In 1993 and 1995, Saudi Arabian historian Ahmad Murshid published the first and second volumes of his collection Tayba wa-Dhikrayat al-Ahibba, translated here as Tayba and Memories of the Beloved,Footnote 1 which cover the rather broad topic of “the city's history.”Footnote 2 These two volumes of the projected eight-volume work contain interviews he conducted with residents of Medina, including some who had lived through World War I and the siege of their city by Sharifian forces during the Arab Revolt, as well as descendants of eyewitnesses to these events. The objective of this article is to introduce their narratives to an English-speaking audience, as the perspective of ordinary people is largely absent from the literature on the siege of Medina. Their recorded memories center around traumatic experiences common to civilians during wartime sieges throughout history, including famine, disease, scarcity, fear, uprooting, and death, providing important data on how this historic event affected people who have been treated as a mostly peripheral concern in the limited historiography on the siege. World War I in the Ottoman Empire has increasingly become the subject of historical work on areas outside of what is often associated with the study of “history.” Seminal works by scholars such as Yiğit Akın, Leyla Neyzi, Linda Schatkowski Schilcher, and Abdallah Hanna examine the “lived experience” of Ottoman subjects during what is collectively remembered as seferberlik (Arabic: safar barlik), or the devastating wartime period, incorporating sources such as folk songs and oral histories to understand the formative experience of trauma.Footnote 3 Such scholarship provides vital contributions to the broader historical research on the immense social and cultural significance of the war, and in the process commemorates its victims.Footnote 4 In recording the memories of the witnesses of the siege, Murshid similarly contributes to a broader effort to decenter imperial powers’ narratives and official histories. The interviews in his collection reshape how the history of the siege is told, filling in gaps produced by the “forgetfulness”Footnote 5 of the dominant narratives and challenging historical accounts that rely on dichotomies and problematic generalizations to tell the story of the past.
With interest in the events of the Medina siege increasing in Saudi Arabia, Murshid's collection has gained considerable attention,Footnote 6 fueling debates on “what happened” and on the character of Fakhri Pasha, the Ottoman army commander who defended the city against Sharifian attacks. These debates frequently revolve around the mass departure during the siege of Medina's inhabitants, who were transported in large numbers to cities across the empire, including Tabuk, Damascus, and Istanbul, mostly by way of the Hijaz railway. The sources provide conflicting narratives on whether or not the mass departure was the result of a direct order from Fakhri Pasha to forcibly expel people from the city. Some firsthand accounts of the event, as will be discussed below, paint Fakhri Pasha as a hero figure who tried to preserve the empire and save Medina from rebellious Arab forces backed by British interests. In these accounts, the commander directed inhabitants to leave the city so they would not starve to death because of the shortage of food supplies caused by the siege. Others, such as many of the interviewees in Murshid's collection, portray the departure not as a choice but as a consequence of a strict order intended to cruelly punish the people of Medina, some of whom supported the revolt and called for Arab independence from what they considered to be Ottoman occupation of their lands.
This article does not attempt to reconcile competing claims about the character of Fakhri Pasha or his orders. Rather, its aim is to extend English-language scholarship on this historic event by exploring eyewitness accounts. In contrast to many historical narratives of the siege, the focus here is on asking questions and forming understandings of how it impacted residents of the city. The memories recounted by Murshid's interviewees illustrate that the traumatic experiences they lived through during the siege only reinforced their personal connection with their city and their deep attachment to their identity as madanīs, or people of Medina.
TAYBA AND MEMORIES OF THE BELOVED
As suggested by the title of Murshid's collection, Tayba wa-Dhikrayat al-Ahibba, memory plays a significant role in his construction of a historical narrative of the city; half of the first volume and a significant part of the second are composed of interviews with residents of Medina that focus on their memories of people, places, and events. In the introduction to the first volume, Murshid elaborates on dhikrayāt, or memories, as important sources for exploring the fabric of Medina's society. These memories “invert the place of historical actors on the stage of the past”Footnote 7 and offer an alternative way to examine the siege, shifting attention to the arena of everyday life: to the personal horrors, daily struggles, trauma, coping mechanisms, and defiance of ordinary Medina inhabitants who lived the events.
Six volumes of Murshid's collection have now been published, with two more projected. The first two volumes, the focus of this article, contain interviews with Medina residents that touch on the events of the siege within the interviewees’ broader recounting of their memories of life in the city. That the interviews in these volumes are not focused on the events of the Medina siege in particular adds an important dimension of meaning to their content; the interviewees' choices to bring up details of the siege within general interviews underscore these memories as significant components of their personal narratives and of the history of their city.
The fifth volume of the collection, published in 2007 and subtitled al-Katatib wa-l-Madaris: Madrasat al-Najah al-Namuthajiyya, Safarbarlik wa-Tarhil Ahl al-Madina (The Katatib and Schools: The al-Najah Model School, Safarbarlik, and the Expulsion of the People of Medina), contains a full section devoted to interviews about the siege specifically.Footnote 8 However, it was not incorporated into this article, as locating a full copy of the volume was not possible.Footnote 9 Excerpts from the interviews it contains that have been posted on several Arabic language internet forums suggest that the volume includes compelling details on the siege. A comparison between accounts of the siege in the general interviews examined in this article, and the event-based ones of the fifth volume, would be a productive area for future exploration.
The interviews discussed here are mostly free-flowing. Murshid usually begins by asking each person to discuss his or her life as a resident of the city, and the interviewees start out with information on their date and place of birth before going on to describe their family life, education, and work. As the interviewees narrate their memories, Murshid sometimes intervenes with questions. He refers to the interviews as “direct” and conducted “in the field,”Footnote 10 and records the location, date, and sometimes the time of each meeting. He notes that readers might find instances where the dates of historic events as narrated by the interviewees only vaguely correspond to the actual dates of occurrence, attributing this to the temporal difference between the time of experiencing the events and the instance of remembering them in the interview.Footnote 11
It is important to mention here that although Murshid speaks with people from a variety of socioeconomic groups, including literary figures, prominent religious scholars, craftsmen, and merchants, the first two volumes of his collection only include interviews with men. One can only speculate about the reasons for Murshid's exclusion of interviews with women: are men here considered the only people who can narrate history?Footnote 12 Did Murshid not have access to women as a male interviewer? There is no explanation given by the author.
SITUATING THE SIEGE OF MEDINA: WORLD WAR I AND THE ARAB REVOLT
Before examining the details of the interviews collected by Murshid, it is useful to contextualize the Ottoman-Hijazi relationship and the events of the Medina siege within the broader setting of World War I and the Arab Revolt. The Ottomans acquired important parts of the Arabian peninsula during the 16th century, starting with Selim I's conquest of Mecca and Medina in the Hijaz and then ʿAsir on the Red Sea and al-Hasa on the coast of the Persian Gulf. The ashrāf, who since the 10th century had usually ruled as amirs of the Hijaz, remained in control of the region but were subject to the suzerainty of the central Ottoman state.Footnote 13 Ottoman domination over the peninsula fluctuated, and areas sometimes had to be reconquered, until the empire's collapse during World War I.
The Hijaz was distant from the state center. Its significance to the empire lay not in its wealth, for it had few agricultural or other natural resources, paid minimal taxes, and supplied no troops to the imperial armed forces, but rather in the religious centrality of Mecca and Medina to Muslims worldwide. Servicing the two holy cities by organizing and leading the annual hajj, providing protection for pilgrims, and supplying troops, food, and money to the region, was core to the Ottoman sultans’ legitimizing discourse.Footnote 14 Ensuring a safe route for pilgrims was regarded as a major responsibility of the ruling caliph,Footnote 15 and the failure of a pilgrimage caravan to reach Mecca and return safely “constituted a severe political liability to the Sultan.”Footnote 16 Still, the Hijaz, with its special religious and political position within the Ottoman state, was historically viewed as semiautonomous.Footnote 17 The Hijazi amir was appointed by the Ottoman state, but from among specific families who claimed descent from the Prophet and were regarded as legitimate rulers by local populations. In the mid-19th century, the Hijaz region was made an Ottoman province with an appointed governor, or vali, representing the central government alongside the local ruling amir. This move indicated to the amirs a tightening of imperial control over the region and increasingly created conflicts as authority over internal affairs and management of the holy sites overlapped.
The political situation in the region was also significantly affected by the ascension to power of the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) after the restoration of the Ottoman constitution in 1908 and the subsequent overthrow of Sultan Abdülhamit II. Husayn ibn ʿAli, appointed the amir of the Hijaz in 1908,Footnote 18 felt his power to be deeply jeopardized by the CUP's increasingly centralizing projects. The most notable of these was the extension of the Hijaz railway, a “symbol of encroaching Ottoman authority” in the region.Footnote 19 The railway was constructed from Damascus to Medina under Abdülhamit II, and the successor government pursued plans for its extension to Mecca.Footnote 20 In addition to easing the travel of pilgrims, the extension would provide the central government a means to efficiently transport troops and resources to help maintain its control over the region. It would thus also serve to undermine the amir's authority, making him more liable to central control and disrupting his existing arrangements with regional tribes who supplied and guarded the camel caravans for pilgrims. The railway extension project and other centralizing policies, such as the alteration of Medina's status from an administrative district of the Hijaz province to an independent sancak reporting directly to Istanbul, were perceived as explicit measures to increase direct central rule over the region. Although he remained publicly loyal to the Ottoman state, Sharif Husayn continuously struggled against CUP leadership and its ever-extending power, successfully ousting multiple valis whom he considered too interfering.Footnote 21
The profound military and political changes initiated by the Ottoman entry into World War I on the side of Germany contributed to making the idea of an independent Arab state under Sharifian rule attractive to many Hijazis.Footnote 22 Ottoman involvement in the war meant the threat of foreign attack by Allied forces and possible disruption of finances, food, and other resources from the north, which were crucial to sustaining the region's population. By 1916, it was evident that the state could no longer effectively protect the Hijaz or the region's economy.Footnote 23 A significant number of Hijazi town and tribal leaders came to support the idea of breaking away from the empire under the amir's leadership to avoid possible foreign occupation or economic destruction, despite the weakness of nationalist ideology among the region's general population.Footnote 24 The negotiations of Husayn and his sons with the British, who promised them land and power in exchange for cooperation against the Ottomans, played an immense role in incentivizing the ashrāf to take action.Footnote 25 Husayn announced the Arab Revolt in 1916, backed by various towns and nomadic tribes, including the people of Mecca and Jeddah. Attacks on Ottoman strongholds in the Hijaz began in the summer of 1916, and Arab forces soon captured Mecca, Jeddah, Yanbuʿ, Taʾif, and the southern Hijazi ports; only the Ottoman defense of Medina was sustained, under the command of Fakhri Pasha.
Prior to 1916, Fakhri Pasha was stationed as commander in Mosul, then deputy commander in Aleppo. With the outbreak of the Arab Revolt, the capture of Mecca, and clashes underway in Jeddah and Taʾif, he was sent to defend Medina as the newly appointed commander of the Hicaz Kuvve-i Seferiyesi, or Hijaz Expeditionary Force.Footnote 26 Arab irregular forces, consisting mainly of hired bedouin and volunteers under the leadership of Husayn's son Faysal, began attacks on Medina in the fall of 1916. Many of these attacks targeted the Hijaz railway, hampering communication between Medina and the outside world and disrupting the flow of much-needed food, supplies, and reinforcements to the garrison in the city. The Arab forces were frequently able to capture small groups of prisoners, deserters, and camels, as well as guns.Footnote 27 However, they were unable to fully penetrate the city due to the Ottoman garrison's greater number of troops and superior artillery.
Although successful at sustaining their defense, Fakhri Pasha and his troops struggled with numerous difficulties that inhibited their ability to engage in effective offensive attacks. Disease was rampant among the soldiers, who were weakened by exhaustion and insufficient food, and regular Arab raids kept them continually tied up in fighting and resulted in heavy losses of men and animals. Besieged by surrounding Arab forces, the Ottomans in Medina maintained what T. E. Lawrence describes as their “passive defence” for the remaining two years of the war, until “the Armistice ended the war and involved Turkey in the dismal surrender of the Holy City and its helpless garrison.”Footnote 28
The perspective of the Ottoman military forces stationed in Medina under Fakhri Pasha's command is richly documented in Turkish by two witnesses of the siege. Both sources include excerpts of important telegrams, letters, and other communications exchanged between the various factions involved in the conflict. Naci Kaşif Kıcıman, an intelligence officer attached to Fakhri Pasha, wrote a series of articles that appeared soon after the war in the newspaper Tercüman-ı Hakikat; in 1971 they were collected and published as Medine Müdafaası: Hicaz Bizden Nasıl Ayrıldı? (The Defense of Medina: How Did the Hijaz Separate from Us?). The other author, Feridun Kandemir, was serving with the Hilal-i Ahmer Cemiyeti, or Red Crescent Society, during the siege. His memoirs were published in 1973 as Fahreddin Paşa’nın Medine Müdafaası: Peygamberimizin Gölgesinde Son Türkler (Fahreddin Pasha's Defense of Medina: The Last Turks in the Shadow of Our Prophet). Both chronicles exhaustively describe what they present as a remarkably heroic defense of the city by Fakhri Pasha and his forces through the most extreme hardships, including food and water shortages, debilitating disease, British bombing attacks, locust raids, and severe heat. Fakhri Pasha is a main focus of both accounts, and his statements are often quoted.
In April 1917, Fakhri Pasha made the decision to deport most of Medina's civilian population in order to better sustain the Ottoman defense of the city. Kıcıman argues that the deportation was necessary to conserve supplies for the Ottoman troops. He quotes a declaration by Fakhri Pasha that reaffirmed the commander's resolution to continue the defense of Medina to the end, and asked those who wished to participate in defending the Prophet's city to remain, on the condition that they not demand provisions for a year. Everyone else, he stated, must leave to avoid the inevitable hardships of the war and famine, especially since the limited food supplies coming from Damascus could not support the whole population. As a result, the residents of the city began to depart by train; they, along with their household items, were provided free transport to Damascus.Footnote 29
In their admiring portrayals of Fakhri Pasha, Kıcıman and Kandemir often refer to his religious commitment to defend the holy city of the Prophet despite the difficult circumstances; they depict him as remaining steadfast not out of desire for personal gain or worldly victory but out of a deeply held conviction that he was protecting the sanctity of one of Islam's holiest sites. Kıcıman quotes one of the pasha's public pledges to fulfill what he called a “holy duty” to protect and defend the Prophet's city, asking how he and his troops could be expected to give up on and “abandon the Blessed Resting Place of our Prophet Muhammad.”Footnote 30 This steadfastness was maintained even after it became evident that the situation was dire and directives came from Istanbul to surrender, as part of the Armistice of Mudros signed by the Ottomans and the Allies in late October 1918.
Up to the very end, Fakhri Pasha is described as remaining committed to his cause, refusing to heed surrender orders from the center until he was arrested by his own officers in January 1919. Kandemir vividly narrates how the pasha bid farewell to the holy mosque and the Prophet's tomb, standing at the Ravza-i Mutahhara or Garden of Purity, as the mausoleum is called, eyes closed and trembling, seemingly lost in fervent supplications.Footnote 31 Nothing and no one could tear him away, and even when he eventually looked up and made to exit, he stopped after two or three steps and changed his mind, firmly stating “we will remain here . . . We are mücavir Footnote 32 . . . We cannot leave the side of the revered Prophet. We take refuge in his [promise of] intercession.”Footnote 33 His bed, blankets, and other personal belongings were brought into the mausoleum by his men, and he remained there for some time, insisting that he would be “staying here as a mücavir,” until his eventual arrest and forced removal.Footnote 34 The connection between the defense of the city and of religion is further emphasized in a poem famously composed by lieutenant Idris Sabih Bey upon the Ottoman troops’ departure from Medina. Addressing the Prophet, the poet praises the bravery and sacrifice of Fakhri Pasha and his soldiers in their defense and service of the holy city, and concludes: “The Sons of Ertuğrul cannot do without you, / these Turks who sacrifice their lives but not their Beloved . . . / Eternal servants of your two Holy Sites, / even in death, our souls watch over the Ravza.”Footnote 35 As will be discussed below, the religious motivations of the commander and his troops are also a subject of debate among Murshid's interviewees and an important lens through which to interpret the events they witnessed.
REMEMBERING THE SIEGE OF MEDINA
The interviews in Murshid's collection provide us with a means of exploring how civilian residents of Medina experienced the siege and were affected by the events they witnessed. One interviewee, named Salih Tahir, frames the siege within his understanding of the political situation at the time:
In the year 1334 [1916], the Turkish troops began to complain, as there was no authority that could provide for them or fulfill their needs, so they began to divide up [into factions]. After that, they united against the Ottoman government, and we suddenly found soldiers taking off in every direction—to Bab Qabaʾ and some to Bab al-Shami—and Medina descended into general chaos, so the Ottoman government decided to appoint Fakhri Pasha as military commander in Medina. This man was able to stabilize the situation and fulfill the soldiers’ needs, especially with the looming threat of the ashrāf to Ottoman authority in Medina.Footnote 36
Residents remember with particular vividness the hunger and disease that marked the siege years they lived through. Jaʿfar Faqih, who was seventeen years old at the time, recalls that the middle of the year 1336 a.h. (1918) was the most dire period of the siege, after Fakhri Pasha prohibited the sale and purchase of food in the city. According to Faqih, trying to fulfill the religious obligation of fasting every day during Ramadan was especially difficult. There was often no food to precede the start of the daily fast at dawn, nor with which to break it at sunset. Many people ended up “tying [a belt tightly around] their stomachs” to lessen the pain of hunger. Some, he explains, went to great lengths to steal a few dates:
The famine was so acute that some youths of Medina whose names I do not remember used to make their way through the dubūl Footnote 37 without fear of scorpions or snakes, going outside the city walls, forced to steal whatever dates they could find on the palms to feed their families, then returning through the dubūl again at night.Footnote 38
Faqih explains that Ottoman soldiers took advantage of this situation and sold their own rations to people at exorbitant prices.Footnote 39 Hasan al-Sayrafi, born in 1918, recalls that his father told him about similar experiences with food shortages and purchasing soldiers’ rations at excessively high rates. He says that during Ramadan in 1918, when the famine was extreme, his father purchased five loaves of bread from the Ottoman soldiers for one gold junayh,Footnote 40 each loaf measuring ten by ten centimeters. The father kept one loaf for himself and gave one to his wife, one to his mother, one to “Aunt Zaynab, and the fifth loaf to a woman from the Sharbini family.”Footnote 41 His family had several gold junayhs at the time, but it made no difference as there was nothing else to purchase with them. The family often had nothing but water to drink in the morning before fasting each day, and nothing but water with which to break their fast in the evening.
At one point during the siege, al-Sayrafi's father was approached by a representative from the Ottoman gendarmerie and offered seven soldiers’ rations in exchange for twenty-nine gold junayhs. He agreed and, out of fear of being robbed on the way home, added an extra junayh to have the goods delivered directly to his house. The rations consisted of “one kilo of camel meat, one kilo of oil, and one kilo of bulgur” for a total of thirty gold junayhs.Footnote 42 Al-Sayrafi's mother cut up the meat and dried it, thereafter using one piece for each meal. The family would choose one of their wooden wardrobes to chop up and use as firewood, as there was no fuel for cooking.Footnote 43
ʿAbd al-Qadir Samman recounts hearing from an elder who had survived the siege a story of fighting wild dogs for the meat of a dead horse:
Shaykh Mahdi al-Jarrah, God have mercy on him, told me how during the Ottoman era after the year 1334 [1916], when the people of Medina were stricken with famine, Turkish soldiers threw a dead horse that had belonged to one of the Turkish commanders in the neighborhood of the seven mosques. Shaykh Mahdi al-Jarrah and some others took a knife and made their way over there to cut up pieces of the dead horse meat to eat and quiet their hunger, but when they arrived, their battle was with the wild dogs—the area was completely empty except for Shaykh Mahdi and his friends, and the dogs tried to scare them away by barking loudly and charging. It was with great difficulty that they were finally able to cut off a piece.Footnote 44
An interviewee named Zaki Abu Rubʿiyya relates that
Once, a man from the TakarnaFootnote 45 was able to catch a cat, which was considered rare; a cat was as valuable as a sheep at that time. He was stopped by two people from Medina who bought the cat for three junayhs and took it to a Turkish butcher situated on the Mudarraj Bridge . . . When asked how much the butchering would cost, the butcher responded that he would slaughter and skin the cat for them if they would allow him to partake in eating it. They agreed to this, butchered the cat, and ate it.Footnote 46
The hunger experienced by residents of Medina drove them to desperate behavior that pushed the boundaries of established social and religious norms, such as theft or the consumption of foods normally considered repulsive or prohibited by Islamic law.Footnote 47 That these men, now in their nineties, remember the specific quantities and costs of food, and sometimes even the exact dimensions of a loaf of bread, underscores the significance that hunger plays in their understandings of what the siege meant to them and their communities.
The interviewees also recall that hunger and disease affected “even the Turkish soldiers themselves.”Footnote 48 Many died, while the wounded were attended to in a clinic set up in what Faqih refers to as the “Bushnaq houses in Bab al-Majidi.”Footnote 49 Al-Sayrafi's father had also mentioned the clinic at the Bushnaq houses to his son, and described a strange disease that afflicted many of the Turkish soldiers, who would feel pain only in their heads and then fall down dead.Footnote 50
Another common point of focus in the interviews is the act of departing Medina. ʿId ʿAfifi recounts that his then twenty-one-year-old father Yaʿqub ʿAfifi was captured, along with other young men, by Turkish troops and forced to leave the city on the “train of terror.”Footnote 51 ʿImran al-Husayni describes how “Fakhri Pasha forcefully removed the families of Medina, and had them expelled” by train.Footnote 52 “After watching everyone leave and experiencing the horrors of the Sharifian siege,” he explains, “my father had no other option but to leave as well, so we left with the last transport vehicle departing from Medina, and no one left after us.”Footnote 53 Ahmad Tharwat claims that Fakhri Pasha forcefully expelled the people of Medina without giving anyone a chance to “organize his affairs or leave a will.”Footnote 54 Tharwat was separated from his father, who was expelled with fifty other people in the middle of the night during extremely cold weather.
In contrast to the Turkish accounts written by Fakhri Pasha's subordinates, which emphasize the “Tiger of the Desert’s” religious character and concern for Medina's welfare, the interviewees often portray the commander as cruel, punishing the people of Medina and having no regard for the sacredness of the city's holy mosque. While narrating the events of the siege, many of them attribute a sense of personal responsibility to him for their departure and the destruction of the city. For example, Abu Rubʿiyya refers to Fakhri Pasha as “that man who forced the people of Medina to leave.”Footnote 55 Faqih calls him “Fakhri Pasha, who exterminated Medinian society.”Footnote 56 Tharwat dismisses Fakhri Pasha's self-proclaimed reason for the expulsions, namely “protecting the people of Medina from the attacks by the Sharifian forces surrounding the city.” Instead, he insists that Fakhri Pasha was serving his own interests and desire for power, attempting to transform the city into a military barracks to win the battle and maintain Ottoman control of the city. According to Tharwat, Fakhri Pasha ordered the railroad to be re-directed through the city, presumably so he and his troops would have more efficient access to it, destroying the city in the process by cutting through several streets.Footnote 57 He also used parts of the holy mosque as watchtowers and weapon depots.Footnote 58 Even the commander's headquarters was situated within the mosque, as Samman notes in his description of Fakhri Pasha's arrest by his own officers at the end of the siege:
Fakhri had his headquarters at the back end of the holy mosque, near the schools, and after many attempts, they succeeded in reaching him with the help of his son-in-law, the officer who was protecting him. He was made to understand the severity of the situation outside, and how the soldiers and people were suffering. Before leaving Medina, he ordered one of the calligraphers to write the following verse on the upper part of the first hall just inside Bab al-Salam on the left: “Allah is predominant over His affairs but most people know not,” then he left the mosque from Bab al-Salam, signaling the end of Medina's catastrophe at that time.Footnote 59
The charged language used by most of the interviewees to describe Fakhri Pasha, and the blame they attribute to him for what they believe were his punitive actions, raises the question of how personal these memories are, or whether aspects of them were reconstructed under the influence of a collective understanding of the commander as a cruel character.
According to the interviewees, in several instances Fakhri Pasha made a direct decision about whether a person would leave the city or be allowed to remain. For example, Abu Rubʿiyya vividly recounts:
After Fakhri Pasha had expelled the people of Medina, there remained no more than about forty people in the city, and I remember among them Hijazi the baker and another person called al-Kaw. These two had refused to leave the city, and were napping under the Sabil tree in Bab al-Shami when Fakhri Pasha rode past them in a yellow car and had them awakened. By way of a translator, he was able to understand that they wished to remain in Medina, so he ordered them to work in Baqiʿ for a daily wage of two pieces of bread and some dates after sunset, burying the dead Ottoman soldiers without washing or shrouding them—these were Fakhri Pasha's orders.Footnote 60
Tharwat's grandmother's husband, Amin Afandi, was personally requested by Fakhri Pasha to remain in Medina to serve as the imam for the Ottoman troops stationed there.Footnote 61 Muhammad Silkawi explains how his father, Hasan Silkawi, a merchant of dates and grains, was prevented from leaving Medina by Fakhri Pasha since he was essential in securing provisions for the troops. According to Silkawi, the commander put his father and others like him under strict supervision and forced them to continue finding means of providing food.Footnote 62
If the interviewees portray the inhabitants of Medina as victims of a brutal war and a cruel military commander, they also provide examples of people acting to determine their own fates. The insistence of many individuals and families on remaining in their homes, even when this meant difficult work and poor living conditions, illustrates one means of resistance to the events surrounding them. Some families decided it was better to flee to areas like Yanbuʿ willingly, before they were forced to leave or subjected to the brutality of the Turkish troops.Footnote 63 Others decided to side with the ashrāf, escaping from the city to Sharifian-controlled territory. For example, Abu Rubʿiyya describes how his family was able to escape:
We left from Bab al-ʿAnbariyya with difficulty, and escaped by way of Jaraf in the west, passing by an area called Jirsiyya, and kept going until we reached the Sharifian army in Furaysh. To those arriving from Medina seeking their protection—especially those who were accompanied by their entire families—the ashrāf usually distributed a bag of rice, tea, sugar, clarified butter, and coffee, as well as four to five junayhs with which to purchase meat.Footnote 64
ʿAfifi recounts how his father, who was captured with other young men and expelled from the city by train, attempted to break free of Fakhri's forces. He managed to escape from the train before it reached Jordan and continued his journey on foot, eventually finding work shoveling coal in order to feed himself and save some money. He did not return to Medina until ten years later.Footnote 65
Some interviewees describe their persistence in pursuing an education during the siege, despite the many difficulties. Upon his family's return to Medina during the middle of the siege, al-Husayni continued his studies at various zāwiyas, or small religious schools, throughout the city, as there were no proper schools in operation.Footnote 66 Tahir recalls how he had to secretly make his way to the home of a scholar who lived close by, as the severity of the situation meant that almost no one moved about the city. He was able to continue his studies with the scholar until the ashrāf took over Medina in 1919 and things began to return to some semblance of normalcy.Footnote 67 The oral histories recorded by Murshid are not simply narratives of passive victimization but illustrate many acts of determination and persistence by the people of Medina in the face of great hardship.
ABSENCES AND SILENCES
In addition to examining what the oral histories tell us, it is important to consider what they do not. On some level, the interviews as recorded by Murshid seem to decontextualize the events they recount. They do not place the Sharifian revolt or the siege within the larger context of World War I or emerging nationalisms in various territories of the Ottoman Empire. They do not express how the subjects felt at the time about the political dynamics playing out around them. For example, did the interviewees hope the ashrāf would defeat Fakhri Pasha and take control of Medina? Did they have opinions about British-Sharifian collaboration against Ottoman rule in the Hijaz area? How did they conceive of the legitimacy of Ottoman rule of their lands in the first place? The interviews do not identify with or draw comparisons between the siege and incidents of a similar scale experienced by other peoples, such as the dire famine in Syria during the war years.
One wonders whether this silence is because the interviewees truly had no broader political concerns and simply desired stable lives regardless of whose rule they lived under, because they were unaware of such incidents, or because the current political climate in Saudi Arabia influenced what they chose or were asked to speak about. Perhaps expressing sympathies for either the Ottomans or the ashrāf, both of whom were eventually defeated by the Saʿuds, would have troublesome implications with the Saʿudi regime today.
Furthermore, the interviewees often discuss the terror and trials they and their families, friends, and neighbors directly experienced without connecting these experiences to the present or touching on ways they shaped their lives in the long run. Their memories contain stories of the deaths of family members, relatives, and sometimes entire households, and the evacuation of whole neighborhoods. While waiting in cities like Damascus, Konya, and Istanbul to return to their city, people in need of money were often forced to sell their property back home in Medina. For example, al-Husayni's family, taking refuge in Damascus, was so desperate for money that he says “we had to sell our home in al-Sihaymi . . . to Shaykh ʿAbd al-Hakim al-Shami for 700 junayhs; my father received 300 junayhs up front, and the rest was to be paid in Medina.”Footnote 68 Faqih emphasizes that “many families were wiped out because of the siege, their locked houses becoming inhabited afterward during the beginning of Sharifian rule by whoever found them empty.”Footnote 69
Clearly, after the events of the siege, Medina was no longer the same place with the same population. But the interviewees do not explain how witnessing the trauma or experiencing such drastic changes to their city and their everyday lives influenced the social fabric of their society in later years. Many who had been forced to leave talk about returning to Medina and transitioning to life under Sharifian and then Saʿudi rule as if they had simply closed one chapter of their past and calmly turned to another. For example, Tharwat recalls that “after returning to Medina, I joined the only school at the time,” and the story of his education and career goes on, with no further reference to the siege or its consequences.Footnote 70
The interviewees provide little indication that experiencing these events impacted them with reactions often associated with trauma, such as recurring images, dreams, or numbing.Footnote 71 Death is referred to calmly and concisely. For instance, al-Husayni narrates how he and his family were among the last people to leave Medina, arriving at Tabuk after a delay of nine days due to Sharifian vandalism of the railroad: “We arrived at Tabuk, my mother died and was buried there, and Basri Pasha was waiting to receive us with supplies.”Footnote 72 This extremely brief description of his own mother's death feels strangely distant. Other interviewees refer briefly to how entire families were wiped out, simply listing the names of these families and their members without going into further detail. Some make no mention of deaths or severely violent incidents at all.
Often for witnesses of traumatic events, the verbalization of such memories and their integration in “narrative” form into a larger recounting of the past can be associated with great pain and difficulty. Witnessing the death of a loved one, or experiencing a forceful expulsion from one's home or the destruction of one's hometown, for example, might result in repression, whereby interviewees omit important elements from their narratives.Footnote 73 Witnesses may also feel that language is inadequate to express the offenses and utter helplessness they experienced. In the case of the Medina siege interviews, there is almost no evidence that subjects felt any pain or difficulties while recounting their memories. This may be because Murshid rarely provides descriptions of his interviewees’ emotional or bodily reactions when speaking of particularly traumatic details, except for an occasional note on how the person was too tired to continue the interview. Recording in more detail these kinds of behaviors and reactions—if the interviewees displayed any—might have provided readers with greater insight into how Murshid's subjects were affected by the process of recounting their memories. In addition, no indication is given by Murshid of how comfortable his interviewees felt with him as a listener. This is an especially important factor, as the process of recounting traumatic events very much includes a dependence on an empathic audience to whom memories can be articulated and transmitted.Footnote 74
Comparing memories of the siege as narrated in these interviews with the event-based interviews of the fifth volume of Murshid's collection would undoubtedly offer a more nuanced perspective. What an interviewee decides to bring up when asked to talk about his life in general as a resident of Medina may be very different from a narrative he provides when information regarding a specific event is elicited from him. Depending on the social context at the time of interview, as well as the mode of interviewing, interviewees may choose to present a narrative that is more wrought with collective nationalist themes, or is more focused on “facts” and “what happened” rather than on how they felt. As the events of the siege become more socially meaningful, and as public interest grows in the witnesses as bearers of an important historical truth, interviewees might reconstruct their memories with different focal points or details.Footnote 75
In addition, the way the oral historian approaches the subjects, the types of questions s/he poses, and the direction in which s/he guides the interviewees all matter. Interviewees who have experienced trauma can often resort to “giving a ritualized repetition of facts that [are] consistent, cohesive and ironed-out; palatable for a listening audience.”Footnote 76 Thus, the oral historian might need to “steer” the interviewees away from a chronological recounting and focus instead on their emotional responses to the traumatic events they had lived. Examining the role Murshid takes on in his fifth volume, how he centers the interviews specifically on the siege, what kinds of questions he poses, and how he directs the conversations would be useful for a comparison with the interviews presented in this paper.
CONNECTING PAST AND PRESENT
This article has aimed to demonstrate how oral histories describing the experiences of ordinary residents of Medina can contribute to historical accounts of the siege, an event that is gaining in interest today. The interviews published by Murshid contain recurring themes that provide insight into what aspects of the siege witnesses deem important to a historical narrative of their lives and their city, shifting the traditional focuses of dominant narratives and official histories. The interviews also confront us with striking silences and absences, often provoking questions rather than providing answers, and thus require a reading that works to “understand the tragedy of a society in the absences and gaps.” Footnote 77
The interviews in Murshid's book indeed contain many gaps, inviting further investigation of these and other first-hand accounts as they become available. However, they leave us with no doubt about the interviewees’ deep attachment to and love for their city in the present. Regardless of their political concerns or affiliations, how trauma in the past shaped their family dynamics in later years, or how they selectively remember and forget the siege, the men continuously affirm and reaffirm their connection with Medina. Through their insistence on staying in their homes during extremely difficult circumstances, through the poetry they wrote yearning for their city while away, through a commitment to return after forceful expulsion, and finally, through recounting their traumatic experiences, the message that comes through their memories most clearly is that they are, first and foremost, people of Tayba. This is a fundamental part of their collective identity. Murshid incorporates his subjects’ memories of the siege, and of other events and life experiences, into an understanding of what makes these men madanīs, or people of Medina, and, in turn, legitimate narrators of Medina's history. In the interviews in these two volumes of his collection, the focus is not on the siege itself but rather on what life in Medina, through good times and bad, was like for these people, how they remember it in the present, and what it means to them. All of these memories together, including their gaps and absences, make up the narrative of Medina's history.
