1927: How Seismology Received Islamic Theology

Sharp earthquake shocks 1505 hours yesterday about 50 killed and 250 injured at Nablus about 22 killed and 25 injured at Ramleh about 30 killed and 70 injured at Lydia. Few casualties also in Jerusalem, Jericho, Ramallah, Hebron and Ainkarem and in a number of villages … neighboring … Jerusalem, Ramallah, and Nazareth. Full extent of material damage not yet ascertained. All emergency measures are being taken." With these words, telegrammed on July 11, 1927, the of cer administering the government of Palestine announced the event of an earthquake. His second telegram related that the Government House suf ered extensive damage and was evacuated. The third telegram reported "no British or European personnel of Government or resident killed or wounded in Palestine or Trans-Jordan so far as can be ascertained."¹ Augusta Victoria, the high commissioner's residence, was declared "uninhabitable" and the commissioner had to requisition a house in Jerusalem.²

The destruction was noticeable everywhere. The number of killed and wounded was low because the adult population was engaged in the harvest; the destruction of the buildings, however, was signif cant.³ In Reineh, all but 10 out of a total of 160 houses were severely damaged and had to be demolished. In Lydia, the greater part of the town was destroyed and the entire population—about 6,000—was camping outside.⁴ The population of Nablus was also reportedly staying outside of the city.⁵ The last major earthquake that had devastated Palestine was ninety years earlier, on January 1, 1837. Extending from Safad to Beirut to Damascus, in Palestine the earthquake damaged Tiberius, Nablus, and Hebron, leaving several thousand dead; Safad and several other villages were destroyed.⁶ The 1927 earthquake paled in comparison.⁷ It was nonetheless a disaster of grand proportions, reported and managed through the humanitarian channels of the British colonial government in Palestine. The government announced assistance to individuals in the form of loan-bearing interest.⁸ And to support the immediate reconstruction ef orts, it opened a Central Relief Fund to which donations from all over the world were directed.⁹

The earthquake was also a natural calamity; the discipline of seismology, then under the influence of the continental drift theory, informed its scientifc assessment.¹⁰ But, as it turned out, the tools of seismology were insufficient to unearth the "earthquake habit" of Palestine, the understanding of which was deemed necessary for any adequate seismological assessment. Subsequently, and in an attempt to recover the region's deeper, interior history, a text from another tradition of knowledge surfaced. This was an Islamic theological text that chronicled earthquakes in the Muslim world, including in Palestine, over the course of six centuries until the year 1499. The result was the intersection of two traditions of knowledge, represented by two fgures of authority. First, there was the American seismologist and Stanford professor, Bailey Willis (1857–1949), who was recruited by the colonial government to of er a seismological report on the earthquake. Confronted with the alien conditions of an unfamiliar place, he confessed to being unversed with the "earthquake habit" of Palestine. Second, there was the fifteenth-century Muslim polymath whose study Willis consulted a year later in order to recover the habits of Palestine's earth. This was the well-known Egyptian polymath Jalal al-Din al-Suyuti (1445–1505), who wrote a chronology of earthquakes in the Muslim world.

The title of al-Suyuti's chronology is Kashf al-salsala 'an wasf al-zalzala (Revealing the Chain of Echoes/Meaning in the Description of Earthquakes, hereaft er Zalzala).¹¹ Completed before al-Suyuti's death in Cairo, Zalzala posits earthquakes as divine signs inviting interpretation. Zalzala also includes a list of earthquakes that took place in the Muslim world from year 7 hijri (628 CE) to 904 hijri (1499 CE). Of all the philosophical and scientifc accounts of earthquakes that preceded al-Suyuti's in the Islamic tradition, his reemerged into the modern world of colonial expansions.¹² It was translated into English in the mid-nineteenth century, and by the 1920s, Willis would make extensive use of al-Suyuti's study...