Centering Place in Tawfiq Canaan’s Literary Cartography

Abstract

In the early-twentieth century, Palestinian physician and ethnographer Tawfiq Canaan published roughly forty-five studies on the cultural and narrative traditions of the largest section of Palestinian society, the fellaheen (peasantry). In this article, the author examines how Canaan’s expansive collection of stories related to holy sites across Palestine in Mohammedan Saints and Sanctuaries in Palestine (1927) produces a provocative literary cartography—a narrative that operates much like a map. In so doing, she contends that Canaan both contests orientalist constructions of the Holy Land as frozen in biblical time and, critically, unsettles the very spatiotemporal logic governing dominant colonial narrations of place. This epistemic shift, the author concludes, is the result of Canaan’s recentering of Indigenous Palestinian place-based knowledge as both the subject and method of his study. This approach offers instructive lessons applicable within and beyond the disciplinary, regional, and temporal boundaries that have so far circumscribed the study and reception of Canaan’s work.

Keywords:

• land
• indigeneity
• narrative
• epistemology
• place
• cartography
• space

The harvest of the corn and the period spent in the vineyards and the time of gathering the olives are always occasions of joy. Men, women and children are busily occupied … Children spend the whole day in the fresh air playing barefooted and with head uncovered. In the evening the male members of the family return from their daily work and spend the night in the vineyard. The joyous songs and exuberant health are ample proof of the happiness of the people in this simple life.¹

In the early-twentieth century, the Palestinian physician and ethnographer Tawfiq Canaan (1882–1964) published roughly forty-five studies on the cultural practices and narrative traditions of the largest section of Palestinian society, the fellaheen (peasantry or farmers), who constituted approximately 80 percent of the Palestinian population at the time.² An idyllic longing reverberates throughout Canaan’s corpus. The above citation from “Plant-Lore in Palestinian Superstition,” first published in 1928 in the Journal of the Palestine Oriental Society (JPOS), illustrates this nostalgia for the still present but threatened traditional ways of Palestinian life. In a landscape broadly subjected to the exploits of European colonization and, in particular, to the authority of the British Mandate that seized control of Palestine a decade prior to the publication of “Plant-Lore in Palestinian Superstition,” Canaan signals an acute apprehension of erasure.³ This concern also surfaces in one of his most expansive studies, Mohammedan Saints and Sanctuaries in Palestine (1927),⁴ also first released serially by JPOS. “The primitive features of Palestine,” warns Canaan, “are disappearing so quickly that before long most of them will be forgotten.”⁵

In Saints and Sanctuaries, Canaan identifies himself as “a son of the country.”⁶ He was born to an influential Protestant family in the small town of Beit Jala in the Bethlehem governorate, and partook of a class status and religious affiliation removed from the majority fellah population about whom he wrote and who he treated as a physician throughout his career.⁷ As Mitri Raheb notes in the introduction to Canaan’s autobiography, this positionality compelled him “to act as a cultural broker.”⁸ Dedication to cultural translation, however, also dominated the nahda (the period of Arab “awakening”) from which Canaan emerged as an ethnographic scholar. This cultural and political movement, spanning the mid-nineteenth to early-twentieth centuries, was characterized by the construction of the so-called binary between a traditional East and a modern West—a negative ontology inherited from orientalist discourse that produces the Self and Other in strictly opposing terms. Many nahda scholars, while challenging the negative stereotypes produced by this paradigm, internalized its ideological premise of the East/West binary as opposing ethno-spatial and -temporal spheres. Arab scholars in this period were, consequently, often engaged in modifying rather than rejecting orientalist discourse, particularly as a tool through which to instill pride in Arab cultural heritage and advance national independence movements.

Writing within orientalist discourse, scholarship on the “East,” like that published in JPOS, could therefore as much idealize as dehumanize the Palestinian fellah as an archaic remnant of a biblical past. Such essentializations emerge in Canaan’s association of the fellah with Palestine’s “primitive features,” characterized by the “happiness” of the fellah’s “simple” bucolic life. This romantic tendency is suggestive of what Sherene Seikaly calls an “impulse for nostalgia, mourning, and idealization of pre-Nakba Palestine” that threatens to “flatten the topography of Palestinian social life.”⁹ Even while Canaan’s ethnographies were produced primarily in the 1920s and 1930s—that is, before the 1948 Nakba of Palestinian displacement, erasure, and exile—his apprehension of disappearance evinces a similar nostalgic foreboding. Although essentializing tropes salient in orientalist discourse are evident in Canaan’s ethnographic work, it is his interpolation of this discourse—contesting erasure and asserting Palestinian peoplehood, territorial grounding, and rooted presence—that invites critical reexamination.

In this article, I argue that Canaan’s Saints and Sanctuaries elucidates the physical and storied construction of Palestinian place. By cataloguing the topographical markers of sacred sites (the “shrine, tomb, tree, shrub, cave, spring, well, rock [and] stone”¹⁰), Canaan’s collection of what I call Palestinian land narratives¹¹ produces a provocative literary cartography—a narrative that operates much like a map. Critically, this literary cartography not only contests the colonial remaking and erasure of Palestinian space-time, but also unsettles the very spatiotemporal logic governing dominant Western narrations of place. This epistemic shift, I conclude, is the result of Canaan’s recentering of Indigenous Palestinian place-based knowledge as both the subject and method of his study. This approach offers instructive lessons applicable within and beyond the disciplinary, regional, and temporal boundaries that have often circumscribed the study and reception of Canaan’s work. That is, the existing literature on Canaan has primarily focused on his advancements in the fields of ethnography and medicine in the early-twentieth century.¹² In addition to biographical information, these studies often describe aspects of his intellectual and cultural labor, including his collection of traditional amulets,¹³ personal photographs,¹⁴ and descriptions of Palestine’s sacred trees.¹⁵

However, this article contributes to the few examinations of Canaan’s corpus that offer more critical analysis. Namely, it joins two of the most sustained and insightful examinations of Canaan’s work that broaden its scope and reception beyond the study of Mandate Palestine: Sarah Irving’s dissertation, “Intellectual Networks, Language and Knowledge under Colonialism: The Work of Stephan Stephan, Elias Haddad and Tawfiq Canaan in Palestine, 1909–1948,” and Salim Tamari’s chapter on Canaan in Mountain against the Sea: Essays on Palestinian Society and Culture. Irving argues for the importance of both locating scholars in “their intellectual and political environments” and of “using non-elite genres—including language manuals, travel guides and translations—in researching intellectual history.”¹⁶ Her study builds upon Tamari’s work, which establishes Canaan’s positionality as a Palestinian, navigating Western political and intellectual frameworks. Here, Tamari identifies and names Canaan’s approach as “al-ithnughrafiya al-judhuriyyah,”¹⁷ which he translates as “nativist ethnography,” but which may also be literally translated as rooted or radical ethnography, uplifting, as Tamari argues, the deep-seated “living tradition[s]” of Palestinian life upon the land.¹⁸ In so doing, Tamari and Irving open a new space for examining how Canaan’s interventions may not only contest the stereotypes and distortions produced by orientalist discourse, but also how his work—however subtly—may also subvert its very organizing logics.¹⁹ It is within this alternative reading of Canaan’s work that this article is situated.

Palestinian Land Narrative

In Native Women and Land: Narratives of Dispossession and Resurgence, Cree scholar Stephanie Fitzgerald elaborates a Native tradition of “land narrative”—stories “made legible through landscapes, waterways, and other geographic features,” which are “imbued with spiritual power and Indigenous knowledge.”²⁰ Fitzgerald explains that land narratives are living entities, “created and re-created” over time, that have come to assume both regenerative and disruptive potentialities.²¹ In other words, land narratives are both living archives (produced in the face of and irrespective of colonial conquest) and counternarratives to settler-colonial place-making, exposing the latter’s dependence upon Indigenous removal and erasure. These characteristics of land narrative—made legible by physical space, possessing “spiritual power and Indigenous knowledge” and “created and re-created” over time—are salient across Canaan’s Saints and Sanctuaries. As historian Khalid Nashef explains, Canaan’s study of Palestinian place-based narratives elucidates “the physical expression of popular beliefs”²² evidenced, for instance, in Canaan’s recounting of the tale of “Sittnā el-Ghārah” (“Our Lady of the Laurel Tree”). In 1917, this sacred figure, long venerated at a laurel tree east of the village of Beit Nuba (near present-day al-Ramla), is said to have appeared during the British invasion of Palestine “standing on the top of her tree, with a greenish garment, a light head-shawl and a sword in her hand, which dripped with blood,” and whenever “the English troops advanced she threw them back.”²³ As this story illustrates, land narratives are responsive to contemporary events, and as such, their endurance across time and space is a product of resilience and adaptivity.

In another instance of land narrative, Canaan explores the sanctity of wells and springs due to the importance of water and the mystery attributed to naturally flowing fonts of life. He recounts a tale of Mary at the well (bir), associated with two sacred spaces in the Bethlehem area: Bir ‘Onah (The Well of Help) in Beit Jala and Bir al-Sayyida (The Well of the Lady) in Beit Sahour. Recounting the tale of Bir ‘Onah, Canaan writes:

While the Virgin was carrying her child on a hot summer day, she passed the valley beside Bêt Djâlâ [Beit Jala]. She and her baby became thirsty, but on reaching a well she discovered that it was dry. The Virgin bent over the brim and said: intlî yâ bîr layšrab el-walad eṣ-ṣghîr,²⁴ “become full, O well, so that the young child may drink!” The water began immediately to flow to the brim. St. Mary and Christ bent down and quenched their thirst. The impressions of the knees of both, and those of the hands of Mary remained in the rock. From that time on it was also observed that the brim became dyed red on the feast of the Virgin. The well received the name Bîr ‘Ônâh, “the well of Help,” since it responded to the call of the Virgin.²⁵

In his study of Bethlehemite folklore, mid-twentieth century Palestinian folklorist Issa Massou relates a similar story about another sacred well, Bir al-Sayyida. Recording the Virgin Mary’s similar invocation (“Ya bir fur fur, lashrab minnak u ghur/O well overflow overflow; so that I can drink, then sink”²⁶), Massou addresses a divergent detail that distinguishes the two stories. At Bir al-Sayyida, when refused water by a woman attending the well, Mary punishes her entire family line by uttering an “imprecation that their number should never exceed forty.”²⁷ Massou indicates that the story of Bir ‘Onah “links up in most of its details” with Bir al-Sayyida in Beit Sahour, apart from this imprecation.²⁸ These kinds of similar motifs, which diverge in plot details but not root structure, resonate throughout Canaan and Massou’s studies; however, Canaan’s Saints and Sanctuaries stands out for his organization of land narrative by geographical motifs, imbedding Palestinian sacred stories in the land’s natural topography (trees, water courses, caves, stones, etc.), rather than by plot, character, or region, as in Massou’s study focusing on Bethlehem and its surroundings.

Canaan identifies four enduring characteristics of Palestinian land narratives evidenced by the “Lady of the Laurel Tree” and the tales of Mary’s wells: the frequent role of natural topography in defining sacred spaces; the allocation of a waliy (saint or sacred person) who protects and is venerated at these sites; sacred events, appearances, or powers attributed to the sacred space and waliy; and the possibility of joint veneration at sanctuaries shared across the Abrahamic faith traditions.²⁹ This framework, which accommodates the sedimentation of narrative traditions in place, stipulates that Palestine’s natural terrain has been integral to the formation of its people’s religious folklore and collective identity. Canaan centralizes the role of nature in shaping sacred spaces within Palestine as a principal characteristic of its land narratives, stating: “We rarely find a holy shrine which is not directly attached to a tree, cave, spring or well.”³⁰ These sacred stories, embedded in the natural topography, give narrative shape to the life-generating forces of Palestine’s terrain.

In chronicling land narrative by geographic motifs and tracing their variations across Palestine, Canaan preserves an invaluable archive of practices that root Palestinian collective daily life in the land. Many of these village spaces have been razed to the ground by Israel since 1948,³¹ and those villages whose remains are still visible are often erased as ruins that, when returned to the present through “preservation,” are twice desecrated as relics from a lost time and people—for instance, the village mosque or church turned into an Israeli bar, restaurant, art gallery, or museum.³² As Rana Barakat argues in her examination of the “preserved” Palestinian village of Lifta, it is not the relics of these villages that persevere in Palestinian memory, but rather the remembrance of life-giving practices in communal space. Barakat recounts, for instance, how the importance of Lifta’s bir persists in the memories and imaginations of its villagers who were displaced, expelled, and exiled in 1948. Land narrative, like memories of Lifta’s bir, Barakat argues, “steal [it] away from the world of symbols and metaphor of death and bring it back into the world of life and living.”³³ Canaan similarly privileges this mode of Palestinian de-ruination by chronicling extant narrative practices in the “world of life and living”—that is, through giving attention to the details and variations of regional practices over time, and the location of these rites and practices within Palestine’s wider sociohistorical context. As such, he illustrates the enduring place-centered construction of Palestinian peoplehood by mapping an alternate conception of ongoing Palestinian time into an ongoing and deeply sedimented Palestinian place. Examining Canaan’s work through this lens of spatiotemporal mapping in particular exposes how he confronts orientalist, archaic, and static constructions of Palestinian space-time.

Orientalist Cartography vs. Canaan’s Literary Cartography

In the nineteenth century, during what Beshara Doumani calls the “biblical rediscovery of Palestine,” European scholars produced more studies on the Holy Land than any other Arab region apart from Egypt.³⁴ The Palestine Exploration Fund (PEF), founded in London in 1865 under the patronage of Queen Victoria, significantly contributed to this project. Its central goal was to generate knowledge about the Holy Land—a kind of spatial exercise in biblical exegesis—intensively cataloguing Palestine’s topography and people. From 1871 to 1878, the PEF conducted its first project, the “Survey of Western Palestine,” which was an expansive mapping project characteristic of biblical orientalists’ acute interest in antiquity and emphasis on scientific accuracy. This survey, figuratively, historically, and scientifically, brought the Holy Land under British domain,³⁵ producing reductive narratives and images of the Palestinian geography and fellaheen as examples of what Tamari calls the “living Bible,”³⁶ as though perfectly preserved remnants from an archaic time—remnants that resembled the ruins unearthed by the orientalist archeological expeditions of the time in their attempt to resurrect biblical space.³⁷

While appreciative of Palestine’s religious and scholarly value, those leading the PEF’s cartographic expeditions were often disdainful of the actual land and its people.³⁸ The Palestinian body, mind, and terrain were imagined as interconnected subjects of British reform and control. The colonial narrative of developing the land—which conceived of both the land and its inhabitants as the targets of “progress”—was spurred by Britain’s cartographic revolution in the late-sixteenth century, when widescale mapping facilitated the enclosure of private territory, and was later advanced by colonial-mapping projects as a tool for installing modern systems of land management, property law, borders, and transit.³⁹ It is therefore unsurprising that cartographic expeditions in the late-nineteenth century, like those of the PEF, were intimately linked to the 1916 Sykes-Picot Agreement, the secret treaty signed by French and British colonial forces on a map that divided Arab lands, and the subsequent British occupation of Palestine in 1917.⁴⁰

It was into this terrain of orientalist spatial constitution—what Edward Said calls the colonial “imaginative geography”⁴¹—that Canaan emerged as a scholar of Palestinian ethnography in the 1920s. The Palestine Oriental Society (POS) was the main venue through which Canaan contributed to archiving and codifying Palestinian ethnography. Founded by the American biblical scholar Albert Tobias Clay in 1920, the mission of the POS—the “cultivation and publication of researches on the ancient Orient”—nearly replicates that of the PEF in the 1870s.⁴² Canaan served on the POS board and published extensively in JPOS for almost two decades.⁴³ Although orientalist ideology and method are therefore evident in Canaan’s ethnographic writing—especially in his intensive categorization of the fellaheen’s spaces, and his recourse to idyllic and reductive characterizations of their life—an important nuance emerges in Canaan’s narration of Palestinian space-time. That is, Canaan’s collection of land narratives articulates the materiality, alterability, and sedimentation of Palestinian cultural practices over time rather than characterizing the Holy Land by an inert biblical primitivity.

In Saints and Sanctuaries, Canaan identifies how popular practices and sacred narratives are “common to both [Muslims] and Christians among the Palestinian peasantry,”⁴⁴ rooting popular Palestinian customs in the history of Palestine’s natural topography, as well as developing biblical parallels across the Abrahamic faith traditions. As Tamari argues in his study of Canaan’s life and work, however, this biblical parallelism diverges from orientalist constructions because Canaan examines popular Palestinian traditions as “modern and residual manifestations of daily life” from biblical narrative, rather than as static remnants of the “living Bible.”⁴⁵ This subtle departure has major ramifications for Canaan’s articulation of Palestinian peoplehood, illustrating an epistemic shift from biblical recuperation toward a method that historian Reinhart Koselleck calls the “sedimentations of time” in place.⁴⁶ This is particularly relevant to political Zionism’s claims to Palestine, intimately bound to the orientalist discourse of revitalizing biblical space. While Zionist claims to Palestine are cast through the lens of a presumed biblical right, Canaan deploys a cultural analysis of customs in the Bible (essentialist nonetheless) to delineate the real continuity of Palestinian inhabitation on, attachment to, and inheritance of the land. This is echoed in anthropologist Sharif Kanaana’s remarks on the enduring and adaptable character of Palestinian sacred lore, stating that while many “aspects of the folk religion have some roots in official religion,” their divergences are not polemical—that is, there is “no contradiction between ‘folk’ and ‘official’ religion.”⁴⁷ As such, the relationship between Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and earlier traditions are embedded in an oral tradition where narratives of place often take precedence over textual origin or scriptural accuracy. Canaan, therefore, neither accepts nor reproduces a Zionist claim to the land substantiated by a so-called divine and exclusive inheritance; rather, he illustrates the political grounding of indigeneity in the continuity of Palestinian inhabitation, cultivation, communal practices, and ancestral ties to the land which all variously articulate the rootedness of sha‘b Filastin (the people of Palestine). Canaan’s exploration of spatial constitution in these narratives moves the focus away, then, from the Palestinian fellah as a primitive remnant frozen in biblical time, to Palestinian attachment to the land as an autochthonous narrative articulation of belonging.

Thinking through Canaan’s ethnographies in this way, we discern how the act of place-making performed in the land narratives he catalogues is mirrored in his own writing practice—what Robert Tally identifies as literary cartography. That is, the “writer of narrative engages in an activity quite similar to mapmaking”⁴⁸ since:

a map is not only a geometrical figure like a grid, a visual archive like a table, or even a work of graphic art like a painting; a map may also constitute itself in words. There is an almost simultaneous figurative and literal aspect of literary cartography, and the writer engaged in such a project need not always be self-consciously mapping. Sometimes the very act of telling a story is also a process of producing a map. And this operates in both directions, of course: storytelling involves mapping, but a map also tells a story, and the interrelations between space and writing tend to generate new places and new narratives.⁴⁹

By examining Canaan’s work through the lens of literary cartography, we return to his decentering of orientalist epistemology. Canaan’s storied mapping of Palestinian space does not produce a linear narrative of Palestine in a mimetic depiction of its terrain, but rather illustrates the “sedimentations of time” in place.⁵⁰ The collection of Palestinian storied sites, organized by natural markers (in the table of contents, for instance, by “High places,” “Trees,” “Water courses,” “Caves,” and so on),⁵¹ moves the reader across Palestinian space and time simultaneously and in multiple directions. The very necessity for scientific precision in the geographic narrative Canaan constructs of Palestinian space-time is rendered irrelevant by a different kind of exactitude: Palestinians’ Indigenous place-based knowledge and rooted relationship to the land.

As Seneca scholar Mishuana Goeman suggests, land narrative illuminates the distinction between Indigenous and colonial place-making—the conscious conception of “land as a meaning-making process” rather than a passively “claimed object.”⁵² This logic constitutes an alternate way of knowing and narrating placeness, for instance, as the conceptualization of peoplehood or nationhood outside the settler-colonial paradigm of statehood. Canaan’s literary cartography performs a comparable act of meaning-making. As aforementioned, Tamari names this approach a rooted or radical ethnography by which Canaan traces the Palestinian fellah’s rooted existence, traditions, and ancestral connections to place. Canaan articulates Palestinian autochthonous identity, therefore, through a history of Palestinian agricultural practices and attendant cultural heritage grounded in the historical continuity of Palestinian presence, cultural autonomy, and territorial rootedness. In so doing, his literary cartography may be read as an early articulation of indigeneity as both a cultural and political category,⁵³ confronting the rhetorical violences of colonial narrations and erasures of Palestinian space, time, and peoplehood.

That Canaan adapted orientalist tropes and wrote in German and English⁵⁴ is therefore not only a marker of his class and education, but also of the incentive for subaltern groups to mobilize hegemonic discourse and language as potential conduits of influence. In other words, by negotiating a dominant and often hostile intellectual tradition, Canaan’s literary cartography translates Palestinian peoplehood into the scholarly discourse of his target audience—the political elite administering the British Mandate and the scholarly elite producing biblical, archeological, historical, and cartographic research on Palestine.⁵⁵ As expressed by Katherine McKittrick—whose work spans the fields of Black, gender, anticolonial, and diaspora studies—this kind of disruptive scholarship evinces alternative methods of “gathering multifariously textured tales, narratives, fictions, whispers, songs, [and] grooves,” whose multiplicity and presumed incongruities challenge the epistemic “primacy of evidentiary and insular normalcies.”⁵⁶ This interdisciplinarity, she continues, affirms multiple “ways of knowing” and “unorthodox practices of belonging that discredit ethnic absolutism and its attendant geographic fictions.”⁵⁷ Canaan’s ethnographies weave together the fabric of Palestinian knowledge in explorations that span a range of traditions from folk and religious narrative, geography, botany, and architecture to extant traditions of Palestinian scholarship, challenging restricted orientalist knowledge. Therefore, Canaan’s literary cartography not only illustrates the resilience of Palestinians’ Indigenous place-centered narration, but also signals a nascent place-centered methodology.

Canaan’s Place-Centered Citational Practice

A reading of Canaan’s citational practice and engagement with Palestinian knowledge also evinces this epistemic shift toward a place-centered research practice. In Saints and Sanctuaries, Canaan disrupts the practice of cyclical citation—that is, the closed-loop of European knowledge production by which, as Said notes, orientalist discourse is reproduced via a “system for citing works and authors.”⁵⁸ He does so by integrating both Palestinian interlocutors as Indigenous sources of knowledge and Arab historical and literary sources, asserting in the preface that “only a small part of this has hitherto been systemically employed.”⁵⁹ Canaan still cites the work of prominent American, German, French, and English orientalists. However, he does so in many cases not only as evidence, but to correct erroneous claims, linguistic errors, misidentifications, and misinterpretations of stories or cultural practices, in addition to elaborating where he finds current studies lacking. For instance, he cites German orientalist Paul Kahle (1875–1964) over fifty times, more than any of his European and American counterparts. Of these references, however, almost half constitute some form of correction or elaboration upon shortcomings in Kahle’s work.⁶⁰ Canaan’s citational practice, then, in part performs an interpolation of orientalist discourse by pairing it with that of Arab and Muslim scholars whose lives and works span a millennium—from medieval Andalusian scholars Maslama al-Majriti (c. 950–1007) and Ibn Rushd (1126–1198), to twentieth-century Palestinian ethnographers Stephan Hanna Stephan (1894–1949) and Elias Haddad (1879–1959).⁶¹ In fact, Canaan’s most cited Palestinian sources in Saints and Sanctuaries are fifteenth-century scholar Mujir al-Din al-ʿUlaymi (1456–1522), twentieth-century historian and folklorist Omar al-Saleh al-Barghouti (1894–1965), and his contemporary Palestinian interlocuters.

Canaan cites Mujir al-Din al-ʿUlaymi’s al-Uns al-Jalil bi-tarikh al-Quds wal-Khalil⁶² (The Glorious History of Jerusalem and Hebron) more than forty times as one of the most comprehensive and reliable Arabic historical geographies of Palestine from the Middle Ages. Born in Jerusalem, Mujir al-Din produced al-Uns as a comprehensive history of Jerusalem, Hebron, and the broader region of Palestine. That Canaan cites him extensively is unexceptional in both biblical orientalist studies and the Muslim historiographic and intellectual heritage—the two fields upon which Canaan draws most.⁶³ Canaan’s decentering of orientalist epistemology emerges, then, not in his citation of Mujir al-Din, but rather, in how he puts the historical narratives in al-Uns in conversation with the land narratives of the Palestinian fellaheen of his time. In other words, Canaan does not deploy al-Uns to evince the biblical primitivity of Palestinian geography, holy sites, or people, as though frozen in time, but instead to illustrate the sedimentation of Palestinian land practices—its human geography, the narrative construction of its space, and its attendant cultural traditions—as both flexible and enduring.

The majority of Canaan’s citations draw from the first and second volumes of al-Uns as they relate to the construction and narration of Palestinian space. The second volume, which contains invaluable descriptions of Palestine’s human geography, starts with the shrines, monuments, and quarters of Jerusalem before moving to other towns and villages, including Hebron, Bethlehem, al-Ramla, al-Lydd, Asqalan, Gaza, Jericho, and Nablus. However, while Mujir al-Din focuses on the shrines of pre-Islamic prophets, largely omitting those in active use,⁶⁴ Canaan is interested in understanding the construction of Palestine’s sacred spaces from the pre-Islamic to the contemporary moment, and into Palestine’s provincial geography. In one instance, he describes a field near Beit Jala called al-Maskhutah, covered by rocks of various sizes, by relating this story:

The peasants of a village celebrated a wedding. The ‘arūs (bride) was brought from her father’s house on a camel, as the custom used to be and is still in some villages. She was followed by a great crowd of friends, who sinned so glaringly that the Almighty God punished them by changing the whole of the processions into a field of rocks. Once their shapes could be clearly recognized, but through the disintegration caused by weathering only a few can still be identified. Thus one is still shown the bride riding on the camel, and many rocks are explained as representing a woman, a man or a child.⁶⁵

In a note on this narrative, Canaan cites a comparable story relayed by Mujir al-Din that “God had changed at the time of Pharaoh many Egyptians into stones.”⁶⁶ Here, Canaan cites Mujir al-Din to demonstrate the continuity of land narratives’ structure and characteristics, suggesting the long passage of time through the literal “weathering” away of the stones. In another passage, which examines stones, outcroppings, mountains, and high places as pivotal to Palestinian sacred space, Canaan recounts a “modern belief” about the Dome of the Rock that, “under this rock four streams flow” to the north, south, east, and west. Canaan contends that this modern belief has “its parallel” in al-Uns, where Mujir al-Din comments that “all water that is drunk comes from under the Saḫrah.”⁶⁷ In addition to Canaan’s citations of Mujir al-Din, he draws upon other historic catalogues of Palestinian space, including popular Muslim guidebooks,⁶⁸ cosmography,⁶⁹ and travel writing (rihla),⁷⁰ reflecting a genealogy of Palestine’s spatial narration in Arab intellectual heritage.

Canaan also cites extensively from his contemporary circle of Palestinian ethnographers, especially Omar al-Saleh al-Barghouti⁷¹ (more than twenty times), who inhabits a nebulous position in Saints and Sanctuaries between scholar and interlocuter. That is, at times, information is cited from Barghouti’s publications and at others it is “heard,” “reported,” or “derived” directly from Barghouti himself.⁷² Barghouti, like Canaan, was a member of the POS where he lectured and published on Palestinian folklore and traditions. Although French and German biblical scholars were among the most prominent contributors to the POS, the largest number of ethnographers were Palestinian, including Barghouti, Stephan, and Haddad, all of whom Canaan cites in Saints and Sanctuaries. Of relevance, therefore, to Canaan’s decentering of orientalist epistemology is his citational practice that promotes Palestinian-led knowledge production by scholars who are themselves—as ethnographers of Palestinian village life—dedicated to documenting Palestinian rootedness in the land.

Saints and Sanctuaries is not, however, only a product of archival research and collegial citations. Canaan visited 235 holy sites, attended countless festivals and ceremonies, and collected a vast assortment of stories, songs, proverbs, and idioms directly from his Palestinian interlocutors.⁷³ This expansive study is thus also a product of Canaan’s physical movement across Palestinian space, collecting land narratives directly from the people and places he visited. Canaan’s interlocuters are therefore the most prevalent sources in Saints and Sanctuaries, numbering more than fifty citations.⁷⁴ Whether named or unnamed, nearly all references are accompanied by the person’s location, articulating the geographical specificity of land narrative which tethers its people to place. The geography of these interlocuters is also reflective of how Canaan is himself situated in the space of Palestine, concentrated in and around Jerusalem and Bethlehem, although stretching south to at least Hebron and north to at least Nazareth. In Saints and Sanctuaries, then, Canaan engages Palestinian intellectual and narrative traditions, producing a work that is not only about land narrative, but composed from it. That is, Saints and Sanctuaries extends the Palestinian tradition of land narrative, exemplifies its regenerative character, and builds upon its perpetuation of place-based Indigenous knowledge over space and time.

Conclusion

In her study of Canaan’s life and work, Irving notes the subversive character of his interventions. Citing Franz Fanon’s postulation that colonial power makes every effort “to bring the colonized person to admit the inferiority of his culture,”⁷⁵ Irving uplifts Canaan’s refusal to do so while also adapting the “tools of colonial culture” to demonstrate the value of his own.⁷⁶ I argue that, moreover, Canaan’s place-centered approach in Saints and Sanctuaries must be read not only as a counternarrative that contests Palestinian inferiority, but as evidence of an epistemic shift that recenters Palestinian ways of knowing. Narrating the sedimentation of time in place, Canaan’s literary cartography thus both counters orientalist remappings and advances an alternate method of narrating Palestinian space and time. Rather than aspiring to produce a biblical space-time of excavated ruins, Canaan elucidates the interconnectedness of Palestinian place and peoplehood through the continuity of Indigenous presence and knowledge.

The integrality of conceiving of Palestinian history through space is intrinsic to how Canaan recenters narrations of Palestinian place and peoplehood, countering a dominant historical discourse that systematically privileges the arrival, perspective, and sovereignty of the colonial body, its geopolitical formations, and its epistemic traditions. Through Palestinian cultural and intellectual heritage on the one hand, and orientalist discourse on the other, Canaan attempts to translate Palestinians’ rooted peoplehood to the Western reader—that is, relative to, but not in the service of, orientalist constructions of biblical space-time and “primitivism.” In so doing, he subtly disrupts these very frames by asserting the continuity of Palestinian time, the integrity, ingenuity, and abundance of knowledge and history contained in so-called primitive traditions, and the sedimentation of Palestinian historical presence on the land through storied place.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Amanda Batarseh

Amanda Batarseh is an assistant professor in the Department of Literature at the University of California, San Diego. She received her PhD in comparative literature from UC Davis and was a UC Chancellor’s postdoctoral fellow at UC Riverside. Her recent publications include “Raja Shehadeh’s ‘Cartography of Refusal’: The Enduring Land Narrative Practice of Palestinian Walks” (Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry, 2021) and “Reading Indigenous Grammars of Place and Narrative Permeability in Bethlehem’s Mary” in Bethlehem: A Socio-Cultural History (printed by the editor, 2020).

Notes

1 Tawfiq Canaan, “Plant-Lore in Palestinian Superstition,” Journal of the Palestine Oriental Society, 1928: 58.

2 Abd al-Wahhab Kayyali, Zionism, Imperialism, and Racism (London: Croom Helm, 1979), 149.

3 Tawfiq Canaan, Mohammedan Saints and Sanctuaries in Palestine, vol. 5 (London: Luzac & Co., 1927), v.

4 From here on referred to as Saints and Sanctuaries.

5 Canaan, Saints and Sanctuaries, v.

6 Canaan, Saints and Sanctuaries, v.

7 Anglican missionaries first arrived in Palestine in the 1820s. The Protestant bishopric in Jerusalem was later established in 1841 through a joint agreement between the Church of England and the Church of Prussia.

8 Mitri Raheb, “Introduction,” in Tawfiq Canaan: An Autobiography, by Tawfiq Canaan, ed. Mitri Raheb (Bethlehem: Diyar, 2020), 13.

9 Sherene Seikaly, Men of Capital: Scarcity and Economy in Mandate Palestine (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2016), 4. Seikaly unsettles the binary inscribed upon Palestinian history that often produces this flattening effect by dismantling the “dual economy model” that draws a “stark binary” between a modern capitalist economy (ostensibly imported to Palestine from Europe) and a pre-modern Arab one (ostensibly of the “primitive” fellah) (8). This binary, Seikaly suggests, insinuates the presence of distinct socioeconomic spheres dividing industrial urban centers in Palestine (the primary targets of European intervention and, subsequently, of Jewish settlement) from the rural peripheries of the fellaheen, and in so doing, erases Palestinian urban-rural economic histories. However, not only did the Palestinian city possess a dynamic relationality to its surrounding villages, unsettling this presumed urban-rural divide, but also cities like Jerusalem where Canaan lived were undergoing a rapid demographic shift in the early-twentieth century, blurring the boundaries between the madaniyyin (townspeople) and qarawiyyin (villagers). This relationality is not synonymous with a leveled Palestinian society by which the social distinctions demarcating Palestinian socioeconomic hierarchies dematerialized. See also Rana Barakat, “The Jerusalem Fellah: Popular Politics in Mandate-Era Palestine,” JPS 46, no. 1 (2016): 7–19, https://doi.org/10.1525/jps.2016.46.1.7; Salim Tamari, “The City and Its Rural Hinterland,” in Jerusalem 1948: The Arab Neighbourhoods and Their Fate in the War (Ramallah: The Institute of Jerusalem Studies & Badil Resource Center, 2002), 68–83.

10 Canaan, Saints and Sanctuaries, 1.

11 Amanda Batarseh, “Raja Shehadeh’s ‘Cartography of Refusal’: The Enduring Land Narrative Practice of Palestinian Walks,” Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry 8, no. 2 (April 2021): 232–52, https://doi.org/10.1017/pli.2020.38.

12 Baha Al-Jubeh, “Magic and Talismans: The Tawfiq Canaan Collection of Palestinian Amulets,” Jerusalem Quarterly, no. 22–23 (Winter/Autumn 2005): 103–8, https://www.palestine-studies.org/en/node/77947; Melania Borgo, “Tawfiq Canaan: The Life of a Physician and the Palestinian History,” Biografie Mediche 2 (2013): 29–30, http://www.centrostudipromozioneprofessionemedica.it/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/Biografie_Mediche_numero_2_2013.pdf#page=31; Philippe Bourmaud, “‘A Son of the Country’: Dr. Tawfiq Canaan, Modernist Physician and Palestinian Ethnographer,” in Struggle and Survival in Palestine/Israel, ed. Mark LeVine and Gershon Shafir (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 104–24; Sarah R. Irving, “Intellectual Networks, Language and Knowledge under Colonialism: The Work of Stephan Stephan, Elias Haddad and Tawfiq Canaan in Palestine, 1909–1948” (PhD diss., University of Edinburgh, 2018); Birgit Mershen and Ulrich Hübner, “Tawfiq Canaan and His Contribution to the Ethnography of Palestine,” Palaestina Exploranda (2006): 250–64; Khaled Nashef, “Tawfik Canaan: His Life and Work,” Jerusalem Quarterly, no. 16 (2002): 12–26, https://www.palestine-studies.org/en/node/78010; Arpan Roy, “Trees of Life,” Jerusalem Quarterly, no. 78 (Summer 2019): 72, https://www.palestine-studies.org/en/node/1235757; Tawfiq Canaan, Tawfiq Canaan: An Autobiography, ed. Mitri Raheb (Bethlehem: Diyar, 2020); Norbert Schwake, “The Great War in Palestine: Dr Tawfiq Canaan’s Photographic Album,” Jerusalem Quarterly, no. 56–57 (Winter/Spring 2014): 140, https://www.palestine-studies.org/en/node/137537; Salim Tamari, “Lepers, Lunatics, and Saints: The Nativist Ethnography of Tawfiq Canaan and His Circle,” in Mountain against the Sea: Essays on Palestinian Society and Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 93–112.

13 Al-Jubeh, “Magic and Talismans.”

14 Schwake, “The Great War in Palestine.”

15 Roy, “Trees of Life.”

16 Irving, “Intellectual Networks, Language and Knowledge under Colonialism,” 5.

17 In the English translation of this study, which appears in Mountain Against the Sea, ithnughrafiya al-judhuriyyah is translated as “nativist ethnography.” Salim Tamari, “Lepers, Lunatics and Saints: The Nativist Ethnography of Tawfiq Canaan and His Jerusalem Circle” [in Arabic], Majallat al-Dirasat al-Filastiniyya, no. 58 (Spring 2004): 3, https://www.palestine-studies.org/en/node/35689.

18 Salim Tamari, Mountain against the Sea: Essays on Palestinian Society and Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 111.

19 This is evident, for instance, in the 2023 partnership between Birzeit University Museum, led by Rana Barakat, and Insaniyyat Society of Palestinian Anthropologists that conducted a workshop on the history of Palestinian ethnography, and especially the work of Tawfiq Canaan, in the winter of 2023. This was followed in March 2023 by a panel discussion titled, “Reading Tawfiq Canaan in Contemporary Palestine: Historical-Anthropological Exploration.”

20 Stephanie J. Fitzgerald, Native Women and Land: Narratives of Dispossession and Resurgence (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2015), 16; see also Keith H. Basso, Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language among the Western Apache (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996).

21 Fitzgerald, Native Women and Land, 16.

22 Khaled Nashef, “Taufiq Canaan: A New Appraisal” [in Arabic], Majallat al-Dirasat al-Filastiniyya, no. 50 (Spring 2002), 11, palestine-studies.org/en/node/34792.

23 Canaan, Saints and Sanctuaries, 71.

24 I have not changed the way transliterated Arabic appears when citing other authors. For this reason, transliteration styles in the article may appear inconsistent. I have used a modified version of the IJMES system for all my transliterations of Arabic words and, when citing other authors, retained their transliteration system, reproducing the citation exactly as it appears in the original text.

25 Canaan, Saints and Sanctuaries, 242.

26 Issa Massou, “Religious Folklore of the Bethlehem District in Jordan” (PhD diss., SOAS University of London, 1962), 13.

27 Massou, “Religious Folklore,” 12.

28 Massou, “Religious Folklore,” 61.

29 See Canaan, Saints and Sanctuaries, 97: The natural impetus for the location of these holy sites is intimately related to the sacred figure, waliy, embedded within the natural location: “Everything belonging to a shrine is sacred to the spirit of that saint who inhabits the place, and will never be taken or removed, except on special occasions, where such objects (as oil, stones, leaves of trees, etc.) are used as a barakah [blessing], or as medicine. In all other cases the saint severely punishes the evil-doer for not respecting him [or her].”

30 Tawfiq Canaan, “Haunted Springs and Water Demons in Palestine,” The Journal of the Palestine Oriental Society 1 (1922): 153.

31 Walid Khalidi, All That Remains: The Palestinian Villages Occupied and Depopulated by Israel in 1948 (Washington, DC: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1992); Sharif Kanaana, Bassam al-Ka'bi and A. Halla, The Destroyed Palestinian Villages (Rabat: ISESCO, 1994); Rochelle A. Davis, Palestinian Village Histories: Geographies of the Displaced (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010).

32 Rana Barakat, “Lifta, the Nakba, and the Museumification of Palestine’s History,” Native American and Indigenous Studies 5, no. 2 (Fall 2018): 1–15, https://doi.org/10.1353/nai.2018.a721563; Kanaana, The Destroyed Palestinian Villages.

33 Barakat, “Lifta, the Nakba,” 11.

34 Beshara Doumani, “Rediscovering Ottoman Palestine: Writing Palestinians into History,” JPS 21, no. 2 (1992): 7–9, https://doi.org/10.2307/2537216; Khaled Furani and Dan Rabinowitz, “The Ethnographic Arriving of Palestine,” Annual Review of Anthropology 40 (2011): 477, https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-anthro-081309-145910.

35 Zayde Antrim, Mapping the Middle East (London: Reaktion Books, 2018).

36 Tamari, Mountain against the Sea, 98.

37 Nadia Abu El-Haj, Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2008).

38 See Claude Reignier Conder, “The Present Condition of Palestine,” Palestine Exploration Quarterly 11, no. 1 (1879): 9, https://doi.org/10.1179/peq.1879.11.1.6: Conder, who conducted the “Survey of Western Palestine” remarks on the “native peasantry” that, while a “naturally clever and energetic race,” they were “brutally ignorant, fanatical,” and “inveterate liars.” See also Conder, “The Present Condition of Palestine,” 9–10: In 1879, some forty years before the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the establishment of the British Mandate in Palestine, Conder outlines a proposal for “dealing with the fellahin” of Palestine. Through an “English scheme of reforms,” and “under the eye of the English,” he expresses the aim of advancing the “down-trodden peasantry of the Holy Land.” See also Edward Said, The Question of Palestine (New York: Vintage Books, 1992), 81: The archeologist R. A. Stewart Macalister, who served as the PEF director of excavations and led one of the earliest archeological projects in Palestine in 1902, similarly asserts that the “native inhabitants of Palestine”—what he calls a “most unprogressive country” and whose people he remarkably absents from the entirety of his History of Civilization in Palestine (1912)—“do not appear to have made a single contribution of any kind whatsoever to material civilization.”

39 Brenna Bhandar, Colonial Lives of Property: Law, Land, and Racial Regimes of Ownership (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018); Gary Fields, Enclosure: Palestinian Landscapes in a Historical Mirror (Oakland: University of California Press, 2017).

40 These scientific fields, which advanced colonial expansion and domination, were subsequently adopted and adapted by political Zionism as tools of settler-colonial nation building. See Nadia Abu El-Haj, Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2008).

41 Edward Said, Orientalism (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd., 1978).

42 “Introductory Notice: Constitution,” The Journal of the Palestine Oriental Society 1 (1920): 3, https://archive.org/details/journalofpalesti01paleuoft/page/2/mode/2up.

43 By 1938, even while continuing to serve on the POS board, Canaan had stopped publishing his work in its journal. This has led to speculation that Canaan parted ways with the predominantly European and American collection of scholars, likely due to his support of The Great Revolt (1936–39). In 1936, as Palestinians engaged in collective resistance—imposing economic and political pressure on the British though general strikes, expressing the anticolonial nationalist aim of independence, contesting the legitimacy of the British Mandate, and demanding an end to its administrative support of political Zionism that aspired to the creation of an exclusive ethnoreligious state for the Jewish diaspora in Palestine—Canaan published two English treatises directed at swaying British public opinion, The Palestine Arab Cause and Conflict in the Land of Peace, supporting Palestinian national independence. See Irving, “Intellectual Networks, Language and Knowledge under Colonialism,” 81.

44 Canaan, Saints and Sanctuaries, iv.

45 Tamari, Mountain against the Sea, 98 (emphasis in the original).

46 Reinhart Koselleck, Sediments of Time: On Possible Histories, trans. and ed. Sean Franzel and Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2018), 6. Koselleck’s theory of history has the advantage of assessing not only the “different velocities–acceleration and deceleration” of history that reveal “different modes of historical change” and as such offer a more nuanced view of temporal complexity, but also his concept of sedimentation makes room for the theorization of spatial history—that is, the narration of history through space rather than its now dominant converse, the narration of history through time (25). Countering the dominance of chronological time as the mediator of historical space, Kosellack argues that “space is just as much a condition of possible history as time” since it is both “something that should be metahistoricaly pre-supposed for every possible history and something that is historicizable, because it changes socially, economically and politically” (27).

47 Sharif Kanaana, “Folk Religion among Palestinians,” in Struggling for Survival: Essays in Palestinian Folklore and Folklife (al-Bireh, Palestine: Society of Ina’ash al-Usra, 2005), 195–96.

48 Robert T. Tally Jr., Spatiality (London: Routledge, 2013), 40.

49 Tally, Spatiality, 40.

50 Koselleck, Sediments of Time, 6.

51 Canaan, Saints and Sanctuaries, vii.

52 Mishuana Goeman, “Land as Life: Unsettling the Logics of Containment,” in Native Studies Keywords, ed. Stephanie Nohelani Teves, Andrea Smith, and Michelle H. Raheja (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2015), 73 (emphasis in the original).

53 Steven Salaita, Inter/Nationalism: Decolonizing Native America and Palestine (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016). Salaita explains that the term Indigenous is not merely an identifier of certain shared cultural practices, but is, rather, “infused with numerous connotations about access, belonging, biology, culture, jurisdiction, and identity. Indigeneity is not simply a moral entitlement” but is indeed also and critically a “political category” that stands in opposition (as opposed to an addendum) to colonial narrations of place, people, and history (19).

54 Selected writings in German: Aberglaube und volksmedizin im lande der Bibel [Superstition and Popular Medicine in the Land of the Bible] (Hamburg, Germany: L. Friederichsen, 1914); Dämonenglaube im lande der Bibel [Belief in Demons in the Land of the Bible] (Leipzig, Germany: J. C. Hinrichs, 1929); “Der ackerbau in Palästina” [Agriculture in Palestine], Globus; illustrierte Zeitschrift für Länder- und Völkerkunde 96 (1909): 268-272, 283-286; “Der Kalender des palästinensischen Fellachen” [The Calendar of Palestinian Peasants], Zeitschrift des Deutschen Palästina-Vereins 36, no. 4 (1913): 266–300; “Die ‘Azazme-Beduinen and ihr Gegiet” [The ‘Azazme Bedouin and Their Region], Zeitschrift des Deutschen Palästina-Vereins 51 (1928). Selected writings in English: Mohammedan Saints and Sanctuaries in Palestine (London: Luzac and Co., 1927); “Demons as an Aetiological Factor in Popular Medicine, Part 1.” al-Kulliyah 3, no. 4 (February 1912): 150–54) ; “Demons as an Aetiological Factor in Popular Medicine, Part 2.” al-Kulliyah 3, no. 5 (March 1912): 183–90; “Haunted Springs and Water Demons in Palestine,” Journal of the Palestine Oriental Society 1, no. 1 (1920/1921): 153–70; “Folklore of the Seasons in Palestine,” Journal of the Palestine Oriental Society 3 (1923): 21–35; “Tasit er-Radjfeh (Fear Cup),” Journal of the Palestine Oriental Society 3 (1923) 122–31; “Palestinian Demonography,” The Parents’ Review 37 (1926): 718–23; “The Child in Palestinian Arab Superstition,” The Journal of the Palestine Oriental Society 7 (1927): 159–86; “Plant-lore in Palestinian Superstition,” The Journal of the Palestine Oriental Society 8 (1928): 129–68; “Water and ‘The Water of Life’ in Palestinian Superstition,” The Journal of the Palestine Oriental Society 9 (1929): 57–69; “Light and Darkness in Palestine Folklore,” The Journal of the Palestine Oriental Society 11 (1931): 15–36; “The Palestine Arab House: Its Architecture and Folklore,” The Journal of the Palestine Oriental Society 12 (1932): 223–47, 13 (1933): 1–83; “Arab Magic Bowls,” The Journal of the Palestine Oriental Society 16 (1936): 79–127; “The Saqr Bedouin of Bisan,” The Journal of the Palestine Oriental Society 16 (1936): 21–32; “The Decipherment of Arabic Talismans,” Berytus Archaeological Studies 4 (1937): 69–110; 5 (1938): 141–51; “Topographical Studies in Leishmaniasis in Palestine,” Journal of the Palestinian Arab Medical Association 1 (1945): 4–12; “Superstition and Folklore about Bread,” Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 157 (1963): 36–47.

55 See Tamari, Mountain against the Sea, 110. As Tamari notes, Canaan did not write for an Arab intellectual base, like contemporary Palestinian nationalist authors of the period, such as Muhammad Izzat Darwaza, Awni Abd al-Hadi, Musa Alami, and Ajaj Nweihid, who were “rather oblivious” to his writings. This lack of awareness or interest is not evidence of a contrary belief system, however, but rather of the received belief that Palestinian “rootedness” (this immanent political category of indigeneity) was not only self-evident but also, according to a Western paradigm of civilizational progress, insufficient in the struggle for national sovereignty.

56 Katherine McKittrick, Dear Science and Other Stories (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021), 18.

57 McKittrick, Dear Science and Other Stories, 19.

58 Said, Orientalism, 23.

59 Canaan, Saints and Sanctuaries, vi.

60 For instance, on page 13 of Saints and Sanctuaries, Canaan cites, “Kahle, PJ VIII, 141, explains the palm branches as a prophylactic measure against the evil eye. I have never heard such an explanation. Neither palm branches nor their representations are ever used as an amulet against the evil eye”; 211: “Not bidereke as Kahle notes it, but with el and q (instead of k). It means ‘shield’ and not ‘slowly’”; and 230: “The exact working of the translation is correctly given by Kahle, PJB VIII, 103, but the intention of the verse is not to go to the village and bring water from it, but to ask the Prophet for help. I heard this verse from a woman of Nebi Samwil, so the translation of Kahle would hardly fit the case.” See all instances in Canaan, Saints and Sanctuaries, 13, 14, 63, 204, 210, 211, 212, 220, 224, 230, 278, 298, 302, 305, and 306.

61 Nashef, “Taufiq Canaan: A New Appraisal,” 7. Nashef similarly notes this citational practice, indicating that Canaan, (even in his first article, “Agriculture in Palestine”) although clearly well-versed “in the field of ‘oriental studies,’” also quoted classical sources “such as Strabo and Eusebius” as well as “Arabic sources such as Mujir al-Din.”

62 Published c. 1495, al-Uns is divided thematically into four volumes: the first part is historical, spanning the pre-Islamic to the Mamluk period; the second is historico-geographical, dedicated to the physical description and history of Muslim shrines in and beyond Jerusalem; the third is biographical, presenting important rulers from the time of Salah al-Din to the present; and the fourth traces contemporary history.

63 Orientalist scholars have translated and cited Mujir al-Din since at least the mid-nineteenth century, including the British orientalist Guy Le Strange in Palestine Under the Moslems: A Description of Syria and the Holy Land from AD 650 to 1500 (1890), which references al-Uns throughout.

64 Robert Schick, “Geographical Terminology in Mujīr al-Dīn’s History of Jerusalem” in Geographical Dimensions of Islamicjerusalem, ed. Khalid El-Awaisi (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2008), 91–105; Andrew Petersen, “Arabic and Muslim Historiography,” in Bones of Contention: Muslim Shrines in Palestine (Singapore: Springer Nature, 2018), 13–25.

65 Canaan, Saints and Sanctuaries, 242.

66 Canaan, Saints and Sanctuaries, 242.

67 Canaan, Saints and Sanctuaries, 83.

68 These include, for instance, Al-murshid liz-zair wad-dalil fi manasik wa zyarat amakin al-Quds wal-Khalil by Mustafa al-Ansari (cited in Canaan, Saints and Sanctuaries, 100, 295) and Manasik al-Quds al-Sharif by Yusif Diya’ al-Din al-Danaf al-Ansari (Canaan, Saints and Sanctuaries, 101)

69 Canaan cites Ibn al-Wardi’s Kharidat al-ʿajayib wa-faridat al- gharayib (The Pearl of Wonders and the Uniqueness of Strange Things), which is part of the tradition of Islamic cosmography (‘ilm awsaf al-kawn, literally “the science of the description of existence”). This genre describes both the visible and invisible phenomena of the cosmos of all kinds, including planets, stars, countries, seas, islands, straits, mountains, rivers, springs, wells, plants, animals, and minerals.

70 Canaan cites the rihla of Abd al-Ghani al-Nabulsi (1641-1731) to Palestine which he describes in, Al-Hadra al-unsiyya fi al-rihla al-Qudsiyya primarily dedicated to his travel in Palestine, for instance, in the same fashion that he cites Mujir al-Din—to demonstrate continuity rather than immutability. In a discussion on shrines visited by those that suffer from physical ailments, Canaan notes (114-115) how a “man with fever tries to get rid of his disease by walking seven times around the tomb of šēḫ Ḫrēs. After each turn he picks up a stone and places it on the tomb.” This is followed by a citation from al-Nubulsi confirming that “the sick and troubled of his time used to place stones on the tomb of Aḥmad ed-Dadjānī [in Jerusalem], hoping to get rid of their difficulties.”

71 Barghouti lived through and was an active public figure throughout the periods of Ottoman, British, and Jordanian control of Palestine. He was a well-known editor of the influential Palestinian newspaper Mir’at al-Sharq, a lawyer, a nationalist who opposed British rule, and a scholar responsible for publishing the first modern history of Palestine in the twentieth century.

72 Canaan, Saints and Sanctuaries, 18, 44, and 53.

73 Canaan, Saints and Sanctuaries, vi.

74 Canaan’s cited interlocuters in Saints and Sanctuaries include: Initials only, Artas (37); unnamed student, Jerusalem, from Nazareth (58); leper (58); villagers, Suba (69); Imam, Beit Safafa (72); Armenian, Victoria, Jerusalem (79); villagers, Beit Jala (91); initials only, Jerusalem (98); priests, Mar Saba (108); Abu Shukri Mustaklim (108); Musa Abu Nada (116); George Qurt, Jerusalem (120); priest, Ishaq Tuma, al-Khader (123); people of Abu Gosh (129); people of Lifta (130); Um Elyas, Jerusalem (133); Bedouin of Idwan tribe (137); person from Abu Dis (141); Canaan’s father’s notes (144); woman in Taybeh and Um Elyas in Jerusalem (144); Abu Elyas, Jerusalem (145); Um Elyas, Jerusalem (146); Canaan’s father’s notes (149); Canaan’s father’s notes (150); people of Sharafat (150); Ibrahim Djirius, Beit Jala (162); Miladi, Birzeit (164); people of Lifta (165); Um Mohammad, Imwas (165); Beni Hasa, Battir (175); Abu Osman, Jerusalem (178); Um Bsharah, Thleidjeh (179); Mansur, Lifta (180); Um Elyas, Jerusalem (184); woman of Lifta (185); people of al-Qubeiba, Jerusalem (189); women in Jerusalem (190); Canaan’s father’s notes (196); woman, Malha (212); villagers of Abu Dis, Sur Baher, and Nabi Samwil (219); S’ud Abu Sa’id, Abu Dis (220); people of Beit Jibrin, Hebron (228); Um Mohammad, Jerusalem (245); Canaan’s father’s notes (256); Canaan’s father’s notes (265); people of Beitunia (289); Canaan’s father’s notes (292); Sheikh, Deir Ghassana (296); old man, Deir Ghassana (297); Canaan’s father’s notes (304); Muhammad, Beit Surik (304).

75 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 1963), 236.

76 Irving, “Intellectual Networks, Language and Knowledge under Colonialism,” 39.