Jerusalem. The Biography

they approached the Church.
    Although Baedeker warned tourists that ‘there are no places of public amusement in Jerusalem’, this was a city of music and dancing. The locals met in the coffee houses and cellar bars to smoke
narghileh
water pipes, play backgammon, watch wrestling matches and belly dancing. At weddings and festivals, there was circle-dancing (
dabkah
), while singers performed such love songs as ‘My lover, your beauty hurt me’. Arab love songs alternated with the Andalusian Ladino songs of the Sephardis. Dervishes danced their
zikr
wildly to the
mazhar
drums and cymbals. In private houses, music was played by mixed Jewish and Arab musicians on the lute (
oud
), fiddle (
rabbaba
) double clarinets (
zummara
and
arghul
) and kettledrum (
inaqqara
). These instruments echoed through the six hammam bathhouses that were central to Jerusalem life. The men (who used them between 2 a.m. and midday) enjoyed massages and had their moustaches trimmed; the women dyed their hair with henna and drank coffee. The brides of Jerusalem were led by singing, drumming girlfriends to the hammam where all their body hair was festively removed using
zarnikh
, a pitch-like syrup. The wedding night itself started at the baths, then the groom and his party collected the bride from her home and, if this was a wedding of the Families, they walked under a canopyheld by servants, illuminated by torches and followed by a drummer and a band of pipers, up to the Temple Mount.
    The Families were the apex of Jerusalem society. The first municipal leader was a Dajani, and in 1867, Yusuf al-Diya al-Khalidi, aged twenty-five, became the first mayor of Jerusalem. Henceforth the post was always held by the Families – there would be six Husseinis, four Alamis, two Khalidis, three Dajanis. Khalidi, whose mother was a Husseini, had run away as a boy to attend Protestant school in Malta. Later he worked for the liberal grand vizier in Istanbul. He regarded himself first as an ‘Utsi’ – a Jerusalemite (he called Jerusalem his ‘homeland’) – second as an Arab (and a Shami, an inhabitant of Shams al-Bilad, greater Syria), third as an Ottoman. He was an intellectual, one of the stars of the
nahda
, the Arab literary renaissance that saw the opening of cultural clubs, newspapers and publishers. * Yet the first mayor discovered his was a fighting as well as municipal job: the governor despatched him with forty horsemen to suppress fighting at Kerak, perhaps the only mayor of modern history to lead a cavalry expedition.
    The Families each had their own banners and their own special role in the city’s festivals. At the Holy Fire, the thirteen leading Arab Christian families paraded their banners but the Nabi Musa was the most popular festival. Thousands arrived on horseback and foot from all over Palestine to be greeted by the mufti, usually a Husseini, and the Ottoman governor. There was boisterous dancing and singing to cymbals and drums. Sufi dervishes whirled – ‘some ate live coals, others forced spikes through their cheeks’ and there were punch-ups between Jerusalemites and Nablusites. Jews and Christians were sometimes beaten up by over-excited Arab bravos. When the crowds had assembled on the Temple Mount, they were saluted by a cannonade and then the Husseinis on horseback, brandishing their own green banners, led the cavalcade towards Baibars’ shrine near Jericho. The Dajanis waved their own purple Banner of David’s Tomb. Yet the Families, each with their own dynastic domain – the Husseinis had the Temple Mount, the Khalidis the lawcourts, and they all competed for the mayoralty – were still struggling for supremacy and playing the perilous game of Istanbul politics.
    The Orthodox Slavs of the Balkans, backed by Russia, wanted independence;the Ottoman empire struggled to survive. The accession of a new and more forceful sultan, Abdul-Hamid II, was marked by massacres of Bulgarian Christians. Under Russian pressure, Abdul-Hamid accepted a constitution and the election of a parliament: in Jerusalem, the Husseinis backed the old autocracy and the Khalidis were the new liberals. Mayor Khalidi was elected to represent Jerusalem and headed off to Istanbul, yet the constitution was a feint. Abdul-Hamid cancelled it and started to promote a new Ottoman nationalism combined with an pan-Islamic loyalty to the caliphate. This intelligent but neurotic sultan, diminutive with a bleating voice and a tendency to