The first Series commemorated Professor Hanna Batatu (1926-2000) and honors the scholarship and contributions of the late Palestinian political scientist and historian.
The 1908 Constitutional Revolution as a Critical Point in the History of the Levant (Bilad al-Sham): A Reading of the Problematics of Local History
The first lecture in the Hanna Batatu Lecture Series is entitled “The 1908 Constitutional Revolution as a Critical Point in the History of the Levant (Bilad al-Sham): A Reading of the Problematics of Local History”, and was given by the Palestinian sociologist, Professor Salim Tamari.
Dr. Salim Tamari is professor of sociology at Birzeit University and an adjunct professor at the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies at Georgetown University. He is senior fellow at the Institute for Palestine Studies (IPS), and the former director of the IPS-affiliated Institute of Jerusalem Studies. He is editor of Jerusalem Quarterly and Hawliyyat al Quds. He has authored several works on urban culture, political sociology, biography and social history, with a focus on Palestine and the Eastern Mediterranean.
His lecture addresses the Constitutional Revolution that overthrew the Ottoman Sultan Hamid’s tyranny and opened the door for a new socio-political system in the capitals of the Levant. He will present a new reading of the contributions by local historians, who had different positions concerning the Constitutional Revolution and the concept of Ottoman decentralization.
The lecture particularly tackles the critical social changes that swept through the city of Nablus during the revolution and the counter-revolution (1909) through the works of the following local historians: Rafiq al-Tamimi and Mohamad Bahjat (ethnography of Beirut, Damascus, Aleppo, Jerusalem, and Balqa); Ihsan el-Nimir (defending the Sultanic Regime and Abdulhamid’s administration against the Young Turks) and Muhammad Izzat Darwaza (analyzing the Constitutional Revolution and the counter-revolution.)
The lecture will attempt to answer the paradox of how and why the first anti-feudal Arab party (Al-Hamadiya Association, Nablus 1902) rallied against the Constitutional Revolution and sent volunteers to fight alongside legions of the counter-revolution (the Hamiidan Restoration). It will also shed light on the importance of reading the local history to understand the conflict that swept through the Levant between the principle of Ottomanism and national separatist movements.
Dr. Salim Tamari’s reading builds on the legacy of Professor Hanna Batatu through analyzing the relationship between rural areas and the city, the relationship between peasants and the state, and the structural change in the composition of the local groups that dominated the central state.
Society and History in Iraq between Hanna Batatu and Ali al-Wardi
Titled “Society and History in Iraq between Hanna Batatu and Ali al-Wardi”, the second lecture in the Hanna Batatu Lecture Series was given by Lebanese-American historian, Dina Rizk Khoury.
Khoury is Professor of History and International Affairs at George Washington University and a Guggenheim Fellow. She earned her doctorate from Georgetown University under the direction of Professor Hanna Batatu in 1987. Her first book, State and Provincial Society in the Ottoman Empire: Mosul 1519-1834 (Cambridge University Press, 1997, 2002) earned the Fuat Koprulu bi-annual prize from the Turkish Studies Association and the Kuwait-Britain Friendship prize from the British Society of Middle Eastern Studies. Her second book, Iraq in Wartime: Soldiering, Martyrdom and Remembrance (Cambridge University Press, 2013), is a social history of the Iran-Iraq and the 1991 Gulf War. Her new project focuses in nationality and citizenship in Iraq and the Gulf from the late 19th century until the issuing of modern nationality laws in the 1920s.
Khoury’s lecture focuses on the writings of Hanna Batatu and Ali al-Wardi and the implications of their distinct methodologies to our understanding of the history and politics and present-day Iraq. The Palestinian political scientist and the Iraqi sociologist utilized radically different approaches and reached divergent conclusions about the nature of Iraq’s modern national project.
Drawing on Marxist class analysis, Hanna Batatu traced the development of Iraqi society from a pre-modern one based on tribal and communal loyalties, to a modern class society in which allegiances to class and to political parties co-existed and sometimes replaced older more traditional allegiances. By contrast Ali al-Wardi drew on the sociological thinking of Ibn Khaldun as well as on the work of American social psychologists. He understood the history of Iraq, not as a linear progression from pre-modern forms of social organization to modern ones, but as a continuous struggle between hadara and badawa, between the cultures of urban settled life and the primordial allegiances to tribe and sect.
Writing in the late 1970s at the height of Ba’thist power, Hanna Batatu’s history of the Iraqi Communist Party and its liquidation by the Ba’th, exhibited a faith in the ability of popular mobilization to forge a change in society. Ali al-Wardi had no such faith. He saw the politics of the 1920 rebellion, claimed by nationalist historiography as the birth of modern Iraqi nationhood, as mired in allegiances to sect and tribe. Al-Wardi’s ethnographic approach led him to assert that the cultural personality of Iraqis was incapable of assimilating modern forms of sociability.
Looking at Batatu’s and al-Wardi’s histories of modern Iraq in 2016, one would tend to find much in al-Wardi that helps in our understanding of present day Iraq. Beginning in the 1990s, al-Wardi’s works have been republished and widely circulated. This revival of al-Wardi speaks to a wider questioning of the Arab world of the project of modernity and the post-colonial regimes that have ruled since the 1950s. Batatu’s class analysis and his relative optimism in the project of modernity appear incongruous with the present realities of Iraq. However, we give up a great deal of insight into the modern history of Iraq if we only see its social history through the lens of al-Wardi’s work. Not the least of what we give up is the accomplishments, however problematic, of the modernization project in Iraq and the prospect of speaking of an Iraqi future outside the confines of sect and tribe.
The History of the Iraqi Communist Party: Between the Academic Hanna Batatu and the Political Activist Aziz Sibahi
Titled “The History of the Iraqi Communist Party: Between the Academic Hanna Batatu and the Political Activist Aziz Sibahi”, the third lecture in the Hanna Batatu Lecture Series was given by the Iraqi historian, Thabit A.J. Abdullah.
Thabit A.J. Abdullah was born and raised in Baghdad Iraq. He received his PhD in history in 1992 from Georgetown University in Washington, DC. He currently holds the position of Professor and Chair of the Department of History at York University in Toronto, Canada. Prior to this he held positions of Assistant Professor and Director of the Middle East Studies Program at the American University in Cairo (1992-1996), Assistant Professor of History at Oklahoma State University, and Associate Dean for External Affairs at York University. His chief academic interests are medieval and early modern social and economic history of Iraq. He has, nevertheless, also published on modern and contemporary Iraq. In addition to English and Arabic, his books have been translated to numerous languages including Italian, Spanish, Lithuanian and Chinese. His most recent publication is a forthcoming article in the Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient entitled “The Mandaean Community and Ottoman- British Rivalry in Late 19th Century Iraq: The Curious Case of Shaykh Ṣaḥan.” Professor Abdullah is also active as a regular commentator in a number of television and radio programmes in Canada and the US.
Thabet’s lecture focused on the different approaches adopted by Batatu and Sbahi in writing the history of the Iraqi Communist Party. In 2002, after decades of delays and postponements, the Iraqi Communist Party finally published a work outlining and analysing its history. The threevolume work written by one of the Party’s long-serving cadres, Aziz Sbahi, appeared as a direct response to Hanna Batatu’s monumental work on Iraq. Batatu had long hoped that the Party would respond to his work by publishing their own version of how their history unfolded and was delighted to hear that Sbahi had started to work on it. Unfortunately, he would not live long enough to read or comment upon it. While both, Batatu and Sbahi, adopted a Marxist approach to writing the history of the Communist Party, their respective backgrounds left its mark on their work. Batatu was an academic of Palestinian origin. He was educated at Georgetown and Harvard in the United States and had an uncanny ability to place his subject within the broader social and economic framework of modern Iraq. Batatu tended to emphasize the objective conditions in which the Party developed and the general social background of its members. Sbahi, on the other hand, was an Iraqi from a poor family background. With very little formal education he was, on the whole, a self-educated man who joined the Communist Party in his youth and spent his entire life struggling within its ranks. His history is written from the perspective of one who lived the struggle from within and emphasizes the subjective conditions and individual decisions taken at specific instances. After looking at examples of the two authors’ differing approaches to the writing of the history of the Iraqi Communist Party, attention was turned to the present. The question, which was asked at the end of the presentation, was whether the two approaches may help us shed light on the current condition of the Party after the American invasion of 2003?
An authority on the histories of Iraq and Syria
Hanna John Batatu (1926-2000) was an internationally renowned scholar and a highly regarded authority on the contemporary Arab world, specifically the histories of Iraq and Syria. Born in Jerusalem, Palestine, Hanna Batatu emigrated to the United States in 1948. The Nakba and the plight of Palestine and its people had a visceral impact on his life. From 1951 to 1953, he studied at Georgetown University’s Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service and earned a prestigious award for undergraduates. He won a scholarship to study political science at Harvard where he met and studied with Professors Barrington Moore Junior and Herbert Marcuse and was heavily influenced by their Marxist methodology. Like his mentor Marcuse, Batatu would later define and introduce himself to his students as an independent Marxist. He was interested in Soviet history, but ended up writing on Iraq. He earned his PhD from Harvard in 1960 with a dissertation entitled The Shaykh and the Peasant in Iraq, 1917-1958.
From 1962 to 1982, Batatu taught at the American University of Beirut. Then from 1982 until his retirement in 1994, he taught at Georgetown University, where he held the Shaykh Sabah Al-Salem Al-Sabah Chair of Contemporary Arab Studies, and was subsequently named Professor Emeritus upon retirement.
From the 1950s till his passing in 2000, Professor Batatu dedicated his writing and career to studying, teaching and writing about the history of the modern Middle East. In his writings, Hanna Batatu set the highest standards for historians and researchers and effectively established a scholarly basis for the study, analysis and historical documentation of societal development in contemporary Iraq and Syria. His methodology is grounded in political sociology and considers in detail social factors in the development of state and society, with particular emphasis on the social composition of political movements.
Hanna Batatu started studying Iraqi history in the 1950s, taking a particular interest in the revolutionary movements that were then prominent in that country, especially, but not limited to, the Iraqi Communist Party. From the late 1950s on he travelled to Iraq several times. He succeeded in gaining access to communist political prisoners and secret police files before the revolution of 1958. A letter of recommendation from an Iraqi friend helped him access security service archives from various periods of Iraqi history up until the 1970s and he used this and his considerable range of personal contacts with figures from different political movements to compose his magisterial study of political change in Iraq, The Old Social Classes and the Revolutionary Movements of Iraq (1978, Princeton University Press). His work on Iraq has widely been considered the pre-eminent study of modern Iraqi history and one of the best works on the Middle East to be published in the second half of the 20th century. It paved the way for any study that followed concerning modern Iraq and its political and socio-economic history.
Hanna Batatu also undertook a study of Syria in his book, Syria’s Peasantry, the Descendants of Its Lesser Rural Notables, and Their Politics (1999, Princeton University Press). The work was applauded by Professor L. Carl Brown as ”vintage Batatu, with awesomely thorough research. . . a solid sociopolitical study of modern Syria’s rural population [that] will take its place among the classics of rural history.”
Yahya Sadowski, Professor of Middle East Studies at Johns Hopkins University’s Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, described Batatu as ”probably the greatest political scientist to study the Middle East in the past 50 years,” and stated that ”[h]is analyses of Iraq and Syria were unprecedented in their level of detail, their nuanced understanding, and the authority of their conclusions.” Abbas Amanat, Professor of Modern Middle Eastern History at Yale, said that Batatu’s seminal book on Iraq ”still maintains its place as one of the major works of history of the 20th-century Middle East.”
Hanna Batatu, however, both defied labels and disliked them.
In addition to his enduring works, Hanna Batatu was a committed and beloved teacher and inspirational mentor to generations of scholars. His lectures were comprehensive, meticulously prepared and organized and rich. He was humble and approachable and although he lived a hermetic life dedicated to his scholarship, he occasionally socialized with his students and invited them to visit his home. The 1991 Gulf War against Iraq and its destructive aftermath saddened Hanna Batatu and hastened his decision to retire. He was worried that the knowledge he so generously shared would be used to harm the societies and peoples he had studied with such passion and respect.
Hanna Batatu’s final project was a major work he had been planning and collecting material for on the history of Palestine. He did not live to finish it.
The ACSS closed the Hanna Batatu lecture series with an occasional publication that pays tribute to Hanna Batatu and his seminal work.
Link to the publication: http://www.theacss.org/pages/occasional-publications/906/
في ختام السلسلة، أصدر المجلس كتابًا يضمّ المحاضرات الثلاث، وتعقيبًا، وشهاداتٍ لأساتذة وطلاب وأفراد من عائلة بطاطو، ومجموعة قصاصاتٍ صحافيّة نُشرت عنه، فضلًا عن سيرته الذاتية وصور خاصّة له.
The ACSS produced a short video briefly narrating Batatu’s life.
Link to the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9eiRe6jwQj8
كما أصدر المجلس فيديو قصيرًا بعنوان “حنّا بطاطو: السيرة والمسيرة” يختصر من خلاله سيرة المكرَّم وإرثه الفكري.