For well over several decades, scholars have compiled and explored expressions of the nineteenth century enterprise of intellectual and cultural “awakening,” (nahda) in the Arab world. Initially this work was situated in teleological conceptions of European progress versus Eastern backwardness. Its launching pad was the purported shock of European military and economic expansion and cultural hegemony on Middle Eastern formations of society, culture, and politics. Recent scholarship on art, literature, and philosophy has rigorously overturned the binary of the advanced versus the backward. This work has revealed a dynamic process of cultural, artistic, and knowledge production and consumption that entailed both continuity and rupture with previous forms, traditions, and practices.
Through a critical and interdisciplinary approach, this panel contributes to the rethinking of the nahda by attending to its intersections with and influence on economic thought and material practices. If the concept of being modern remains indispensable because it captures the social, political, and cultural projects that accompanied industrialization and the rise of capitalism, how then did the project of being modern influence materiality and material experience in the twentieth century Arab world? By addressing shifts in conceptions of private property, free trade, and new literary and art markets, this panel will situate the nahda as central to, rather than derivative of, various stages of economic liberalism in the twentieth century.
The panel reveals the ways in which the nahda and the notion of private property, free markets, and culture as commodity were inextricably linked and together constituted a discrete ideology for early twentieth century nationalists in the Arab world. The panel will address how nationalists in Palestine understood shifting regimes of landholding, despite their potential to empower Zionist settlement, as central to a new conceptual nexus of nationalism and civil society. The panel will then attend to how Palestinian economic elites in the 1940s conceptualized the imperative of an economic “rebirth” by actively linking self-determination to the great expectation of free trade. The panel moves to explore the emerging market for fiction in early 20th century Egypt as a “scandalous’ field of material and symbolic production caught up in a locus of competing cultural pressures. Finally the panel undertakes an analysis of the 1930s and 1940s market for Arab-Lebanese “landscape” views as a site of notions of religious belonging, the production of a secular piety, and the formation of a physical, aesthetic, modern citizen.
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Dr. Munir K. Fakher Eldin
My paper will discuss the class limits of an early twentieth-century vision of Arab liberal modernity (al-nahda) in a rural Palestinian setting—the Beisan Valley in late Ottoman and Mandate Palestine (1909-1948). In its original late nineteenth-century meaning the term nahda referred to the intellectual efforts of Islamic modernist reforms such as Jamal al-Din al-Afghani and Muhammad Abduh. Yet the term offered other writers and activists—outside the religious or sectarian cannon—a maxim to describe their vision of modernity. Christian and Muslim Arabs found unprecedented power in broadening the notion of the nahda. This paper explicates the ways in which class culture (that is the culture and ideology of civil society) and influence on governmental power and politics, as opposed to confessional identity, most characterized the flexibility and desirability of an Arab modernity.
The paper will offer an analysis of the history of landholding in the Beisan Valley as a changing matrix of governmental power and politics, in which we find important articulations of Palestinian nationalism and Arab modernity under two different land regimes—the Ottoman and the British Mandate. The emergence of a number of Zionists settlements in Beisan in the late 1930s and their domination of the region after the expulsion on its Arab inhabitants in 1948, led many historians to read the history of landholding backwards, as a pre-history of Israel. Instead, my paper will bring to the fore the complex ways in which Palestinian Arab nationalists understood shifting regimes of landholding—despite their potential to empower Zionist settlement—as central to a new conceptual nexus of nationalism and civil society. By discussing the class tensions of this project, this paper also attends to the ways in which common people understood and interacted with nationalist modernity and its visions for land and social relations.
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Dr. Sherene Seikaly
In this paper I concentrate on Palestinian uses of the Allied World War II rhetoric of “democracy and the free world” to explore how elites linked national freedom to economic prosperity. I focus on economic elites to complicate the flattened topography of Palestinian social history by moving beyond the ubiquitous binary of the decadent, infighting notables and the honorable but ignorant peasantry. This paper will focus on the period just after the declaration of the White Paper of 1939, which committed to a unified Palestinian state within ten years that would consist of an Arab majority and a Jewish minority. Although the official Palestinian line was to reject the White Paper, businessmen were invested in the promise of a unitary state, at the same time that they drew on and shaped ideas about national freedom and economic prosperity. Businessmen built on earlier turn of the century notions of “an economic nahda” to actively link self-determination to the great expectation of free trade in the 1940s.
It was in this period that Palestinian economic elites exchanged visits, literature, and expertise with their counterparts in Lebanon, Syrian, Egypt, Tunisia, and Morocco. Together these men envisioned the contours of postwar trade. For Palestinian elites, like many others, the promise of “democracy and the free world” was embodied in the notion of free trade and the potential economic prosperity it assured. In Palestine and beyond, colonial officials, businessmen, political figures, and reformers were shaping and managing a new national and political object called the economy. The colonial administration’s introduction of income tax in Palestine in the 1940s was one of many technologies to make and manage this newly conceived object. Palestinian elite advocacy for free trade was in part a response to these new technologies. In this paper I explicate these businessmen’s postwar vision, in which they constituted the vanguard of “a brave new world.” I show how Palestinians crafted the character of the postwar capitalist, whose innovation, courage, energy, and professionalism would ensure the seemingly co-dependant dyad of profit and progress. This paper will explore how even in the face of limitations and challenges to Palestinian self-determination, free trade nevertheless held the promise and potential of national independence for economic elites.
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Dr. Samah Selim
Throughout the 20th century, the history of the Arabic novel has played out in a complex social field defined by the tensions between modernist aesthetics and nationalist politics. Readerships, markets and bestsellers are rarely - and reluctantly - acknowledged as central dimensions of the novel’s circulation as a modern literary genre. The critical backlash, in Egypt, against Ala al-Aswani’s Yacoubian Building (2002) is a fascinating case in point.
This paper will reach back to the beginning of the 20th century to explore the emerging market for fiction in Egypt as a “scandalous’ field of material and symbolic production caught up in a nexus of competing cultural pressures: a courtly literary system in deep flux, the growth of an urban “middle-brow” readership, nascent nationalist regimes of moral and social utility, and the intense public appetite for translated “foreign” fictions.
The paper will focus on Khalil Sadiq Efendi’s fiction serial The People’s Entertainments (Musamarat al-sha’b 1904-1911). Sadiq was keen on casting his literary enterprise as a service to the nation, and he constantly editorialized about the noble and didactic function of novels. On the other hand, he was also an astute businessman and equally invested in promoting the idea of a thriving marketplace in which literature would circulate as a commodity much like any other. Sadiq resolved the evident tension between these two poles – and tried to forestall his highbrow critics – by constructing a liberal literary discourse based in the ambiguous idea of profit, simultaneously moral, social and economic.
While nineteenth century Paris is regularly rehearsed as the emblem of urban capitalist modernity in the adapted melodramas and thrillers published in The People’s Entertainments, a corrupt fin de siècle Cairo continually haunts this ‘other’ social geography in a narrative act of recognition, affiliation and auto-critique. The question of literature as public good and private commodity will be examined against the backdrop of contemporary practices of translation and adaptation, and these highly controversial rewritings of metropolitan “imagined geographies” into early Arabic language fictions.
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Dr. Kirsten Scheid
In studies of modern Arab art generally and Lebanese art in particular, art stemming from the artist’s religious affiliation and art stemming from a humanist, secular nationalism are often assumed to be at odds due to their conflicting essences. Indeed, the rise of an art market has been taken by historians and art connoisseurs alike as a sign of secularization of the Arab world. Just as capitalism introduced the commodity which evokes individual desires and means, an imported bourgeois system of art production introduced fine art easel-painting which, it is said, evokes a particular kind of viewer-subject.
Yet during the Nahda pious and humanist positions were not polarized. While Lebanese artists, for example, debated the relationship between piety, sect, and nation, they believed in an art that would reconcile all three. They envisioned something we could call secular piety that would unite aesthetically activated viewers in nation and faith, transcending emerging sectarian boundaries. At the same time that the Lebanese state was being organized along sectarian lines, capitalist systems of production and distribution were coming into being.
Modern Lebanese artists provide an important means for studying the relationship between, citizenship, market, and aesthetic imagination. Generally, the aesthetic is subordinated in social analyses to political and economic structures, as if art is a mere epiphenomenon of social processes. What this assumption overlooks is the possibility that art forms actually participate in social debates and crystallize positions by offering alternate articulations. The paper will tackle changing notions of the meaning of religious belonging in nascent nation contexts by looking at the market for Arab-Lebanese nationalist landscape “views” as the production of a modern, secular piety that could address an inherent, physical aesthetically modern citizen. Data for the paper will be collected from archival sources, including exhibition catalogues, sales records, and artists’ diaries, as well as oral histories and object analyses.
Art is a crucial subject for understanding any historical setting, especially one whose very icon has been the transformations in material culture. Study of art produced in the Nahda that is not based on the assumption of inherent categorical differences will give us a better sense of how art was productive of the Nahda.
