In May 1910, the brilliant and peripatetic journalist, educator and political strategist ‘Abd al-‘Aziz Jawish published a column about “Workers’ Rights and May Day Demonstrations” on the cover of al-‘Alam, the nationalist organ for which he served as editor. Jawish had devoted the better part of the previous two years to a multifaceted project of expanding the Egyptian National Party’s popular constituencies. But when he described organized labor as “the most important ideological, political, and economic movement the world has seen since the beginning of human history,” he was not only signaling the National Party’s continued support for Egypt’s fledgling unions and syndicates. Rather, as Jawish went on to explain, he sought to emphasize, “our obligation as a nation oppressed and mistreated in our own country to sympathize with the oppressed and mistreated across the globe in their pain and suffering and to struggle to lighten the burdens of humanity . . . for the weak, if they unite, may overpower the strong.” Jawish’s creative transposition—from the localized struggles of working groups to a generalized array of “peaceful wars” between the weak and the strong—was just one instance of a vernacular politics of comparison that saturated anti-colonial thought and practice in the eventful first decade of the twentieth century. Jawish and his contemporaries recognized that the logics of foreign rule were premised upon a particular framework of racialized comparisons that arbitrarily likened colonized peoples to each other and exaggerated their differences from Europe. Far from accepting such colonial representations in a “derivative discourse,” a diverse array of authors and activists argued back by invoking an alternative comparative geography of emerging solidarities both within and beyond the colonial world. Drawing on articles from the Egyptian press as well as political intelligence reports from the Egyptian Ministry of Interior, this paper focuses in particular on the multiple, overlapping valences of the category “union” in a moment of global upheaval. When Egyptians invoked union, they sought to establish that their own experiences of privation and disenfranchisement were meaningfully commensurable with those of constitutionalists in Istanbul and Tehran, anti-colonial nationalists in India and Ireland, and striking workers everywhere. Rejecting a mode of historicism that understood colonial development as a deferred repetition of Europe’s past, the proponents of union laid claim to a different notion of historical temporality, one grounded in the lived possibilities of contemporaneous transformations across putatively incommensurable domains.

Between 1904 and 1911, Egyptian intellectuals intensely and acrimoniously debated the history of the conquest of Egypt in the seventh century by Arab tribesmen. For the first time in Egypt’s history, Muslim and Christian polemicists argued over the way in which the story ought to be told, a debate that erupted into the major sectarian crises of 1910-1911. But why did the history of early Islamic Egypt become so contentious at this particular moment? I argue that this urgent turn toward the seventh century was driven by a comparative urge to answer the question: what is colonialism? This question of how to portray the early Islamic past posed significant implications for characterizing the British occupation of Egypt in the present. If the Islamic conquest of Egypt had been legitimate, why was British rule in Egypt illegitimate, imperial apologists asked? Egypt had been a province of the Byzantine Empire in the seventh century, just as it had been an Ottoman province in the nineteenth; the British, like the Arabs, had annexed the territory of an empire state. Yet the analogies that the British had initially thought would normalize their rule would be turned upside-down by their opponents. In the press, comparisons between the seventh and the twentieth centuries became ever-present. The heated debates soon provoked violence when Christian activists overturned the infamous slogan “Egypt for the Egyptians” to argue that only they, the Christians, were Egypt’s rightful rulers, as only they were truly native to the country, the Muslims being later transplants. In response, Muslim thinkers such as Ali Yusuf and Abd al-Aziz Jawish used colonial comparison to explain what they understood to be particular to, and particularly immoral about, British imperialism. It is these articulations—on the coloniality of British rule in Egypt— that form the core of this paper, which draws upon documents found in several archives and in private papers.

The claim that the Islamic Revolution of 1979 forever changed the politics of the Arab world is now a truism. Yet what actually changed for Arabs in 1979? This paper examines political writing within the Arabian peninsula by writers engaged in a renewed comparison between Iran and its Arab neighbours. It assesses how particular intellectuals responded to the revolution not as a geopolitical threat, but as an idea that for better or for worse, also represented the political future. It retrieves political writing that came after the violent siege of the Grand Mosque in Mecca by millenarian Sunni militants in 1979. Particularly, work by the ‘Father of Arab Atheism’, Saudi Arabian author Abdullah al-Qusseimi who began his career as an exegete of Wahhabism, but is said to have renounced religion during a life in exile in Cairo. Al-Qusseimi made intellectual separations between dynastic and clerical authority, usually to condemn both, by engaging in comparison; between Arabs and Europeans, and between Arabs and Iranians. His later writings on religion and politics often took Iran and its reigning clergy as an historical object-lesson to write from. While the revolution in Iran resolved this distinction by making the moral authority of clerics supreme, in Saudi Arabia a clergy was violently subordinated to royal power, a move he saw as the surest way to finally decouple morality from politics. Yet because obedience to a sovereign and to the laws of the state could only be promoted as obedience to worldly executors of religious doctrine, historians of modern Arabia have only been able to think of political legitimacy in religious, cultural, or ‘tribal’ terms. This is precisely the opposite of how al-Qusseimi viewed the monarchy. He viewed Saudi Arabia's embrace of religion as superficial and perhaps temporary. His ideas disrupt the point at which historians conventionally narrate the history of modern Saudi Arabia without distinguishing between profane and sacred authority. By engaging in comparisons with events in Iran, and European history, he suggests that to begin any such narrative, the relationship between cleric and ruler must first be seen as a contradiction between the ethics of the militant and the cold realpolitik of the prince. Al-Qusseimi’s intellectual contribution thus offer a way to rethink both the contemporary politics modern history of ‘the Gulf’, itself first born as a political idea barely a year after the Islamic Revolution.

This paper traces the uses of comparisons between Algeria and Libya, two colonies that shared a peculiar parallelism. Side by side, both underwent particularly virulent forms of colonial rule that set them apart from their North African neighbors, facing prolonged wars of conquest, waves of European settlement and a distinctive form of administration that tied them closely to Paris and Rome respectively. This similarity was no coincidence, as the Italian colonial project in North Africa from 1911 onwards borrowed from the earlier French conquest of Algeria, and Italian and French bureaucrats shared tips and legal expertise on controlling unruly Muslims. For some of them, the two ‘Latin sisters’ were essentially running one common project with two empires: returning North Africa to its former Roman glory through a combination of mass agricultural settlement programs and aggressive archaeological excavations. On the other hand, this proximity could also be toxic. French officials were keen to distance themselves from Italian colonialism at times, especially after the advent of Mussolini’s fascist regime, worried that news of atrocities in Libya might boomerang back to their own North African possessions. Bad neighbors could expose the weaknesses of colonialism at home, and for the administration as much as for nationalist politicians. Some of the earliest formal political mobilization in Algeria took place around the Italian invasion of Libya. For those who sought to improve the colonial system whilst appearing loyal to France, this strategy of emphasizing differences between French and Italian colonial rule worked well, because complaining about Italians was less risky and therefore a useful proxy for complaining about France. On the other hand, a more radical line of analysis, which became more influential in the 1930s, saw all European imperialism as one and the same. In this light, the narcissism of minor differences between the two empires obscured the systemic reality of European supremacy. Using archives in Algeria, Italy and France as well as a range of press sources, this paper argues that it was through comparing Algeria and Libya that people determined whether there was one colonialism or several.