Sarah Irving

“Since the turn of the millennium, histories of Late Ottoman and especially Mandate Palestine have moved away from the political framing of the Arab-Israeli conflict to consider questions of society and culture, as well as, increasingly, adopting frameworks such as environmental and medical history. One of the most important voices in this movement, as a scholar and as a mentor of others’ work, has been Salim Tamari. This volume brings together new and established researchers on Late Ottoman and Mandate-era social and cultural history, many of them Palestinian, to showcase the kind of work inspired by Tamari’s legacy, to reflect on the development of these themes in the historiographical context, and to contribute to the decolonisation of Palestinian history. The contents range from considerations of tourist souvenirs and artisanal manufacture to the social history of Gaza, and from debates around cosmopolitanism in colonial Palestine to the socio-economic roles of Palestinian women.” (from abstract)

'The House of the Priest’ presents and discusses the hitherto unpublished and untranslated memoirs of Niqula Khoury, a senior member of the Orthodox Church and Arab nationalist in late Ottoman and British Mandate Palestine. It discusses the complicated relationships between language, religion, diplomacy and identity in the Middle East in the interwar period. This original annotated translation and accompanying articles provide a thorough explication of Khoury’s memoirs and their significance for the social, political and religious histories of twentieth-century Palestine and Arab relations with the Greek Orthodox church. Khoury played a major role in these dynamics as a leading member of the fight for Arab presence in the Greek-dominated clergy, and for an independent Palestine, travelling in 1937 to Eastern Europe and the League of Nations on behalf of the national movement. (

"This book examines the ways in which non-Arabic cultural influences interacted with the rich, complex and sometimes conflictual environment of the Arab world in the pre-independence era. It comprises a series of 11 detailed case studies, including topics such as the songs of Egyptian forced labourers in the British Army in World War I, the translation and commentary of an Ottoman text in interwar Palestine, and the contested use of French in the Algerian independence movement, that highlight the complex interplay of colonial pressures, traditional and novel art forms, local and international practices, notions of identity and belonging. The book demonstrates how the interaction between Arabic and non-Arabic cultural and intellectual production as well as influences from imperial Europe and the Islamic East, have in various times and spaces inspired creative tensions which challenge binary views of East-West relations and the standard imperialist-colonial frameworks. In this sense the volume seeks to offer a critique of both established modernising conceptions of cultural development and nationalist, nativist frameworks based on the values of a specific political project."--