Nine Quarters of Jerusalem

Based on Matthew Teller's book "Nine Quarters of Jerusalem" I developed a tour in the old city of Jerusalem that introduces the visitor to the different cultural, social and religious communities that are part of the social fabric of the city. In April 2025 Matthew was visiting Jerusalem and we did the tour with a group of expats and diplomats. I recorded the tour and edited the recording into this lively episode that makes you feel you are walking with us in the streets of Jerusalem.

You can buy the book from the Educational Bookstore in Jerusalem on Salaedin street or you can order it online. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:04

Welcome back to Stories from Jerusalem Podcast. This is the longest podcast episode I have ever uploaded. I considered cutting it into two halves, but honestly, it's a lot of work, and I figured that you can always pause it and come back to it later. It's about two hours long. This is an episode that was recorded during the Nine Quarters of Jerusalem tour that I was very happy to do with Matthew Teller, the author of the book by that name. Matthew was here in April 2025, about a year ago now, and based on his book, I developed a tour that introduces you to the different religious and social cultural communities that make up the cultural mosaic of the old city of Jerusalem. I edited the tour recording to the best of my abilities. You will definitely still hear some background noises, but that also has its charm, I believe, for this episode. And I hope that after listening to this, you will want to order the book. And of course, you can buy it from the educational bookstore in Jerusalem. And now without further ado, let's start from near Newgate in the old city of Jerusalem. And my name is Kristal. I know several of you because you've been on my tours before, but for some of you, I'm new. I am a Dutch citizen married to a Palestinian from Beitsafafa. I studied tour guiding in the Netherlands. I was a tour guide there for many years. Then I moved here to get married to my husband. And after the children were growing up, I wanted to go back to my career. And so I studied tour guiding first at the Bethlehem Bible College. And I got my Palestinian tour guide license from the PA. And then I studied the Israeli tour guide program here in Jerusalem. And I also got my, which is what I'm using today, uh, the uh license uh from the Israeli Ministry of Tourism.

SPEAKER_05 2:15

That's let me I'm gonna chip in very quickly. That's rare, right? I mean, how many tour guides are there? I don't know what the answer is. How many tour guides have accreditation from the Palestinians and the Israelis?

SPEAKER_01 2:27

I don't think there's many people that have both licenses, and I always say I learned two different narratives about the same geographic location, and it's very interesting. And then after uh 7 October, and uh there is no tourism, uh, I didn't have any work, so I decided to start organizing tours for expats who already live in the country. And I started it in September, and by now I have a WhatsApp group with over 260 people in it. Most of you are in it. If you're not, you can uh get yourself added. And there are tours every weekend and uh and then on the Tuesdays. And then as I was reading the book by Matthew, Nine Quarters of Jerusalem, I do have a hard copy, which is actually I have you signed it for me, but you I don't think you knew this. Yes, because somebody brought it when you did the um uh the first uh launch, brought it for me, and you had had it signed for Christmas.

SPEAKER_05 3:24

So I didn't sign it in front of you.

SPEAKER_01 3:26

We didn't meet, we met later. I read the book, and I for me I loved this book so much, I already I'm reading it for the fourth time now. Of course, I read it so many times because I wanted to make this into a tour, and it was one of the ideas I had as soon as I had opened the first pages. So by chance I met Matthew later, and then I once uh was oh, and then you were working on the book uh Daybreak in Gaza. You asked me for uh uh helping because I do a podcast, that's why we're also recording. I thought I'll put it also on uh on Stories from Palestine podcast. And uh you asked me to help you with an interview for that book, and then I said, by the way, I have an idea. I would love to make a tour based on this book, and then we started to uh to talk about it, uh send each other messages, and from one thing came the other. And then we have a tour now, and I did the tour once as a tryout, starting from the other direction. Today we decided to do it the other way around because we want to end at the educational bookstore, uh so it's going to be for me also in a way new. And what's so special is that today Matthew is with us. I mean, the author of the book.

SPEAKER_05 4:40

The author.

SPEAKER_01 4:41

I'm not gonna be talking as much as I usually do.

SPEAKER_05 4:44

No, no, no. Yes, she will. Yes, she will.

SPEAKER_01 4:46

Because I think Matthew uh should do that. But before I give Matthew the um uh uh the chance to explain the title of the book, the stage and the title of the book, I want to start by reading a quote from the book. And the quote is a quote that he uses also on page two, so it's an important quote. It's by John Atlil, who was a Jerusalemite author who died in 2018. He says, Only by living inside the old city, enclosed by its walls, can you really come to know Jerusalem? Along its narrow streets, you begin to feel its force. You are changed by its shrines and holy places, you are baptized by the city of stone. But it is not easy to be a Jerusalemite. A thorny path runs alongside its joys. They great the great or small inside the old city. You don't know how to treat Jerusalem. Most people treat Jerusalem as a city, but it's not a city, it's not London, it's not New York, it's not Paris. This is a person. Jerusalem is a living person, it breathes, it talks, it fights. It's not a city. Every minute in Jerusalem is a special minute. It is something that gives you a new life. You become a new person every minute. It's a beautiful quote to start to start this uh tour with. And now we want to know. You say nine quarters of Jerusalem. I open my map and I say four quarters.

SPEAKER_05 6:24

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 6:25

What's up with the four quarters? It's not saying four quarters.

SPEAKER_05 6:29

The story, I'm gonna make this quick because uh the point is not me, and the point is even not Christelle. The point is where we are and the people who live here. I'm gonna start with a lie. And the lie is that the conflict that's going on here today is a religious conflict. That it's something to do with religion. It's something about Judaism or Islam and Christianity and how they interplay. It's a lie. But it's a lie that's very, very prevalent, and you hear it from lots of different quarters. We heard it the other day, actually, when we did the tour up in Al-Aqsa, that this is a religious war. It's not a religious war. It's a political war, if you like. It's not really a war, but it's a political conflict. But that idea of religion being underneath it all, I think, has part of its origins in how we, and I'm saying we as Europeans as opposed to to Jerusalemites, have been fed, if you like, the idea of what this place, which is what the center of everything, what this place is all about. And that lie rests on division that Jews are here and Muslims are here and Christians are here, and Armenia's here, but that's a different subject. So most or all of the maps that all of us use, not just tourists, we're being tourists today, right? Whatever we do in our professions, we're now tourists, right? Uh tourists or academics or the media reinforced day after day after day in literature, on TV, on the internet, everything, is the idea that the old city where we're standing now is divided, this is colour-coded even, into four very clearly defined ethno-religiously uh manufactured quarters. Muslim quarter, Jewish quarter, Armenian quarter, Christian quarter. I have been lucky for a bunch of reasons. We can talk as also as we're walking around, what my background is. Um, but because of a bunch of privileges that I happen to have been born into, I've been able to be moving to and fro and to and fro from my home in the UK to Jerusalem all my life, since I was a little kid. I never understood once I came here and once I started to grow up and look around a bit, I never understood why we have these maps, because these maps don't relate to the reality of the places that we're going to see today. There is no dividing line here. You can't, you know, between the Muslim court and the Christian court, you can't tell when you're walking on that alleyway that this side is supposed to be Muslim and this side is supposed to be Christian. It's madness. So that was the genesis of the idea of trying to uh coalesce all these stories that I've had buzzing around in my head all of my life into a book, and that was the basis for calling it something to do with the quarters of Jerusalem. The story I'll I'll compress the story for you. The story very briefly, how this came about. I wanted to know how who started dividing Jerusalem, the Muslims against the Jews against the Christians against each other. There's a long history about the cartography of Jerusalem in the medieval period, it's a whole like PhD subject. We, you know, I'm not going to go into it. In the medieval period, broadly, um, Europeans who are mapping Jerusalem mapped it figuratively. So Jerusalem was seen as the centre of the world, it was the junction point between the earth and the heavens. It was not depicted in a realistic way, it was depicted as a perfect circle, which referred to the omphalos of the world, the navel of the world. Um, or it was depicted as a as a sort of European-style fortress, a castle with like turrets and and everything. Most of the time the mapmakers didn't hadn't seen the place, so they didn't know what it was. But it was also there was a there was a divine Jerusalem, a figurative, a symbolic Jerusalem, which they were representing. And that um uh but equally, at the same time, there are Arabic sources all through the medieval period that refer to Jerusalem in realistic terms as a cluster of neighborhoods. So there was one historian in the 13th, 14th century who referred to 39 neighborhoods, quarters of Jerusalem. Um, and uh Mujah al-adin, um who was a historian in 1495, uh, referred to 18 quarters of Jerusalem in his period. And that situation lasted through to Napoleon. Napoleon invaded in 1798, first Egypt and then Palestine, and he brought, as well as military, he brought with him artists and scholars and and and scientists and cartographers as well. And there's this surge of interest in Arab and Turkish culture which followed in Europe in the 19th century and has lasted really till today. I'm gonna compress the story even more because we need to start moving. I can see we're on Dutch time today, so it's like there were conflicts in the 1830s, 1840s. It's a very, very turbulent time for Palestine. There had been a revolution, uh rebellion in Egypt, there had been a popular uprising here against the Ottoman rule, and also the European powers were getting involved here for the first time. So soon after Napoleon, we see the first maps produced which are actually traced on the ground, like not figurative but but cartographically accurate representations. And alongside that we have greater European influence. Foreign consulates are opening for the first time in the 1830s, 1840s here, and one of them is the British. So I'm coming around to us. We are the source of all of this. In 1842, the first Protestant bishop of Jerusalem arrived, appointed by Britain, with him as part of this sort of movement for European influence in Jerusalem. With him, with the the bishop was a chaplain. He was a young man called George Williams. He was age 27 when he was posted here. He was only here for about a year or so, 1842, that sort of period. A few years later he published an edition of his book called The Holy City, and it included a map. There had been very few cartographically accurate maps in the couple of decades, few decades before him, and they didn't show any of these quarters. His map was the first. So George Williams's map in 1849 shows these quarters pretty much as they are exactly today. The point being the British were seeking influence in Jerusalem. They needed to know exactly who lived where, because, as well as the diplomatic presence, there was a religious presence. The British efforts here were focused on converting the Jews to Christianity. This was an evangelical movement within British Anglican Protestantism, and it's now expanded. It's now in American Protestantism, but the same urge is there. Before George Williams, these quarters didn't appear. Pretty much every single map ever made since George Williams in 1849 shows Jerusalem divided into four quarters according to ethno-religious division. The root of it, the root of the quarters that you'll see on the maps on the wall, and you'll see on the TV, and you'll see on the internet, is colonialism. The British were here to divide and rule in a very simplistic formulation. And they did it extremely well because it's lasted for almost 200 years, reinforced by successive colonial authorities in Jerusalem, to set the city's populations against each other. And it's still surviving today. And what I'm concerned about, why I wanted to write the book, is because if we only ever see Jerusalem as the center of a religious conflict, what does that do to our understanding of the occupation? It subverts the political understanding of the occupation and it replaces it with a religious understanding, which is quite false because it comes from a 27-year-old British old Etonian missionary from 1849.

SPEAKER_01 15:14

So we have nine quarters, you said. Oh, okay. Nine is just a number, right?

SPEAKER_05 15:18

You have to sell a book, right? I mean, you know, you can't just write a book and put it out there and expect it to you have to give it a little bit of something. So I wanted something which had a bit of poetry to it, but I also wanted to subvert the idea that quarters are four. Like there's you divide a thing and you divide it, those are four quarters. So I I just tried to play a little bit with reader expectations, and I just tried to undermine it a bit. So when you see nine quarters, it's like, what are you talking about? No, they can't be nine quarters. What do you talk about? And then you pick up the book and then you look at it, and it's like, oh no, and then you take it and you buy it. That's the idea. And I looked at, I looked at, you look at even numbers. Even numbers are wrong, they're too square, two, four, six, eight. It doesn't, it doesn't feel right. One is no good.

SPEAKER_13 16:04

No.

SPEAKER_05 16:05

Three, three quarters? No. No. Five quarters, maybe, but it's like it's a bit, uh, it doesn't quite work. Seven is too mystical, like the dance of the seven veils or something, or whatever. Seven, there. Uh, nine was what I ended up with. Eleven is too much, thirteen, fifteen, seventeen is too long. So I chose nine and I settled on nine.

SPEAKER_01 16:25

We are going to visit several of the communities or minorities that are written about in the book, that people have been interviewed for in the book. We will meet some people along the way. We cannot everywhere let other people speak because then it's a never-ending story. So it's bits and bytes, and then, of course, in the end, when we finish at the educational bookstore, and if you don't have the book yet, you can get the book and get the full story. Mahmoud's with us on Mahmoud time. Yalla, good morning. Let's go. This direction. Uh, this is Hagov, the owner of the shop, he's Armenian, and uh he's uh interviewed for the book, so we are not gonna quote him because he's here, and he can tell us the story of his family and uh the yeah, the special story about the tiles, the street names, and so on.

SPEAKER_07 17:22

Okay, so let's begin with uh the first step. How did this art come to Jerusalem? The Armenian poetry, which is now so important and part of the local culture. We go back to 1919, the Dome of the Rock. The British mandate wanted to replace all the ceramic tiles covering this building. Now, these were last done in the 16th century and were falling apart. So the governor, Sir Ronald Storz, said, I want to replace them. Now to work on this job, he brings David Ohaneson, a very well-known ceramic artist, Armenian, uh, from Turkey. David comes to Jerusalem, goes to the dom of the rock, sees that needs to replace around 48,000 tiles. And these are huge tiles, hand-made, hand-painted tiles. He needs to bring a team of artists to help him do the job. He goes back to Turkey, to the city of Kutania in Turkey, brings with him my grandfather, Madhardic Karakashan, who was the painter, and Nishambalian, who was the potter. Now, the three artists uh leave Turkey during the Armenian Genocide. Now that's the background of the story. They come to Jerusalem. By coming here, they survived the genocide. Now they arrive in 1919. There used to be an old ceramic kiln right next to the Dome of the Rock. They fix it, they repair it, and start making some sample tiles. Now the British like the samples, but the Muslims, the Waks, says we don't want Armenian Christians to work on our mosque. So after about a year, they cancel the project. Now, the three of them they cannot go back to Turkey. There's nothing left in Turkey. They stay in Jerusalem and open the first Armenian pottery in 1920. It was located on the Via Dolorosa, and that's how this art is established here. Something good comes out of the British in the end. So that's the that's the beginning. Now, in the market you see a lot of things that are core Armenian pottery, but it's all mass-produced in Hebron, and uh it's imitations of this type of art. Yes? Now we come back to the story in the in the book. Second generation was my father, Mr. Stepan Karakasha. 1966, during the Jordanians, he is commissioned to do the street signs in Arabic and English. Now you'll see these around the old city. Uh 67 come to Israelis and they say, please add the Hebrew. Now he didn't know how to write Hebrew, so the mayor gives him the phones and he starts making the Hebrew, which is a later edition. You'll see that it's added later after 67. So every day I come to work, I look up and I see my father's work. There's this connection which frankly keeps me in Jerusalem. Otherwise, I would not stay here.

SPEAKER_05 20:31

This is uh just to reinforce what you're saying, every single street sign inside the old city that you'll see on the walls all around are hand there. The tiles are handmade. Handmade, yes. The design is hand-done, the lettering is hand done by my father. Your father, exactly. This is the sort of of personal family connection that is, I think, extremely unusual and very rare and very valuable. The Armenian pottery has become inextricably linked with the visual and artistic representation of Jerusalem to the outside world. The Armenians and the Armenian history that's embodied in the person you see standing before you today is at the core of Jerusalem identity, not a marginalized, it's not something on the edge. This is Jerusalem standing before you. Thank you.

SPEAKER_01 21:30

Thank you, Hagup, for showing us. You can always come back here and uh do uh a workshop with your family for a nice party or something with the colleagues, or to buy new things for your house. Does anybody in this group by any chance have a tattoo made by Razouk? Nobody. Yet. Maybe after this, you will come back and you would consider it. Yeah. The tattoo shop is not open yet. It's too early to get a tattoo. But we are here because we want to speak a little bit about the Coptic community. Copts are Christians from Egypt. And usually when you look at the place and it says since 1855 or since maybe 19th century, here it says Tatou with heritage since 1300. You interviewed Wasim, right? For the book. What can you tell us about Wasim and the Tattoo family?

SPEAKER_05 22:44

Wow, okay. Let me try and remember. Wasim, I think, is the 27th generation. And his son and his uh, I think it's his son, right? Anton, who is now the 28th generation of tattooists. Um, he told me that the family originates in Minya, which is a town um in Middle Egypt, halfway along the Nile, which is a uh uh uh I think is a majority even Coptic or very heavily Coptic Christian town. Um and there was a tradition there of tattooing pilgrims uh that had returned from Jerusalem, um which is uh very common throughout the Coptic community. It's sort of, I don't I feel like a bit awkward that I'm speaking for Copts. Are there any Copts here? No. There's a there's a sort of uh an identification within the Coptic community, not just here but anywhere, that uh uh a tattooed cross on the inside of your wrist is a kind of identifier. It's uh it's it allows you into the church. It kind of proves who you are, that who you are, you what you say you are. And that's especially significant also today in Minya, where the Copts are a minority and they're also oppressed by the Egyptian government as well. And there are some conflicts and there's there's some violence as well. And so this tattoo becomes extremely important to know who is who, if you like, and as a sort of identifier to each other. Um seems family. I don't I don't think that even he knows the story of why or how exactly they migrated from Minya to Jerusalem. But there's obviously a connection with the with the Coptic tradition anyway, and the base of Coptic worship here. At some point over the 27th generation, some point in the middle, they arrived. And he is able inside, he has photos as well, of his, also like Hagop, his his forebears, who would tattoo uh Coptic Christian pilgrims who had uh visited the church and and can finished their prayers and finished their devotions and then were about to head home. And people would have different designs the Jerusalem Cross, which is a square cross with four little crosses in each segment. Um he's got uh like St. George and the Dragon and the Virgin Mary in different forms or whatever, but these are uh sort of stamps. The way that his grandfather and his great-grandfather would operate is you'd have a little stamp, you would ink the stamp, and then you would stamp it on the on the skin of the person, and then you have something to trace. So you then like pick out the the tattoo with the needle, and you then you insert the ink under the skin. And these uh these old wooden uh stamps that he has date back to the 17th century and before. And there's even there's been study, there's a book that I have at home of uh tattoo, wooden tattoo stamps from Jerusalem, and they're studied and they're analyzed, and the different designs and the progressions of the styles depicted.

SPEAKER_01 25:54

He has a whole book that you can flip through where you can find so many designs, and some of them are really religious, but then there's also some beautiful olive leaves, for example, or hearts. There are a lot of things that he does, and I want to read from the book a quote. He says, Wasim that he interviewed. I see it like baptism. Baptism with water is a physical process, but it's not your body that is baptized, it is your soul. When we tattoo people, it is a very deep spiritual connection that you cause people to feel what they are and who they are. I tell them, you'll take this with you. The tattoo is a reflection on your body of a mark on your soul.

SPEAKER_05 26:40

This was like, oh my god, he said this, and I was sitting in the in the other doorway around there and I melted. Because this is so evocative. But the guy himself, I'll describe him a little bit, the guy himself, he's a tall guy, he always wears black, he's got long hair, he's got tattoos, obviously. He is the is he the president or is he the leading member of the Holy Land, Harley Davidson Motorcycle Club? He lives the life, man. It's like tattooing is like a family vocation, but it's also it's part of his identity and how he operates in this country as well.

SPEAKER_01 27:19

And now you know where it is, so you can all come back during later hours of the day and uh see what he does, and maybe decides that you are inclined to get a little um memory of your stay in Jerusalem. Yes. With what?

SPEAKER_05 27:39

This is really bad. This is real, this is the worst. So just very, very briefly, and I'll do this just because we were just at Hagop's place, and so we can do this while this is still fresh in your mind, this is the work of Hagop's father. So in the Jordanian period, he was contracted to do these uh street signs for every street in the city, as the idea that the Jordanians, one way of the Jordanians stamping their claim to the old city. Obviously, what there are multiple different ways, but one way is to name and identify and label a street that previously had only been known orally. Everybody knows the street, of course. Everybody who lives here knows which corner is which, which street, they have their own names. And then the government, in this case the Jordanian government, comes in and says, we are gonna name this street after this person, and this street after it's a form of uh state building. That aside, you can see that there's uh there are two lines, obviously English and Arabic, because this is the Jordanian government, right? Um, which were done originally by hand and fixed, and then after 67, Israel invades and occupies, and you can tell that the the olive leaf design is around the two, and then the Israeli government, when it's here, says, right, we are going to also stamp our authority on this place and name the you know, name the place and add our identity to it. So they added the Hebrew, not at the bottom, of course, above, right? And so the Hebrew, you'll see as we go around, some of the signs were done post-67, and they are three lines with the border around all three. Many date from pre-67, they have two lines with a border, and the Hebrew with an extra border above it, which is the case here as well. Just so you have it fresh in your mind. This is the Armenian Quarter. There's a mosque in the Armenian Quarter, and we're just going to the Maronite convent who are not Armenians. This is not Armenian, this is not Armenian, and yet we call this the Armenian Quarter.

unknown 30:16

Sorry, Sami.

SPEAKER_01 30:17

Sami's not here. He's not here. No, no, no. Yeah. Um because we are we're going to talk about uh another community, the Syriac community. And the Muhtar of the Syriac community, Sami, has a little shop here. He was a tailor all his life, he's 90 years old, and uh he currently doesn't really do tailoring anymore. But he's usually there and he sells chals, but he also has these specific things that uh the clergy wears. But he's 90 years old, and so recently he's not been coming to the shop all the time, which is a pity because he's quite a character, but it will give us a little bit more time to go to the St. Mark's Church and talk about the Syrac community there. But uh, yeah, what is your uh memory about your interview with Sammy?

SPEAKER_05 31:07

Well, Sammy's great, but it's like I uh we shouldn't linger because it's kind of like if you haven't seen Sammy, it's kind of it's all a bit irrelevant. But he's a lovely guy, he's he was formerly Jerusalem's premier tailor. So uh, you know, presidents and uh prime ministers and um what's his name? Teddy Colleg, the Israeli mayor of Jerusalem, or had their suits done here. He made uh uh vestments, clerical vestments for all the different churches and whatever. He tells a story. He's a he's a great raconteur, he's like super like uh uh quality dress always, and he's like his hair is in perfect place, and he's like he's he's a real character, and he maintains this even at the age of whatever he was, and almost ninety now.

SPEAKER_03 31:52

He's 90 now.

SPEAKER_05 31:53

He's 90 now, yeah. He tells a story. I we'll need to move on. He tells one story which is um which is very funny. He talks about his five nationalities. And he's gonna tell it much better than I do. He talks about five. So the first one he says is I'm Turkish, because the Syriac Church, unlike other churches in different um religious uh uh uh networks, allow patrilineal descent. So he says, My father was born in Turkey, so therefore I can claim Turkish nationality from my father. Then he says that um, oh yeah, because his father was born in Turkey and he fled during the genocide. The genocide in Turkey in 1915 was not only against Armenians, it was against uh Christian religious minorities of all different kinds, including the Syriacs as well. And then he says he feels British because he was born here in 1935 when this was a uh a British mandate uh ruling the area. Then Jordan gives him a passport, and then Israel gives him an identity card. And then, obviously, he identifies as Palestinian as well. He's part of Palestinian society, he speaks Arabic, he's Palestinian culturally. So he claims five nationalities in one person. This is his sort of his little spiel that he does. He's a lovely guy. The Syriac, we can talk about the Syriacs actually when we get to St. Mark's, because that's going to be, that makes more sense. It's it's kind of, if you haven't seen the guy, there's uh not a lot of pointing stake, so let's move. Harat a Sharaf. Sharaf? Harat asharaf is the old Ottoman uh neighborhood.

SPEAKER_03 33:34

Right.

SPEAKER_05 33:35

So the sign in English and in Hebrew is the hospital, and the sign in Arabic commemorates or remembers the Ottoman quarter that was here, but is erased.

SPEAKER_01 33:56

We are at the Syriac Church of Saint Mark. Now, for some people, carry on. For some people, uh this may sound unfamiliar, but the Syriac Church believes that this is the place where the last supper happened, where Jesus had the last supper, not on Mount Zion, but here. And this is the the the singing of Yostina.

SPEAKER_05 34:28

Yeah. Who's uh I met her more than 10 years ago here. Um no, that's not her. Where are we here? For heaven's sake. And she sung for me, and also the people I was with, the Lord's Prayer in Syriac. So the Syriac people, I mean, I'm also I feel like I'm speaking out of tone because I'm British and it's like we're in the Syriac church. We should have a Syriac person say this. Um the the Syriac church and the Syriac people are rooted in what's now the borderlands between Syria and Iraq and Turkey, in an area which we might think of as it's uh like Kurdistan, but they're not Kurdish. And they're a put they're a church which traced their origins right back. They're often in English mistakenly called Syrian. There's a sort of the Syrian Orthodox Church. That's a that's a there's a complicated thing with translation between English and Syriac and Arabic that leads to that confusion, but they're not Syrian. Syriac is a is a dialect of Aramaic, which was the lingua franca across the whole of the region before Arabic. So Jesus spoke a dialect of Aramaic, and Syriac is another dialect of Aramaic. Do you want to tell the story about the church? That's the with the with the upper room and the everything. You know, do you know it better than I do? Isn't that beautiful? Yes.

SPEAKER_01 36:39

You said that she was she came from Nineveh, right?

SPEAKER_05 36:43

She came she came from northwestern Iraq, right up by the border between Iraq and Syria and Turkey. Nineveh, which is the the province up in that corner. And she came here 2000, I think, and I met her in 2014. I think also now I think she went back. I think. I'm not sure she's still here.

SPEAKER_01 37:06

Last time we were here, there was somebody from the from the church who let us down into the renovated uh area. And I think we can enter, we have to see. But they found here an inscription that refers back to a church that was here in 73 AD, which means that the early Christians, after the Romans had destroyed Jerusalem completely, who had probably left Tupella but then returned, used to come together in places where they remembered the life of Jesus, which they spent together. And this place is referred by the Assyriac Church as the place where Saint Mark's mother had a room where they used to come together and most probably had their last supper, where they had the last meal before Jesus was convicted and crucified. Which means that the location that we know on Mount Zion has a competitor. And because of the finding of that inscription, that people used to come together here as one of the first churches, it is indicated as one of. Of course, we know in the Holy Land, especially in Jerusalem, we usually have more than one place where an event happened or is venerated. And I know that we have uh people among us who would not agree maybe on this location. But they are doing uh renovations in the church. But I think that we can can we go down? Yes?

SPEAKER_05 38:45

These these sorts of stories are also indicative of a of a different weight that is added to documentary evidence and goodbye, and oral history, oral storytelling, and very often, particularly among marginalized groups or minorities, you'll find that the oral traditions, the stories that meant that the people who gathered here remembered Jesus, like personally, and so they commemorated this place, and that tradition has extended without any documentary evidence, that is very often underplayed. Because the victors write the history, right? The people, the majorities and the and the and the people who win are the ones who write the books, and the people who are marginalized and who are discriminated against have to hold on to their stories within their own communities and they retain the power of the stories. That's what I was trying to do in this book, uh, ironically enough, is to tap into a bit of that, to t to retell and to publicise to boost the oral storytelling of the marginalized, including this place.

SPEAKER_01 41:30

Thank you, Michael.

SPEAKER_05 41:31

I have a question. Um how many Syriac people are there in uh Jerusalem today?

SPEAKER_09 41:37

In Jerusalem we are about between 400 and 500 families. Families.

SPEAKER_05 41:44

Families, okay. Okay. And and mostly where do the the the families uh in Jerusalem do they live? Do they live still in the old city or they live outside of the city?

SPEAKER_09 41:56

Oh, certainly families in the most of them outside.

SPEAKER_05 42:00

Right. Right, right, right. What's um maybe this is a weird question. What what's the identification of the Syriac community? Do uh uh how do you identify? Do you identify as Syriac, as Assyrian, as uh Palestinian or Israeli or like what?

SPEAKER_09 42:20

I don't know. So everyone has their own opinion. I'm not getting what they but they they are very, very religious. Their everything is God and the church. The church, you see. We have Bethlehem, you have, you have two families in Jericho, and you have Syriacs also Indian. Now we have Indian living in Israel, they come every Sunday to pray. Ah, what's the connection between the Syriac church and the Indian church?

SPEAKER_05 42:51

Uh I told you uh Saint Thomas went to uh Kerala and he preached there, and we had many feminists also from uh they went there, and they bring them together about 2.5 million Indian Syriac of how does the Syriac Church um fit into the arrangements in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre?

SPEAKER_09 43:17

Because you're the chapel where are the where are the Coptic church behind the Japan of St. Nicodemus and Joseph of Alimathea. Okay, so you have a presence inside the church, but a small presence, only this could be the lead tomb of Jesus. Why? Who took the body of Jesus? Joseph of Alimathea, and he put it in his tomb, which is there. So um, but how blessed we are Syriac because we are the first Christians, because Jesus all crammate, and we adopted Christianity and the first Christianity, we have this place and we have the chapel of the uh Saint Joseph of the We have about 455 from the seventh century.

SPEAKER_04 44:08

Right. Right.

SPEAKER_09 44:10

So and we are running close. We are all bent, you know, we are not the capitalistic amendment. The other people they can play.

SPEAKER_05 44:18

So there's talk a little bit if you can. We also need to move, but talk a little bit about the genocide. You said mu is it most or all of the families here came after 1915?

SPEAKER_09 44:30

There were Syriacs. I'm I'm sure they were. In the first century they were. Not only, but they were Syriacs. And that's how.

SPEAKER_05 44:42

So the genocide was not only targeting Armenians, it was targeting also Syriacs. My grandfather was also.

SPEAKER_09 44:49

Really? Your grandfather? Oh, I'm sorry. And there were about 500,000 Synequators who were killed, 35,000 Greeks, and 1.5 million. And some were killed, and then the survivors were pushed. But my father came afterwards again. And how what impressive guy needed to serve? Because if you can touch God in your hands when you love the other fee of charge.

SPEAKER_01 45:22

Wonderful, thank you. We need to move on because we have this. Yes. Oh yes.

SPEAKER_03 45:37

Thanks.

SPEAKER_01 45:38

Alright, I'm I'm gonna do the map again just to give you that feel of yeah, yeah, yeah, the four quarters that we are used to seeing. And right now we are on the rooftops over the markets, and we are right in the cross point of all the four colors. So where all these different so-called quarters meet each other, that's where we are now, but we are on the rooftops, so we're on a higher level. Actually, below us in the time of Hadrian, there was the Cardo, and the Cardo was almost 30 meters wide, with on either side shops and columns. And then during the Crusader period, about a thousand years ago, Queen Melisant said, you know what, if we make that huge street with smaller parallel to each other's streets, then we can have more open more shops. And so we will have three streets with shops that people can browse in, and that all of that market is under our feet right now. So if you believe in four quarters, if you're a believer, then that is the Armenian quarter in that corner. We're looking towards the Christian quarter, we're heading later towards the Jewish quarter, and on that side would be the Muslim quarter. But if you look behind me, you can see the church of the Holy Sepulchre or of the resurrection. It depends if you're Catholic or Orthodox, what you will focus on with the domes. And then just before you see those domes of the church, you see the Omar mosque. The minaret of the Omar mosque. Yes, so many mosques here in Palestine are called after Omar ibn al-Khatab, who was the first Muslim to come and conquer Jerusalem. And uh in 638 he had a meeting with Sophronius, the bishop, and he said, Well, you know, I'm going to give you some sort of rights. You are going to be allowed to do your church services. Of course, you have to pay some taxes, and there were some rules for Christians, things they couldn't do anymore that they used to do before. But Sophronius and Omar they had an agreement. And there is, of course, this legend that you will hear every tour guy tell, so I'm gonna tell it to you too. Uh, which is that uh Omar, it was time to pray, and he had to pray somewhere. And Sophronius offered him to pray inside the church of the Holy Sepulchre. And then Omar refused because he said, if I pray inside, then later Muslims are going to claim that it is a holy site for Muslims and they may take over. So they he they said that he picked up a stone, he threw the stone, and then where the stone hit ground, that's where he made his prayers, and that later they decided to build a mosque named after Omar. A similar story you will hear in Bethlehem, because right across from the Nativity Church in Bethlehem, on the other side of Manchester Square, there's also an Omar mosque. Although, what I learned at the Bible college is that Omar actually did pray in the church, but then he said, after I prayed here, Muslims should be able to pray in the church of nativity, because for them, Aisa, Jesus is just a very important prophet, but they should not call for prayer or come to pray together. They should come as individuals to pray. And then some people have concluded that when the Fatimid Caliph El-Hakim in 1009, when he destroyed many churches in the Holy Land, he did not destroy the Nativity Church because Omar prayed in it. So there where you link up the stories. So we are making a point here, right? This is the Christian quarter. Yeah, yeah. But there is a mosque in the Christian quarter.

SPEAKER_05 49:18

It's added visual evidence and you know, evidence of our own feet and our own bodies and our own eyes that there is no division. This would be, am I right? This exact the Muistan is one of the dividing lines. Is there's no line? And we know there's no line. And there's nothing on you know, this side that's different from this side, or this side that's different from this side. It's one city.

SPEAKER_01 49:40

Yes, we are going to go towards what is the Jewish quarter on the map. And I think by now that's the only quarter where you really find only Jewish people living there. Although we will see and point out the mosque, the Mamluk time mosque that is still in the Jewish quarter. And in the Jewish quarter, we are going to visit a group of Jews that are neither Ashkenazi nor Misrahi nor Sefardi. They are Karaite. Karaite. We're going to visit the Karaites. I was in touch with Avi just now. He's waiting for us.

SPEAKER_05 50:17

There's a book idea that I had when I was doing this book, and it's still one of those ideas that you have buzzing around in the back of your head. Um, and I've never realized it yet. But maybe I will one day. It's I have this title, The Jerusalem of Disappointments. There's a whole tradition of writing by Europeans and Americans during the 19th and the early 20th century about people, also previously actually in the medieval period too, but that's a slightly different issue, about um written by people who arrived in Jerusalem to see the spiritual capital of the world, to experience the glory of divine contact with the junction point between the earth and the divine. And they found a city full of ordinary people living ordinary lives, and their alleys stink, and there are donkeys, and there's filth, and there's not then, but there is now, graffiti, and they hated it. Like Mark Twain. They were so disappointed, and they wrote it in the book. There's like dozens, hundreds of accounts of how disappointing Jerusalem, the real Jerusalem was, to these people who arrived. So when you see evidence of the real Jerusalem, this is not worse than this. This is a part of Jerusalem as much as this is a part of Jerusalem. We don't know who did that. I don't know. I don't know why they did it, I don't know who they did it or whatever. But these the the sign, the evidence of ordinary lives, of human lives being lived beside the places that are venerated and adored in multiple religions, I think is really important, and that was a big motivation for me for writing this book.

SPEAKER_01 51:58

New book, new tour. The disappointments of Jerusalem. Alright, we are in the heart of the Jewish quarter. As you can see, we have here the Horva synagogue. Horva is a Hebrew word means ruins, and it's called the ruined synagogue because before the synagogue that you see now, which was opened only about 10 years ago, there were two previous synagogues that had been ruined, destroyed on the same spot. One was ruined in 1948 in the war with the Jordanians, and before that there was a synagogue that was built that was with borrowed money. And because they were not able to pay back their lenders, uh the story goes that the lenders eventually ruined the synagogue, and that's why they still call it until today the ruined synagogue. But to the left of it, you can see the minaret of a mosque. So here again we are making that claim that you cannot speak about four quarters completely divided because there was a mosque here already in the Mamluk period, and the mosque was here before even the first synagogue was built here. But this mosque, even though it's been renovated twice, is not open. I called the guy from the Oklaf that uh you all know, Auni, and uh he told me, no, Crystal, we have uh renovated it, we have even uh appointed a Muazin and uh a Sheikh for it, but we have not been able or allowed to operate it. So it's a mosque that a lot of tour guides that stand here will tell you this is a great example of coexistence, but if you know that the mosque is not allowed to be used, then you know it is not the car is moving and we are also moving because we are we have Avi waiting for us at the Kerai Center. Yeah, hi Avi. Hello, hello, I don't even know. I have 20 people, and Matthew is here. Do you remember the book? Okay, he he's the one who wrote the book. He I think he did an interview with you. Matthew? Is this the same person you interviewed, or was it somebody else?

SPEAKER_05 54:14

Do you remember me? Do you remember me from a long time ago?

SPEAKER_08 54:18

How many people interviewed hundreds? No, no, hundreds, but yeah.

SPEAKER_05 54:25

We did, we sat here and we talked. But uh I can understand if you don't remember me. That's all right.

SPEAKER_01 54:30

It's okay, but you are already famous in this book. Uh we would like to see the film. Yes? We are at the Karaite Center, the synagogue is down. I don't know if we have time to go down, and we also can only see it from the glass window, right?

SPEAKER_08 54:49

Anyway, you can you are not allowed to enter.

SPEAKER_01 54:51

Anyway, we're not allowed to enter, so we can see the film to know more about the Karaites because I think the film gives you a very clear uh explanation. It's about 10 minutes. Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 55:29

Okay, so I mean, just very, very quickly, because there's an exhibition which is very interesting. I don't know how much time we have. So you can get a sense that this ties into this community ties into the things that I was saying also in St. Mark's about the difference between documentary transmission of culture and identity and oral transmission of cultural identity. So the Karaites accept the Torah and they do not accept the rabbinic interpretations of the Torah which have been imposed or accepted by mainstream Judaism. So it effectively means that for mainstream Judaism, which includes uh you know the vast majority of Jews in the world and also the Israeli state, the Karaites are not Jewish. They're apostates. So there are restrictions on Karaite practice, even today in the state of Israel. Complications around marriage, there were, there was the the right to slaughter animals in the Karaite way, was only very, very recently approved. There are other things as well. There were issues with the Karaite cemetery, which lies in the path of the proposed cable car. There's a bunch of other ideas which place the Karaites as a tiny minority within Judaism in opposition to the Israeli state, which I think is very interesting, which is why I wanted to focus on them in the book.

SPEAKER_01 56:52

Yeah, you can you can take a peek into the synagogue from the glass fencers. It's down below. One of the things that I read is that when they quarreled about in the Abbasid period, if they were allowed to build a synagogue or not, that they said, well, as long as it's not higher than any of the religious Muslim buildings, and then if we can't hear you praying, then we can uh accept the idea so that they build it underground. So that was never higher, and it wasn't there was never prayers could be heard in the streets. So that's why you have this very low synagogue.

SPEAKER_05 57:27

And I think it's also, it's uh for me, also it's very, very interesting that this uh uh you could characterize it as a sort of a fundamentalist strain within Judaism. What they're saying is the only thing that has divine authority is the word of God, as we have it in the in English, the Old Testament or the Hebrew Bible or the Tanakh. And everything else that's been piled on top by the rabbis, by the commentaries, by the commentaries on the commentaries and the interpretations of the commentaries, all of that other stuff is human, and we can ignore it. So that kind of fundamentalist idea, I mean it's very common in in religious uh traditions, not just Judaism, obviously there's fundamentalist in in Christianity and in Islam as well. It's just it's a it's a very, it seems to me, a very hidden and uh you could say deliberately concealed corner of Judaism that is kept it's sort of, it's tolerated, but it's not absorbed into the family. And they're kept quite deliberately outside. And how that functions with the sort of the nationalistic, militant nationalism of Israel today as well, and how Israel and the and the mainstream um rabbinic uh authorities within Israel try to dominate worldwide Judaism as well, how that interplay works out in relation with the eyes and the and the and the viewpoint from here, from this courtyard, was what got me interested, which is why I put it in the I'll do a little introduction now and I'll give you the full story somewhere in the next stop. So briefly, hold in your mind when you're here the extent of urban infill that that surrounds us and that comes down to the edge here, and the urban infill that you can't really see, but that goes up everywhere here. And this, apart from this, this is a new addition which is particularly egregious, but anyway, this is only very recent. Before this whole plaza was empty. So just hold in your mind the image of the old city of Jerusalem with houses and alleyways and everything filled in as we've been walking through, and then this vast open empty space. So where we are, and hold that because that's important to why we're here and why we're gonna tell the story that I'm gonna tell later. This is the Western Wall. So what we have is the boundary wall in front of us of the mosque compound, the Alaksa compound, of which the Dome of the Rock is one prayer space and Al-Aqsa Mosque is another prayer space, but the whole of the quadrangle, the whole of the rectangle that is the Alaksa compound is deemed to be a mosque, the whole thing. Open, closed, prayer spaces, not prayer spaces, buildings, not buildings, it's all a mosque. And the wall of the west, there's a whole reason why. You can talk better than me about the construction and the and the mountain and how there was a mountain which needs to be leveled. I'll leave that to Krista. But there's a there's a long retaining western wall. This is the west side, that's the east side, that runs for 488 meters or something from there up to the corner over there. Before, about the 16th century, the wall, which is now, whether it's the holiest site in Judaism, it or actually the the mosque is the holiest site in Judaism. There are there are ways of uh circumlocution around this topic. At the moment, this is the most holy place that Jews can pray in the world. Before the 16th century, this was not actually very important. There's almost no evidence in Jewish sources that this was a site of any sort of significance at all in terms of devotion. The sites that were significant in terms of devotion were the Mount of Olives, which is the ridge behind, where there were rituals of purification and uh uh priestly uh uh uh uh devotions were performed, and the Golden Gate, which is a gateway which is now blocked, midway along the eastern wall of the compound. We can't see it, it's the other side of the Dome of the Rock. Because following the destruction of the temple in 70 by the Romans, when the Romans destroyed the second temple, there would this cause this massive disruption in Jewish devotional practice. When the temple is destroyed, where do you pray? There's nothing left of the holiest place that we had. And so this has caused a crisis in Judea and a spiritual crisis in Judaism, which in to an extent persists today. Practically speaking, in Jerusalem, what the Jews did is they they prayed, also they were barred as well. They prayed as close as they could to the site of the former temple, which is effectively where the dome is, more or less, where the golden dome is. And those were the Mount of Olives outside the city and outside the Golden Gate outside the city. Up until the 16th century. And in the 16th century, the the Ottoman Sultan Suleiman was responding to politically motivated expulsions of Jews from around Europe. Spain, a very famous one is Spain in 1492, when Spain kicked out all of its Jews and caused this massive wave of migration across the Mediterranean from west to east. Many ended up in Turkey, whatever, but that the expulsions continued in other European states in that period. Suleiman comes to power uh 50, 60, 70 years later, and he, for deliberate political and economic reasons, wanted to make Jerusalem more attractive to Jews. So he wanted to encourage the Jews that had been displaced to come into his empire and to settle and to pray and to boost the economy and to, you know, whatever, provide labor and everything. So what he did was he first of all closed the golden gate, which is still sealed, and where the Jews used to pray outside, this is difficult without visualization. Maybe we'll look at the map next when we go to have coffee. He closed the golden gate, and then where the Jews used to pray, just outside the gate and where the wall is, he built a cemetery, a Muslim cemetery, which is still there today, just outside the walls. That was a sort of a nudge to Jewish public devotional practice away from there and away from the Mount of Olives. And what he did instead was he brought Jewish devotional practice from outside the city inside the city. He opened an alleyway right next to this, actually part of a stretch of this wall, not because this wall was particularly special, it was just the western retaining wall holding up the platform on which the mosques were built. And there were lots of houses, which is the key point to the story I'm going to tell later. There were lots of houses filling this area here. Behind the last row of houses, just next to the wall, he opened an alleyway so that Jews could pray beside the wall because it was closer to the site of the temple that had been destroyed by the Romans. So he was encouraging Jews back to Jerusalem by saying, You don't need to pray on the hill, you don't need to pray outside, you can pray inside the city, here. And it's at that point that this wall becomes significant and it becomes a focus of Jewish devotional practice, and has been for the last 400 years as well. And then there were various spiritual uh uh insights from Jewish sages about the spirit of God and how the spirit resides within the wall, above the wall. Beside the w the there's yeah it's a little bit too much to and I'm also not a Jewish sage as you may have spotted.

SPEAKER_01 1:06:07

This is uh Bab el Katanil on the cotton market katanil um which one is Babyl Silicil is the one that we saw just and then we went down the stairs. The one we almost entered. Okay, people have a maximum. Yeah, I don't know. Yeah, male. Alright. You can find a spot either outside or inside. And I'll go and bring you bring make the order. Yeah, are you doing it? Okay, there is coffee and me also.

SPEAKER_05 1:07:00

And another coffee for me, please.

SPEAKER_01 1:07:10

When Matthew mentioned the big plaza in front of the western wall, or sometimes known as the whaling wall, you could see that it's very open and that everybody can come there, even dance there, pray there, but it wasn't always like that. And we brought you some pictures to show you what it was like before. When there was still, and this is another one of the minorities that we are uh going to mention, it was still the Haret al Magarbe, which means the quarter of the well, maybe Moroccans or North Africans. So I'm going to pass some photos around because I think it's easier to see them from that uh uh close-up. And Matthew, you spoke to somebody.

SPEAKER_05 1:07:58

It's so professional. This is like I'm being introduced on the like uh on the CNN.

SPEAKER_01 1:08:02

I also do a podcast. By the way, somebody recognized your voice. It was Pedro. I think I know that voice is the yeah, yeah, he was a BBC reporter.

SPEAKER_05 1:08:12

Was hey BBC, yes.

SPEAKER_01 1:08:14

Um so in on page 218, I have Masoon.

SPEAKER_05 1:08:19

Yeah, but I'm not gonna start the story with Masoon.

SPEAKER_01 1:08:22

Okay, you tell your story, and then maybe I'll quote Maison.

SPEAKER_05 1:08:25

I haven't done this before, but I'm gonna see if I can remember the details, and if I can't, thank heavens we've got the book right here. So the story starts 900 years ago in a small village, which I'm now gonna mispronounce, called, I believe, Castellana, Castellana, in Andalusia, near Seville. And I know um I'm again I'm teaching my grandmother to suck eggs here, again. But yeah. And there was a boy born then, which year was it? 10 blah blah blah blah blah ten something. 1090s, 1101, I can't remember quite which year. There was a boy there who was born, he was called Shu Aib. This was when Andalusia was under Muslim rule, and he was born into a poor family. And there are various uh stories that survive about his childhood, but it seems that even from a young age, this boy understood that his destiny lay elsewhere. He had to leave the village that he lived in. So he made his way, because at this point, of course, as has been the case throughout a lot of history, the Mediterranean Sea was not the division, the border that we see today between something and something else, between Europe and Africa or whatever, between this mentality and this mentality. No, the Mediterranean Sea was a uniting space, was a space of unification and was a space that was easily crossed and was crossed and transversed and transected all the time by cultures north to south and south to north, and east to west and west to east. So he realized that his destiny lay elsewhere. So he made his way from his small village to the great city of Fez in what's now Morocco in North Africa. And there he learned more about Islam and he became a scholar, and as he grew up, he gathered some followers to him as well. He became very learned in the traditions and particularly became known for his spirituality. He was a very spiritual, very uh sort of evocative speaker. Later in life he set up a uh uh Zawiyah, a religious uh institution in a city called Bijayah, which is on the coast of what's now Algeria. Now he took the name as of Abu Mayan, and he's celebrated as a a great Sufi mystical Islamic figure. And there are traditions around him later in life that he was accompanying Salah Hideen when Salah Hideen arrived in Jerusalem in 1187 in order to kick out the European Crusaders. Whether Abu Mayyan was actually there, he would have been an old man at this point. Or not, it's uh yeah, who knows. But the tradition was he went on uh on a the Hajj pilgrimage from uh Bijaya to Mecca, and on his way back, then he linked up with Salahedin in Damascus and he joined Salahedin's army of forces who came and they took Jerusalem. And then Salahedin's uh son Afdal, after Muslim control had been regained over Jerusalem from the European invaders, the occupiers, Al-Afdal set up an area of the city to honor and support that Moroccan North African contingent in the army that had joined them to liberate Jerusalem. And the area that he allocated for their settlement was the area that we were looking at. That corner of the city below the the great western retaining wall holding up the mosque, that area was the Moroccan, North African, the two terms are kind of interchangeable. Moroccan quarter, if you like, or area or neighborhood. There was the the religious institution there was called the Aftaliyya, after Afdal, Salah Hajdin's son, and it survived for 700 years. It was it grew, there were houses, there were mosques, there were areas, there were gardens, there were neighborhoods, there were families, and there's a whole long history of this particular quarter, but it survived from 12 something until the 20th century. So now we have Masu. If you remember what I talked about when Suleiman wanted to bring Jewish uh public observance into the city for those political-economic reasons. I mean, he it wasn't a sort of ecumenical vision of sharing the space or he had very particular reasons to bring Jews into Jerusalem. But he did so by, as I said, behind the last row of houses in this Moroccan quarter, up against what's now the Western Wall, he opened this alleyway, this alleyway of space so that there was access for Jews to reach the wall, which is the closest point to where the temple used to be. And you can see images. I mean, we have maybe do we have any uh aerial images of that of that alleyway? Maybe not, but you can find photos very easily that show the alleyway behind the houses with Jews praying uh up against the Western Wall. As Zionism starts to emerge and rise in the late 19th century, the idea arose quite early on that uh we need more space, that Jews need more space to pray. This alleyway, which had been granted by Suleiman, who's a Muslim Sultan, is not good enough, and we need more space. So there were lots of interactions in the early 19th century between the pioneers of Zionism and the Ottoman and then the British authorities to try and buy more space or take more space or control the space better. They didn't want donkeys going there, so try and like to try and like clear it up, whatever. There was lots of interaction. And there were various disputes as well. There's a there was an episode which led to the to the riots of riots, the uprisings of 1929, which was sparked by a particular uh action by a British policeman who was summoned to this particular alleyway and started knocking heads, and then there was a conflict, and then it led to a nationwide uprising. But anyway, this is another aspect of British policing policy in the in the mandate period, which never mind. Um and we come to 1948. So in 1948, during the wars, the violence uh between the communities that led to the Declaration of the State of Israel and led to the Nakba. There was a lot of destruction in the old city beside the Moroccan quarter, in the Jewish quarter, where we were walking and talking. But the Moroccan quarter was largely not touched. So it survived through 48, more or less unscathed, and you can still see photos, and there are personal accounts of people who visited in the Jordanian period between 48 and 67. To say that the alleyway was open, there were even, there's a the uh the idea that Jordan forbade Jews from entering at all. That's not the case. There are accounts of Jews who came to Jordanian Jerusalem and came to the wall as well. Anyway, it survived unscathed. In 67, Israel launches this war and occupards the old city and then occupies. June the 7th, 1967, the Israeli army approaches from two different sides and they and they take the Western Wall with its alleyway. And there's a very famous photo in Israeli uh discourse and in the National Library of Israel taken by an American photojournalist who kind of got down and he took a photo of three Israeli soldiers, young guys, Israeli soldiers, with the wall behind them, sort of with this idealistic look of uh triumph and victory on their faces. It's a very, very famous sort of war photo. And the moment was immortalized thereafter, but anyway. Yeah, yeah, you did win a prize. Um June the 7th, right? June the 8th. I'm also compressing the story as well. June the 8th, Ben Gurion, David Ben Gurion, the former Prime Minister of Israel, arrives and he visits the war because this is like for nationalistic Zionists, this feels like redemption. This is like we are retaking this ancient, it's not so ancient, but anyway, this ancient holy site, and we now have uh uh possession of it. Ben Gurion comes. There's a whole load of army officers and politicians who visit as well. Ben Gurion comes, he says, first of all, he says, we should tear down the walls of Jerusalem. Because the walls, the like the walls surrounding the old city, they were they were built by a Muslim sultan, Suleiman. They're not Jewish, they are uh an imposition from outside, and we need to destroy them and then unify Jerusalem as the Jewish capital. I mean, thankfully that didn't happen. But what he also said, drawing on the contact which I skipped over from the early 20th century between the Zionist uh authorities or the activists and the British Mandate authorities, to take the area in front of the wall, what he also said was now we need to demolish this whole area in front of the Western Wall, sweep away this slum, which is not a slum, it's a neighborhood that people have been living in for 700 years, clear it all because the festival of Shavuot, the Jewish uh festival of Pentecost, is coming up, and all the Jews in uh Eres Us will be coming and they want to pray, and this alleyway is not big enough. So it's the not big enough narrative is coming up and coming up and coming up again. And on June the 8th, 67, Ben Gurion opens the door, and this is when action is taken. So they draw up a plan the next day, and that night the men with sledgehammers go in. So there are soldiers going through the neighborhood, banging on doors, shouting, forcing entry, expelling people in the mid, you know, in the night time. This is starting at 10 p.m. It was after Shabbat. So they waited until Shabbat finished and then 10 p.m. they started. And then the bulldozers came in and they worked all night. And by the morning, June the 11th, Sunday morning, the whole neighborhood, 700 years old, is gone. It's rubble. You can find there were pictures online, you can find a photo of the of the rubble with a bulldozer in front of the western wall. The whole place had been destroyed. Uh many people were killed. One woman is reported to have been killed because she was deaf. She was an older woman, and she was deaf, and she was living in her house, and she didn't hear the shouting and the banging. It was late at night, she was asleep, and they just demolished her house with her still in it. And these stories survive, these stories are still told. So the community that lived there that was partially destroyed, killed on the spot, and then also uh expelled and dispersed, they hold the stories still. So the space that we see today in front of the Western Wall, that plaza, which is now a focus for the State of Israel, as a place where new uh graduates from the army uh training are brought en masse, a hundred thousand people or more, for their swearing-in ceremony to the state, to the flag. That's where that happens. The massive celebrations for Jewish religious festivals, that's where that happens. In two days, uh tomorrow, in fact, tomorrow night, and then the day when the tomorrow night there's a Yom Hazikharon, the remembrance for the for the Israeli soldiers who have been killed, and then the next day, the Independence Day of Israel, that is the focus of all of the state splendor to celebrate these occasions. There is no not one single memorial or indication or sign or note or anything that this was anything other than an open space. There is nothing there. There is an absence of memory. There are very few buildings, one or two buildings that survived the destructions of 1967. One of them I talk about in the book, and this is Mason. So there's one building which is above the just beside the steps where you go down, there's a security checkpoint for the Israeli police. Just uh beside that. We walked very close to it just now. There's a sort of anonymous doorway, and you can go in through this doorway, and there's a courtyard, a very beautiful little courtyard, and you uh there are six families who live in there supported not by the Jordanian Waqf, but by the Moroccan Waq. And you can go up, and there's a little mosque on an upper level within the courtyard. Within the mosque is a tomb. And the tradition is that this is the tomb of Abu Mayyan, the boy from the village near Seville. And there's the green cloth that covers the tomb, it has his name, Abu Mayan al-Ghoth. Was he here in Jerusalem? But this is the oral evidence. The documentary evidence that we do have is that his grandson, who was also called Abu Mayyan, was here. Because we have his signature on a document in the Wakf archives from 1303. So we know that Abu Mayyan's grandson was here in 1303. Was his grandfather also here in the previous years? Who knows? But this is a the tiny uh remaining element of the Moroccan quarter as was of Jerusalem. Thank you.

SPEAKER_01 1:22:35

Yes, thank you. I wanted to read the quote and then we have to continue. On 11 June, a Sunday morning, Nazmi Al-Juba ventured out to investigate. What we saw was indescribably horrific. Right there at the bottom of the stairs, we saw soldiers, so many of them, heavily armed from head to toe, dancing and singing in a language that we didn't understand. And behind them, emptiness. The Moroccan quarter no longer existed. The fig and pomegranate trees were gone, and so were the alleys I used to walk and play in. Maslochi and his fig tree were not there. The only thing visible under June's hot sun was a cloud of dust hovering over a heap of rubble. Bulldozers, which I had never seen before in my life, were roaring along their metal chains to the tunes of victory music. All right, we are heading now towards the Afro-Palestinian quarter, and I have a connection with somebody who is hopefully gonna be there to open for us the community center so we can talk about the Afro-Palestinian community. Take a chair, yes. And your name is Maali. All right, we are here in the Afro-Palestinian Community Center. I don't know if you were aware that there is Afro-Palestinian community in Jerusalem. I became aware a few years ago and then recorded a podcast episode with somebody about yeah, where did they come from? Uh why do they live here? And then I realized that the community is not only living in this specific area, there are other parts of the old city and also outside of the old city, but this is where they have their community center. And of course, Matthew also wrote about the Afro-Palestinian community in his book. And will you, when you read it, you will learn more about how this building and this area and also on the other side of Aladin Street were two places that were built in the Mamluk period as pilgrimage houses, places where people who came to pilgrimage to Al-Aqsa could sleep at night, and that's called a ribat. And those two places at some point were allocated for people from the African continent who were Muslims and who came on pilgrimage first to Mecca and then to Jerusalem and who stayed here and who very often found jobs here, especially in protecting security, uh supporting the Akha Mosque. They lived here for uh longer periods of time until at some point, we don't know exactly what happened, the Ottomans claimed the buildings and made them into prisons, one for long term and one for short-term stays. And that is why there is still reference to this place as Habzad Dam, which means the prison of blood. So it seems that was a hard period in the history, especially in the period when the Arab revolts happened. And then eventually the places were rededicated to the Afro-Palestinian community in the time of uh Amin Al-Husseini, who had bodyguards from the Afro-Palestine community, and one of them took a bullet for it for him to protect his life. So he had a good relationship with the Aukaf, with the WAF, the Jordanian today department of uh taking care of all these uh Islamic properties, and they said, well, then the Afro-Palestine community can live here.

SPEAKER_05 1:26:24

This is it's kind of easier to see here that we've the where the external walls of the Mamluk construction, like not this one, but past it. But you can see these two and these three. So this is a courtyard dating from the 13th century. 13th century and within which the community has has created. So this is half of where these 400 and 400 plus people are now living within within the Mamluk walls. And now Sharden is now you're unable to leave like this area. Jerusalem, okay, at least they give you Jerusalem at least. Okay.

SPEAKER_10 1:27:14

So these actually we drew them um uh two years ago, all of us, and we tried to do things that uh represent our um I our identity. So this is a word that we try to write in a way that they don't understand what's written because they will come and erase it. Um resistance in Arabic. Okay. This is revolution with uh nice. Nice. This is Hamdala. And this it says at that um this uh on this land worth living. Yes, on this uh land what's worth living, and this is the African map with the Palestinian map and with um as if uh Jerusalem was the way and this is just a beautiful And this is hot that's the coffee and this is just colored colour.

SPEAKER_02 1:28:10

So the the police would come here and erase things?

SPEAKER_10 1:28:14

Uh erase uh the Palestinian flag once, so we tried to carefully do things without them knowing what it means.

SPEAKER_05 1:28:23

So you can tell them this is this is not a word, this is just uh a picture. This is you couldn't.

SPEAKER_10 1:28:29

Yeah, yeah, but you can tell them when they come.

SPEAKER_05 1:28:33

It's awesome. I've never seen this kind of calligraphy before.

SPEAKER_10 1:28:35

Yeah, no, no. And this one said what? Here I can see.

SPEAKER_05 1:28:44

Oh wow, yeah, yeah. Just we need to continue, thank you very much.

SPEAKER_01 1:28:53

We still we still have Sufis and gypsies, so uh but hope to see you again. Thank you, thank you. Right, we have we have two more communities to to talk about on our tour. The Sufis, oh actually, they're yeah, it's the Sufis and the Gypsies, and the Sufis will spread out between the Afghania uh and hopefully the Indian hospice uh we can enter. Although it's gonna take little time, but it's something very special to see. And then I will speak about the gypsies when we are there, because we're not really going to go through the neighborhood where they live because it will be too much. You can't do everything. Matthew joined one of the meetings here at this Zowir, the Avrania Zawia. And I hope you are gonna tell us a little bit about that experience, and uh, we are gonna listen maybe a little bit to what that sounds like. But first, you'll try. You tell us because you you've been inside there. What does it look like?

SPEAKER_05 1:30:06

Um, I mean, I'll try and explain what it looks like, but what's what's the basis for this little section of the tour? Before even I get to that, I'm just gonna say one brief addition, which is that as Christelle said to me, like when we were sitting drinking coffee, the key job of a tour guide is to figure out what to leave out. Because there's too much. There's whatever you're doing, whatever subject, whatever city, but especially this city, and especially these subjects, you could spend a lifetime doing a walking tour. You could walk your legs down to the bone and you would not see, uh certainly not see everything, and not even see a fraction. So I want to just make it clear that the the communities that we're seeing today are outnumbered tenfold, a hundredfold by the communities that we won't have time and are not able to see today. And some of them are within the walls and some of them are outside the walls, some of them are indigenous, and some are not. Obviously, we have representatives from European countries here, but you can think about the German influence in in Jerusalem, the Swedish influence in Jerusalem, the American influence in Jerusalem, these communities also have a value, and they also have their own stories and their own additions, like the Armenians and like the Syriacs and like the Africans, to the mosaic, the tapestry or whatever, whatever uh metaphor you want to use to describe Jerusalem. So it's just to make a little sort of mental note that it's not like this is comprehensive. We're missing out a lot. And some of the things that we're missing out are represented by people who are in our community today as well. Anyway. I feel very, very underqualified to talk about the the Sufi the significance of Jerusalem in Islamic mysticism of all people. I don't know, but you know, even Yazid, you could do that. Go on, you're much better than me at doing this. I'm not a Sufi and I'm not Jerusalemite, and I'm not.

SPEAKER_00 1:32:20

As far as we know, there was like six Sufi corners in Jerusalem. This is the only one that continued today working. Many of them they were closed. Like Mavlaviz one, we have like we didn't pass like next to it, but there's another one called the Mavlaviz next to Jerusalem. There is the Bukhari one just behind on the next street. But what's the basis? Why, what is first of all, what is Sufism? Yeah, I mean again.

SPEAKER_05 1:32:43

And why is Jerusalem important in Islam?

SPEAKER_00 1:32:46

Sufism have like uh I I still remember nice definition, you know, modern definition that Ali Jabda from the Afro-Palestinian community gave one and he called them the only exotic sexy Muslims for white European.

SPEAKER_05 1:33:04

It's not wrong. It's right.

SPEAKER_00 1:33:06

It's right, you know, like Sufism focused, you know, like between Islam, you know, like Sufism were the first to focus more on the spiritual Islam, you know, and they didn't follow the practice very strictly, and they focused more on the spiritual one. Of course, you know, like the place is very clear when we talk about spiritual and Jerusalem, you know, like for Muslims, so the connection is very clear. Ghazali is one of the most famous Sufis. He came to Jerusalem. He wrote, as far as I know, he wrote part of his books, even in Jerusalem.

SPEAKER_05 1:33:35

He was living in the in the rooms where the Golden Gate is. If you look at the Golden Gate, there are two domes, small domes above the sealed Golden Gate. His rooms were under these domes. Traditionally, this is where Ghazali, who is uh 11th-century uh Islamic uh theologian, uh, lived and worked in Jerusalem just before the Crusaders, the last few years before the Crusaders killed everyone.

SPEAKER_00 1:34:01

In the last 150 years, as far as as we read and we asked like many people why in Jerusalem like Sufism just disappeared, you know, like slowly, and only one corner from six stayed, you know, like Allah. Many of the Sufis weren't accepted a lot, you know, like by other, you know, like type of Muslims, especially like Mavlavis, you know. One of the people.

SPEAKER_05 1:34:23

The Mavlavis are the are the are the whirling dervishes. This is the order within the brotherhood, if you like, within the Sufis, who focus on uh connection with Allah through spiritual means, and their connection with Allah is by whirling and whirling and whirling. So this is familiar, I think, to Europeans, especially from Turkey, where the whirling dervishes with their huge skirts as they whirl around, you whirl yourself into a trance by which then you achieve a greater connection with the divine. You're literally high, literally high. So the also the Mevlevis or the Mawlewis in Arabic had a lodge like this one just over here, a few streets over.

unknown 1:35:05

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 1:35:06

And you know, like, but the must, as far as you know, like I know, the must who were, you know, like not accepted a lot in Jerusalem, it's not a complete group. They call themselves the followers of Halad. Halad is one of the Sufis from Iraq that he was killed. And Halad took spiritual Islam completely to a different level. You know, that he reached a level when he mainly, you know, when when everyone, you know, like went against him, he said, if you cannot go to Hajj to Mecca and go around the thing, it's more about the concept, it's not about the stone and the plague. So clean around your house from the dirt and do the whole hajj thing around your house. This is many groups of Muslims went, you know, you're changing our religion, you know, like for a big fight happened, you know, like counter-revolution, right? It's a counter-revolution. Counter-revolution, exactly, you know, like and at the same time it was very political, some of them. Like some of the Sufi, many Sufis, they really pulled themselves from the social life and they wanted to be like monks more, you know, until Halaj and a few other names that came and they said, No, you know, be spiritual, but you need to be involved in the politics, you need to be involved in the social life. And this is then when they have this concept, the government at that time didn't like them. Through Mamluks or through after the Ottomans, you know, like they wanted this kind of Sufis who pulled out from politics and social life and stay alone like a monks. We like you, we have no problem with it. And the Ottoman Empire really supported this kind of movement, but the movement closer to Halajis or other, you know, like that they were no, we need to have our word in the government and what's happened. So they were fighted, you know, like very hardcore from the Ottoman government that it's end many of these cornets. And this is the way we survived it.

SPEAKER_05 1:36:58

And this is also this ties into this theme that we've had all during this tour of marginalized communities. So the Sufis represented in this particular case, we're standing outside. I'll talk about this place as well in a second. But the Sufis, even though they were, in essence, sort of at the beginning, they were the lifeblood of Islam. They were the spiritual innovators who were creating ways of trance and ways of understanding the divine that went beyond just the texts alone and tried to touch people's hearts and their souls. From that situation, they were pushed and pushed and pushed by the more conservative forces within the religion. And that pushing, which began sort of around Ghazali, Sabah Ghazali was one of the pushes, actually, um, for a thousand years through to uh Atatuk in uh in modern Turkey, who banned all the Sufi orders. Turkey was covered in Sufi orders, banned them all, and the the constraints on being able to express Sufism, also today, when we have the orthodoxy, we were talk at the uh the Kara'ite place about the conflicts between the marginalized Jewish community and the mainstream uh rabbinical uh Jewish uh authorities who control the narrative and who lead the Israeli state and who say you're not Jewish. There's a similar situation in all sorts of places, and this is one of them, where conservative Islam is uh represented by uh Saudi Arabia and Egypt and Pakistan and other countries are saying that this form of devotion is not Islamic. You're not you're not really doing what you should be doing. You're you're you're marginal and you're not exactly apostates, but you're on the edge of the religion, and we are the center of the religion. So what I was trying to do, in including them in the book, is to say the same thing in different contexts, is to talk about the people who've been marginalized by greater powers.

SPEAKER_01 1:39:06

Yeah, but I want them to hear what you heard, but to say a few words about your experience.

SPEAKER_05 1:39:11

So the Afghania is um it's an old building, and it was uh it's I I've done I forget what the dedication is, but I think the building is 13th, 14th century. And it was occupied over the centuries by different orders of Sufis. Um in the 20th century, the early 20th century, or the late 19th century, it became associated with the Afghan uh worshippers who would come from Afghanistan and the countries of Central Asia to Jerusalem to uh to pray at Al-Aqsa. And so it became known as the Afghanir because of that Afghan connection. So inside, there's also, um, I should say, built uh on the other side, like back to back, is another Zawiya, another uh Sufi institution called the Bukharia or the Nakshabandia, which is uh associated with another uh brotherhood, another order within Sufism. But they were built back to back. They created this sort of little community of people who originated from uh Afghans and Tajiks and Turkmen and Uyghurs and Uzbeks and yeah, and all these uh this area of Central Asia. So you go inside, there's a courtyard. It's a pity that we can't see it. There's a quite a wide courtyard with trees in the middle. Around the edge of the wall are um eleven uh small sort of cells, sort of monkish cells. On this side, this is a mosque. There's a mosque on an upper level and a gathering hall on a lower level. But the main thing that binds Sufis together across the different brotherhoods of different orders are these types of devotion to bring you closer to Allah through chance. Some do it through music, some do it through whirling, and some through do it through chant and repetition of chant. Um and there's a ceremony called the dikr, zikr or dikr, uh, which is uh centered on a key Sufi idea that you remember God. You remember God every minute, every second of every day in your life, whatever you're doing. And the the the dhikr, the ceremony of the dhikr is designed to allow you to remember. Um and it used to be there was the traveller, great traveller from Turkey, Evlih Chelebi, um, who visited Jerusalem in the 1700s. He counted 70 of these lodges. And he said the dhikr happened every single night in Jerusalem, every night. Now it doesn't happen every night. The last time I was here on dealing with the Afghanir, it was once a week. And it may not even be that anymore. This is a whole aspect of Jerusalem's identity and history and spirituality which is draining and draining and draining away. Anyway, I was very lucky that I found out which night they were going to do the dhikr. And I was here and I joined, and there's a circle, it's uh all men, which is also not exactly attested to. Women have joined the dhikr in different places at different times. The one I was in here was uh was all men, and you form a circle and you're holding hands, and there are sort of steps, they're swaying back and forth like this, and there's uh chanting, you're led in chants, and you repeat the name of God. Allah, Allah, Allah, Allah for hours. I'm very, very lucky. I've been to other vicar in different Cairo and other places in Aleppo as well. They're utterly, utterly transforming, extraordinary experiences, and I'm not Muslim or Sufi or anything.

SPEAKER_00 1:43:30

What can you mind command something very important to call Sufism? I heard them from someone who's more reading.

SPEAKER_01 1:43:37

So there are two brothers, Nazir and Nazir. And Nazir said about himself that he's the more talkative. He said, Oh, I can talk to you for three days. I said, No, I need only five minutes. Well, he's a nice person. So we're we're uh at the Sufi, again, Sufi hospice of the Indians. So this was a lodge for people who were coming from India to Jerusalem. And if they wanted to go to Al-Aqsa, then they had to stay here for a while, and then they stayed at the Indian Lodge, which is basically built around a small cave where Baba Farid, a 13th-century Sufi leader, supposedly spent time, prayed, and uh meditated. And so around that small cave, the Sufi lodge developed, and it is until today, it is by the same family that has been taking care of it for at least now a hundred years. Yeah. And uh there are two brothers. You I think did you speak to Nazir or Nazir? I spoke to Nazir.

SPEAKER_05 1:44:40

The older one is called Nazir and the younger one is called Nazir.

SPEAKER_01 1:44:43

He said he's coming.

SPEAKER_05 1:44:44

Oh, he is coming.

SPEAKER_01 1:44:45

Yeah, yeah, he said he's coming.

SPEAKER_05 1:44:47

There's a famous story about Baba Farid. His nickname and the name that he's widely known by is uh Shakar Ganj. Or Ganj is Shakar. And this means uh treasury of sugar, like the sh the sugar sugar gold mine or something. And apparently this stems from an episode when he was a boy. This is all sort of apocryphal stories about holy men. Um when he was a young boy, he was praying and he was, and his mother saw him that he was praying even as a young child, and he prayed so hard and so hard and so devotedly and so impassionedly that when he came to the end of his prayers and he stood up and he's rolled up his prayer mat that his mother found a depository of sugar under his prayer mat, sent by Allah to sweeten this child's uh life into the future because he's so holy. And from that day until his death, he was called uh Ganja Shakar, Shakar Ganj. Who can say, but still, Baba Farid did he mention that his his uh uh shrine is still receiving millions upon millions upon millions of pilgrims in um what's the name of the place? Pakpatan is it Pakpatan? In India, in India. I'm sorry, I forget the name of the place. Millions upon millions, and there are devotional music is continually played at his shrine, and the festival in honor of him attracts more millions. He is a key central figure um in the Sufi history of India.

SPEAKER_12 1:46:31

Wow.

SPEAKER_05 1:46:33

Good to see you. It's great to see you. How are you doing? You're looking really well. Exactly, exactly. Exactly. I'm so happy to be back, and I'm happy to see you again. Thank you. It's her tour, but it's it's about this book.

SPEAKER_08 1:46:46

About this book, so yeah.

SPEAKER_05 1:46:48

Most welcome ever. Thank you so much. This is Nazir.

SPEAKER_08 1:46:51

Yes, I am sorry, I should have started introducing myself. I'm Nazar, I'm sorry. You are now in Little India.

SPEAKER_01 1:46:58

Little India.

SPEAKER_08 1:47:01

You remember the long version? He came to make an interview for he said 15 minutes. It lasted for three hours. At least, maybe more. I wanted to continue, but he said, please, I am hungry.

SPEAKER_05 1:47:16

You're a good storyteller as well.

SPEAKER_08 1:47:19

I tried my best.

SPEAKER_05 1:47:21

There's a very, very interesting story about NASA. Your grandfather.

SPEAKER_08 1:47:25

My grandfather, yes.

SPEAKER_05 1:47:26

So there was a period in the 19th century when this place was neglected and was in trouble. The the the there was not uh it wasn't in the state that you see it now. Exactly. Um, and there's a whole political background which we is going to be complicated to get into around the Mufti and the British uh arrival in Jerusalem. Yeah, exactly. But talk to us about your your grandfather and how your grandfather and your family and you ended up in this place.

SPEAKER_08 1:47:56

Well, the whole story started uh in the year now it's 100 years, by the way.

SPEAKER_05 1:48:01

101, is it, or 100?

SPEAKER_08 1:48:03

101. 101. Right, yes. The Ansari heritage uh lasted since the year 1924. That's when my grandfather uh was nominated to come uh and uh he was like selected, right?

SPEAKER_05 1:48:22

Selected, exactly, yes from in India by the authorities here. The uh they came from here.

SPEAKER_08 1:48:27

No, they had nothing to do with it at that time. But yeah, what happened is that there was a vacancy. And because this is an Indian uh heritage property real estate, you give it whatever name you like. At that time, the Grand Bufti of Jerusalem, Haji Amin Husseini, was uh in charge of all the holy Islamic holy uh and uh the Islam if you like. And it was a mixture, a cocktail of whether it's religious, political, you name it. So he wanted at that time to win the hearts of the largest concentration of Muslims in the world. At that time, and it was the Indian subcontinent before the separation of Bangladesh and Pakistan and etc. So he headed there in a delegation trying to win the hearts of the Muslims at that time the whole issue was run by a group political religious group that he laughed at movement, which was the fall of the Automan Empire. And it was headed by the two brothers, Shawkat Ali brothers. One of them is buried in Al-Aqsa Mosh, by the way, because he was friendly with Hajamin Husseini. So he died in London at that time. But he asked to be buried here. He's the only non-Arab, if you like, who's buried there. The rest are mainly the Husseini family. Anyway, so he went to India, Hajame, to collect religious support and financial support. At that time, he had this idea of establishing an equivalent Islamic university in Jerusalem, similar to Al-Azhar in Cairo. And the idea was to build this university in Al Aksamos, but he needed funds. So we went to collect funds. The story goes, and God knows all the crimes, whether it's true or a fiction or a dream, that the Indians did provide him with funds. But what happened? The university was never built. And the whole idea disappeared. Anyway, in order to win their hearts, he said to the Shahkat Ali brothers who were running the Hilafat movement, we have Indian property in Jerusalem. This and others. It has always been called the Indian Hospice. Similar to other hospices in Jerusalem, the old city, the Afghani hospice, the uh uh Bukharian, etc. They were uh a lot, about 12 or 14 of them. They all dissolved, by the way, except the Indian hospice. All of them disappeared one way or another. Without getting into details, the only hospice that survived, the Muslim hospice, because there are Christian hospices also, like the Austrian hospice and the Russian and the Lutheran and uh yeah. Anyway, so they they he asked for the Shokat Ali to nominate somebody to come to Jerusalem to run the Indian hospice. They nominated my grandfather, who happens carrying his name also, Nazar. His name was Nazar Hazan. And he was a member of the Khilafat movement. That's why they nominated him. This started in the year 1924. Since then, the Ansari family has been running the Indian hospice. Look how many years and decades passed, and we are still. By the way, recently talk about your father.

SPEAKER_05 1:52:50

Don't forget your father.

SPEAKER_08 1:52:51

You met my father?

SPEAKER_05 1:52:52

I never met your father.

SPEAKER_08 1:52:54

That's very unfortunate. Yeah, because very shortly after your visit, he died.

SPEAKER_13 1:52:59

Ah, I'm sorry. I'm sorry.

SPEAKER_08 1:53:01

Yeah. So and the good news, how the Ansari family is has been running the Indian Hospice and will continue to run, is that my brother has been nominated and he is now appointed as the director and trustee of the Indian Hospice. So it runs in the family.

SPEAKER_05 1:53:21

Right, of course it does.

SPEAKER_08 1:53:23

He was supported and endorsed by you know that Jordan is running the Al Aukaf, the endowment. So my brother was endorsed by the Indian government, the Jordanians who are running the Al Au Khaf, because this is, after all, an Islamic endowment.

SPEAKER_02 1:53:45

Yeah.

SPEAKER_08 1:53:45

Although it belongs to the Indians, but it's still an endowment. So theoretically, it's under the control, the supervision, let me say, not control. Yeah, yeah. The supervision of uh Al-Auqaf.

SPEAKER_05 1:54:01

Yeah.

SPEAKER_08 1:54:01

Have you met the head, Azam?

SPEAKER_05 1:54:04

I know him. Well, I know of him. I know of him.

SPEAKER_08 1:54:06

Yeah. Interesting figure. Meet him.

SPEAKER_05 1:54:09

Okay.

SPEAKER_08 1:54:09

Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 1:54:10

Okay.

SPEAKER_08 1:54:10

So just recently, my brother has been appointed as the director and trustee of the Indian Hospice. So after that, the Indian Hospice went through ups and downs. Bright days, dark days, bitch dark days, because it survived what happened in 1948. And during the Six Days War, the Indian hospice was bombed. And we lost the Ansari family lost three members. My grandmother, my aunt, and my nephew. And all of you were also injured. All of the Ansari family, we were between 18 or 20, all injured, between light, medium, and serious dangerous injury. And when the Israeli army entered, believe it or not, who rescued us was the Israeli army because it seems that there was a mistake. So they took us to the only hospital nearby, and guess where was that? The Austrian hospice. Now it's not a hospital. So we stayed. After that, the whole of the Indian hospice was either partially or completely destroyed. And it stayed like that for many years. Now at that time, a financial aid was offered to rebuild the Indian hospice. But my father, God bless his soul, insisted that if it's to be rebuilt as it's it is the Indian hospice, it carries the name of India. So it's the responsibility of the Indians to rebuild it. And that's what happened. The Indian government provided financial support to rebuild. It's not rebuild, it's mainly renovate, maintain, maintain here and there, because nothing new is built here. So it went on until the India established uh diplomatic relations with Israel. And God really blessed us because they are both good friends. So we the days of feeling, I'm sorry, family at the Indian hospice, feeling as orphans without a mama, no more. Now we have a big mama. May God bless his soul and give him long life and good health. Guess who? Modi. Modi is he came by the way and visited Israel twice. And that's a topic that I wanted to mention.

SPEAKER_05 1:57:12

You have a lot of diplomats here as well.

SPEAKER_08 1:57:14

Yeah. We will have a look at the photographs. So Modi came twice, first time to Israel, and he they are good friends, Bibi and Modi. They are like this. Yeah, yeah. And that's good news for us, the Ansari family. Because we have now a back support.

unknown 1:57:35

Anyway.

SPEAKER_05 1:57:36

So explain. So what's uh because you I remember you we talked about uh nationality and how you're not the the family is not the same as as Palestinians, no, we are India, you're Indians.

SPEAKER_08 1:57:48

All of the Ansari family with the passport and the national family. Of course, we we are still Indians. You know, no, my father uh resisted the temptation, huge temptation, during the days. By the way, the Ansari family started with British passports. We were British subjects. But when my father became the director and trustee of the Indian hospice, he surrendered his British passport in favor of the Indian passport. And that's how the Indian Hospice survived. Because it's the Indian Hospice run by Indians, not locals. As you some of you might know, Baba Farid is uh a Sufi from Sufi. And he was so friendly with the tea to the extent that 16 verses of his uh poems are included in the only book. So uh there is a small Sikh community in Israel.

SPEAKER_05 1:58:59

They make it a point to come every once in a while now and then to uh give their respect and uh it's a living it's a link between the between Islam and Sikhism in a person.

SPEAKER_08 1:59:13

Exactly, in one person. He was friendly with one of their uh gurus. Yeah, I think the third guru.

SPEAKER_01 1:59:30

It never happened. Well, now you're here all right, Nader. Thank you very much for your kindness. We are going to uh finish off the tour, and then those who want to come to the educational bookstore for the lunch, we will walk without uh any further explanation. But I want to finish up by saying that in the tour that I designed, we would also talk about the Dome, Gypsy community. And because I can see and even myself feel that by now we had enough information and we're getting really tired. I don't want to go deep into that. But if you read the book, you will read that there is a gypsy community that is in the book represented by a woman called Amun Slim. And Amun was part of this community that lives in this part of the city, which is the Muslim quarter, and the they are part of what is called the Dome community. So they are also originating from India, and there is the Lome that ended up in the area of Armenia Caucasus, and they speak Loma Vren. There is the Roma that you may have heard of in East Europe, and then we have the Dome people, and the Dome are the ones that live in this region. There are thousands of domes. Also, there were in Gaza, in the West Bank, and a community in Jerusalem. And what we read in the book from Amun is that it was very hard for her growing up in a community where there was not a lot of people who were pushing her to continue school. There was a lot of illiteracy, and she used to get her money by selling postcards to the tourists. And then you read that she learns English from the tourists and she gets an opportunity by meeting some uh Dutch, actually, Christian community on the Mount of Olives, and she then gets support to study more, and she has a degree in business administration and she starts her own center. Now, her center that supports the Dome Gypsy community is not here, it's in Shafat, which also makes it for a tour harder because you don't have a place where you can stop. I know where her house is, so indeed the tour that goes the opposite direction, I would pass by her house and talk a little bit about her and then read from the book, which is what you will do at home. But what I did do after meeting her is on a Tuesday in the coming weeks. I don't have the date, but you can look at the program. On a Tuesday morning, we're organizing a breakfast with the Dome Gypsy Center in Shuafat, where you can have a real gypsy breakfast and then see the center and buy some beautiful things that are made by the women of the Dome Gypsy community. For example, the earrings I'm wearing that I did especially for today, so you can see how beautiful things they make, you can buy on that morning. If you say, Oh, Chris, I would love to do that, but I cannot on Tuesdays because then I work, please hit me up because then we can try to organize it another time over a weekend. So that is just to credit also the Dome community. I am you are coming for sure. You make it on another on another day of the week. For those of you who are now going to leave us because they're not coming to the educational bookstore. Uh, thank you very much for joining. And then I'll take this opportunity to thank, of course, Matthew for being with us today, for writing this incredible book that is so inspiring. And thanks to Mahmoud for joining and inviting us to the educational bookstore where we can have lunch and buy the book.

SPEAKER_05 2:03:12

And thank you to Christelle as well.

SPEAKER_01 2:03:16

Thank you. It's really a wonderful morning. Well, now I think we have enough of information. Now we need something in the belly.

SPEAKER_05 2:03:24

Coffee, tea, and food. Yeah, let's do it.