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Throughout the twentieth century and most of the nineteenth, the city of Nablus ("Little Damascus," as coined by Maqdisi) evoked images of soap, knafeh, and tolerance of homosexuality. It was also a region of sporadic rebellions by its surrounding peasantry. The epitaph Jabal al-Nar, "the Mountain of Fire" (acquired during the 1936 Revolt), has become synonymous with the city of Nablus and its history, evoking the 1834 rebellion of Qasim al-Ahmad against the Egyptian armies of Ibrahim Pasha as well as a series of revolts that punctuated the Ottoman, Mandate, and Israeli periods after that.1 Ahmad's peasant rebellion is often seen, with some exaggeration, as a turning point in the formation of Palestinian nationalism and a separatist Palestinian identity.2 Little is known however of the city as a bastion of conservatism and a center for counter-revolutionary activities. Local historians have keenly observed this other side of Nabulsi temperament, mainly through their preoccupation with the stable, the continuous, and the quotidian. In this historical note, I will examine a short and crucial episode when the city rallied against the overthrow of the autocratic regime of Abdulhamid II and for the restoration of Hamidian despotism.
By most contemporary accounts, the Young Turk Revolution and the (re) adoption of the suspended constitution (Ikinci Mesrutiyet Devri) in April 1908 was a pivotal moment for the Arab provinces, and for Palestine in particular. It heralded the end of despotic rule by Sultan Abdulhamid II; it put an end to press control and press censorship, and made possible a renaissance of publishing and dissemination of newspapers, books, and pamphlets; and it allowed for the freedom of assembly and, within limits, the formation of political parties in Syria and elsewhere - including parties calling for regional autonomy. Finally, it reintroduced the system of qualified democratic participation of all regional and ethnic groups in the parliament within the context of the idea of Osmanlilik - common Ottoman citizenship. Mass celebrations of Hürriyet (the "declaration of freedom") were widely reported and photographed in the public squares of Beirut, Damascus, Jaffa (in front of the citysaraya), and Jerusalem, as well as in a large number of district centers such as Tripoli, Nablus, Latakia, and Zahla. Although regional officers orchestrated many of those celebrations, many...