Sailing the Modern Episteme: Al-Tahtawi on the Mediterranean

Erudition and the Republic of Letters, 2025

A study of Ahmad ibn Qasim al-Hajari

Islam, State, and Modernity, 2017

This world is a comedy to those that think, a tragedy to those that feel. — Horace Walpole Arabic Thought Beyond the Liberal Age can be viewed as a culmination of the feverish explosion of what has been called " Nahda studies " in the past decades. The compulsion to re-enact the Nahda is declared in fidelity to Albert Hourani's legacy for the intellectual history of the Arabic speaking world. However, the editors, Jens Hanssen and Max Weiss, in their distinctly postcolonial theoretical framing of the book, depart radically from the tradition of intellectual history Hourani worked within. In this regard, the volume can be seen to pay homage to Hourani by bidding him farewell. Although presented as the proceedings of a conference held at Princeton University in Hourani's honor (October 2012), the plan for an intellectual history of Arabic thought proposed by the editors is tethered to their framing in the introduction, which will be the main object of scrutiny here. Due to its significance, this review will focus primarily on the problematics posed by the editors' theoretical framing of the intellectual history of the Nahda, and only secondarily on the individual contributions included in the volume. For it is in the introduction that the editors lay down a framework for rethinking Arabic intellectual history through positing the Nahda as a global concept (37). In their introduction, Weiss and Hanssen lead the reader down a winding path upon which the historical and the logical are intertwined in a thorny thicket of references:

2012

This study aims to examine nineteenth-century Occidentalism on which little research has been done. Understanding how the East views the West is not just an end in itself, but it can help us better understand post-colonial theory, which has always been more skewed towards Western views. The study will look at some of the tenets of modern Occidentalism, among them powerless discourse, knowledge, ambivalence, emancipation of women and the use of religion in legitimizing the discourse. I will also investigate the erroneous conception that Occidentalism is the opposite of Orientalism. Even though both fields of post-colonial theory share some common features, the stance of each school is different due to the political situation from which it emanates. I will be focusing on the travel narratives written in the nineteenth century by Egyptian travelers who visited France after the French Campaign in Egypt. I will examine two seminal works representative of al-Nahḍa (The v Arab Renaissance) movement which was beginning to take place in the first half of the nineteenth century and then was stifled towards the end of the century with the advent of British colonization. These works are by two reformers with a religious background: Rifāᶜa Rāfiᶜ al-Ṭahṭāwī, who wrote a travel memoir entitled Takhlīṣ al-Ibrīz fī Waṣf Bārīz (literally, The Extract of Gold in the Description of Paris), and translated as An Imām in Paris: Al-Tahtawi's Visit to France (1826-1831) and ᶜAlī Mubārak's ᶜAlam al-Dīn (1882), never translated into English or French. Minor writers to be discussed are ᶜAbdel-Raḥmān al-Gabartī, Qāsim Amīn and Muḥammād ᶜAbdou.

Journal of Islamic Studies, 2010

Hungarian Cultural Studies, 2019

Albeit what can be described as the "European" contributions to world modernities (with Arab modernity included) are often perceived as a self-evident fact, a scrutinizing look is useful in shedding more light on the mostly ignored European cultural contributions to the Arab Nahḍah (Arab Renaissance) and modernity that were neither colonial nor orientalist, especially during the last quarter of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century, with particular focus on Egypt and the Levant. This study examines the contributions of Europeans who settled in Egypt and the Levant, such as the Hungarian photographers Otto Schoefft (1833-1890s) and Zoltan Kluger (1895-1977), Hungarian illustrator and painter Éric de Nemès (1910-??), the Spanish cartoonist Juan Santez and the Armenian cartoonist Alexander Saroukhan (1898-1977), to name a few. It also challenges the perception that the Europeans who migrated to and settled in the Arab region (especially in the early twentieth century) were living in "cultural ghettos." Instead, the work of the above artists, literati and others shows that the European communities in Egypt and the Levant were cultural agents who contributed to the literary and artistic landscapes in their respective fields of expertise.

Historian, 2011