you know, um, Christians.
Muslims. Jews. Catholic. Orthodox, Sunni. Shia. What happens if you open the box and you see that there's a rather messy reality inside?
Um, and that manifests itself in an individual, like the commercial shocker, but also in communities of discussion like that.
But of course, later in his life, he very much is, you know, part of a community in a more formal religious sense, which is the Protestant one.
And so he has to go through an experience of rupture to get there.
Um, and it's interesting to think of him again in Damascus.
You know, a sort of prosperous, um, Ottoman subjects, uh, with very good connections among people of many different religious communities.
Um, but even before he becomes a Protestant, having problems with the Greek Catholic community under Maximus Loom,
the reforming patriarch, defining itself in a rather more rigid way, in a way that,
um, tends to, you know, uh, sap the authority of, uh, the kind of wealthy elite families such as his own,
um, and put them more on the clerical authority and, you know, um, tell them what to do.
And he doesn't like being told what to do. In particular. He doesn't like being told what to believe.
Um, and, and so there is a kind of individualism of rupture with a new style,
communal project that nonetheless, this is a thing has to lead him in that moment into a new community,
into the Protestant community that he's then very central to actually, you know, forming as something distinct in Damascus.
So there is something of a tension, I think, um,
between him trying to forge an individual intellectual pathway and finding a way of doing this in moving between these religious communities,
which are themselves becoming more sharply defined. And you can find other examples of that at that moment,
in the sort of mid 19th century of intellectuals, I think, thinks of, uh, Ahmed Ferdowsi should.
Yeah. For instance, you know, there are many other issues one could point to, um,
who go through different transitions from one religious community to another.
Um, and in a society that is coming to define itself even more sharply than before, I think in terms of religious affiliation, in one sense,
this is then possible to, you know, as a form of individuality to find some, um, you know, through moments of rupture, if you like.
And this is that also prior to another moment when it is actually possible to think of a secular project in a secular public sphere and,
you know, defining oneself in, in that way and not having to worry so much about religious affiliation.
So it's this it's this rather kind of awkward transitional moment that is difficult to define you, uh, in terms of our later understandings.
Um, yeah. So I guess in my book I look at two different kinds of communities.
First, uh, maybe communities, the social religious communities that my protagonists were born into.
And in each chapter, I try to really also shed light on, um, that context.
And it's quite astonishing that they actually came together not only in terms of religious, um, uh, diversity,
but also really social background and class, because there you have this was kind of, you know, old Jerusalem, my family, uh, Muslim family.
Uh. Sort of aristocracy, if you want.
And Gibran, who was really, uh, who is Syriac Christian, uh, was born in the region of Adana and came as a young boy,
uh, two, three years old to Bethlehem as a refugee and was barefooted, uh, throughout his childhood.
And then really through education, scholarships, had this, uh, social mobility.
He was, uh, admitted to the Arab College, which was the highest educational institution or Arab educational institution in Palestine,
and then later obtained scholarships to go to Exeter and Cambridge, um, uh,
before he returned, um, then to teach um at his former school, uh, in Jerusalem.
So there's this social and religious, uh, uh, community's background.
But then, you know, there's friendship, which is the kind of community or the communities we build.
Right? Which depends maybe on our choices, the choices we make on our preferences and so on.
Um, um, but then this friendship really, um, which, um, became impossible or then the rupture really caused certainly by the Nakba,
that by political violence, we can say, or by with every bomb being right,
there is also the possibility of friendships that is, um, being, um, destroyed.
I talked earlier about the interviews I did with, um, well,
it was very interesting because he distinguished between the friendship that was possible between Arabs and Jews.
And we know these are categories that are not carved in stone, but were very much invented by,
uh, European and in particular British colonialism, just like the Middle East.
Right. Um, so he told me he drew a difference between this generation, where such friendship was already really rare.
I mean, he remembers a few, um, Jewish boys in his schools where Arab Jews, uh, but they didn't have much contact.
Uh, but he said the generation of his father, there was much more friendship.
Right. And he really draws a line with 1917, the Balfour Declaration and one such friendship that I look at.
But it's really on the fringes of all this. Um, but that I hope now to write an essay about, um, is the friendship between his father, Ahmad Sami,
who was the head of the Arab College, and, um, you the Magnus, who was, um, the rector, the first president of the Hebrew University.
They were friends. And it makes a lot of sense that they were friends because they were also colleagues.
They worked together. They were both the heads of the highest Jewish and, uh, Arab, uh, educational institutions.
And there were also plans of turning the Arab College into a university, but their friendship is nowhere mentioned.
Right. I mention it briefly, and now I'm writing about it.
But if you read there, I think there's 1 or 2 biographies on Magnus.
No mention of Ahmad. Um, I really think there's a reason for this, because we always read these histories as separate histories, right, Magnus?
We read in terms of Israeli history, right, and in terms of Palestinian history, but we don't read them together.
So one of the aims, what I found very intriguing, I didn't plan it like this, but just following my characters,
if you want life trajectories, made it possible for me to read these histories together.
And also because of Wolfgang Hildesheim, um, and also his experience later on as an interpreter at Nurnberg,
which really traumatised him, uh, to read together the Holocaust and the Nakba.
Not in comparison, but as linked and tangled histories.
So I was able to. It wasn't planned like this, but just like following these life trajectories.
Yes, you have to read these histories together.
So for me, that was also really eye opening.
Well. These are rich and fascinating books about rich and fascinating lives,
and I can't recommend them to you strongly enough just for your own reading pleasure.
Or who knows for a little bit of inspiration of where you might want to go next to fill the gaps in the lack of biography in this field.
But if you want to know where are the people in the history of the Middle East?
Where are the people? These books will give you a good answer.
Will you please join me in giving the very warm us to thanks to our country?
You want to mention that they're on fire upstairs and.