This project started with the purely fortuitous discovery I made of a photograph dated 1912, representing an Arab man in his traditional costume, posing in the corner of a Moresque-style room or courtyard. I owe this discovery to a friend and colleague, Esra Gençtürk, who had shown me this image, handed down by her family, hoping that I might be able to tell her something about it. Thanks to the inscription on the back, I had no difficulty identifying the subject and recipient of the photograph. The man was Khalīl Djawād al-Khālidī (1864–1941), a member of the famous Jerusalemite Palestinian Khālidī family, posing, as noted in his handwritten inscription, ‘in an apartment of the palace of the Alhambra, located in the city of Granada, in al-Andalus’. The photograph was addressed to one Hasan Tahsin Bey, ‘prosecutor at the Beirut court of appeal’, my friend's great-grandfather. Khālidī identified himself as ‘former judge of Diyarbekir’ (Figures I.1 and I.2).

There was nothing exceptional to such an exchange between two colleagues, who were probably also friends. In the last decades of the nineteenth century, photography had made remarkable progress in the Ottoman Empire and had spread considerably throughout society. Signed portraits had thus become a popular and efficient tool of sociability among the middle class and elite. However, Khālidī's memento was not as common as the photographs his contemporaries frequently exchanged. First, this was a full-length and ‘contextualised’ portrait, much rarer than the conventional studio headshots or bust-size portraits produced by most professional photographers.

Moreover, the image was taken away from home, which is all the more surprising when one considers that Ottoman subjects – particularly Muslims – hardly had a reputation as globetrotters. In fact, when they did happen to travel outside the empire, or even in the provinces, postcards turned out to be a much more accessible and affordable way of sending greetings to parents and friends while at the same time offering them a peek of the place(s) they were visiting. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the setting Khālidī had chosen for his portrait was certainly not ordinary. The sight of a Muslim Arab posing in front – or rather, in – one of the most celebrated monuments of Arab and Islamic culture was quite meaningful, as suggested by the inscription on the back, which included a short poem, which Khālidī claimed to have also inscribed in the ‘visitors’ book of the Alhambra’.