Gaza. Un profilo della città a partire dalla letteratura geografica in lingua araba tra i secoli IX e XIV

Abstract

This article aims, first of all, to respond to a specific concern: namely—given that at the time of writing the brutal genocide carried out by the Israeli occupation forces against the Palestinian population living in Gaza is underway—to restore to Geography the rights it seems to have lost as a result of History’s abuses. These same rights being claimed here, however, do not concern only the geomorphological features of a strip of land measuring barely 360 square kilometres, but also the people who inhabit it—more than two million until October 2023, largely refugees, “displaced persons,” forced into internal migrations in order to escape the violent assaults suffered by the entire Palestinian community with the Nakba, or “catastrophe,” of 1948. Today, the city of Gaza—together with other significant urban centres within the “Strip,” including Bayt Ḥānūn, Khān Yūnis, and Rafaḥ—lies in ruins, destroyed by repeated bombardments, and those who have survived are being driven to starvation. Nor is this all. The proposal of an Anglo-American transition plan for Gaza suggests the abrupt and extremely drastic distancing of the possibility of a process of liberation and self-determination for the Palestinian community, increasingly excluded from political decisions that directly concern it, and whose fate is decided “at the negotiating table”—today as in the past—by foreign Powers. Within the extensive Western historical and geographical scholarship devoted to Palestine—scholarship which focuses especially on Jerusalem and the Holy Places—Gaza is often unjustly kept “at the margins.” Unjustly, because both the city’s rich past, beginning with the period that witnessed the decline of Byzantine hegemony and the opening of the Islamic era (late 6th century–first half of the following one), and the significant role Gaza later held, in the Islamic period, within the broader Near Eastern region—and not only there—are left in the shadows. Despite this serious silence, it must be said that the city of Gaza, together with the surrounding region, appears repeatedly and in diverse ways in the descriptions of Arabic-language geographers who, starting from the 9th century—a period marked, within the broader adab literature of the Abbasid age, by the flourishing of emerging geographical writing—provide, through abundant estimates, descriptions, and observations, a highly compelling picture of the territories that then composed the Islamic world and/or dār al-islām. Such information, given the multifaceted interests of their authors—something entirely normal in Islam—does not remain confined to geographical data alone, but is often enriched with historical notes, biographical profiles of notable figures, quotations, and various other elements that allow these same sources to be used in historical discourse as well. This is also the case for Palestine, first reached by Muslim armies at the beginning of the major expansionist conquests in the first half of the 7th century, and for the city of Gaza itself, which forms part of it. What this contribution will attempt to do, therefore, is to restore to Gaza its centrality and importance—whether religious, administrative, or cultural—within both the Palestinian region and the wider Near Eastern context, as these are reflected in Arabic-language geographical writing between the 9th and 14th centuries.