Hikayat: The Four Quartered Myth of Jerusalem

Introducing our Hikayat series, an ongoing conversation exploring the many threads of Palestinian cultural and historical heritage.

For our first Hikayat event, we will be hosting Haitham Khraishi: a Palestinian-American who grew up between Maryland and Palestine, with family roots in Tulkarem, Palestine. He has been a docent at MPP since 2020, where he has given guided tours, presentations, and helped curate the space in 2022. He also creates content online delving into the ancient, medieval, and modern histories of Palestine to provide insight into understanding its people, sites, and cities. One of his goals with content creation is to make information on Palestine easily accessible and digestible for viewers familiar with Palestine or interested in learning for the first time.

For this Hikayat, we're exploring: Maps of Jerusalem…for as long as Haitham can remember, maps of Jerusalem were always divided into four quarters: a Muslim, Jewish, Christian, and Armenian Quarter. However, this way of dividing the city never made sense in reality, as multiple people, businesses, and religious sites exist between all of these so-called "quarters." After further research and reading, he came to find that Jerusalem had even more ethnic and religious communities than these designations fully described. The purpose of this presentation is to explore where the myth of the four quarters originated and to uncover the stories of the other often-forgotten communities that have shaped this important city.