My Grandmother and Other Stories: Histories of the Palestinians as ...

merger with Egypt far-fetched, and the independence of Palestine created fears among
nationalists that it would have to face the Zionist movement alone. There was a return to
sentiment favourable to greater Syria. “The idea of joining Palestine to Syria is spreading
powerfully those days”, wrote Khalil Sakakini in his diary on 20 January, 1919.
People say: Palestine and Syria are two sisters visited together by
catastrophes so far, and by a common thirst for freedom and independence.
Now they must have the same fate, and under no circumstance should one
be amputated from the other. At the same time the notion of ‘Palestine for
the Palestinians’ and full independence is retreating, and you have many
people who are against the idea [of independence] altogether. 52
Sakakini’s views were echoed by a large number of local nationalists.
Unsentimental Education
Ihsan’s world outlook was at once secular, pacifist and compassionate. One is struck
by his cosmopolitan outlook given his traditional family milieu, limited education,
and even more limited life experience and young age when he was drafted into the
army. We know that his father Hasan had insisted that his sons and daughters receive
a Qur’anic education before they were sent to (mostly) secular schools. 53 Ihsan’s
natural (i.e. non-ideological) pacifism was no doubt a reaction to the carnage of
the war, and the death rate generated by disease and famine during WWI. But his
outlook was formed basically through interaction with several intellectual figures
that influence his thinking in that period: Omar Saleh al-Barghouti, Adel Jaber, Musa
Alami, Khalil Sakakini, Is’af Nashashibi and cousin Hasan al-Khalidi–who had just
received his medical degree from Beirut. To these we must add the towering figure
of Rustum Haidar, the deputy director of the Salihiyyah College in Damascus, who
visited Jerusalem frequently and who met with Turjman during one of his visits to
his teacher’s home. Within this group, Ihsan was a young and impressionable soldier,
and mainly an observer. His crucial link was Sakakini, his teacher at the Dusturiyyah
College (established in 1909). Ihsan continued to visit his teacher/mentor at least
three or four times a week during the war years. It was from Sakakini that he acquired
the idea of recording his thoughts in a diary, but more significantly, he absorbed the
latter’s critical thinking about nationalism and his progressive views on children’s
education and the emancipation of women.
Turjman’s close circle of friends challenges the prevailing assumption about the late
Ottoman period, which suggests that Arabs’ acquisition of a secular and modernist
education was confined to mission schools (Russian seminaries in Nazareth and
Bayt Jala, the La Salles Brothers in Jaffa and Jerusalem, St. Joseph’s Schools and
[ 42 ] HISTORICAL FEATURES The Short Life of Private Ihsan