Lightning through the Clouds is the first English-language life-and-times biography of ‘Izz al-Din al-Qassam, a preeminent figure who helped to reshape the political and religious landscape of the ...region. A Syrian-born, Egyptian-educated cleric, he went from the battlefields of World War I to join the anticolonialist fight against the French in Syria. Sentenced to be executed by the French military, he managed to escape to Palestine, where he became an increasingly popular presence, moved by the plight of the poor and disenfranchised. Outraged by British rule and the encroachment of Zionism, he formed a secret society to resist the colonization of Palestine first by the British and then by Jewish immigrants from Europe, once again taking up arms and advocating for a moral, political, and military jihad as the only solution. His death at the hands of Palestine Police in 1935 drew thousands to his funeral and sparked the 1936–1939 Arab Revolt. His influence continues to be felt in the region; for example, the military wing of the Palestinian Hamas organization is named the ‘Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades. Al-Qassam is either revered or reviled, depending on the observers’ perspective, but he is without doubt a fascinating and historically significant individual whose influence on the past, and our present, makes this examination of his life both important and timely.
This article explores how photography documenting humanitarian aid in French-occupied Germany was mobilized to enhance France's image, against the backdrop of increasing anxieties about its ...international standing. It draws on images found in the archives of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration and the French occupation zone , which sat between the 'official' and the 'private'. In doing so, it calls for a recognition of the role of amateur and relief workers photographers in sustaining post-war visual discourses of internationalism and national-self fashioning. Although largely overlooked today, these images play a role in wider debates about what it meant to be 'French' in the aftermath of the Nazi occupation. Relief workers and amateur photographers built on and reproduced aspects of the widely disseminated narrative about the universalism of resistance to disrupt images of the zone as a refuge for wartime collaborators. This neglected aspect of humanitarian imagery offers fresh insights into the contribution of these photographers to post-war diplomatic strategies.
This book uses a study of Syria under the French mandate to show what historical developments led people to start describing themselves and others as 'minorities'.
What role does military force play during a colonial occupation? The answer seems obvious: coercion crushes local resistance, quashes political dissent and consolidates the dominance of the occupying ...power. However, as this discerning and theoretically rigorous study suggests, violence can have much more ambiguous consequences. Set in Syria during the French Mandate from 1920 to 1946, the book explores a turbulent period in which conflict between armed Syrian insurgents and French military forces not only determined the strategic objectives of the colonial state, but also transformed how the colonial state organised, controlled and understood Syrian society, geography and population. In addition to the coercive techniques, the book shows how civilian technologies such as urban planning and engineering were also commandeered in the effort to undermine rebel advances. Colonial violence had a lasting effect in Syria, shaping a peculiar form of social order that endured well after the French occupation.
Divided rule Lewis, Mary Dewhurst
2013., 20131017, 2013, 2013-09-27
eBook
After invading Tunisia in 1881, the French installed a protectorate in which they shared power with the Tunisian ruling dynasty and, due to the dynasty's treaties with other European powers, with ...some of their imperial rivals. This “indirect” form of colonization was intended to prevent the violent clashes marking France's outright annexation of neighboring Algeria. But as Mary Dewhurst Lewis shows in Divided Rule, France's method of governance in Tunisia actually created a whole new set of conflicts. In one of the most dynamic crossroads of the Mediterranean world, residents of Tunisia— whether Muslim, Jewish, or Christian—navigated through the competing power structures to further their civil rights and individual interests and often thwarted the aims of the French state in the process. Over time, these everyday challenges to colonial authority led France to institute reforms that slowly undermined Tunisian sovereignty and replaced it with a more heavy-handed form of rule—a move also intended to ward off France's European rivals, who still sought influence in Tunisia. In so doing, the French inadvertently encouraged a powerful backlash with major historical consequences, as Tunisians developed one of the earliest and most successful nationalist movements in the French empire. Based on archival research in four countries, Lewis uncovers important links between international power politics and everyday matters of rights, identity, and resistance to colonial authority, while re-interpreting the whole arc of French rule in Tunisia from the 1880s to the mid-20th century. Scholars, students, and anyone interested in the history of politics and rights in North Africa, or in the nature of imperialism more generally, will gain a deeper understanding of these issues from this sophisticated study of colonial Tunisia.
"In the interwar Eastern Mediterranean, European colonial modes of establishing land claims and controlling populations converged with a recent Ottoman past featuring desperate and violent efforts at ...nationalization and an increasingly empowered Zionist settler colonialism. States of Separation explores how this confluence produced a series of internationally supported plans to move "minority" communities in, around, and out of the newly constituted states of Iraq, Syria, and Palestine under the aegis of the League of Nations - a massive demographic experiment that carried lasting political and social consequences for the twentieth century Middle East and the international order."
French-colonial Tunisia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries witnessed shifting concepts of identity, including varying theories of ethnic essentialism, a drive toward ..."modernization," and imperialist interpretations of science and medicine. As French colonizers worked to realize ideas of a "modern" city and empire, they undertook a program to significantly alter the physical and social realities by which the people of Tunisia lived, often in ways that continue to influence life today.Medical Imperialism in French North Africademonstrates the ways in which diverse members of the Jewish community of Tunis received, rejected, or reworked myriad imperial projects devised to foster the social, corporeal, and moral "regeneration" of their community. Buttressed by the authority of science and medicine, regenerationist schemes such as urban renewal projects and public health reforms were deployed to destroy and recast the cultural, social, and political lives of Jewish colonial subjects. Richard C. Parks expands on earlier scholarship to examine how notions of race, class, modernity, and otherness shaped these efforts. Looking at such issues as the plasticity of identity, the collaboration and contention between French and Tunisian Jewish communities, Jewish women's negotiation of social power relationships in Tunis, and the razing of the city's Jewish quarter, Parks fills the gap in current literature by focusing on the broader transnational context of French actions in colonial Tunisia.
The aim of this paper is to shed light on the so-called ‘Poitrot Report’, submitted to the French Military Government in Baden-Baden, Germany, in December 1945 and published in a reduced German ...version in 1946. Its author was the French-Moroccan psychiatrist Robert Poitrot, who had been put in charge of the public mental asylums in Südwürttemberg after World War II. Poitrot took responsibility for restoring psychiatric care during the occupation, and was also eager to document Nazi ‘euthanasia’ and to start investigating the role of staff in mental hospitals during National Socialism. Focusing on the ‘Poitrot Report’, this paper also reflects on life in Württemberg mental hospitals and the interaction between French representatives such as Poitrot and regional German medical staff.
Disarming words Tageldin, Shaden M
2011., 20110513, 2011, c2011., 2011-06-12, Volume:
5
eBook
In a book that radically challenges conventional understandings of the dynamics of cultural imperialism, Shaden M. Tageldin unravels the complex relationship between translation and seduction in the ...colonial context. She examines the afterlives of two occupations of Egypt--by the French in 1798 and by the British in 1882--in a rich comparative analysis of acts, fictions, and theories that translated the European into the Egyptian, the Arab, or the Muslim.
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