Displacement and Dispossession in the Modern Middle East by Dawn Chatty (review)

As World War I raged and the Austro-Hungarian, German, Ottoman, and Russian empires were dissolving, hundreds of thousands of civilians were forced from their homes and lands. Many of those displaced sought refuge in the Middle East, especially Muslims made unwelcome in Europe or in the new Soviet Union. In Displacement and Dispossession in the Modern Middle East, Dawn Chatty set out to “contextualize the dispossession, statelessness, and forced migration in the Middle East,” which in this study encompasses territories of the former Ottoman Empire (2).

Chatty theorizes that the integration of minorities, but without their assimilation, led to the exceptional cultural diversity of the Middle East. Unlike other parts of the world, the Middle East, she contends, provides a “framework whereby different peoples can successfully find a place for themselves without either being assimilated or excluded” (2). Her study also places the better-known Palestinian and Kurdish dispossessions of the twentieth century into the broader context of forced migrations and exiled populations resulting from imperial policy, colonialism, and the mid-twentieth century Arab socialist awakening.

An anthropologist, Chatty employed an ethnographic approach to her study. From 2005 to 2007, she collected thirty-six oral histories in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Egypt from among the oldest surviving generation of migrants whose families were dispossessed over the last one hundred years. Using research assistants from the respective communities, Chatty interviewed and digitally recorded narratives from the Circassians, Armenians, Palestinians, and Kurds. She used a topic guide to stimulate the interviewees’ memories of “childhood and youth, their memory of forced migration or those of their parents, their recollections of places where they sought refuge, the institutions and networks in their new places as well as their perceptions and aspirations regarding home and homeland” (3). For some of the elderly, the interview was a last opportunity to recount traumatic experiences. Many narratives are heroic accounts of extraordinary courage and resilience, sometimes by mere orphans. Chatty does not indicate whether she has archived her interviews for this study (305). However, some of the previously recorded Armenian testimonies she includes are available through the Zoryan Institute (166).

The first part of the book establishes the historical and theoretical aspects of displacement and forced migration in the Middle East, primarily by using secondary sources. The second part is composed of four case studies, enhanced by the author’s collected oral testimony and narratives.

From 1860 to 1914, Circassian, Chechnyan, and other Muslim peasant communities—as well as some Jewish artisanal and trader families—were expelled from the Caucasus and the Balkans during the many Russian-Ottoman wars. These displaced Europeans maintained their language, customs, and traditions when they settled in Syria and Jordan and achieved significant economic success. Ninety-three year old Abdul Salem said, “We came in carts—we didn’t stop.… all the way from Abkhazia to Sham [Syria]. Death would have been better. When a person dies, he is rested…. It has been continuous tragic mishaps and suffering…just when we started to belong, to become rested…. the Jews [Israelis] took over [the Syrian Golan Heights in 1967] and we were driven out” (7).

The first domestic genocide of the twentieth century resulted in more than a million Armenians massacred, deported, and starved between the outbreak of World War I and the establishment of the Turkish Republic in 1923. Many expelled Armenians sought refuge in the Middle East. The Armenian Church in Egypt had already been strong and well established from previous migrations. “I grew up speaking Armenian. We don’t have this feeling of being different. We are Egyptians, I mean we are Armenians by birth, so we speak our language, we cook our food, we dance our dances, we have our customs,” said Sonia (135).

The dispossession and forced migration of the Palestinians throughout the Middle East is examined since the 1948 Nakba or “catastrophe.” The collected oral histories of exiled Palestinians contribute to an understanding of their resilience and...