This chapter examines doctors’ writings and unionization. It demonstrates how the Palestinian printed press contributed to professionalization and popularization of medicine and created new modes of doctor-patient interactions. Doctors’ publications exercised professional, social, and moral authority over their community and claimed prestige within the medical community. The chapter then explores local, national, and regional medical associations, following the formation of local associations in Haifa, Jerusalem, Jaffa, and Nablus; the participation of Palestinian doctors in regional conferences and associations; and finally, the formation of Palestine’s Arab Medical Association.

Palestinian Doctors tells the story of the country’s community of Arab doctors from its inception in the late nineteenth century until the catastrophe of 1948. The book’s introduction situates its contribution to several fields of research. First, the book contributes to the history and sociology of the professions, offering a reconceptualization of the professions in colonial and settler colonial contexts. Second, in the context of histories of the medical profession in the Middle East, this is a unique case study that does not involve a local university or a state building project, but rather individual and localized networks alongside regional educational mobility and regional networks. Third, it builds on and contributes to existing scholarship on Palestine’s urban Arab elites, burgeoning middle classes, and histories of the professions, weaving medical professionals into this tapestry. Finally, it introduces Arab doctors to the history of medicine in Palestine, which concentrates predominantly on Jewish and missionary medical professionals.

The eighteenth-century Wahhābī movement in central Arabia arose with the aim of combatting the Muslim cult of saints, and in so doing led to the establishment of the Saudi state. An analysis of texts authored by the movement’s founder and eponym, Muḥammad b. ʿAbd al-Wahhāb (d. 1206/1792), demonstrates that he fully adopted the tawḥīd al-ulūhiyya doctrine, together with its attendant terminology and argumentation, from Ibn Taymiyya’s writings. It was due to this doctrine that the early Wahhābīs viewed Muslims who practiced a popular cult of saints as polytheists who must be converted or conquered; in their attempt to do so, the Wahhābīs transformed Ibn Taymiyya’s theoretical and often abstruse polemic into a casus belli with real-world consequences that reverberate to this day. The early Wahhābīs’ intransigent Taymiyyan-based monolatry distinguished them from broader currents of eighteenth-century Muslim revivalism and provided a template for the radical salafī militancy of recent decades.

This chapter examines the development of health services in late Ottoman Palestine. Through the eyes of a French physician living in Jerusalem in the first years of the twentieth century, it surveys the city’s medical institutions and personnel as a prelude to developments in the decades to come. It focuses on Jerusalem, which Western and missionary competition made into the city with the highest bed capacities in the empire, and on late Ottoman and regional developments, which set the stage for the medical profession’s development. Western encroachment, Zionist immigration and funding, late-Ottoman administrative reform, and local Palestinian initiative created an institutional and social setting that transformed Palestine’s medical landscape.

This chapter concentrates on the spatial presence of Palestinian doctors – the communities they served and those they did not. Villages rarely had medical facilities or doctors, and peasants had to travel to the town or city for medical services and would otherwise rely on traditional practitioners. Towns usually had missionary medical facilities, a small community of doctors (some of whom were native to the town), and one or two government medical facilities – a District Health Office, a government clinic, or a small hospital. Palestine’s large cities – Jerusalem, Haifa, and Jaffa – were characterized by a relatively large professional community, substantial Jewish presence, strong missionary presence that provided both educational and medical services, and a strong presence of the Mandate administration. The chapter places doctors on Palestine’s map and examines how medical services transformed urban relationships, as well as those between the city, the town, and the countryside.

This chapter examines a premodern salafī precedent for modern theonomy taken from the field of uṣūl al-fiqh (jurisprudential theory). It traces a polemic waged since the eleventh century CE in Islamic legal writings which argues that categorical adherence to the juridical precedent of a given law school – a practice known as taqlīd – constitutes a form of polytheism. According to these authors, obedience to law is a form of worship, and thus obedience to the ruling of a human jurist, in contravention of a ruling found in a divinely revealed text, is tantamount to worship of that jurist. In contrast with a widespread misconception in the academic literature, premodern opposition to taqlīd was not a condemnation of textual literalism, and in fact the authors who engaged in the polemic could be generally described as fundamentalists who leaned toward ahl al-ḥadīth literalism (Ḥanbalīs, Ẓāhirīs, and eighteenth–nineteenth century revivalists). This polemic’s castigation of taqlīd as adherence to man-made law furnished an important precedent for modern salafīs’ characterization of democracy and parliamentary legislation as inherently polytheistic.

This chapter looks at Palestinian doctors’ interactions with their Jewish counterparts as both a political and a professional rivalry. Jewish doctors treated Arab patients, and Jewish and Arab doctors worked together in government institutions, shared clinics, consulted each other, and fought common enemies of morbidity and mortality on the same land. The chapter examines Jewish-Arab interdependency and rivalry, bringing forward its articulations in the Arab and Hebrew press while underlining the effects of intercommunal violence on this encounter and attempts at direct cooperation. At the heart of this chapter is the mass migration of German-Jewish doctors to Palestine following the Nazi takeover, and the ways in which it affected relationships within the medical profession.

The journey toward Palestinian Doctors began almost a decade ago, and its intensive writing phase took place during a global pandemic that transformed our generation’s engagement with medicine and disease. The last two years transformed the pace of Palestinian doctors in their nation’s history, as many of them were targeted, incarcerated, or killed during the war on Gaza. At a time of increasing dehumanization, the history of medicine, and the history of Palestinian health and Palestinian medical professionals, more specifically, has a humanizing potential. The history of medicine touches the core of our shared humanity, shared vulnerability, and perpetual efforts to find cures and ease suffering.

The radical salafī jihādī school – the tendency to which groups like al-Qāʿida and the Islamic State adhere – is characterized by dogmatic adherence to a doctrine of theonomy that condemns parliamentary democracy and man-made law as a form of polytheism, and the regimes based on them as apostate. While the founders of the school were undeniably influenced by Mawdūdī and Quṭb, they rearticulated the concept of ḥākimiyya as a logical corollary of Ibn Taymiyya’s monolatric doctrine of tawḥīd, and likewise found a ready-made template for the interpretation of monolatry as theonomy in the premodern salafī condemnation of taqlīd. The chapter situates these writings in the discursive context of interactions and polemics with competing schools (e.g. quietist salafīs and the Muslim Brotherhood); traces the relation between doctrinal development and major episodes such as the Islamist uprising in Syria in the early 1980s, the war in Algeria in the 1990s, and the emergence of al-Qāʿida in Afghanistan; and analyzes how the articulation of an intransigent theonomy doctrine contributed to the delineation of salafī jihadism as a distinct school.

The Introduction sets the stage for the detailed intellectual history of salafism to follow by introducing key analytical concepts in political theology and Axial theory. It frames modern salafī theonomy within a general understanding of the developed Abrahamic traditions as a meeting-ground for two competing conceptions of transcendence. Both the ancient Israelite and Greek Axial revolutions are described as differing responses to the model of sacral kingship characteristic of the archaic states in the region: The former assigned true kingship to God alone, who then stands in competition with mundane sovereigns and demands exclusive allegiance to Himself, while the latter, in a process starting from the Late Bronze Age collapse, dissolved issues of sovereignty and power into ontological and metaphysical formulations. These originally distinct conceptions are analyzed through their contrasting tenets in five categories, the most important of which is the distinction between ‘monolatry,’ on the one hand – the restriction of worship to one God – and conceptual monotheism, on the other. This analysis provides the basis for the typological study of Taymiyyan theology undertaken in Chapter 1, and more generally for the treatment of monolatry and theonomy in the salafī tradition throughout the book.

Modern salafī theonomy is indebted to the premodern salafī tradition inaugurated by Ibn Taymiyya (d. 728/1328), and in particular to his doctrine of tawḥīd al-ulūhiyya. This doctrine states that in essence Islam is more a monolatry (Gr. monos, sole + latreia, worship) than a monotheism. The doctrine rests on a distinction between two aspects of divinity. One, termed rabb, refers to God as the sole creator and efficient cause of the universe, and the sole wielder of power in it, and thus is the aspect that expresses divine predetermination. The second aspect, termed ilāh, designates God as the sole proper object of worship, and more generally as the proper telos or final cause of all human activity. Ibn Taymiyya argued that most unbelievers acknowledge the rabb aspect of divinity, and are deemed unbelievers solely because they fail to make God their sole object of worship (ilāh). In Ibn Taymiyya’s writings the doctrine functioned primarily as intra-Muslim polemic against rationalist Ashʿarī theologians and Ṣūfī mystics, but it likewise served to condemn the Muslim cult of saints, thus laying the foundations for the rise of the Wahhābī movement in the mid-eighteenth century.

Through mapping the sociological origins of Palestinian doctors: their birthplace, class and family origin, early educational background, and university education, this chapter shows the social transformations of Palestinian communities during the late Ottoman and Mandate periods. It traces the development of the professional classes, from landed, mercantile, and religious notability, which converted, and sometimes supplemented, existing economic and cultural capital into professional education. It argues that throughout the Mandate period, the social origins of the professional community diversified to include families and individuals who gained mobility through sociocultural and economic capital. The chapter also looks at secondary and higher education as a meeting ground for the formation of lifelong professional and personal networks on a regional scale, as doctors were one of the only groups educated outside Palestine. The chapter builds on quantitative analysis of biographical data of about 400 doctors who worked in Palestine. Sources include biographical dictionaries, biographies and autobiographies, and various educational and employment lists.

This chapter illuminates the impact of the 1948 war on the Palestinian medical community and locates its role in assisting their communities during the Nakba. Within a few months, the British administration withdrew its funding from all governmental health services, most Palestinian Arab doctors were displaced, and casualties mounted. Observing the medical profession during the war, this chapter follows heroic stories of perseverance. Lacking any state structures or national independent institutions, however, these efforts were necessarily localized and short-lived, suffering from a severe lack of supplies. Largely dependent on private practice, the Arab medical profession in Palestine began unionizing only three years before the war and had limited resources of its own. The chapter reviews the resources mobilized to deal with these challenges and the community’s fate following the Nakba.