Ottoman History Podcast - Palestine and India at the Dawn of Decolonization

Episode Date: February 11, 2026

with Esmat Elhalaby hosted by Susanna Ferguson | How did Palestine become central to anti-imperial movements and thought in the global south? In this episode, Esmat Elhalaby asks how Arabs and South Asians contended with the “parting gifts of empire” in the long twentieth century, often by turning to Palestine. He talks about how Arab writers in conversation with India reinvented Orientalism as a critique of empire and reinterpreted the political possibilities and limitations of Islam as a political force. We close with a discussion of Esmat’s new work on the intellectual history of Gaza, the importance of talking about “bad Palestinians,” and what it means to write history at a time of genocide.    « Click for More »

In a remarkable essay on Palestinian history, Palestinian scholar Edward Said once noted that our history is written by outsiders, and we have conceded that battle in advance. But the question remains, as historian Asmat al-Halabi puts it, which outside and which outsiders. Certainly, Al-Halabi writes, there is a world, whether the west or the north, that is hostile in its account of the Palestinian past. But there is a much larger world, the South, that has historically embraced Palestinian history and Palestinians, which has seen itself in Palestine and vice versa. That outside is the global that our scholarship has yet to account for.

El Halaby's recent book, Parting Gifts of Empire, Palestine, and India at the dawn of decolonization, is an important step towards a truly global history of Palestine and the question of Palestine that takes the global South, and particularly South Asia, as a point of focus. Esmat al-Halebi is assistant professor of transnational history at the University of Toronto. Esmat, it's a pleasure to have you. Thank you, Susie. It's a pleasure to be on. So I thought we could start today by talking about this question of which outsides. Why did it seem so urgent to you to address the way that Palestinians and Arab intellectuals who were engaged in the question of Palestine studied, wrote about, and visited South Asia over the course of the 20th century? Well, I think, you know, the ideas, the critique that Saeed and the Ibrahim Obolod and that so many people raised, which was really, you know, the critique of Orientalism, the way Palestine was represented in the relationship between Palestine's representation and its colonization was so important, right? That's something we see every day. It's why we don't read the New York Times. It's why we're, you know, constantly trying to rehumanize or re-narrate the way Palestinians are represented.

But the issue there, what ends up happening, or the artifact of that critique in Palestinian history among people who support the Palestinian cause is a kind of myopia, right? And it's like, well, well, Palestine is exceptional or Palestinian history is unique. And my interest was in connecting Palestinian history with other histories. And I think that's something that is relatively easy to recognize today because we see movements for international solidarity. We see the way people are constantly invoking analogy when talking about Palestine or genocide in Gaza or whatever, but is maybe not necessarily the primary way the history.

is written. In my book, there aren't so many Palestinians, right? The key characters outside of the introduction where Abu Lourdes and Saeed and these people are forming a kind of historiographical or theoretical backdrop, the key characters aren't Palestinians, right? There's many Arabs, there's South Asians, but people living in Palestine or born in Palestine aren't the key characters. And I think that's an important way to approach the history of Palestine, right? In part because there's so much work to be done politically to connect Palestine to its region, right, to recognize its Arabness, which is something that the so-called peace process, for example, and the historiography that emerges from it.

You know, historians are riding under the conditions of Oslo for a long time, right? So what is Palestine in that scheme? We're lucky that we don't necessarily have to do that. Our situation is genocide. But beyond its Arab context, it's international context, right? And this is something that is much larger or certainly predates 1948, right? And so that was something that I was trying to account for. And its global anti-colonial context, which it seems to be really frames the way that you talk about how writers working in Arabic engage their counterparts in South Asia, in the sense that they're both grappling with the ongoing realities of partial decomposures.

colonization, and also, as you point out, in the case of both Palestine and India, their partition in 1948. So you title the book, Parting Gifts of Empire, Palestine and India at the dawn of decolonization. And I'm wondering if we could think about empire and anti-imperialism as a kind of framework to bring Arab and South Asian intellectual history together. What do we learn from how both Arab and South Asian writers thought about what you call the parting gifts of empire? There were, you know, at least three things that were on my mind in putting these histories

together. And I should say, you know, the parting gifts of empire part of the title I stole from Edward Saeed and the Don of Decolonization part I stole from Iqbal Ahmed. And so the only sort of original contribution I have to this title is Palestine and India, which is also the part I'm least comfortable with in part because I don't think it captures necessarily the global or international conditions that I'm trying to describe. But in terms of, you know, what is the usefulness of this perspective or this kind of connection or weaving these histories together? The first thing and the sort of fundamental

thing, the reason I was first interested in looking at India is to move away from Europe, right? to de-center Europe, to look beyond European sources and European influence, which had been so important in thinking about the histories of the Nada in particular, the sort of the intellectual history of the Arabic-speaking world in the 19th century and after. And the translation of European texts, the movement of intellectuals to Europe to study, the presence of Europeans in the Arab world, either as missionaries or as colonial administrators or as travelers or whatever, that had dominated the historiography for better or worse, in the same way that Europe had dominated the Arab world. This was about the history of modernity and the history of capital and the

history of imperialism. Europe is not irrelevant. Now, Europe is small in the history of the world, though. You know what I'm talking about? Like trans-historically, big picture, it's a tiny little place, and I didn't think that it was fair to keep looking that way. So part of it was about shifting the perspective and looking about what are the, what are the connections to the east of the so-called Middle East, right? And places that call the Middle East West Asia, right, because they are east of it. Right. So for them, it's West.

And so India, for my own reasons, was the place I started looking, or South Asia in general. And I think that gives you, that's a fun and useful place to look. it turned out for me because there was this deep history. This wasn't necessarily a place that was far away. You can talk in the 20th century about the connections between the Arab world and Latin America, for example. Right. But that's really late 19th, early 20th century and after story. West and South Asia were intimately connected since, you know, the continents were touching or whatever.

You know what I'm saying? It's a long time. And it's something that was narrated. It was something that was mapped. It was some, you know, it's not like this was a new connection. And a lot of the people I studied were interested in that. So part of it was that. Okay, so Europe.

You know, forget Europe. Let's try to think about what are the Asian connections? Related to that was also to think about what are the connections beyond the standard rubrics for narrating the relationship between the Middle East and South Asia or Asia and Africa in general. and the most well documented and the strongest of which is the history of Islam. In the 19th and 20th century, the history of sort of Islamic reform or revivalism or modernism or whatever. Separate and intersecting projects that are taking place between West and South Asia and Southeast Asia and beyond.

And you can look at a lot of people and track the travel of the olama, the transformation of Islamic journals, the relationship between people from South Asia or East Asia studying in Cairo and so on. And that's really interesting and important work. But also, I thought that Islam wasn't a sufficient enough explanation for some of these relationships. And in fact, some of the people are looking at were saying that explicitly. So I wanted to look at that. And the last thing, which I kind of sort of already mentioned, was the question, of Palestine and de-exceptionalizing Palestinian history

and thinking about how Palestine is often severed from its context, both the global anti-colonial context, but even its mere sort of geographic location, right? It's the analytical approaches that we bring to Palestine, the colonialism, if you're smart, peace and conflict studies, if, you know, you're not, Palestine becomes like a sort of, you know, fake things sometimes if you get sloppy and you don't end up connecting it to other histories, other contexts, right? Palestine suddenly is, you know, the mandate context, for example, is lost or the Ottoman context is lost when we have this singular focus, you know, on Zionism and so on.

So one of the things that your book does that I thought was really interesting is to insist that Palestine, the real thing as it was understood and encountered, as well as the question, of Palestine, capital letters, becomes a kind of focus in anti-colonial thought more broadly. So we have to see that in the long 20th century moment of thinking about these parting gifts of empire, that the question of Palestine is really at the center for a lot of people, not just Arabs, but people in South Asia and elsewhere around the world. And I'm wondering if you could talk to us a little bit about what you're thinking about when you talk about anti-colonial thought. And these are things that scholars talk about in a variety of different ways. And in the book, you have a really clear-eyed vision of what this means to you.

Well, I'll get to the Palestine part second or not at all to see where this goes. I mean, look, there's a lot of enthusiasm for decolonization or decolonizing, let's say. You know, we want to decolonize everything. And that's good, actually. I'm down with that. I'm enthusiastic for that enthusiasm, right? Unfortunately, some of it is also fascist. Hindutva intellectuals, so-called,

in South Asia are very keen to decolonize, but that means, you know, cleansing their land of Muslims and so on. Meanwhile, you have academics in the West, mostly, which is to say in North America and in Europe, who want to decolonize their scholarship, their curriculum and the institutions where they work. And they do this, or they claim to do this, or they try to do this, or they desire to do this methodologically. right? It's a question of method. So it's a methodological fix for the problem. And, you know, me and probably others aren't necessarily satisfied by that relationship to decolonization and knowledge. And so in this world of decolonizing knowledge and decolonial and so on, people are very critical

of political decolonization, rightly, which is that, you know, one flag goes down and another flag goes up, British flag, French flag is going down and the flag of these independent countries are going up and nothing else changes. Now, first of all, I don't think that's necessarily true. I think that's a kind of caricature of the history of political decolonization. Moreover, that's also an old critique, right? And I think some of the people involved in the project of political decolonization were very conscious of the limits of this project. But at the same time, what ends up happening through that critique is that everything associated with the period of, political decolonization, let's say, in independent countries or whatever, which included, of course, the expansion of universities and literacy in ways that we'd never seen, doesn't get recognized and acknowledged and studied, right? In fact, it gets caricatured or ridiculed as

too attached to some mythological, excuse me, mythological project or too embedded in the coercive structure of this, yeah, all this stuff. You know, it's, it's, it's, It's like it's bad disciplining knowledge. But very few people have actually spent time thinking about what is being published in journals coming out of these new countries, these new institutes, these new centers for the production of knowledge. So I was interested in accounting for, if we're so interested now in the contemporary, and we should be, in decolonizing knowledge, I think there's probably a lot to be learned from the knowledge

projects that were associated with political decolonization. And that's something that I try to do a little bit in the book. Yeah. And it's a profound, you could say, critique or you could even say invitation. You know, I think you write in the book this idea of what is method without a project? And I think that's really something we could learn from these knowledge projects that you introduce. That method isn't really enough on its own. It has to be connected to a project of politics. And this idea that method exists independent of politics is probably a fantasy. And we should be explicit about how we see that working in our own scholarship and that of the folks we engage with in the past. So I want to dive in now to some of the key examples that you bring us to in the book,

these moments of encounter between Arabic-speaking intellectuals, many of whom are thinking about Palestine, and intellectuals, writers, and political actors in South Asia. And one of the things I found remarkable about the book is that it's very clear about not just the possibilities, but also the limitations of different kinds of what we might call South-South projects or knowledge projects that don't pass through Europe. And one example of this analysis is the case of Wadilla al-Bustani, who was born in Mount Lebanon in the 1880s, becomes an English speaker, an anglophile, and eventually part of the kind of production of Orientalist knowledge about South Asia. But you insist in the book, through your own close reading, that Wadia's India was his own. It wasn't

just a recapitulation or bad copy of what British Orientalists were producing, but that it shows us something different. So I wonder, could you tell us a little bit about that, how you read Wadia's work within and also beyond what we think we know about Orientalist scholarship? So Wadiabostani is born in the late 1880, 1886, and studies at Syrian Protestant College in Beirut, which is now the American University of Beirut, studies English and French. And then, in a that's distinct, I think, for people of his generation is, you know, enlisted in Imperial project that is associated but not exactly the same as the missionary project that's existing in Beirut.

So he ends up in Cairo, right, where he's fairly miserable, but he knows English. He's not alone, right? There are a number of what they call Syrian Christians, right, in Cairo in this period, in Cairo, but also in Sudan. who get recruited by the British colonial apparatus in Egypt. Exactly. And he's basically bored of that because he's a poet and, you know, he doesn't want to be a bureaucrat. But in any case, he keeps it up.

He ends up in Hudaida, which is also a part of the British Empire in Yemen. And then at a certain point, ends up in Bombay. And there he is actually working for a Kuwaiti merchant, right? He's no longer sort of in the employ of the British, but he's obviously still in the, in the, he's now, in the heart of the British Raj, you could say. Okay. And he's there and he gets pretty interested in Indian literature. He goes, he visits Tagore in Bengal.

He, in fact, is the first translate of Tagore into Arabic. He's writing articles about India for Al-Hilal, which is very important periodical in Cairo at this time. And then at a certain point, he's in British South Africa. And he ends up in Haifa, just as the British are ending up in Haifa because of the First World War. Now, why is this person interesting to me? Well, the connections that you might have had between Cairo and Delhi and Mecca or between Najaf and South Lebanon or whatever, these were connections that were about the olima, right, about a particular. group of Islamic scholars and about Islamic scholarship and that kind of training.

And the connections that you had that were keeping the Indian Ocean alive as a place full of Arabic and Urdu were about trade. And they were, to varying degrees, we have some written recollections of that relationship. But here you have a guy who's born in the Shuf in Lebanon, on, right, who's a Catholic, basically, who ends up in India, you know, as this kind of secular bourgeois intellectual or whatever, right? This is different. This is completely mediated by empire, right? This is a totally imperial relationship, a new imperial relationship produced by the British.

And yet it seems like Wadia makes of South Asian literature and culture something a little different than what his British peers might have made of it. So what's his take? How does he experience this journey that he sort of takes on the coattails of the British Empire? Well, initially he's, you know, like many of his generation, he's totally caught up in Orientalism, which is, you know, the peak of European knowledge. You know, if all European knowledge is the best knowledge that ever was, Orientalism is the best of the best. Right. And so he's eating that stuff up.

And it's certainly determining both his relationship to the British Empire, which he's, kind of down with and his relationship to India. And of course, this is an India that is produced in conversation between British Orientalism and Brahminical Indian intellectuals who are interested in producing a kind of monotheistic idea of Hinduism and an Indic past or whatever, through a return to the texts of the Mahabharate and the Ramayan and these sorts of things, right? So he's all about that. But he's all about that. He's also interested in, you know, the politics of Indian anti-colonialism, Easternism, and this kind of world that exists not too far from his own.

But he doesn't really get it until he ends up in Palestine right after the Balfour Declaration is publicized. And he, as someone who has spent up until that point his career in close coming. company with British colonialism is like, this is not going to turn out well for us here in Palestine. So it's the question of Palestine that really kind of causes him to understand the British imperial and Orientalist projects differently and maybe kind of start to look for something new in the Easternist texts that he's coming across in South Asia. Exactly. And, you know, he's one of the founders, for example, of the Muslim Christian Association

in Haifa, which is these organizations right at the beginning of the mandate that are of these proto-nationalist organizations, which the British shut down very quickly. He becomes interested in thinking about the possibilities of Arab collectivity, a Palestinian collectivity, a Muslim Christian unity in Palestine. But he's also using his experience in India to narrate that possibility. So that's one kind of early example of how a 20th century Arab intellectual kind of comes to engage with South Asia in a particular way. And I think Wadiah really returns us to something that we talked about earlier, which is this importance of the question and indeed the experience of Palestine in framing and in Wadiah's case reframing his engagement with

empire. So in Wadiyah's case, this kind of comes into this project of Muslim Christian solidarity that he actually draws from his experience in South Asia that's kind of crystallized by his experiences in Haifa. I want to move now to another moment in the this story, which is in the 1930s, when you describe a trip by a group of scholars, or ulama, from Cairo's great mosque university of Azhar, who go to India in 1936 as part of this kind of intercontinental conversation about what Islam could mean as a political project. Why did these Azharis go to India? And what does their experience teach us about how to think about Islam as a political force in the 20th century world?

These Azharis end up in India for a very specific reason. Basically, a year before, or in 1935, B.R. Mbedkar, who you may have heard of, a very important leader of Indian leader in general, but particularly of Dalit politics. He makes a speech where he says, I will not die a Hindu. And eventually Mbitkar converts to Buddhism, right? And many other Dalits convert to Buddhism. And we should say that Dalits are also known as untouchables. They're kind of the lowest down on the totem pole of caste politics in modern India.

Exactly. And so this gets a fair amount of publicity worldwide. This claim that Embedkar makes and, of course, sends the Indian elite in a bit of crisis, right? The Hindu elite in India into a bit of crisis. But for some Muslims in Egypt, this seems like an opportunity. Right. Well, they're like, okay, well, maybe we can convert all these Dalits to a Islam. And so they do a kind of investigation. They write to Indian Muslims and so on, and they decide

to send a delegation. And so a handful, or a little more than a handful of Azharites head to India, and make a kind of, it's a kind of, you know, fact-finding mission, you could call it, where they're trying to determine the possibility of converting Dalits to Islam. By the time they get there, they realize that that's not really the way this is going, right? That's not what And Bedkar is promoting, and that's not necessarily how even Indian Muslim sort of national organizations are approaching the question. But they nevertheless go all around India. They visit a lot of people.

They spend really most of the time with Muslims and going around to various Muslim institutions, including mosques and schools. And they end up writing this report. It's first published in Majalit al-Azhar, the magazine of the... of al-Azhar. You know, so, I mean, you know, these Azharites are, are, let's just say these guys are arriving. People are like, thanks for coming. You know what I'm saying? Like they're, these, this is seen as a group of important scholars from Cairo

who are coming to, to study the state of Indian Islam or to think about India. They write this report, and the report is extremely condescending towards Indian Muslims. It's basically like, these guys, they're not quite like us, right? They have these various practices, which we're not really into. We think they should change, right? They're fairly explicit about that. And the response among some Indians is, you know, what the hell? I mean, we open our arms to you, we open our doors to you and so on and so forth. We expect this from white people. They literally say that, right? Well, we don't expect it from you. And I think that's revealing. And it's one thing that I try to think about,

out in the book a little bit, and especially in that chapter, is, you know, we have a kind of idea of the global or whatever, of connection as good, right? Connection is good. Globalization, if that's a thing, is a good thing. It's going to, you know, everyone going to have McDonald's and therefore everyone's going to have democracy or whatever. But I think what's clear about this moment and what this particular episode reveals is the extent to where it's the extent to which meeting people who are kind of far away and different for the first time also produced, also revealed that difference, right? And so an idea that there was some kind of homogenous Muslim thing out there was revealed to these people as not being true, right? And the response was actually,

you know, we're not going to celebrate this heterogeneinated, you know, that kind of stuff, that we're going to, we're against that. And so thinking about the kind of sort of tensions and actual encounters that existed within and underneath and beyond this idea of a kind of global Muslim Ummah or Muslim community that could be raised to anti-colonial action, which is something that other scholars have discussed. In other words, it wasn't always so easy. Totally. And you know, for people sympathetic to the left, you know, you want to lay claim on the international, right? That was, it was something that you were trying to make happen. but actually international there wasn't always a liberatory thing it had to be made that way right so

through specific engagements and I think that's maybe an idea that could resonate beyond this specific example exactly so I want to turn now to the question of Palestine which we talked about a little bit with Wadi al-Bustani why is it that Palestine comes to the center of Arab engagements with South Asia and vice versa over the 20th century in this era of decolonization. And what does that mean for different formations of anti-colonial thought? So Palestine, I think, comes into the picture in a few different ways. I mean, one thing that turns Arabs in general, I think, away from Europe and the West and indeed the East as represented by the Soviet Union.

that east, right, but not the real east or whatever, not Asia, let's say, is the partition of Palestine in 1948, right, which is supported both by the United States and by the Soviet Union. This has a devastating effect, right, on communists, first in Palestine and the rest of the Arab world and on the fortunes of communism afterwards, although there's a lot to be said about, you know, the persistence of communist movements in the Arab world. after that, I think sometimes they get written off and they shouldn't. And that's one thing I've been interested in doing more recently. But beyond communism.

For a lot of Arab intellectuals and Arab political movements, there is then a search for different places for support that is beyond the United States and the Soviet Union or the so-called two blocks of the Cold War, right? And for some that was India, for a lot of people that was, India. I mean, worldwide or among the third world, because it was seen as a kind of successful project of, you know, decolonizing political sovereignty and industrialization and, you know, education. And you had the charismatic figure of Nehru and so on. You had a large population,

et cetera, et cetera, right? Even though India itself had been partitioned in 1948? Yeah. So that's, that introduces a certain complexity in the Arab case, right? Because what were they, What was the other country? It was Pakistan, which was a Muslim country, right? And so actually, for a lot of Arabs, Pakistan was seen as a natural ally. And to get into the political history a bit, which isn't necessarily foregrounded in the book, after the Suaz crisis, as it's known, in 1956, the UK and France and Israel invading Egypt, India plays a big role diplomatically in putting that on the agenda.

on an international scale. And Nehru was very vocal and so on. And a lot of Arabs, after that point, come to recognize India as a very important political ally and interesting place. And there's some interesting examples of that in the book. So that's one reason is, you know, the Soviet Union and the problems with Soviet support for Israel.

So that really forces Arab intellectuals and other anti-colonial thinkers to look for a left vision not tied to the USSR, right? That betrayal really challenges their relationship to a communism articulated by the Soviet Union. Well, some, I should say. I mean, you know, so the, the guy who I really look at in the book is Clovis Maksul. And, you know, a lot of Arab intellectuals are not looking for anything left, right? So that's part of the problem. I mean, so you have, you have right-wing Arab intellectuals or right-wing Arab political figures like Hajimina al-Husaini, right, who's very popular among Zionists, but not necessarily among Palestinians,

who is also looking for other allies in the East and in other places through his kind of international Muslim projects. But this is not someone who's interested in the same projects of liberation that someone like Clovis Maksud, who is a socialist, is. right, Hajjima al-Hassani is an enemy of the working classes and of communism, right? Maksud is anti-Soviet. There's no doubt about that, right? And we can talk about sort of non-alignment. Yeah, you describe Klovis Maksud in the book as perhaps the most articulate theorist of non-alignment in Arabic, which is a fascinating designation for a person that a lot of people, even maybe historians of the region,

don't really know a lot about. What was his vision of non-alignment? What was the project as he saw it? So Clovis Maksud for the uninitiated, and Clovis, you know, is a funny name for an Arab, but that was his name. He was actually born in the United States, as some Syrians, Lebanese were in the first half of the 20th century, but grew up mostly in Lebanon and then studied in the U.S. and the UK. And he, I think, is, I say that about him, in part because he devotes considerable amount of time, especially in the first part of his career. in theorizing non-alignment, theorizing was known as the third force, right, in thinking about how a place like India or examples like even China's might be useful for Arabs to look at in their unfinished project of liberation, right? That's key, right? This is something that, this is why I'm so keen on salvaging or recovering or whatever to use that kind of language, the histories of political decolonization, because this, it's not like,

I'm not trying to romanticize it. What some people do, there's no doubt. Someone like Maksud is one of the keenest critics of these Arab states, right? Nevertheless, he ends up writing all this sort of stuff, but he's also very much attached to India, right? He's, he ends up, he's first like a visiting professor in New Delhi, and later he becomes the Arab League's ambassador to India. And in that role, He builds these very close relationships with other Indian intellectuals who are like-minded. And he speaks extensively to public audiences. And he creates a kind of center of Arab thinking and Indo-Arab interaction in Delhi in the form of the Arab League embassy in India, which starts to publish a magazine, which gets a lot of Indian readers.

And anyone who's familiar with the history of the Arab League will be surprised to hear all this because the Arab League is generally a fairly useless institution. But again, if you attend to this kind of intellectual or cultural project, you can then find some of the more interesting things. Like, for example, even the cover of my book, which is a painting of Palestinian guerrilla done by the great modernist painter Zain al-Abedeen from Bengal. this was commissioned by the Arab League's office in New Delhi in 1970 when he was sent to Jordan to make these images of Palestinian refugees. You can find these intellectual and cultural connections, which I think are significant, and speak to the depth of popular support for a kind of non-alignment or third-worldism or Afro-Asianism to collapse all these things, which I'm keen to do, to be honest.

which is missing from the political histories, especially the cynical and racist political histories which exist. Yeah, you write in the book, I think, that figures like Clavis Maksud help us to see a popular Nine Alignment, and this is your quote, that was sustained not simply by the charisma of national fathers, but by the continuous efforts to imagine new institutions and write new histories. So this is a much more broad and popular account of what non-alignment needed to mean

beyond the works of major heads of state, Gamal Abdonasur of Egypt, Julius Nayre of Tanzania, what non-in alignment needed to mean to make a new world that maybe we haven't paid enough attention to in the past. I mean, we paid no attention to them. I mean, maybe the evidence for that is that I had not ever read anything about Clovis Muxud before now. And he's like one of the most famous guys in the whole book. The irony, I mean, my last chapter, which is the most sort of nation-based chapter,

which looks at the development of West Asian studies or Islamic Studies in India. India and mostly looks at a set of sort of Indian Muslim intellectuals post-47 who are developing the institutions for the study of the Arab world in India. These are people that wrote extensively in English and in Urdu that the Indian historiography has not touched, right, has never come to it, in part because of a kind of structural Islamophobia in Indian historiography. And also because of the kind of nationalist frame of history writing in many places, right? it seems to me that the anglophone history, at least, of Arab thought also hasn't grappled with any of these folks in a serious way.

That's another story. And I think that, you know, that gets to the question of Europe and it's dominance. So I want to zoom out here at the end of our conversation to ask you a little bit more about what it is to write the history of Palestine at this moment. And to think about what it is that you're working on now, which is an intellectual history of Gaza. And to do that, I want to quote a brief passage from the book that really stuck with me, where you write, that Palestinianness is constitutive of a set of values and practices related to a struggle for freedom that is echoed in the work and writing of Jean-Genei, Francois Kestaman, Rosemary Sayre, and Iqbal Ahmad. I found this framing very generative and also different from some of the other articulations of what Palestinianness means in scholarship in this moment. So can you say more about what you

meant by that and how you came to that perspective? You know, right before that quotation I mentioned Fais Ahmed Fais, who spent time in Beirut among Palestinians. This is when he's exiled from Pakistan. And he says in an interview once something like, you know, I spent so much time with the Palestinians or I spent this time among the Palestinians, I became one of them. And all these other people I mentioned, Iqbal Ahmed, Rosemary Sayyah, and others all said similar sorts of things, right?

And I found that very striking, in part because you don't necessarily hear that about too many other peoples, let's say, and in part because I agreed, right, that they were, why not? I think that's one of the virtues of Palestine, right? I mean, if Palestine is going to be useful analytically, and I'm not always sure that it is when people try to think of Palestine as a kind of way to view the world. But if it's going to be, then we have to really sort of grab onto it and make it into something that offers something new in terms of of our political imagination. Something beyond a kind of ethnic belonging then perhaps?

100%, which is not to discount the social belonging to the land that Palestinians have, but it's also to say that we have an opportunity, I think, as a collectivity, to demand something more of the world, in part because the world has come to us so often, right? I mean, look at how many histories we can tell of solidarity with the Palestinian people. Now, part of it is because of the long history of colonization. of the Palestinian people, right? As I mentioned, I think in the book, Palestine comes up so often in meetings of Afro-Asian states and so on, because it hasn't ended. Of course, there's another

resolution for the liberation of Palestine because it's still a topic of concern. Unlike, for example, Algeria or other countries or Vietnam, where it comes into the scene and then retreats, because the war of liberation is successful, Palestine persists. So you have a long history of solidarity. There is Palestinian solidarity with other peoples. but not at this scale, right? And so I think it's incumbent on Palestinians when you see that kind of solidarity to do something with it and to imagine Palestinianness beyond our own specific history in one place. So maybe I could ask you then about your new project, an intellectual history of Gaza,

which you've published a bit about already. And Gaza is obviously where your own family is from, many of whom are now living and dying in Israel's ongoing genocide. And in particular, the work has focused on family member and Palestinian writer from the 1920s, Himmi Abushabin, who signed much of his writing in the press as Afrit or Mischievous Demon, a kind of gadfly, which I really like. Abushabin is an interesting character. He's a critic of the British occupation and of Zionism, which he sees as the kind of colonizing force in his land. But he's also a critic and a really sharp critic of the Palestinian elite. And just to give one example that I found pretty hilarious,

in 1931-32, Abu Shabin really takes kind of a dig at Hajan al-Hasani's world Islamic Congress that he convenes in Jerusalem. And we mentioned that Hussein earlier. He's kind of an unpopular figure because he gets appointed to this position that the British basically invents the grand mufti of Jerusalem. So he's seen by many Palestinians and still is by historians of various stripes as complicit with the British colonial project. So here's Abu Shaban in your translation. I advise you to stop holding these ridiculous conferences. There is no one left in Palestine who has not become a representative of a conference

or a member of an executive committee. Do not learn your politics from your current leaders, for theirs is a politics of holding chairs after the flood. Learn your politics from Gandhi and Gandhi's youth and Gandhi's children. And then you will be guided to genuine patriotism. So obviously here we see the Indian connection and the sort of broader anti-colonial imaginary that we've been talking about. But beyond this, what's at stake for you in recuperating work like Abu Shaban's?

I mean, there are many reasons, but I think that the key reason for me, especially in the case of Halma Abushaban, is precisely this figure of the demon and of Afrit. In part because there is, again, a tendency when thinking about Palestine and Palestinians, either they're noble savages. I mean, well, either they're terrorists or whatever. That, okay, forget that. But let's say people sympathetic to the Palestinian cause, right? The poor, innocent Palestinians, it's too bad what happened to them. You know, they're just trying to live. And it's like, well, you know, I think I'm interested in bad Palestinians, right? I think, you know, that's a history that needs to be recognized. Palestinians in that way

are like everyone else. And someone like Helmi, who is explicitly taking on that position as Afrit, as mischief maker, as demon, is, I think, an important example to bring in to the present. So that's one reason. I don't think Palestinian history needs to be this kind of deodorized history of good Palestinians. The other reason I'm interested in writing this work, and Abu Shahban is one figure of many. He's sort of the first chapter of this new book that goes into the 21st century, is to think about the history of Gaza as a place where you do have writing and writers. All the work is interested in poets and how Palestinian poets in Gaza also produced works of history,

histories of Gaza, right? So much of the histories of Gaza, and we've had an explosion of books on Gaza, or at least with Gaza in the title, I would say, in the last two years. An explosion of books with Gaza and the title, right? Because that's what publishers are interested in, and that's what writers who are interested in publishing will write about. But there has been very little engagement with, first, Palestinian writers from Gaza in the first place, and we could say Palestinian writers in general.

And second, for historians, historians of Gaza and Gazaan historians have been completely ignored. And there's a substantial Arabic historiography of Gaza, and nobody's looking at it. And it strikes me that this really resonates with the first book in the sense that, and you know, it sounds heartbreakingly obvious, but it hasn't really been done from an intellectual history standpoint in English. In the sense that it shows that Palestine's a place like any other place, it's full of intellectual engagement and critique and debate and gadflies and internal questioning of what's the vision, what are we doing here.

And it's also the object of an enormous body of scholars. written in Arabic, often by Gazans, which has a lot to teach us. And not engaging that scholarship and that space of debate is a real lost opportunity. So maybe I could just close by asking more generally, and this is sort of a personal question, but what it is to write Palestinian and Gaza history right now, as in the way you sometimes describe yourself as a son of Gaza? What sort of keeps you going? I mean, it's a hard question to answer. I mean, I think, you know, like for so many people, the last two years or so have been, you know, the worst two years of my life. I finished this book under those conditions, right? So they were also

at the forefront of my mind when I was writing the introduction and revising and so on. And certainly now as I've been working on the history of Gaza, which is something I've been thinking about and researching for a long time, but I never got to in part because I was writing this other book. And so, you know, I think there are a few different ways to think about what what keeps me going. We can talk in more general terms about the question of responsibility, which might fall on all kinds of people with a profession, right? And I happen to be, you know, a worker in a university and a relatively privileged worker on the international scale. And because of that, I think I have a certain ethical responsibility to describe what's happening in the present

and its relationship to the past in clear terms for the public. And that also might mean I have an ethical responsibility to those who are writing in Arabic or those who are, you know, being killed by Israel or even to my family. There's also, I think, for me, interest in all those people who have been eager to buy and read those books with Gaza in the title. I think it's great that people are interested in Palestine and want to read more about Palestine and want to free Palestine. I'm that, these are all things. These are all things that I've devoted my life to. So why shouldn't more people do it? At the same time, I can see the various ways that what is out there has been inadequate. I mean, the reason that I

came to this project in the way that it is, this interest in poets and poetry. And Hulbi of Abu Shabban is many things, but he's also a poet. And Ma'inip Sez, who I also write about is also a poet, is because I've noticed the amount of Palestinian poetry that has circulated in the last couple of years on the internet at protests all over. People are reciting Palestinian poetry. People are interested in Palestinian poetry. But actually, what's available for them to read is very little, both in terms of poetry, but also other genres, right? And this also speaks to the political economy of publishing. And it's much easier to publish Palestinian poetry or Arab poetry or poetry and translation in general than it is works of political theory or history or criticism

that I think are sometimes harder to circulate. So I'm interested in bringing that more forward. And really rendering deeper, more complex and even more human, the view that people reading in English are able to have of Palestinian and Gassan intellectual life. And that does seem to me to be as worthy of a project as any project of reading and writing could be at this moment. So I'm eager to read the new work as it comes out. And I want to thank you very much for taking the time to come on the podcast. podcast. Thank you. Thank you, Susie. It's a real, real honor and pleasure.

For listeners who want to find out more, I really recommend picking up Asmat al-Halabi's recent book, parting gifts of empire, Palestine, and India at the dawn of decolonization. We'll also post a bibliography on our website, www. www.oddottomanhistorypodcast.com, where you can keep up with all of our recent episodes and join our broad community of listeners. Thanks very much, and until next time, take care.