Arguing for Political Legitimacy in a Late Ottoman City: A Fictional Literary Dialogue from Gaza, c. 1895

This annotated Dialogue provides a rare glimpse into political discourse during the reign of Sultan Abdülhamid II and an introduction to the little-known genre of Arabic political fiction. The anonymous political pamphlet was written by supporters of the Husayni family in Gaza in the mid-1890s and sent to the imperial government in Istanbul. The bitter political struggle taking place between the Husayni camp and its opponents reached Istanbul at a time when Gaza’s factionalist struggle and political unrest were coming to a head, and coincided with Ottoman-British tensions over neighboring Egypt. As a result, high-ranking officials in Jerusalem, Cairo, and Istanbul became enmeshed in Gaza’s affairs. The text takes the form of a fictional dialogue between three Muslims: Wa?iz ibn Nasuh, the narrator, a respected scholar from Gaza, and two young men from Gaza and Egypt he meets by chance on the beach outside the city. As shown in the analysis, most of the arguments presented in the text had been formulated in a petition sent earlier from Gaza to Istanbul. Through its fictional form and quotes from Arabic poetry, the anonymous Dialogue integrates individual complaints into an overarching narrative that reframes the local political conflict as a threat to the Empire at large and turns Gaza, in many respects a peripheral city, into a vital component of the Ottoman commonwealth.