This paper will consider the linkages between the literary oeuvre and the anticolonial political activities of the Syrian-Saudi poet and encyclopedist Khayr al-Dīn al-Ziriklī (1893-1976). While his magisterial biographical dictionary is frequently cited as a reference work, it is not often studied in its own right as a work of modernist literary prose. The dictionary, which was first published in its entirety in 1957, is entitled Al-Aʿlām: Qāmūs Tarājim li-Ashhar al-Rijāl wa-l-Nisāʾ min al-ʿArab wa-l-Mustaʿribīn wa-l-Mustashriqīn [Luminaries: A Biographical Dictionary of the Most Notable Men and Women from among the Arabs, those who live among the Arabs, and the Orientalists]. It contains nearly 14,500 entries, placing medieval, early modern, and late modern names next to each other in a unified, standardized catalogue for the first time. Al-Ziriklī eschewed the subjective, authorial style of the medieval scholars, opting for a clinical, pseudo-scientific prose in the omniscient third person. Why did he choose to reinvent this classical literary form in the twentieth century? Furthermore, why did he see the reproduction of this imagined tradition as central to interwar statemaking efforts? In his words, he lamented, “There is an empty space in the Arab [cultural] treasury, and in the soul of its reader there is a need. [Filling it] is an obligation of our era.” In this paper, I will first peruse the introduction of the Aʿlām for additional clues as to al-Ziriklī’s political and literary motivations. I will then look up the entries for Al-Ziriklī’s known friends and associates, including anticolonial fighters and activists in the Istiqlali network, such as Muḥammad Kāmal al-Qaṣṣāb, Muḥibb al-Dīn al-Khatīb, and Riyāḍ al-Ṣulḥ, but also Nahḍa littérateurs such as Aḥmad Shawqī, Amīn al-Rīḥānī, and Amīn Saʿīd. Finally, I will revisit his personal reflections from his travel diary from when he fled Syria as a refugee in 1920, having been sentenced to death in absentia by the French authorities, and made his way to the Hijaz, where his modernist literary project was born. Notably, I will make use of the state archives in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, which hold two major collections of al-Ziriklī papers. The Musawwadāt Al-Ziriklī collection housed on the campus of King Saud University (KSU) contains his handwritten notes and literary drafts, while the al-Ziriklī collection at King Abdul-Aziz Public Library (KAPL) contains personal papers related to his political activities, including telegrams, policy memos, and diplomatic cables.

Compiled in the seventeenth century, Shihāb al-Dīn al-Khafājī’s (d. 1069/1659) Rayḥānat al-alibbāʾ wa zahrat al-ḥayāt al-dunyā became something of an instant classic throughout the Islamic world. The work reached well beyond its Egyptian provenance to find audience everywhere from the Ottoman Balkans to Mughal India. More than a mere record of his contemporaries’ poetry, al-Khafāji’s Rayḥānat al-alibbāʾ is a manual for style and poetics, a work of literary criticism, an ego-document betraying its author’s intellectual commitments, and a snapshot of the classical Arabic canon at a specific time and place. While little studied today (and almost never taught), the Rayḥānat al-alibbāʾ was one of the most copied Arabic literary works in the centuries leading up to the Nahḍa. Even during the boom of printing during the nineteenth century, when the classical Arabic canon as we know it today supposedly began to take form, the Rayḥānat al-alibbāʾ was thrice printed in Egypt (1273/1853, 1294/1877, 1306/1888) alongside near-simultaneous manuscript witnesses, though it would not see publication again until Muḥammad Ḥulw’s edition in 1967. In this paper I explore how this exemplar of late adab profited off its Ottoman-era popularity to be repeatedly selected for print publication during an age of “rediscovering of the Islamic classics.” I then investigate how the Rayḥānat al-alibbāʾ lost its cachet among scholars, printers, and readers, and ultimately failed to gain inclusion into the modern construction of the classical Arabic canon. With an interest in the parallels between literary and intellectual history, I explore the missed connections or simultaneous and incongruous trajectories of the modern construction of the classical Arabic canon. What factors granted al-Khafājī and his anthology the designation of modern or canonical print is often seen to bestow? Are canonicity and modernity even coextensive within literary history? I hope to show that the classical Arabic canon is a perpetually shifting collection of texts and textual practices no more authoritative (or modern) in the late nineteenth century than in the seventeenth. Rounding out my paper, I will posit that recent, ever accelerating scholarship on the post-classical Arabic literary tradition is yet another stage of refashioning the classical Arabic canon, one we must be deliberate and transparent about as we continue to produce it.

Starting in the nineteenth century, scholars across the Arab world set out to propel the established genre of the biographical dictionary into new directions. While varied in purpose, these newfangled compendia shared a commitment to documenting the lives of exceptional figures—the princepes of the modern age. Influenced by changes in the book market, evolving aesthetic preferences, and technological advancements, the development of the modern biographic dictionary saw figures such as Jurjī Zaydān (1861-1914), Ilyās Zakhūra (fl. 1897), and Tawfīq Iskārūs (1871-1942) tailoring the medium to their specific needs. This emergent genre was often enriched with illustrations and distinguished by a more selective approach to its vitae, challenging and yet continuing the earlier tradition of the ṭabaqāt (literally, “generations” or “classes”) and related hagiographic genres (e.g. manāqib and siyar). By centering the biographic dictionary, a central medium of intellectual discourse in the postclassical period, this paper proposes to study the Nahḍa as a “biographical age.” I develop the argument that the emergence of the Nahḍa was intricately tied to the renewed popularity of the biography. While drawing on the form and conceptual vocabulary of previous ages, the modern biographical dictionary enabled the propagation of new intellectual genealogies, the typecasting of effendi subjectivities, and the promoting of underlying political programs. My paper focuses on the work of Jurjī Zaydān, surveying key works in his literary and scholarly corpus, including his "Tarājim mashāhīr al-Sharq" (1903). Zaydān’s multifaceted career as a journalist, novelist, historian, educator, and linguist has garnered significant attention; however, his contributions as a biographer, which encompass a notable cross-section of his intellectual pursuits, remain largely overlooked. I ask how Zaydān’s biographical contributions (broadly defined) reflects or challenges prevalent perceptions of the Nahḍa. To enrich my findings, I study trends in the works of lesser-known authors, especially Ilyās Zakhūra ("Akābir al-rijāl," 1897) and Tawfīq Iskārūs ("Nawābigh al-Aqbāṭ," 1910). Finally, I explore how the Nahḍa as a biographical age helps us rethink the intellectual legacy of early Western scholarship as emblematized by Albert Hourani (1915-1993) in his "Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age" (1962).

This paper examines the formats used by Arab authors to present genealogical information before and after the end of the Ottoman empire, focusing on the visual elements of genealogical works – that is, on diagrams and figures. I ask why one format – which I call the “Ottoman mushajjar” – was superseded by a new format that I call the dawḥa or “great and lofty tree.” Initially, the mushajjar format was used for recording the descent lines of the Ashrāf communities in the empire. This format declined with the disappearance of the centralized Ottoman institutions that curated and authenticated Ashrāf genealogies. When debates about the accuracy of genealogies moved into a new discursive context – the realm of print media – genealogists adopted the dawḥa format for summarizing and presenting their claims because it was easier to read and publish. It also contained new visual devices for certifying information. It is now the dominant format for discourse about the Ashrāf and, not incidentally, the descent lines of tribes in the mashriq. As the interest in tribal identity has grown – especially in the Gulf and Saudi Arabia – the dawḥa format has proliferated on the Internet. The paper builds on the work of Nadav Samin about Saudi Arabia and Barbara Henning about the epistemological challenges that emerged after the Ottoman era, drawing on a broad survey of printed and online genealogical works in Arabic. It addresses the general goals of identifying the factors that shape cultural production and documenting the history of visual representations in the Arab world. In short, it offers an explanation of a particular cultural change.