Campos 257Notes
- arlier versions of this paper were presented at the Fifth Mediterranean E
Social and Political Research Meeting at the European University Institute
(2004) and the SSRC Beirut Conference on Public Spheres (2004). The
author would like to thank the organizers and participants of these work-
shops for their probing comments, in particular Seteney Shami, Fawwaz
Traboulsi, Zeynep Gambetti, Sune Haugbolle and Srirupa Roy. Tamir Sorek
also provided useful feedback.
2.Uns ‘ .ur/‘anās.ir (pl.) can be translated as either “element/component” or as
“race/stock/descent.” In the context of the late Ottoman Empire the mean-
ing is somewhere between the two; group distinctions were made based on
shifting sociological factors rather than solely essentializing characteristic
attributes.
3.What Is Required of Us After the Constitution,” “ al-Ittihad al-‘Uthmani 1,
no. 37.
4.ogers Brubaker refers to this malady as “Groupism,” which he describes R
as “the tendency to take discrete, sharply differentiated, internally homo-
geneous and externally bounded groups as basic constituents of social life,
chief protagonists of social conflicts, and fundamental units of social analy-
sis.” Rogers Brubaker, “Ethnicity without Groups,” Archives européennes de
sociologie XLIII, vol. 2 (2002), 164.
5.ee the introductions of James L. Gelvin, S Divided Loyalties: Nationalism
and Mass Politics in Syria at the Close of Empire (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1998); Hasan Kayalı, Arabs and Young Turks: Ottomanism,
Arabism and Islamism in the Ottoman Empire, 1908–18 (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1997); and Maria Todorova, Imagining the
Balkans (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997) for particularly lucid
critiques of the nationalist literature. See also Maurus Reinkowski, “Late
Ottoman Rule over Palestine: Its Evaluation in Arab, Turkish and Israeli
Histories, 1970–90,” Middle Eastern Studies 35 (1999) for a critique of the
Turkish, Arab and Zionist-tinged histories of Palestine.
6.mong others, see Ussama Makdisi, A The Culture of Sectarianism:
Community, History, and Violence in Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Lebanon
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); and Jens Hanssen,
Thomas Philipp and Stefan Weber, eds., Empire in the City: Arab Provincial
Capitals in the Late Ottoman Empire (Beirut: Orient Institut der Deutschen