Contrary to normative genealogies that position the refugee camp and humanitarian aid at the center and beginning of modern refugee history, this book recovers an alternative genealogy of refuge that starts from the Prophet’s Hijra and leaps forward to late 19th century Ottoman lands in Amman as shelter for Muslim refugee as an alternative model of “modern” refuge and then to the introduction of the refugee camp to Levantine cities in the wake of the Palestinian Nakba of 1948 and ending with the instigation of Arabo-Islamic traditions of hijra and sanctuary as an everyday response to the ongoing war in Syria. All in all, through the case of Amman as a microcosm of post-Ottoman Arab cities in terms of their acceptance of refugees over the last century, this book argues that the cultural and material heritage of hijra and Ottoman regimes of refugee aid and property continued to permeate new forms of refuge, embodied and mobilized inside refugee camps and in the shadow of today’s humanitarian norms.

Research for this book manuscript has been supported by national and international fellowships and grants, including a Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship, a Global Urban Humanities-Townsend Fellowship, an IJURR Foundation Studentship, a Critical Refugee Studies Grant, a Human Rights Fellowship at UC Berkeley School of Law, and grants from the Center for Middle Eastern Studies and the Institute of International Studies at UC Berkeley.