STORYLINE
Palestine, also called as Holy Land, has been one of the few countries in the world which has been photographed and archived by many Armenian and Arab photographers in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Wasif Jawhariyyeh, a local musician, photographer, collector cum petty officer in the British administration of Jerusalem. He collected over 900 rare photographs from both European and local photographers in seven albums and archived them under the title Tariq Filastin Al-Musawwar or “The Illustrated History of Palestine”. The entire collection is divided into seven volumes which depicts the history of Palestine centred around its capital city Jerusalem (Al-Quds). Its Volume One opens with a photograph of the social networks of Jerusalem and their relationship with Palestinian elites, other provincial capitals, and Istanbul. Volume Two has photographs of the arrival of the British, Palestine’s new rulers, World War 1, Arab delegations, Faisal, Abdullah, negotiations, and the breakdown to the riots of Nabi Musa. Volume Three documents the violent occupation of Palestine, the Revolt of 1929, the rise of Zionist militarism and British oppression, and the internationalization of the Palestine. Volume Four is dominated by Zionist settlement, colonial occupation, and violent resistance. Volume Five comprises of large portraits of Palestinian social life around personalities and elites, social hierarchies and social networks. Volume Six rely on Orientalist images, postcards, expatriate, and static images: happy peasants, building projects, processions and religious ceremonies. The final Volume Seven continues a photographic tour of Jerusalem, building a visual tour from inside the city outward to its surroundings, linking it to Palestine and its geography.
These photographs are not just mere evidences of a particular time space but an exploration of Palestinian political, cultural and social lives. Wasif’s collection had started in 1924 comprising of many photographs of Palestine’s landscapes, buildings, people, customs, annual celebrations and historic events from famous local photographers of that time namely Khalil Raad, Garabed Krikorian, Issa Sawabini, and Daoud Saboungi. The photographs clearly capture the unjustified coloniality of the Ottomans to start with, followed by the British and then finally the Zionists. On the visual level, the photographs narrate a story of Jerusalem in which the ruling and elite classes of the Ottoman empire play a central role.
Photographs like the famous Jaffa port in 1868, Khalidi library in Jerusalem, hanging of a prisoner of war near Jaffa Gate of Jerusalem, arrival of first Ottoman war plane in Palestine, surrender of Jerusalem to the British by Mayor Husseini, destruction of Jewish homes in Jerusalem by Palestinian Arabs etc, speak about the transformation of a peaceful Palestine into a war-torn place with the advent of British colonials and Zionist immigrants from Europe. Also, numerous photographs of famous personalities of the ruling class of Ottomans, the British and Zionist stalwarts of the region add more to the story of Palestinian aristocracy. The famous photograph of Sunduq al-‘ajab (the Magic Box), by Khalil Raad, the ancestor of the magic lantern, also known as the Persian Box is one of my favourite photograph in the collection. For poorer children, and some adults, this was the cinema of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Wasif Jawhariyyeh’s seven albums function as bearers of memory, as well as testimonials for a time. They document almost five decades, during which Jerusalem and Palestine changed hands from a large Ottoman Empire to a much smaller entity ruled by the even larger British colonial empire. This time witnessed the start of Jewish Zionist immigration to the country and ended with the complete disappearance of Palestine from the map of the region. Wasif himself was a musician who played an instrument called ‘oud’. He was a singer and instrumentalist too. He participated in many musical performances staged by travelling theatrical groups from Egypt. Wasif’s albums are not just historical memories but testimonials of rejection and partition, displacement of their Holy Land right from Ottoman’s Orientalism to the British Colonialism. Jawhariyyeh’s arrangement of photographs represent the social relations and political history of Jerusalem and to a larger extent, Palestine. In doing this, the albums undertake, by default, a process of undoing, reworking the Orientalist and colonial visual narratives that erase Palestinians from their Holy Land and creation of the state now known as Israel.
My favourite quote in this book: It has been a mistake to see photographs as artifacts of the past and as documents of history alone. Rather, they survive as material objects that bind the past and present as they bind the present and future. A surviving image, in Didi-Huberman’s words, “is an image that, having lost its original use, value and meaning, nonetheless comes back, like a ghost, at a particular historical moment: a moment of ‘crisis,’ a moment when it demonstrates latency, its tenacity, its vivacity, and its ‘anthropological adhesion.’
Pros: The reader is taken through a visual journey right from the Palestine’s originality to its occupation and erasure from World Geography by the Zionist immigrants cum settlers. Some of the rare photographs can be found in this book which might not be available elsewhere for ready reference to a Palestinian studies student. Kudos to the authors for their efforts to compile such a transition of Palestine.
Cons: The book speaks about only Wasif Jawharriyeh’s collection of Palestinian photographs starting in 19th century but should have also carried a brief history of the Holy Land pre-nineteenth century when it was the land of the original Jews and used to be the land where Jesus walked until 33AD and was a Christian/Jewish state until the advent of Islam sometime in the 7th Century.
My rating: 3.5 out 5
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