Seferberlik and Bare Feet: Rural Hardship, Citied Dreams, and Social Belonging in 1920s Syria

Abstract

Introduction: Beyond Honeymoon in Countryside dr. razi Shakhashir's honeymoon did not go as planned. Bound for aleppo with his bride, Shakhashir opted instead for dusty hamlet of nayrab, about ten miles outside of Grey City. if choice of place may have been surprising, so too was choice of activity. dr. Shakhashir was not in nayrab for leisure, but rather for work of an intense sort. he, along with band of young urban professionals from around Syria, was engaged in rural development initiative known as Village recovery Program. throughout nayrab and, indeed, lebanon and Syria, these youths had fanned out across levantine countryside for number of projects aimed at improving peasant hygiene, health, literacy, and agricultural output. When reporter for damascus daily newspaper Al-Qabas visited, he saw Shakhashir surrounded by dozens of peasants awaiting his medical attention. although one would be hard- pressed to know it from look at historiography on nationalism in French mandate Syria, this dynamic interplay between notions of urban modernity and visions of rural backwardness functioned as crucial part of forging national identities. indeed, those youth in nayrab who attracted even honeymooners to their ranks believed they were doing nothing short of injecting a spirit of life in segment of Syrian people... who represent biggest part of sons of this nation.1 an exploration of ways in which ideas of rural inflected urban nationalist discourses would surely have merit.2But while moving nationalism beyond its typically accepted urban habitat to some extent, such an account would remain ensconced in grip of urban nationalists as sole agents of history. this is to say that such an account would be about urban elite's ideas of rural residents rather than rural residents on their own terms. nature of this line of argument recalls Philip Khoury's warning of danger of considering advancing national ideals as the sole measure of historical agency in twentieth- century arab world.3this article is an initial attempt to balance these tendencies. rather than taking Al-Qabas reporter's words as truth - that peasants and other rural residents needed to have spirit of life awakened in them - and rather than taking Al-Qabas reporter's words as reflective of truth, discursive construction of peasant from an urban, middle-class gaze, i will be attempting to do something more grounded, namely understand what lives of rural underclass were actually like. in process, i hope to raise questions about ways in which ottoman past shaped experiences of mandate period (1920-1946) for lower classes, ways in which violence underpinned social and economic order, and, finally, ways in which classes differentiated themselves in this context.4 By examining peasants and lower classes with respect to presences rather than absences, i hope not only to bring to light some understudied aspects of lived experience in mandate period, but also to question some of predominant assumptions of histories of time period.to make these claims, i will rely on Syrian writer hanna mina's memoir, Baqaya Suwar. mina's work chronicles his early childhood, from 1924 until 1929, as his family moved from village to village in northwest Syria in wake of ottoman Empire's collapse and early years of French mandate. mina's memories provide insight into lives of rural underclass and, moreover, demonstrate some of ways in which rural and urban social boundaries were constructed in this period.5 over course of four sections in this article, i will develop an image of rural hardship mitigated by citied dreams: horrors of final days of ottoman Empire repeated themselves (Section 1) as mina's family contended with intense performative violence that underpinned social and economic order in countryside (Section 2); city, however, and its modern institutions represented respite from this suffering (Section 3), as did consumption of goods deemed of modern sensibility, namely shoes (Section 4). …