Khalsa: The Town with a ‘Golden Fountain’: The Rise and Fall of an Arab Town North of the Huleh Valley

This article deals with the history of a frontier Arab town—Khalsa—which was the centre of the Huleh Valley and the connection between Galilee, Southern Lebanon and the Golan Heights during the British Mandate in Palestine (1918–48). This article aims to explore the changes and transformations that occurred in the town and the Huleh Valley in general, and tries to show that, during that period, this remote and peripheral area underwent many social and economic changes. It also demonstrates that these changes not only occurred in the central areas in Palestine but also reached the northern parts. In addition, this article tells the ‘story’ of how this Arab town, which has not been addressed in earlier studies, grew rapidly, and why it collapsed quickly in the 1948 war. It examines what the role of its leader, Kamil Hussein, was and how his relationship with the Bedouin tribes and the Jewish settlements and leaders in the valley affected the results of the war. The story of Khalsa is, to some extent, a case study on the macro-level of what was happening in the Holy Land in the three decades of British rule.     

The anxiety of cultural authenticity in Turkish communitarian thought: Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar and Peyami Safa on Europe and modernity

The uneasy tension between ongoing disputes about Turkey's Europeanisation and an emphasis on cultural authenticity has characterised much of Turkish social and political thought over the last two centuries. This article explores conceptions of Europe, modernity and tradition contained in the writings of two twentieth-century Turkish writers, Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar (1901–1962) and Peyami Safa (1899–1961) whose writings express an anxiety of cultural authenticity. Varieties of communitarian thinking, coupled with an emphasis on a ‘synthesis’ between past and future, tradition and modernity, Turkey and Europe, had been invoked and advocated by many writers and scholars who sought to come to terms with the challenges surrounding Turkey's Europeanisation throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Tanpınar and Safa are widely considered to be among the most influential representatives of this deeply rooted communitarian tradition in modern Turkish social imaginary. By drawing on Tanpınar's and Safa's essays on politics, society, culture and the East–West distinction, this article demonstrates the radical divergences between their perspectives and draws out the political implications of their views of Europe, modernity and tradition. Although he appears to be one of the advocates of Turkey's Europeanisation and the idea of a civilisational synthesis, Safa's conservatism is based on a sketchy theory of radical particularity and cultural essentialism that reflects a repudiation of universalism and cosmopolitanism, and which shows a tendency bordering on a celebration of all collectivist self-assertions and struggles against liberal democracy. Tanpınar's communitarian vision, on the other hand, with its emphasis on ‘tradition’ and ‘continuity’, aims to reconcile the political ideals of European modernity with a restored cultural tradition. One of the primary purposes of this article is to fully work out the originality of Tanpınar's thought by highlighting the intimations of a distinctively hermeneutical dimension that figure prominently in his writings, and which have largely gone unnoticed.