The fall of the Ottoman, Habsburg and Russian empires … generated about thirty new states…. One can reasonably place Ottomans, Habsburgs, and Romanovs into the same pigeon-hole; all were obsolescent political entities in an era of nation-building, to which they offered no alternative. All were weak (relative to their official size and resources) and therefore endangered players in the international power game. All were regarded as doomed, or at least as on the slide, for many decades before they actually fell.

We came in carts – big carts – we didn't stop. Eating and drinking were all done in the carts – all the way from Abkhazia to Sham [Syria]. What can I say? Death would have been much better. When a person dies, he is rested. But those grandfathers of ours suffered a lot, as no other people ever did. They came from Abkhazia in carts, as I told you, all the way through Turkey to the Jaulan. In the Jolan, you know, it was like implanting a piece of wood in a member of your body. If a piece of wood were inserted in your arm, would your arm accept it? It has been continuous tragic mishaps and suffering. Then, just when we started to belong, to become rested, and as if to make things worse, the Jews took over and we were driven out. We left the Jolan empty-handed with nothing but the clothes on our backs.

There was a war between the Palestinians, the Jews and the British. The events started in the 1920s, in Jerusalem, in Nabulus and Jaffa. We – the children – stayed in Jerusalem because my father was sentenced to death by the British. First he was imprisoned in Sarafand. He was working with Al Haj Amin Al Husseini and the Arab High Committee. They worked against the Jews and against the establishment of a Jewish State. They were imprisoned, arrested and deported several times [by the British]. Then they were not allowed to stay in Jerusalem or anywhere in Palestine anymore. My father and Al Haj Amin Al Husseini escaped arrest and went to Damascus in 1935. We remained in Jerusalem, my brother, my mother, my sister, my aunt and my grandmother. Then, in 1937, my father made the decision to stay in Damascus. He was in the Resistance. When he sent for us to come to Damascus we were very sad to leave Jerusalem. We packed and got big trucks to move our things to Damascus. My uncle's family was with us. They also packed and moved to Amman. I was 12 years old at the time.

The problem today is that scholarship has had thrust upon it the necessity of partisan practice, and about this I would like to be very exact. When power of any sort, be it political, professional or institutional takes a hostile stance toward certain directions of study and the results of such study, then scholars can no longer pretend to escape political consequences. Antigone might wish only to give her brother decent burial, but Creon has ruled otherwise and, like it or not, she is forced to perform her private duties within a context defined by the king. This is what I mean by “political intrusion” by now a nearly universal affliction in private as in public lives, for men and women dedicated to knowledge no less than for men and women committed to action. The curse is general, and scholars are neither immune nor exempt.

My parents came here when they were very young. My father was 7 years old and my mother was 6 years old. My mother was born in Anatolia in 1870. There had been a war in their homeland. The Circassians helped the Turks in the war against Russia, but they lost. Then they had to leave these conquered places. My parents used to tell me about their first impression of Damascus in Marjeh. It was a vast green meadow. The oxcarts all stopped there and formed circles. Inside the carts, 15–20 families were squeezed in. They rested in Damascus for 10–15 days and then they carried on to the Jaulan. Their journey had started back in Caucasia and from Abkhazia. Abkhazia is to the east of the Black Sea and there is Abazin beyond the mountains. They came by sea. 5 million people were moved. Of the 5 million only 500,000 arrived in Turkey [Anatolia]. 4.5 million people died on the way, some overland, some in the sea. Most of them drowned. Whole ships sank. Only a half million made it to Turkey. Some people chose to stay in Turkey. Some of our relatives stayed there. Others chose to come to ‘Sham Al-Sharif’. Most people stayed in Turkey. Only some 20 per cent carried on and came here. Our ox-carts all passed through Aleppo, Homs, Damascus, Jaulan and then dropped down into Jordan, a few families stopping here and there. The Turks dispersed us in different places to protect various locations. […]

My native family name is Vosgueritchian. It means goldsmith, because my grandfather had been a goldsmith in Severeg, which is in Western Armenia. My grandfather had been part of a large family. He had four sisters and a brother, but they are all gone, he was the only survivor. He reached Egypt after a very long journey. He came by himself. He found work and he built himself up. He had lost his entire family when he was very young. He was in an orphanage. One day when they needed to decide his age, they lined him up with other boys and put the back of the spoon in his mouth and a doctor passed around looking at the teeth of the boys and say, he is nine years old, for example. This is how they decided his age and said he must have been born in 1905. He left Severeg in 1915 with his whole family. There had been many disturbances and one night the doorbell rang at the house and there were wagons. The whole family went but he and his brother was taken in by a Turkish family and saved on that occasion. Later, he and his brother had to join the marches and his brother died on the road. He arrived in Aleppo alone and was taken into an orphanage. He remained there a few years and then in 1918 he left the orphanage to go back and volunteer to be a soldier [for Turkish independence]. By 1923 he was in Constantinople [Istanbul] with four friends who had also fought with him. […]

I was born in 1920 in Turkey in a village near Mardin. My father's family included 400–500 young men. We came here [to Syria] in 1925. The French were in Syria. They offered us shelter and were very good to us. We were tyrannized by the Turks who were against all Islamic teachings. The Turks were not true Muslims. They wanted us to assimilate. They wanted to force all the people in the villages to wear hats [this is a reference to Mustafa Kemal's efforts to get Western dress adopted by all Turks]. We fled after the revolution led by Shaykh Said in 1920. The Kurds revolted against the Turks. They demanded a self-governed Kurdish state in Turkey. When Shaykh Said was hung by the Turks, many Kurds fled Turkey and came to Syria. I remember we all travelled in big groups, seven or eight families and all of their sheep and cattle which they sold on the way at Ras al-‘Ain. We all walked to Dayr al-Zor and then to Al-Sham [Damascus]. We had relatives here who received us and helped us to settle. This quarter had only Kurds who spoke Kurdish. What is funny was that when my father left Turkey, he had no idea there were other people than Kurds in the world. He was quite shocked when he got to Dayr al-Zor and heard people talking other languages. He used to say that he almost turned back there to return to Turkey. When we had been in Syria for six or five years we were granted citizenship [by the French mandate authority]. […]