The Parisian

Bosphorus

At the Ottomans’ overthrow, the streets of Jerusalem had flooded with revellers, and the citizens danced and whistled and cut down the telegraph wires to take home as trophies. But in Nablus the reaction was quite different. There the crowds gathered outside the municipal hospital, that symbol of Nablus’s modernity, not to support but to protest th

Haj Taher Kamal was a merchant because his father had been a merchant, and his father before him. Merchants were the glue that bound Nablus to the surrounding villages: for the village people they functioned as credit lines, patrons, employers, even friends; for the city dwellers they were both harbingers of novelty and pillars of tradition, and wh

crags

Sedd-el-Bahr

Gallipoli Peninsula

We are never without death, in life. You could argue we exist in a constant state of dying, like a flame, unstable, decaying. And what is sickness, therefore? Sickness is a part of life. We talk of life as renewal, but really it is decay. The fight against decay, sometimes, but decay nonetheless.”

And as the city developed its industries of soap and textiles, this became a common occurrence: the leisure time of the new capitalists expanded as their working hours decreased, and gossip started its ruinous motor into the salons of the wealthy. With such wealth came unhappiness, and with unhappiness intrigue, and the circulation of bitter jokes,

In October 1919, the unrest in Egypt was still simmering. Britain had denied her request for independence at the Peace Conference, and when the leaders of the resistance were exiled to Malta the women of Cairo marched in protest. But the general strike had at last been called off and trade was returning to healthy levels between Egypt and the Levan