In Search of Fatima, page 4
By the turn of the century, this process had brought forth a new and prosperous class of Palestinian businessmen, entrepreneurs, middlemen and professionals, most of whom were Christians. This lead over the Muslims was maintained under the British Mandate after 1920. People said that it was deliberately promoted by the British authorities as a part of the divide-and-rule policy which they used to keep the Palestinians disunited and unable to resist Jewish migration into the country. “Imagine,” my father said, “in the education department where I worked, most of the others were Christians – that is, apart from the Jews whom the British also brought in. And it was the same in every branch of government. How could that have been when Christians were a minority and we Muslims were in the majority?”
None of this, however, impinged on my parents’ socialising, especially my mother’s. Our immediate next-door neighbours were a Christian family called Jouzeh who were in and out of our house all the time. We also made friends with the Tubbeh family, Christians who lived opposite our house. The head of the family, Abu Michel as he was known, was the mukhtar of Qatamon, a post dating from Ottoman times and something akin to a mayor. My mother’s other close friends, Emily Saleh and the Wahbeh family, lived several streets away. She and Emily were devoted to each other and we were brought up to play with her children, the youngest of whom, Randa, was the same age as myself. I was also friends with the Wahbeh children, Lily and Nellie. Ziyad’s best friend, Hani Sharkas, came from a Muslim family who lived two streets below. His mother, Um Samir, and ours were very close and he had a dark-haired sister called Lamis for whom my brother harboured a secret admiration; to his chagrin, even the poem he wrote her when he was ten failed to provoke any interest.
Though we saw a great deal of these largely Christian families because they lived in the neighbourhood, my mother also had a wide circle of Muslim friends who lived beyond Qatamon, in Sheikh Jarrah, in Baq‘a and in the Old City. She socialised with some of the oldest Jerusalem families, the Husseinis, the Nashashibis, the Afifis. There was in Palestine at that time a certain snobbishness with regard to these established families. Each of the major cities had its own upper crust, but the Jerusalem families were considered to be of the highest order.
Their pre-eminence was due partly to wealth and to the ownership of extensive waqf property (pious Muslim endowments held in perpetuity for the benefit of the community, which included both land and buildings), but also to their having held high office under the Ottoman administration which ruled Palestine until 1918. In addition, some of them had traditional responsibility for Jerusalem’s holy places. For example, the Nusseibeh family had held the keys to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre from the sixteenth century. In the scheme of things, our family, not being from Jerusalem and having little wealth, did not feature amongst the elite. But this did not prevent ordinary social interaction, and my mother was as popular with the wives in these families as she was with our less prestigious neighbours.
Families visited each other in the evenings after supper. Lunch being the main meal, supper was usually light and taken at about seven in the evening, after which people went out or entertained. Socialising and mixing with people was my mother’s principal pastime, indeed her main activity in life. Like the other women, she regularly engaged in the practice of what was called the istiqbal. This was a women-only reception, held in the afternoon, when the men were out of the house. Once it so happened that my father was at home and sitting reading in the liwan (the main reception room) as the women began to arrive. They were quite horrified at seeing him and told my mother so in no uncertain terms, whereupon he took himself off chuckling into his bedroom.
Each woman had a certain day for her istiqbal; I think ours took place on Tuesdays. There was a routine to these events. First, we were made to keep out of the way while our mother spent the morning making savouries and sweetmeats. (The best thing about that from our point of view was the wonderful food left over for us to feast on after everyone had gone.) Then, the front room, or salon, to the right of the liwan was dusted and swept to be ready for the occasion. There was an air of excitement as the women began to arrive, all dressed up and bejewelled. A great hubbub arose that echoed throughout the house as they greeted and kissed each other. Everyone admired and commented on each other’s clothes, which was the main aim of the exercise. At istiqbals, no woman adorned herself for men; it was a practice meant only to excite the envy or approbation of other women.
When they had assembled in our salon, the smell of their various perfumes wafted outwards powerfully. I gawped at them through the open door, they looked so glamorous. The talk was all about their households, children and husbands. They exchanged news, gossiped and let off steam. Someone asked if anyone had noticed how one of the Nashashibi women never ate a thing whenever she came to visit. It was a waste of time going to the trouble of making or offering her anything. She would just smile primly and say that she would have loved to, but her appetite was so poor she hardly ever ate.
“I thought there was something fishy about it. I mean you only had to look at her waistline to know it wasn’t true.” The women were agog, as they all thought that some of the Nashashibis were snooty and condescending. “I was determined to get to the bottom of it. So, I walked in on her just before she was due to visit me one day and least expecting it. And there she was, stuffing her face with cakes and pastries! That’s what she does each time she goes out.”
“No wonder she had no appetite! Fancy that, trying to make us feel like gluttons,” exclaimed the others.
If there was one place where a woman could complain about her husband, it was here. The others usually advised caution and patience, as well they might, since a disaffected wife had few other options in our society. In some of these gatherings, although not in ours, women sang or danced for each other. The ones who were especially good at it were usually egged on by the others to perform. A western eye might have seen something erotic in this, but it was nothing of the sort. It was joyous, uninhibited fun and everyone who could joined in. The dancing they did was that known in the West as belly-dancing, which we all learned as children. No one taught us how to do it, we just picked it up. I used to sway my hips and twist my hands around in rhythm with the music when I could barely walk, and by the age of three or four, I was dancing quite adeptly and entertaining the neighbours. My exhibitionism used to distress my brother who would drag me off the table where I was performing and take me home. “You should see your daughter,” he would exclaim to our parents, pushing me angrily towards them, “dancing and singing like a … like a …” and he would run out of epithets.
Although by the 1940s several women’s organisations had come into being in Jerusalem, my mother was never attracted to join, even when friends like Tarab Abdul-Hadi were involved. This woman, whom I was to meet living in exile in Cairo many years later, had been one of the founders of the first women’s organisation, the Palestine Arab Women’s Congress. This was established in the late 1920s and was political in nature, a remarkable phenomenon for the conservative Arab society of that time.
The women who joined Tarab Abdul-Hadi in setting it up came from those very same notable Jerusalem families with whom my mother mixed, but she found their overt political activism not to her liking. From the start, they made clear that they would protest against the Zionist presence in Palestine and would support their men’s national struggle for independence. My mother was uneasy about their bold declaration that they had left the traditional female arena of the home to engage in public life. Shockingly, many of them went on to discard the veil which was then ubiquitous and which my mother also wore. They wrote hundreds of letters and telegrams to anyone they thought might be sympathetic to the Palestinian plight.
But they also had a humanitarian side to their work which my mother did support. They ran a campaign on behalf of the prisoners whom the British authorities had incarcerated for resisting government policy on Jewish immigration into the country. They entreated the British High Commissioner to reduce or commute harsh sentences and they collected money, clothing and food for prisoners’ families who had been impoverished by the loss of their breadwinners. Some of them even sold their jewellery to raise money for their work. In 1938, they sent representatives to the Eastern Women’s Conference in Cairo to defend Palestine. This had drawn women from the Arab countries and also from Iran, and demanded an end to British rule in Palestine, a prohibition on Jewish immigration and land sales to Jews. “Good for them!” my mother said approvingly at the time. “If you ask me, they’re better than the men.”
One of the Jerusalem women’s organisations active during the 1930s (reproduced courtesy of the Palestinian Academic Society for the Study of International Affairs)
Towards the end of the 1930s, the Arab Women’s Congress split into a political and a social branch. The latter proved more appealing to ordinary women and, in the early 1940s, my cousin Aziza, who was then married to Zuhair and living in Jerusalem, joined the social branch. Soon, this association developed branches in other Palestinian cities, including Tulkarm, and Aziza was able to continue her membership when she went back there. She never tried to interest my mother in joining. She was content to socialise in a more informal way.
Socialising came naturally to my mother, as she was talkative and vivacious and in her element when telling stories and anecdotes. Had she been born in another society and at another time I think she could have become a professional comedienne. As it was, her audience consisted of our friends and us. My father’s one form of relaxation was listening to her gossip about our neighbours or people we knew. He would pretend to be reading his book while she talked. But if she stopped her narrative for a moment, he would look up and say, “Yes? What happened next?”
Those early years of the 1940s were probably the best of her whole life. The general troubles besetting Palestine had calmed after I was born and did not resurface to affect our area until after 1945. In that brief period, my mother could enjoy her comfortable social position attained after many years of hardship with my father’s straitened circumstances and struggling career. He was now set to rise in his job and could look to a better salary. With her maid and her gardener and all her friends about her, she felt contented, and the last thing in the world she wanted was for it all to come to an end.
The fact that men and women mixed freely in our area on social occasions was by no means the norm for the rest of Jerusalem. Society was predominantly Muslim and conservative, and men and women did not meet socially. Indeed, many women in the Old City wore the veil and, unlike my parents, people performed all the Islamic rituals of daily prayer and going to the mosque on Fridays. This was in keeping with the traditional life of Jerusalem which had always been viewed by Palestinians as a holy Islamic city and a great religious centre. During the major part of Ottoman rule it was even something of a backwater to which only pilgrims and religious scholars went, many of them hoping to die there. “I suppose in those days, you could best describe it as a large village with a religious atmosphere,” said my father. Jerusalem only began to change in the nineteenth century when the Christian missions established themselves there. In just fifty years, they built over a hundred churches, schools, hospitals and other institutions. From 1900 onwards, European Jews came to join the rest of the new arrivals and establish their own institutions. Twenty years later, the British made Jerusalem what it had never been, the seat of government and the de facto capital of Palestine. As a result, it became the most important city in the whole country.
The change in Jerusalem’s character which ensued was not uniform throughout the city, but occurred in patches, reflecting the pattern of foreign and immigrant settlement. The Old City and its environs remained Muslim, but newly built suburbs like our own had a more mixed population, including a number of Jews who had come to live there because they could not afford the rents in Rehavia, the Jewish settlement directly next to Qatamon. Otherwise, Jews usually confined themselves to certain areas in Jerusalem like the Hebrew University complex on Mount Scopus, or the part behind the King David Hotel known as Montefiore (after the British Jewish philanthropist Moses Montefiore who founded it), and the Jewish quarters in the Old City and at Mea Shearim.
Palestine during the British Mandate, at the time of my birth
Mea Shearim was an odd orthodox Jewish enclave very near to the Old City, established in the early 1900s and full of black-coated men with long beards and ringlets for sideboards. Some of them wore what seemed to us outlandish round fur-trimmed hats and knee-length breeches and formed a bizarre sight amongst the Arabs. People said they looked dusty and unwashed. They were immigrants from Eastern Europe, and we often wondered how they could bear going about in their heavy clothes during Jerusalem’s hot summers. There was little residential mixing between Jews and Arabs, but in commercial areas like the Jaffa Road people mingled, usually without friction. “In fact,” chuckled my father, “all the young Arab men liked to go down to the Jaffa Road to look at the Jewish girls. They found them attractive and used to whistle at them and try and chat them up.” But my mother disapproved. “Yes and you know why. Because they were all easy. They were anybody’s.”
By the end of the 1930s, Jerusalem had acquired a cinema, cafes and something of a social life. The Zion Cinema (which was Jewish-owned) was also used as a stage for shows and plays. Visiting Egyptian film stars, singers and comedians performed there to packed, excited audiences of Jerusalemites who felt themselves part of a new glamorous world. In the 1940s, several other cinemas appeared, and one day my mother took us with her and the neighbours and their children to see a film. It was showing at the Rex Cinema, which was Arab-owned, and soon displaced the Jewish cinemas for Arab audiences. I must have been no more than four years old at the time. We saw the film Frankenstein with Boris Karloff, now considered a cinema classic, but then something of which my mother knew little except that it was foreign (she was used to seeing only Egyptian films). The effect on me was quite horrific and long-lasting. I had nightmares for months afterwards, not helped by my brother’s Frankenstein impersonations. We would sit in the deep window seat of the liwan and he would pull down the shutters to make everything go dark. And then he would invent stories on the Frankenstein theme to make me scream.
The YMCA of Jerusalem opposite the King David Hotel also had an auditorium for concerts and lectures. Young people loved to go there because it offered a variety of entertainments. It had tennis and squash courts, a large swimming pool, a library and a cafeteria. Not the least of its attractions was that it provided a venue for young men and women to meet. This of course was nothing like the sort of mixing between the sexes to be found in Europe and was based much more on people meeting together in families, but nevertheless it enabled the sons and daughters to see and talk to each other. These were predominantly Christians, who also had other opportunities of meeting each other at picnics and gatherings organised by the various Christian churches to which they belonged. Social custom amongst Muslims did not encourage such activities, but many Muslim men and the more modern amongst the Muslim families also used the YMCA. Our cousins Zuhair and Iyyas, who normally lived in Tulkarm but came and stayed in Jerusalem with us frequently, used to take the three of us to see plays there, but Ziyad and I were too young to join in the sports and other activities.
The most popular cafes in Jerusalem were Jewish-owned. “They had tables on the pavements and some of them had a real Viennese atmosphere,” Leila Mantoura, a Christian Palestinian friend, told me. “You could eat the most delicious chocolate cake there.” Iyyas sometimes took Ziyad to such cafes on the Jaffa Road. They had icecream and sat outside, watching people go by. This was a new feature in Jerusalem’s life imported by the European Jewish immigrants. The traditional Arab coffee-house, a feature of every city in Palestine and indeed every city in the Arab world, was of course a place where only men went to talk, play backgammon and smoke a narghile (or hookah).
Our father used to take us out to a Jewish European place in Baq‘a which served ice-cream. When we walked back and it was dark, we could see the sky lit up with a brilliant patchwork of stars. Our father would then give us a small lesson in astronomy, telling us the names of the stars and the constellations. One day, while scraping the bottom of the ice-cream bowl in his eagerness to get at the last mouthful, Ziyad dropped the bowl onto the floor and it broke. As our father was about to tell him off, the owner, who was a Hungarian Jew, held up his hand and hurried over. “Never mind, never mind,” he said, bending down to sweep up the mess. “If all our worries were so small, what a good world it would be!”
Families often went to the new garden cafes outside Jerusalem, in Ramallah and around the village of Beit Jala. We went for outings to the Grand Hotel in Ramallah, except that everybody still called it the Odeh Hotel after the name of its owner. It had a large garden restaurant with shady pine trees where they served charcoal-grilled meat, tasty salads, olives and freshly baked bread. But well-to-do Palestinians still preferred to go to Jaffa for picnics, to swim and saunter about. This had traditionally been Palestine’s major city, where the best families lived, where the first Palestinian newspapers were established, and where the intelligentsia met. “The bride of the sea,” people called it; “bride” in Arabic is used to denote a thing of great beauty.
Jaffa had wide roads, big houses, picturesque views over the Mediterranean and a lively, busy harbour. It was a place for fun, for business and, as Palestine’s major port, for travel. Before Jerusalem livened up, people went there to get away from its fusty religious atmosphere. Whenever my father went to Jaffa to work at the Near East Broadcasting Station established by the British, he would take Siham and Ziyad along with him. As soon as they saw the sea, they would beg to go swimming and then my father would leave them trustingly in the care of one of the men who looked after the beach.
