Life in Palestine Under the Rule of the Ottoman Empire According to Ibrahim Nassralla's Novel: Zaman al-Khoyoul al-Bayda'

Abstract

This study deals with the Palestinian administrative, economic, political, educational, intellectual, and national dimensions as they are reflected in the stories and events of the historical novel Zaman al-Khoyoul al-Baida' by the Palestinian writer Ibrahim Nassralla, The novel that covers three generations from 1880s to the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948. The events take place in a Palestinian village called 'Hadiya ', which serves as a representative of all Palestine. The study proves that the writer emphasizes the Palestinian identity through the stories that he collected from people who lived through the three periods of occupation of Palestine: the Ottoman Empire, the British Mandate and Israel, but the main focus is on the Ottoman Period. Stylistically, the novel has a special printing style. The oral stories are typed in italics in order to distinguish them from written stories. To investigate the information in the people's quoted stories, the events of the novel and the writer's arguments and his descriptions of the life of local Palestinians, the study relies on Paul Hamilton's theory of historicism , which is a critical way of using historical contexts to interpret narrative texts.