Arpan Roy and Noura Salahaldeen, Naseej: Life-Weavings of Palestine (Pluto Press, 2025).
Jadaliyya (J): What made you edit this book?
Arpan Roy and Noura Salahaldeen (AR & NS): We were approached by the then co-presidents of Insaniyyat—Society of Palestinian Anthropologists, in 2021 to brainstorm about a book project about pluralism in Palestine. We suspect we were approached because both our own research deals with what would be considered “minority” groups (although we dislike this term for reasons we explain in the book’s introduction) in Palestine—Arpan researching Romanies and Noura writing her PhD dissertation on (the self-identified) African Community of Jerusalem. The book shifted between various forms over the years, and in the end it became a book of eighteen contributions from twenty-two authors, including ourselves, each taking up the question of the layered human tapestry of Palestine from various angles, sometimes from scholarly perspectives, but also through poetry, fiction, interview, memoir, and more. As such, we hope that the book appeals to readers both inside and outside the academy. After around a year of discussion and struggling with precision, we decided to call the book Naseej, which means “tapestry” or “woven fabric” in Arabic, hoping to offer an alternate vocabulary to discourses on Palestine.
J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures does the book address?
AR & NS: The book might seem subtle or inconspicuous at first glance, but it is rather controversial in Palestine studies. To our knowledge, the book is the first instance of an epistemic break from the trajectory of narrating Palestinians as a monolithic cultural bloc. The reason for this is that Zionism has always denied the peoplehood of Palestinians, so the story of the wonderful diversity that makes up the tapestry of Palestinian society has always been ignored (at best) or suppressed. In neighboring countries like Lebanon and Syria, it has been the opposite story. There, peoplehood has been attacked precisely by a dwelling on diversity, as if a pluralistic cultural make-up cannot possibly amount to sovereignty. In Palestine, the ultimate aim of a colonial/imperialist negation of peoplehood has been the same, even if the strategy has been different. Naseej aims to put Palestine back into its regional context, that which it shares with Lebanon and Syria (and beyond), and explores the stories of the different communities, languages, religions, and subjectivities that made up Palestine historically, and that which still partially survive in some way.
J: How does this book connect to and/or depart from your previous work?
AR & NS: It is the first time either of us has edited a book, so it was a new frontier for both of us. It was a way to tell the story that is deeply dear to both of us through the voices and subjectivities of others. Without quite being aware of it, it also became a vehicle for us to contextualize our own research beyond the particular communities we work with.
J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?
AR & NS: With the genocide in Gaza and the overall pessimistic situation in the West Bank, we feel that this book acts as a unique kind of archive of what Palestine was, in some ways is, and perhaps can be again. It is a document testifying to Palestine not only as a site of death and destruction, but of creativity and innovative forms of life, and as a destination for pilgrims, refugees, and more—for millennia. We hope that this book alters the perception what Palestine is as a concept, if not a place, for the world. A soon-to-be-published Arabic version of the book will, we hope, help open such discussions also for an Arabic-speaking readership.
J: What other projects are you working on now?
AR & NS: Arpan is now working on a new book project tentatively called Sadness of the East, which is an ethnography of Christianity in the Arab world, particularly in the Levantine region, exploring how theology is conditioned by exceptional political duress. Noura is completing her dissertation while preparing to undertake a new research project that traces and articulates the connections between the migrations of the African Community of Jerusalem—across Palestine and Jordan—and the broader waves of African migration to the Levant that occurred during the same period.
Excerpt from the book (from the Introduction, pages 7 to 11)
Naseej collects the work of historians, poets, visual artists, architects, dramaturgists, storytellers, archivists, and more, but above all it is a work of anthropological imagination. It privileges anthropology—the science of experience—in its mode of narrating the intricacies and untold stories of the Palestinian naseej. Crucially, it is not an inventory of the various communities and groups that one finds in Palestine. If it were this, then several groups would be missing. Rather, it looks to sensitivities, Naseej subtleties, and intimacies, and pays attention to minor details of everyday life and experience to tell the Palestinian story anew.
The eighteen contributions in this book are divided into four thematic parts. Part I, “Itineraries,” begins with a riveting poem by Najwan Darwish, in which the poet traces a history of migrations to Palestine from Southern Europe, the Caucasus, Central Asia, and more—all of which is filtered through an Arabic lifeworld that gave shape to the Palestinian naseej. The part then continues to explore these lines of flight. Noura Salahaldeen follows the lives and journeys of three members of the African community of Jerusalem. Traveling alongside these three individuals, the essay crosses into Egypt and Jordan, seeking to find movements and continuities of people, communities, and ideas between Jerusalem and elsewhere in the region. Following this itinerary, Arpan Roy traces what remains of Romani communities in Palestine today, and some of the itineraries of Palestinian Romanies also to Egypt and Jordan after the expulsions of 1948 and 1967—expulsions that affected Romani people no less than any other “kind” of Palestinian. These essays by Salahaldeen and Roy make the case for Palestine having been an essential node for travelers and nomadic communities of the region—a node that has been severed from its surroundings by the advent of Israel. Turning the focus back to Jerusalem, Antranik Cassem, a literary scholar and translator of Iraqi-Armenian heritage, interviews Dr. Gaby Kervorkian, a Palestinian-Armenian doctor from Jerusalem. In the wide-ranging discussion, the two go in depth into Dr. Kevorkian’s life trajectory as a medical student in the Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic, and as an activist for Palestinian liberation both there and in Lebanon. Through this life trajectory, we get a nuanced history of the Armenian community in Jerusalem, and a unique vantage point on the place of Armenians in Palestinian nationalist movements. Closing Part I, Intimaa Alsdudi and Hadeel Assali offer a portrait of a man named Abu Fahad al-Hamidi, nicknamed “Ibn Battuta” after the famous medieval traveler. Abu Fahad is a Tarabin Bedouin living in the buffer zone of the southern Gaza Strip, but is also known as Ibn Battuta because of his extensive travels and wisdom. A bearer of both ancestral knowledge and modern university degrees, his travel stories highlight the ways in which he navigates multiple identities as a trickster to bypass checkpoints and borders, drawing on an unconventional knowledge of geography and social relations. A cosmopolitan Gazan, but also a Bedouin steadfastly holding onto his land, Abu Fahad demonstrates the richness of an identity that is rooted in Palestine while also an accumulation of itineraries in motion.
Part II, “Directions of Prayer,” explores the centrality of Palestine as a destination for pilgrimage and as a hub for spirituality. In the first essay in this part, Tyler Kynn shares vignettes from his research on Muslim pilgrims from medieval India to Mecca and Palestine. Visiting Jerusalem and Hebron in tandem with performing the hajj, Indian pilgrims would be a common and accepted part of medieval Palestine’s social fabric. Exploring other aspects of this theme, in their contribution Dalal Odeh and Eman Alyan embark on a journey through their native Jerusalem, focusing on the living remnants of three Sufi lodges (zawaya), each having origins in Islam’s Persianate “East”—Bukhara, Afghanistan, and India. Odeh and Alyan document aspects of this past and present with special attention to the biographies of the contemporary descendants of the lodges’ long-time custodian families. In his essay, Salim Tamari discusses the contested shrine of Simon the Just, the last high priest of the Jewish Temple of antiquity, in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of Jerusalem. Simon’s shrine once hosted an annual festival with participation from not only Jews but also Muslims and Christians, and Tamari carefully illustrates this history of shared communal life in Palestine that was lost after Zionism—a stark contrast to a contemporary Jerusalem where the sanctity of the shrine is exploited to establish a Jewish majority in the area. Closing Part II, Amir Odeh presents scenes from the past and present of the Ahmadiyya Muslim community of Palestine. Originating in the village of N’ilin, located in the present-day West Bank, but following an ostensibly Indian form of Islam, this community today resides on Mt. Carmel in Haifa. The essay illuminates the community’s genealogical roots, religious conversion and expansion, domestic architecture, fabric of social relations, economic life, and political positioning in the context of the Israeli state’s peculiar version of “multiculturalism.”
Part III, “Topographies,” delves into the vertical layers of the Palestinian naseej. Aamer Ibraheem invites the reader to reimagine Palestine from the standpoint of one of its neighboring regions—the Syrian Golan Heights. Ibrahim engages with a doctoral thesis written by Adib Souleiman Bagh, a Golani geographer, translating a key passage and offering poignant introductory remarks that situate the Palestinian naseej in a regional context. In the next essay, Khaldun Bshara underlines the particularities of Palestinian heritage buildings, and the historical, civilizational and class-based components that have produced similar but not quite the “same” built heritage across history. Following Bshara’s contribution, we reprint Yugoslav anthropologist Nina Sefrović’s 1981 study of a Bosniak community that settled in Caesarea, on the Palestinian coast, in the late eighteenth century. The study was originally written in Serbo-Croatian and is reprinted here in translation. The final essay in Part III is a conversation between artist Jumana Manna and anthropologist Saleem al-Bahloly in which the two discuss Manna’s film on musical traditions in Palestine. Because the film was based on Jewish archives and draws from the work of a researcher closely associated with the Zionist project, the two discuss the traps inherent in using enemy archives in constructing the Palestinian story. The two also discuss the complex history of Arab Jews in Palestine, focusing especially on Zionism’s later expansion to include Jews from the wider Middle East as part of what had initially been an European settlement project.
Part IV, “Familiar Places,” brings Naseej into the intimate spaces of family life in Palestine. Set in an erased Bedouin village in the vicinity of Haifa, Sheikha Hussein Helawy offers a short story recounting an elderly woman’s love for the legendary Egyptian singer Umm Kulthum, and intersperses this story with a coming-of-age story of her granddaughter. In the next contribution, Maisan Hamdan shares a section from her novel on the conflicts and complexities of Druze communities in Palestine, focusing on the prison experience of a young man who refuses to follow an order while serving in the Israeli military. Next, Radi Shehadeh narrates the establishment of a theater in al-Maghar, a village in the Galilee with a religiously mixed population of Muslims, Christians, and Druze. Shehadeh offers a philosophical account of how a group of rebellious youth push social norms and boundaries, and pave the way for cultural life in the village. In the next contribution, Hawa Batwash shares a piece of short fiction that brings to life the Circassian migration to her native village of Kafr Kama in the Galilee, founded in 1878 after the expulsion of many Muslims from the Russian Empire. Lastly, Julia Elyachar writes about the life of her Jewish grandfather in pre-1948 Palestine. Elyachar’s grandfather grew up in Jerusalem before emigrating to the United States after the establishment of Israel. Coming back to visit his hometown decades later, the now elderly grandfather could no longer recognize the city of his childhood. Through a very personal and emotive register, Elyachar asks what may have been lost of Jewish life in Palestine after the ruptures of Zionism and Nakba.
There is one final point to make in considering the historical arc of the Palestinian naseej. This is that the Palestinian naseej, in both its vertical and horizontal axes, was irreversibly shaped by the arrival of Islam and (especially) by its Arab bearers in 637 CE. Ostensibly a linguistic identity rooted in the Arabic language, an “Arab” is an individual who speaks Arabic in any of its dialectic variations, but is at the same time bound to other Arabic-speakers through the shared formal register of al-fusha, through the classical language of the Qurʾan regardless of belonging or non-belonging to Islam, and more recently, a shared experience of colonialism and imperialism in the Arab region in its French, British, Italian, Israeli, and American varieties. If one is to accept this partial view of Arabness—for there is surely more to the story—then there are at least two important consequences. For one, because of its essentially decentralized linguistic nature, the “Arab” component of the “Palestinian Arab” does not negate any of the other “layers” of the Palestinian naseej, whether they be religious, civilizational, mnemonic, or even linguistic. On the contrary, it is precisely the Arabness of Palestine that is the reason why the Palestinian naseej is able to accommodate layer upon layer of forms of life. This is as true in Palestine as it is elsewhere in the Arab world. Here we take pride in the inclusivity of Arabness over the bigoted techniques of belonging practiced by our colonizers.
It is also true that the permissibility of Arabness lends itself to a certain plasticity. It is an identity that is responsive, at times, to cultural and political signs of the times; and we cannot deny the plurality of interpretations of what Arabness means to a given people at a given moment in time. There is no consensus on the matter nor easy way out, but we find solace in the poem by Najwan Darwish, in which the poet traces the lines of flight of Arabness through Kurdistan, Armenia, Anatolia, North Africa, Andalusia, the Hijaz, Shiraz, Isfahan, and Bukhara. He writes: “And by anything less than this, one is not an Arab.” These lines of flight also land in the pages of this book.
The second consequence of the unique parameters of Arabness is the reverberation of Palestine’s colonial present wherever Arabic is spoken. Palestine is the last major European colony remaining in the Arab region, and arguably the world. The immense pain that this reality generates for other Arabs is difficult for non-Arabs to grasp. In this sense, it is the Palestinian experience of colonialism that helps sustain a continuity of Arab unity, for the assault on Palestinian existence is an assault on all Arab existence.
But Palestine is not only pain and suffering. It is also creativity, it is an encounter with the sacred, it is lines of flight from Kurdistan to Bukhara, it is hosting the otherness of others. It is everything that has been denied to a people but that which, with the incomparable pleasure of the forbidden, the same people continue to register in their mnemonic ledger and preserve for generations ahead to inherit, like a piece of jewelry passed down a family line but, for now, locked away.
Refaat Al-Areer wrote prior to his martyrdom: “If I must die, you must live to tell my story.” Naseej is a collection of story after story, from Gaza, Jerusalem, Haifa, Nablus, the Galilee, the Naqab, and from elsewhere in a world that has turned its eyes toward Palestine. We tell these stories keeping Al-Areer’s words in mind, as they are also his story, and so that his last poem was not written in vain. The “you” that Al-Areer entrusts with his story is not a stranger, but someone who is familiar, someone who is entrusted with a family heirloom or treasure. This “you” belongs to the “we” with which we have weaved Naseej.