The Many Worlds of ˁAbud Yasin; or, What Narcotics Trafficking in the Interwar Middle East Can Tell Us about Territorialization

Abstract

IN FEBRUARY 1935, A DAMASCUS-BASED French intelligence officer reported a plan by smugglers from Aleppo to transport 188 kilograms of hashish from Turkish Aintab to their Syrian hometown. From there, the suspects intended to take the drugs by car to Lebanon's capital, Beirut. Once the contraband had arrived, an accomplice was to place a telephone call to the Palestinian port city of Haifa to ask a drug smuggler, Abud Yasin, to come to Lebanon and arrange for it to be shipped via Palestine to Egypt. The plan failed; Yasin, however, reappeared. In December 1938, he was suspected of having paid a ship's captain in Tyre to smuggle 31 kilograms of hashish and 17 kilograms of opium to Palestine. In February 1940, he was leading a drug-smuggling ring operating between Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, and Egypt. The Syrian police intercepted him on a night trip from Aleppo to Zahle, in the eastern Lebanese Bekaa Valley. When he and an accomplice tried to escape in their truck, the police opened fire. Yasin survived and was convicted of smuggling 254 kilograms of opium and hashish. In 1944, he was reportedly trafficking hashish from Zahle via the southern Lebanese border village of Rmeiche to Palestine and from there to Egypt. 1 Yasin's life was adventurous, but not exceptional. In the post-Ottoman Levant, a wide range of people were involved in what officials called "smuggling" across and beyond the borders of the new states of French Mandatory Lebanon (1918/1920-This article is part of a book project interpreting the regional history of the Levant, 1918-1948. Different versions have been presented at Princeton University, the 2009 Middle East Studies Association Annual Conference, and the University of Texas at Austin. I have profited immensely from, and gratefully acknowledge, the help of Firas Talhuk and Yusri Khizaran; from incisive critique by Naghmeh Sohrabi,

Introduction

“…And yet it could 4 Maggiolini (2015). 5 On the understandings of territorialisation in the post-Ottoman era, see Schayegh (2011). 6 On discussions on Arabness during the Mandates, see for example Sati al-Husry's often quoted phrase on Arabic as 'a unified and unifying language' and Antonius (1938), in which the Arabic language is described as one of the defining factors in the question whether somebody can be regarded as an Arab.…”

The economy by other means: The historiography of capitalism in the modern Middle East

“…Johan Mathew went a step further in his study of trafficking in the Arabian Sea to assert that the persistence of outlawed commercial activities in the 19th century, such as the trade of arms and slaves, was a constitutive element of the expansion of capitalism under British imperial hegemony (). These studies of contraband exemplify the convergence of the histories of empire and law, providing a framework to better explain how uneven intra‐ and inter‐imperial jurisdictions functioned (Schayegh, ) and to critique triumphalist narratives of capitalist expansion, such as Timur Kuran's The Long Divergence: How Islamic Law Held Back the Middle East ().…”

Transformative Occupations in the Modern Middle East

“…Indeed, mandate rule, through its simultaneous creation of imperial, international, national, and local jurisdictional scales of operation, territorialized economic life in complex ways. 60 To trace the transformative effect of mandatory rule, it is therefore necessary to follow its protagonists across the new national frontiers that were simultaneously such a rich source of jurisdictional arbitrage, speculative development planning, and potential profit. 61 To sketch how the dossier seeks to address the issues described above, we turn now to the essays themselves.…”