This paper takes as its point of departure Hannah Arendt’s simple but profound assertion that the “human condition” is defined by our “plurality”; by the “fact that men and not Man live on the earth and inhabit the world” (The Human Condition, 1958). In Eichmann in Jerusalem, Arendt states that “Human diversity is a characteristic of the human status without which the very words mankind or humanity would be devoid of meaning.” The paper contends that, without having read Arendt or the works that influenced her, two contemporary Islamists – Sheikhs Mohammad Abu Zahra and Wahbah al-Zuhaili – arrive at similar conclusions regarding the human condition. While Arendt draws on European political and social thought, Abu Zahra and Zuhaili anchor their views in the Islamic tradition. The literature has tended to treat these two centuries-old mega-traditions of theorizing – the largely secular and liberal western tradition and the Islamic tradition – as being at odds. The contribution of this paper lies in demonstrating that scholars who belong to these two traditions can often make similar assertions regarding fundamental issues, such as the centrality of plurality (or diversity) to the human condition. Based on a close reading of the discourses of Abu Zahra and Zuhaili, particularly international relations, the paper demonstrates how the two draw on the Islamic tradition— especially Q 22:13 “Mankind was one community”; and Q 49:13 “O mankind, we created you male and female and made you into nations and tribes that you may come to know one another” – to argue that the grouping of humanity into separate ethnicities, nations and religions is natural and divinely ordained. Not only do the two scholarly sheikhs underscore the divine origin of this human diversity, but they also view dialoguing with and understanding the different other as pivotal for self-understanding. Abu Zahra and Zuhaili, like Arendt, underscore that political dialogue is central for resolving differences amongst groups. The construct of politics as an alternative to violence underpins the discourses of these three scholars. Part of the legacy of Abu Zahra and Zuhaili lies in their advancement of the thesis that peace is the norm in the relationship between Muslim and non-Muslim states, since religious differences per se do not constitute valid grounds for fighting. While Abu Zahra and Zuhaili anchor this assertion in the Islamic tradition, it also reflects their unequivocal embrace of Arendt’s liberal notion that as humans we are defined by our diversity.

In the hope-filled and tumultuous post-Arab-Spring moment, blasphemy prosecutions emerged in Tunisia as a critical and contested mechanism by which the Tunisian judicial system placed concrete limits on the constitutionally guaranteed freedoms of expression and religion. Yet these cases have widely been framed as anomalies, by supporters and opponents alike. My project places these contemporary cases of blasphemy (or attacks against the sacred, al-nayl min al-muqaddas?t) in a longer genealogy of historical blasphemy trials going back to late Ottoman Tunisia. By examining six cases, which represent all known blasphemy cases in Tunisia since (at least) the 1850s, I attempt to unpack the following puzzles: 1) if, as secondary scholarship tells us, blasphemy itself has long been common but its prosecution rare, then why were these very particular blasphemous acts prosecuted? Furthermore, 2) across these blasphemy cases, actors repeatedly invoke vulnerable Muslim feelings and the danger of hurting them. While considering claims of emotional injury as veracious, I will also ask: how might this framing (of blasphemy as emotionally injurious) be useful for opponents and proponents of prosecution? My project begins first in Ottoman and then colonial Tunisia, where two historical "blasphemers" were sentenced to death: the first, a Tunisian Jewish cart-pusher (1857) who allegedly blasphemed in the wake of a traffic accident, and the second, a self-assured Tunisian Muslim student (1904) who ruffled his instructors' feathers. My project then moves to the next set of known blasphemy cases: four blasphemy cases occurring in the post-Arab-Spring moment (2011-2013). The defendants in two of these cases are older elites: one, a TV channel president, and the others, two artists living in the capital. The defendants in the two remaining contemporary cases are marginalized young men: in the first, two self-declared atheists, and in the second, a young gay man living near the Libyan border. All of these 2011-2013 cases resulted (at least initially) in guilty verdicts. Drawing on ethnographic and archival research, my paper will advance a number of initial findings: first, that these blasphemy cases (1857-2013), though seemingly about religion, had much to do with competing political visions of Tunisian society and of who was best equipped to safeguard and lead it. I will also suggest that these opposing political visions were obscured by the use of a language of hurt, reminiscent of Saba Mahmood's term, "moral injury" (2013), and by the prosecutors' invocation of public order.

In the historiography of Egyptian nationalism it is well established that ideas about the remote past were important in the formation of a national consciousness in the nineteenth century. In "Egypt, Islam, and the Arabs" (1986), Israel Gershoni and James Jankowski trace the beginnings of self-conscious Egyptian patriotism to the writings of Rif??a al-?ah??w? in the 1860s and 1870s, noting the praise this author repeatedly bestows on Pharaonic Egypt in his historical works. Two books have been devoted to the subject in English, Donald Reid’s "Whose Pharaohs?" (2002) and Elliott Colla’s "Conflicted Antiquities" (2007), both of which highlight the discipline of archaeology as a site of contestation with the European imperial powers and, hence, the loaded symbolism of the ancient past in emergent local conceptions of Egyptian identity. One text that has not received sufficient attention in this context is the early B?l?q publication "Bid?yat al-qudam?? wa-hid?yat al-?ukam??" (1838), the first printed work in the field of European-influenced “ancient history” in Arabic. Produced by students of al-?ah??w?’s at Mehmed Ali’s Madrasat al-Alsun and reprinted in 1865 for use in schools, "Bid?yat al-qudam??" combines sections derived from earlier Arabic historiography with sections translated, with extensive adaptation, from French works of “universal history.” The preface, which was authored by al-?ah??w? himself, has been discussed by Youssef Choueiri in Modern Arab Historiography (1989), but the main body of the work has yet to be considered by scholars. This paper begins with an investigation into the sources of "Bid?yat al-qudam??," the most important of which is not identified in the Arabic. Building on the source analysis, the paper then focuses on the sections dealing with ancient Egyptian, Phoenician, and Greek history respectively. It is argued that while the section on ancient Egypt features elements that bespeak a particular sense of intimacy with the material, the text as a whole is distinguished by an emphatic universalism, by contrast with the narrow Eurocentrism of the French sources. Yet, it is suggested that in following the division of universal history into quasi-national histories characteristic of the French sources, "Bid?yat al-qudam??" nevertheless marks an important phase in the formation of a discourse of national identity in Arabic. The paper thus sheds light on one of the processes by which the imaginary boundaries of nationhood were erected in Arabic culture, as well as drawing attention to the tradition of a universalism without borders on which these boundaries were imposed.

Islamic Civilization and its Hermeneutical Discontent - al-?fgh?n? and ‘Abduh's Concept of madan?yya Writing the intellectual history of the Nahda, requires a sensitive analysis of its early stage, during which modernism and religion, especially Islam, were not yet clearly defined and were increasingly positioned as contradictory. The journal Al’urwah Al-wuthqah La Infi??m La?a offers a key representation of this historical moment. Despite its short-lived period of publication (from March to October 1884) the journal served as a laboratory for cultural, theological, and political debates, while calling for an anti-colonialist rebellion in all Ottoman countries living under the colonial yoke. The journal was edited and written in Arabic by the forefathers of “Islamic Modernism” Jam?l al-D?n al-?fgh?n? and Muhammad ‘Abduh while both were in exile in Paris. From this displacement, they reflected on the colonial condition and what they understood as a chasm between an ideal image of Muslims and the historical deviation from the path of God, while witnessing the effects of colonial projects on Muslims beliefs and ways of living. An analysis of this journal reveals a rejection of the simplistic boundaries between modernism and religion, in an attempt to reformulate the question from: “how to be modern?” to: “how to become civilized?” While modernity was perceived as a break from the past, the notion of civilizing (madan?yya, tamaddun) allowed for reclaiming aspects of Islamic heritage, thus turning colonial subjects into negotiators with agency rather than passive subjects of modernization. The anachronistic tendency toward reading al-?fgh?n? and ‘Abduh through the lens of later generations and their historical contexts leads most scholars to fail to grasp what I regard as the radical hermeneutics of tradition, which they had started to develop in their journal. Similarly, the scholarly propensity toward considering them the forefathers of Arab nationalism – a category I argue is also antiquated - overlooks the complexity and their diversity of thought. For them, Madan?yya was not what religion needed to reject, but rather a potential source of religious rejuvenation. As such, a new hermeneutical approach emerged: one that relied upon modern science, political sovereignty, and the relationship between subjectivity and collective communities as a baseline for a new reading of the Quran and Islamic tradition. I will provide a perspective that melds the various strands underlining these reforms, such as selfhood/identity (??t), faith (‘aqida), and sovereignty (siyada).

A central topic in contemporary Arab thought is the concept of authenticity (asala). At first blush, this local intellectual preoccupation would appear to chime with Charles Taylor’s claim that modern man lives in an “age of authenticity.” When one digs deeper into what authenticity means in both contexts, however, it becomes clear that the meaning of authenticity differs. Whereas Taylor’s idea of authenticity stresses the authentically creative expression of the individual, Arab discourse on authenticity tends to treat it in culturalist terms, namely as the degree to which a group or society holds on to the elementary roots of its culture. The goal of this paper is to reconceptualize contemporary Arab thought by showing how these ostensibly disparate views of authenticity may be reconciled. First, it analyzes a talk given by the Egyptian literary critic Shukr? ?Ayy?d in 1971, in which he explores contradictory meanings of authenticity in Arab literature, revealing a more varied tradition of discussing authenticity in the Arab world. It then places these different interpretations of authenticity within a rich genealogy of thinking about authenticity that arose in Europe in the end of the 18th century in tandem with the advent of modern society. Combining these perspectives the paper suggests that the discussion of authenticity among Arab intellectuals can be seen as a local instantiation of a global discourse on authenticity that is inherent to modernity. In conclusion, this thesis will be illustrated by using the multifarious, genealogically informed notion of authenticity to suggest new ways of reading and classifying various contemporary Arab intellectuals. The upshot of this approach, besides offering an interesting re-assessment of Arab intellectual development in recent decades, is that it allows for a description of Arab thought that goes beyond a common narrative, which relies on an opposition between traditionalist thinkers who nostalgically yearn for their lost “authentic” heritage and modernizers who want to transform society along a Western model. Instead, it lays the groundwork for interpreting the writings of Arab intellectuals as vernacular attempts at coping with a central demand faced by all people in modern society, namely that of articulating an authentic sense of self. Not only does this perspective level the playing field somewhat for a global exchange of ideas, but it also proves to be a valuable contribution to the study of the concept of authenticity as such, which has largely focused on the European tradition.