32 • cHAPTeR 1
moment. Zionists and their supporters tend to prefer higher estimates
of the Jewish population and lower estimates of the arab population,
while palestinians and their advocates have the opposite preferences.
For the purposes of this study of intellectual history, it will suffice to
provide rough population estimates intended solely to offer the reader
a general, if admittedly imprecise, sense of the size of the populations
of Late Ottoman palestine.^63 In 1881, before the first large Jewish na-
tionalist immigration, Palestine’s population was likely about 462,000,
consisting of 400,000 Muslims, 42,000 Christians, and 20,000 Jews
(including perhaps 5,000 Jews without Ottoman citizenship). By the
start of the Great War, the population had increased to about 740,000,
including 600,000 Muslims, 80,000 Christians, and somewhere be-
tween 60,000 and 85,000 Jews (of whom fewer than 40,000 were Ot-
toman citizens).
In other words, the vast majority of the population throughout the
Late Ottoman period consisted of arabic- speaking Muslims. Of these,
most were Sunnis, though there were also small pockets of Shiites and
Druze, especially in the northern regions bordering on present- day
Lebanon.^64 Though the majority of Palestine’s Sunnis belonged to the
Shāfiʿī madhhab (jurisprudential school), the most influential mufti (ex-
pounder of Islamic law) was that of the Ḥanafī madhhab, as this was
the school followed by the Ottoman rulers and applied in the Islamic
courts. the various muftis, as well as the naqīb al- ashrāf (the repre-
sentative of the local descendants of the prophet Muhammad, plural
nuqabāʾ), were selected from the families of Palestine’s ʿulamāʾ, the
religious- scholarly (and usually also economic) elite. Whereas the muf-
tis and nuqabāʾ al- ashrāf were generally drawn from the local Muslim
population, the quḍāh (Islamic court judges, sing. qāḍī) were usually
foreigners (though there were some exceptions in the early nineteenth
century). The qāḍī of the Ḥanafī court in Jerusalem was a much re-
spected position, appointed by the highest religious official in Istanbul,
the shaykh al- islām.^65 The leaders of Palestine’s rural population, which
constituted the majority of the Muslim community, were village and
regional shaykhs and, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centu-
ries, a new Ottoman position called the mukhtār.^66
(^63) For our purposes, if the actual numbers were somewhat higher or lower, this book’s
argument would not be much affected. I base my estimates primarily on Mccarthy, The
Population of Palestine.
(^64) Abassi, “Temurot ba- ukhlusiyah ha- muslimit bi- rushalayim 1840– 1914.”
(^65) Mannāʿ, “ha- Ukhlusiyah ha- ʿarvit: Ḥevrah, kalkalah ve- irgun,” 8:164– 65.
(^66) the Ottomans created this position to replace the prominence of the shaykhs and
thereby gain a stronger hold on the rural population. Ultimately the shaykhs maintained
much of their power. Ibid., 173.