The acknowledgements of my dissertation in Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University
”lmao reading your dissertation acknowledgments” — someone on the internet.
“I also read your preface to your Ph.D. thesis (on academia.edu) which was hilarious” — someone else on the internet.
Acknowledgements
I owe the most thanks to my advisor, Cyrus Schayegh. He always advised me to think bigger. Based on the scope of this dissertation, he might now be regretting that advice. I would also like to thank my committee members, Michael Cook, Johnathan Gribetz and Zayde Antrim. This dissertation would not have been awarded had you not willingly subjected yourselves to a summer of tortuous misery. Bill Petrich provided wonderful editorial guidance and Christine Lindner saved me from many embarrassing errors. Next in line to thank is the true inspiration behind the dissertation: Lady Gaga. Without having listened to Just Dance on repeat for 10,000 hours, this dissertation would have never come to completion. [To diversify my neurological stimulations, I also listed to Poker Face and Bad Romance.]
Acknowledgements are usually the most interesting parts of dissertations. They are wells of information about advisors, friendship circles, networks of patronage and bodily fluids that have circulated around the field. An old college friend happened to peak over my shoulder one Saturday afternoon while I was drafting these words. “You are already writing your acknowledgements months before your dissertation is due?” he asked in disbelief. I said: “I’m an idiot for starting this late. This is the only part of the dissertation anyone’s going to read.”
How I Choose my Topic
My dissertation did not begin in the Pleistocene millions of years ago. It began in a small corner of the Ottoman Empire and was intended to span only a few years of history. Sensibly, my advisor rejected the proposal on the grounds that it was too obscure. Apparently — and this came as quite a shock to me — not enough people cared about price fluctuations, disease rates and death counts in the Levant from 1914–1918. I confessed to him that, as an academic, my assumed place in the universe was extreme irrelevance, but he pushed me to ask questions that other people cared about too. I insisted that, as an academic, my main interest in life was myself, not anything external to me.
In 2015, I was supposed to present a paper on the 1915 locust attack in Syria and Palestine in Hebrew, a language I spoke with great impoverishment at the time. So I started to binge watch lectures of an obscure historian of medieval Europe, Yuval Harari. The lectures were part of a course Harari taught at Hebrew University that covered all human history since Homo Sapiens departed Africa ~100,000 years ago. The book based on the lecture series, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, is fascinating, and has collected endorsements from Richard Price, Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates and Barack Obama. His lectures have shaped my thinking about how history can and should be written. Much like Schayegh, Harari clearly thought historians should consider the bigger picture. I’d like to acknowledge him for those lectures — and for reading an earlier draft of my introduction. This is important to acknowledge, not because he offered much feedback — but because it means Yuval Harari read an earlier version of my introduction.
I’d also like to emphasize my great indebtedness to all the archivists and librarians I’ve met over the past six years who are important to acknowledge to show I in fact visited archives and libraries — even though I can’t remember any of their names and they played no role in the dissertation at all. At least one of them deserves special thanks: the guy at the Lebanese National Archives who offered me three coffees and a free copy of a book about the Tripoli Islamic court records, but not access to the court records themselves. How could I have forgotten the extreme political sensitivity of 18th century marriage records and waqf property repairs. Later, I discovered the entire collection digitized and browsable at the ISAM library in Istanbul. Lol.
The Khalidi Library in Jerusalem
I would also like to acknowledge the guy I met on a fall 2014 afternoon circulating the cavernous alleyways of Jerusalem’s Old City on a hunt for the Khalidi Library. The guy mistakenly thought I was part of the Khalidi family, a mistake I neglected to correct. It got me access to browse the library’s uncatalogued shelves. The Khalidis assumed my Arabic was “heritage” Arabic (it is not), although they seemed shocked to discover how quickly their language deteriorated in the diaspora. The whole experience was exhilarating, not because of anything I found in the library, but because I got to pretend to be a member of the Khalidi family.
Being a member of the family got me in the door, but it didn’t get me access to everything. I asked multiple times to see the personal papers of Yusuf Diya Pasha al-Khalidi and Ruhi al-Khalidi, two late 19th century intellectuals whose papers were housed in the library. Strangely, the library staff insisted no such papers existed. So I pulled out my copy Rashid Khalidi’s Palestinian Identity and flipped to page 267, which read: “Unpublished sources: In the Khalidiyya Library, Jerusalem.” Several of Yusuf and Ruhi’s letters were on the list. At that point, things got awkward. I was told the files were in the Beirut branch of the library. I politely told the librarian on staff that there was no branch of the Khalidiyya library in Beirut. Incidentally, he knew that. I haven’t been allowed back since.
Most historians of the Middle East have similar stories. It’s a hostile place to do research. Decades of civil war in Lebanon, a legacy of massacres, forced displacement, expulsion and discrimination in Israel, controversy in the Greek Orthodox Church of Jerusalem, political and religious violence in Egypt, autocracy in Syria, Jordan and Egypt and a legacy of genocide in Turkey have made authorities in the Middle East suspicious of historians.
Archives in the Middle East
Arabic was useful in the Khalidiyya Library but less so at the library of the Armenian Patriarchate in Jerusalem, and my Armenian was abysmal at the time. I knew three-quarters of the alphabet, and the word Tagavor, which means king, I think. My plan to gain access to the library’s rich collection was to spot the word Tagavor someplace on the wall and let the librarians marvel in my profound mastery of Armenian. The plan failed: when the time came, I forgot the word, Tagavor.
These experiences were par for the course among historians of the Middle East. Beshara Doumani described his door to door campaign in Nablus in the 1980s tracking down family papers and property deeds in a 2014 episode of the popular radio show, The Ottoman History Podcast. Hanna Abu Hanna traveled to Buqei’a, Beit Jala, Haifa, Jaffa, Rameh and Egypt looking for the descendants of the graduates of the Russian Teacher’s Seminary who studied there from 1886–1914, collecting papers in their possession. Jonathan Gribetz dedicated a chapter of his delightful book Defining Neighbors to Ruhi al-Khalidi’s 1913 manuscript on Zionism, also not open to the public. Salim Tamari has found and published a small library of diaries and memoirs from the late Ottoman and Mandate periods written by ‘Arif al-‘Arif, Ihsan Turjaman, Khalil Sakakini and Wasif Jawhariyya. His resourcefulness should itself be the subject of research. Stamina and creativity have proven essential to writing Middle East history.
The “Abandoned Books”
It’s also worth acknowledging that history has not always been so unkind to privileged historians. Zionist librarians went door to door during and after the 1948 War to collect books left behind by Palestinian Arabs expelled from their homes by Zionists or who left out of fear of being expelled by them, or who left because a war was engulfing the entire country. The collection, known as the Abandoned Books, includes tens of thousands of published volumes and hundreds of manuscripts from all periods of Ottoman rule. It is the closest thing that exists to the collected literary heritage of the Palestinians, in possession of the State of Israel. This dissertation would have been much different without the Abandoned Books; it would have been much worse. Some of the discoveries in chapters three and four — such as Ramla’s underappreciated importance in the history of Palestine — and the importance of the Russian Teacher’s Seminary in Nazareth in understanding the origins of a modern Palestinian identity — probably would not have been made otherwise. Ironically, the theft of Palestine’s books preserved some of its history.
Naturally, the collection also inspires anger and calls to return the books to their rightful owners. Sympathizers with Israel would claim in response that their value to the public is far greater as a collection than it would be returned to the descendants of their owners. I agree. But if the value of the collection is greater when the public can access it — then Israel should let the public access it, especially the part of the public that own the books themselves. Today, many of the Palestinian descendents of the owners themselves are legally barred from viewing the collection, since they are barred from entering the country in the first place. And so the material consequence of the existence of the books has been that foreigners and Israelis have better access to research materials to study Palestinian history, and Palestinians have worse access to materials to study Palestinian history. Here is yet another irony: Palestinian-owned books now enrich Israel and impoverish Palestinians.
Bureaucrats suck
Let’s also acknowledge Ottoman bureaucrats who left behind a paper trail of millions of documents. Their abysmal handwriting seems to have had only one obvious purpose: to make the lives of future historians a nightmare. Once properly deciphered, Ottoman documents exhibit a second quality of great bureaucratic writing: their ability to induce sleep quickly.
Muslim court scribes also deserve our acknowledgement. They had even worse handwriting than the Ottoman bureaucrats and used almost as obscure language. During my period of dissertation research, I sat down for an afternoon of reading a 16th century Jerusalem court record with one the world’s foremost experts, ‘Abla Sa‘id Muhtadi. Three hours passed, and we had partially deciphered six lines of text. By we, I mean ‘Abla. I looked over her shoulder nodding approvingly the same way an improv artist is trained to respond with, “yes, and…”.
Going off the rails
Special thanks must also go to the Managing Editor of a journal who desk-rejected a (much earlier) draft of chapter four. Although my “research in Arabic-language texts and periodicals of the early twentieth century was interesting and unique,” and although I “submitted a very well-written paper,” the “question of the origins of Palestinian identity is a rich one, and the paper did not capture all of that richness.” First lesson to learn here is that anytime someone tells you your ideas are “interesting” you should immediately be insulted. Apparently, for papers to get passed along for peer review, they had to capture “all of the richness” of the topic under discussion. I am left to presume that, if any papers published in this journal did not capture “all of the richness” of the topic, then the richness must have been lost during the peer review process. Based on the journal’s earth-shattering Impact Factor of .244, one would be forgiven if one concluded that the journal’s peer reviewers were usurping a whole lot of richness.
Crossing Ts and Dotting Is
Then there is the long tail of people without whom this dissertation would have been impossible to write: Ze’ev Maghen, who first introduced me to pre-modern Middle East history and who also taught me to never let history get in the way of a great joke; Big Bird, for teaching me the importance of sharing; Nicole Fruth, for nominating me to be a part of the extremely elite “community of entrepreneurs, artists and innovative professionals like myself” called Ivy. I doubt this dissertation would have ever come to completion without the boost I received to my self-worth from her automated message that appeared personalized. I would also like to thank the twitter handler realjamesbowker. Without having followed me, I would have never been able to reach this important milestone in my life: 289 twitter followers (note: by the time you are reading this, that number will have probably since decreased).
This dissertation would also have been impossible to write without the scientists, mathematicians and engineers who made the digital and information revolutions possible. The digital catalogue enabled ambitious scholars to search a few dozen library catalogues far faster than they could have with card catalogues. Then Worldcat.org made searchable with the click of a single button 72,000 library catalogues in 170 countries and territories. Shamela.ws digitized and made keyword searchable tens of thousands of books written by Muslims from all periods of history. Millions of contributors to Wikipedia made the most comprehensive encyclopedia we have ever known, as well as the most comprehensive timeline of the history of the name Palestine. Special thanks go to the Wikipedia alias oncenawhile, who created and maintains that page with painstaking diligence and resourcefulness. Whoever you are — and I know you do prefer to remain anonymous — shukran alf marra.
Ph.D. Privilege
Lastly, I’d like to acknowledge the financial support I received from Princeton University. Ph.D. students at Princeton are among the most privileged in the world. We make more money than professors do in countries like Russia and Greece. We can request an unlimited number of books free of charge from any library in the world. According to Princeton’s records, I’ve requested 292 books in total, and have received most of them. When the inter-library loan staff see my name, I imagine they think, “someone break Foster’s kneecaps.” I also diligently attended Princeton’s foreign language tables, where students enjoy free dinner at a campus dining hall but must commit to speaking a foreign language for the whole dinner conversation — although admittedly my diligence may have come at the ruinous pain of the other attendees. I also enjoyed free lunch around campus often — at least until my immunity wore off to cruel and unusual punishment — the brown bag lunch talk. My department offered free coffee, tea and filtered water. I nearly considered sleeping in the student lounge and showering at Princeton’s Dylan Gym to save money on rent. The plan ran into an unforeseen hurdle: my girlfriend was living with me at the time. Princeton also requires us to submit our dissertations at 1–1.5inch margins rather something like 2.5inch that would make reading a PDF on mobile perfectly fine. If traffic to papers on Academia.edu, where I will post this, is about 25% mobile and 75% desktop, then one wonders why Princeton University wishes so much ill-will on 25% of people who will read my dissertation. Although, admittedly, 25% of readers to any dissertation is usually less than a whole person, so probably not the end of the world.
I should also acknowledge all American voters who contribute significantly to tax breaks for wealthy Americans who donate money to Princeton University. Without the tax breaks they received, they probably would have donated less, and Princeton University might not have the $18 billion endowment that it has, and it might not have been able to support graduate students like me.
Acknowledgments usually conclude with bodily fluid exchanges, also known as significant others. In my case, the critical person to acknowledge here is Jennifer Garner, the lead covert agent on the late 1990s and early 2000s hit action series, Alias. Regrettably, no bodily fluids were exchanged between us, but it must have been my subconscious that led me to seek out a partner who appears to lead life as a double-agent for a shadowy underground organization, speaks more languages than knows what to do with them and makes a killer Bolognese.
Alas, it hasn’t killed me yet!
Postscript
If you enjoyed this piece — than check out my youtube channel where I regularly post comedy videos about the Middle East. Thanks for tuning in!
