Papers by Hussein A H Omar
At the centre of the thesis is puzzle of why Egypt appears to have contributed little to the glob... more At the centre of the thesis is puzzle of why Egypt appears to have contributed little to the global corpus of political thought. Although the country witnessed two major revolutions in 1882 and 1919, there are virtually no histories of the ideas they generated or the thought that fuelled them. Colonial observers suggested that Egyptians were 'political ciphers' and pointed to the absence of abstract political theory in the post-classical Islamicate world as evidence for that assertion, an assertion that contemporary historians have accepted uncritically. They maintain that Muslim jurists and clerics, though long engaged in brokering power, had little interest in theorising its workings. Against those claims, the thesis asserts that this apparent deficit of ideas was rather the product of foundational assumptions on the part of intellectual historians. These include a dependence on a Eurocentric concept of 'politics', which emerged in the 19 th century and eclipsed older modes of thinking about sovereignty, and a reliance on colonial distinctions between 'religion' and 'politics'. Further, the dichotomy between political 'thought' and 'action' (and the presumption that the former precedes the latter) upon which intellectual history of the Middle East has relied not only oversimplified a complex reality, but justified imperial domination then, and now obscures the intellectual contributions of anticolonial activists. Drawing on overlooked and fragmentary sources, I provide a history of political ideas for a place that, it is said, failed to produce any. I reconstruct the sophisticated political theology behind the precolonial system of rule that would be dismissed as 'Oriental despotism'. I then examine how British imperial perceptions of despotism and the Egyptian subject on which it was predicated determined their programme of reform as well as generated theory for an academic 'Science of Politics' in Britain. I end by charting responses to those reforms by political activists, who would evince with remarkable clarity insights—generated through struggle rather than armchair speculation—that would decades later be described as postcolonial theory.
Islam After Liberalism, Oct 1, 2016
This chapter argues that Egyptian practitioners of party politics, such as Ahmad Lutfi al-Sayyid ... more This chapter argues that Egyptian practitioners of party politics, such as Ahmad Lutfi al-Sayyid and ‘Abd al-‘Aziz Jawish, articulated many of the key insights of a postcolonial critique of Eurocentric modernity in the years 1904–1922 over half a century before those critiques appeared in the academic field of postcolonial theory. These political activists repeatedly refused and refuted the charge that they were motivated by pecuniary greed or religious fanaticism, instead insisting that their thoughts and actions be recognized as political, while rejecting the restricted notion of the political as it had come to be defined by imperial hegemons. They rejected the imperial claim that the political and the ethical existed in separate domains and insisted on an alternative model wherein a political education was not, and could not be, understood separately from a moral one. Through the questions these intellectuals posed, they interrogated the very basis of the political theory upon which Lord Cromer’s rule in Egypt was derived. They would come to dismiss the immaculate sphere of “politics” posited by imperial officials as a myth, in a manner that would prefigure several later twentieth century notions of the political.
H-Diplo Roundtable XXII-42, 2021
In this roundtable, Madeleine Elfenbein, Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, Hussein A. H. Omar, Elizabeth F.... more In this roundtable, Madeleine Elfenbein, Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, Hussein A. H. Omar, Elizabeth F. Thompson, and myself review Ussama Makdisi's book entitled, Age of Coexistence: The Ecumenical Frame and the Making of the Modern Arab World (University of California Press, 2019). The conversation is introduced by Cemil Aydin and Georgios Giannakopoulos.
1919 was a year of travelling revolutions across the Middle East and North Africa. The uprisings ... more 1919 was a year of travelling revolutions across the Middle East and North Africa. The uprisings were triggered by the efforts (sometimes secret, sometimes not) of Britain, France, Italy and Spain to colonise the Middle East and to divvy up its territories at the end of the First World War. As their intentions became apparent-after both Britain and France had repeatedly promised otherwise-thousands of men and, for the first time, women took to the streets in protest. War-weary peasants staged sit-ins, removed railroad tracks and occupied buildings across Libya, Egypt, Palestine and Tunisia. By 1920, the tremors had spread to Iraq and Morocco, where guerrillas declared independence from the semi-colonised kingdom. Sudan was engulfed by protests in 1924. By 1925, Syria was in the throes of a full-blown war. The recently established RAF bombed Egypt and Iraq to put an end to the revolutions. Instead, the bombardment energised them. These uprisings have often been understood as isolated national revolutions, but they may be better thought of as a single (if protracted) wave that lasted from 1918 to the early 1930s, much as the Arab Spring movements that began in 2011 continue to reverberate today. The revolutionaries shared slogans, ideas, ideals and personnel. In November 1918, Tripolitanian peasants established a free republic independent of Italian Libya. It inspired copycat movements all over North Africa. A few months later, the Egyptian town of Zifta in the Nile delta declared its independence from the newly minted monarchy and elected a president. Just days after that, the entire province of Minya in Upper Egypt did the same. British officials, convinced these were 'soviets', insisted that the Mufti of Egypt issue a 'Fatwa against Bolshevism' in the hope that the revolutionary struggle might die out. It
This article examines the newspaper obituary as a source for historians of the late 19th and earl... more This article examines the newspaper obituary as a source for historians of the late 19th and early 20th century Egypt. Long utilized by genealogists, these sources have been neglected by historians, for a number of reasons. Rather than read them as an uncritical ref lection of social relations, as genealogists have, historians ought to engage with them critically as a way of understanding how individuals imagined themselves and their social worlds. The article argues that reading and writing obituaries was one of the ways in which a previously differentiated and divided Egyptian elite began to imagine itself as belonging to a single, horizontal class. It further demonstrates how obituaries can be used to chart social mobility in a context where surnames were neither heritable nor standardised. Obituaries provide unique insights into social transformations independent of the political ruptures around which state archives are organised and official histories written. The article shows how sociocultural developments (such as the rise of Islamic modernism) are ref lected in and were transformed through, the reading and writing of obituaries. Discourses around the 'good Muslim death' were inscribed and indeed prescribed through this form, even as it came under increasing attack at the turn of the 20th century for being un-Islamic. Aside from opening up new methodological avenues for writing the history of class, and the history of gender beyond the state, the article emphasises the importance of death as a historical subject of enquiry in its own right. It was said in Cairo that 'a person cannot have died if their death goes unmentioned in Al-Ahram'. 1 On the pages of Egypt's preeminent newspaper, the death notices span over 30 columns, providing a comprehensive necrographic record of each day. Cairo's ladies of leisure, one journalist observed, would turn straight to the 'intriguingly thorough' obituary section at the back of the paper each morning to plan their daily schedule of condolence visits. The notices—which listed ever more distant members of the bereaved family, along with 'the knotted web' of alliances that bound them together—were a precious resource for this sepulchral set, known to drop anything for a funeral. 2 My father, too, always read the paper back to front, but for a different reason: the obituaries were the only news he believed to be reliable. Amid censored texts, doctored images and the unremitting propaganda produced by a succession of autocratic regimes, death was the only certainty in Egypt's state-sponsored newspapers. But with certainty comes banality: empty of biography and featuring little more than a string of names and social relations, the obituaries seem to hold little of value, unless one were a genealogist or a socialite planning the day's round of condolences. It is unsurprising, then, that professional historians of Egypt have seen little reason to turn to al-Ahram's back pages. Fixated on the 'properly archival', professional historians have paid little attention to alternative forms of knowledge about the past such as genealogy, and its sources and methods. Seeking to demarcate as well as police the lines between History (with a capital 'H') and its many siblings, historians have ignored obituaries, consigning them to the progonoplexic genealogist's
The Long 1890s in Egypt, 2014
History and Identity in the Late Antique Near East, 2013
Histories of Egyptology: Interdisciplinary Measures, Aug 2014
Thesis Chapters by Hussein A H Omar
At the centre of the thesis is puzzle of why Egypt appears to have contributed little to the glob... more At the centre of the thesis is puzzle of why Egypt appears to have contributed little to the global corpus of political thought. Although the country witnessed two major revolutions in 1882 and 1919, there are virtually no histories of the ideas they generated or the thought that fuelled them. Colonial observers suggested that Egyptians were 'political ciphers' and pointed to the absence of abstract political theory in the post-classical Islamicate world as evidence for that assertion, an assertion that contemporary historians have accepted uncritically. They maintain that Muslim jurists and clerics, though long engaged in brokering power, had little interest in theorising its workings. Against those claims, the thesis asserts that this apparent deficit of ideas was rather the product of foundational assumptions on the part of intellectual historians. These include a dependence on a Eurocentric concept of 'politics', which emerged in the 19 th century and eclipsed older modes of thinking about sovereignty, and a reliance on colonial distinctions between 'religion' and 'politics'. Further, the dichotomy between political 'thought' and 'action' (and the presumption that the former precedes the latter) upon which intellectual history of the Middle East has relied not only oversimplified a complex reality, but justified imperial domination then, and now obscures the intellectual contributions of anticolonial activists. Drawing on overlooked and fragmentary sources, I provide a history of political ideas for a place that, it is said, failed to produce any. I reconstruct the sophisticated political theology behind the precolonial system of rule that would be dismissed as 'Oriental despotism'. I then examine how British imperial perceptions of despotism and the Egyptian subject on which it was predicated determined their programme of reform as well as generated theory for an academic 'Science of Politics' in Britain. I end by charting responses to those reforms by political activists, who would evince with remarkable clarity insights—generated through struggle rather than armchair speculation—that would decades later be described as postcolonial theory.
Press & Public Engagement by Hussein A H Omar
Junior Research Fellow, History of the modern Middle East and North Africa, Academic rigour, jour... more Junior Research Fellow, History of the modern Middle East and North Africa, Academic rigour, journalistic flair A group of Oxford academics has written the below letter following the debate surrounding an article in The Times entitled "Don't feel guilty about our colonial history" by Nigel Biggar, Regius Professor of moral and pastoral theology at the University of Oxford.
Talks by Hussein A H Omar
Book Reviews by Hussein A H Omar
Arab Studies Journal, 2019
Review of l MODERNIZING MARRIAGE: FAMILY, IDEOLOGY, AND LAW IN NINETEENTH-AND EARLY TWENTIETH-CEN... more Review of l MODERNIZING MARRIAGE: FAMILY, IDEOLOGY, AND LAW IN NINETEENTH-AND EARLY TWENTIETH-CENTURY EGYPT Kenneth M. Cuno Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2015 (320 pages, 7 black-and-white illustrations, notes, bibliography, index) $39.95 (cloth)
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Papers by Hussein A H Omar
Thesis Chapters by Hussein A H Omar
Press & Public Engagement by Hussein A H Omar
Talks by Hussein A H Omar
Book Reviews by Hussein A H Omar