Tunuslu Hayreddin Pasha as the late 19th century Ottoman thinker was known, is credited with being the towering figure of liberal constitutionalism that brought Tunisia’s first constitution in 1860. Khayr al-Din al-Tunisi, the Arabic avatar of the liberal constitutional thinker, was also the Grand Vizier of the Sublime Port for a year (1878-1879) under Abdel Hamid II. Al-Tunisi appears in all major intellectual histories of the Arab world in the late 19th century and is a towering figure in the al-Nahda historiography, appearing in the al-Nahda cannon in the works of Elie Kedourie (1980) and Albert Hourani (1962). Under the current historiographical turn of locating “early modern liberalism’s reluctance to endorse the imperial project” (Sartori 2006, 624), there is an effort to regain previously discarded intellects. Within this new epistemological space that was not yet wholly dovetailed to empire, and the turn to “rehabilitate an understudied period, roughly 1870 to 1914 (Khuri-Makdisi 2010, 7),” there stands a project that reexamines such figures away from Orientalist tropes that essentialize Arab intellects of the 19th century as backwards, but also as distinct from nationalist tropes that condemn such figures as reformist intellects who wavered in the face of colonialism. In locating how such texts travelled and circulated, as well as the rise of the kiraathane – reading coffee shops – an argument is made that these texts had a better receptability in the Ottoman world (Khrui-Makdisi 2010), as opposed to the Islamic manuscript. As a figure that travelled and witnessed turn of the century events, such the first constitution of the Sublime Port in 1861, al-Tunisi is lauded as an intellect that was a liberal reformer who saw no contradiction of the coupling of these reforms with al-shari'a. Yet how different would the story be told if all those who examine al-Tunisi were shown to rely on a faulty translation? Reading al-Tunisi's aqwam al-masalik fi ma'rifat ahwal al-mamalik in his native Arabic, compared to the canonical translation by Carlos Brown (1967) which most encyclopedic entries of al-Tunisi and those who see him as a liberal anti-colonial figure rely on, shows several instances of transplantation of a secular liberal meaning not in the author’s text. Thus, this paper presents al-Tunisi away from the turn to locate such figures within a liberalism that was not colonial, problematizing the emphasis on the politics of translation and circulation of 19th century Arabic texts in the Ottoman Empire.

The print cultures of the decades straddling the dissolution of Ottoman Empire provide a particularly rich archive for historical investigations seeking to ground the social history of knowledge production in novel mappings of context. A reductive form of contextualist reading currently dominates nahda reception studies, one that is inattentive to both the material underpinnings of the will to translate and the ‘ideational’ dimensions of conceptual dissemination. Postcolonial narratives of Arab intellectual modernity, for instance, tend to pit an undifferentiated and spatially fixed Europe against a colonized intellectual class unwittingly reinscribing the conditions of its own epistemological subjugation. Taking the reception of Nietzsche in the Arabic press as a case study, this paper contests the narrow contextualism of such accounts. It does so by recuperating the expansive semantic range of the concepts Arab thinkers appropriated from the German philosopher's works. Their readings of Nietzsche bear on the broader question of how European currents of anti-positivist thought were elaborated in non-metropolitan contexts rife with anxieties about the foundations of progress, the status of classical traditions of thought, and the cultural requisites of political self-determination. This paper draws on the work of a range of Arab commentators, including Shibli Shumayyil, Farah Antun and Salama Musa, but focuses primarily on the Egyptian essayist ‘Abbas Mahmud al-‘Aqqad. Between 1923 and 1924, he published a series of articles on the ‘Abbasid-era panegyrist Abu ’l-Tayyib al-Mutannabbi, in which he argued that the “philosophy of life” embodied in the latter’s poetry prefigured the ideas of Nietzsche and Darwin. Al-‘Aqqad drew on a naturalist vocabulary informed by turn-of-the-century biological concepts (“struggle for existence,” “natural selection”) to cast al-Mutannabbi as an interlocutor “between” the two thinkers, a figure who synthesized the scientific and existential dimensions of their interventions. His arguments invoked a concept central to Arab thinkers’ engagement with Nietzschean thought: the agon, or the premise that life is characterized by ceaseless and ineradicable struggle. The conception of human nature and sociality embedded in this vision invites us to rethink the predicaments of alterity and translatability in light of these thinkers’ efforts to constitute modern existential-biological knowledge as an idiom of human similitude. Al-‘Aqqad’s case also reminds us that such efforts involved the reactivation of classical Arabic genres of commentary and forms of intertextuality. It points to the deep continuities between the popularizing ethos of late Ottoman littérateurs and the classical tradition of belletrist compilatory literature they referenced.

Public order has served as a critical component of the ability of sovereign power to reach into the lives of its subjects and citizens. Recent literature in anthropology and history of the Middle East has described the translation and actualization of this concept within various legal regimes of the colonial Middle East, particularly Egypt, beginning in the late nineteenth century. Public order has worked along the fissure between the public and the private, authorizing the state to intervene in the seemingly sacrosanct realm of the private when and wherever it deemed such intervention necessary for the common good. One outcome was and continues to be the state’s increasing ability to regulate religion especially when particular practices seem to transgress the perceived sensibilities of an assumed majority. Recent cases point to the relevance of public order to the shifting constitution of religion in the region as well as processes of societal exclusion. This paper turns to a set of other translations of public order in Egypt that occurred prior to and after its initial appearance within Egyptian law codes. It attempts to connect the legal manifestations of this concept to intellectual ones that, as I show, were themselves embedded within broader projects of translation. My focus is on the lawyer and Jewish reformer Murad Farag and his defense of a coreligionist who was accused of this act in the Port Said National Court of Appeals in 1902. During the case and after, Farag denounced the blood libel profusely and powerfully in the press, partly in terms of public order. He understood this concept as part of his broader project of reform through the translation of liberal concepts into his religious tradition and other religious traditions in Egypt. In recuperating this vision, which was eventually erased by the extension of pubic law in Egypt, I juxtapose it with two other articulations of public order: the first embedded within local translations of the European blood libel accusation and, by extension, European anti-Semitism; and the second by the courts and within Egyptian law. Providing a historical genealogy of public order beyond the legal and constitutional domains, the paper reveals the complex layers that characterized its initial articulations in turn-of-the-twentieth-century Egypt and the material and political modes that partly determined them.

Until recently, historians of the Middle East have largely read the work of late Ottoman writers through the prism of identity looking for the stirrings of nationalist and religious sentiment that would emerge in the twentieth century. This scholarly activity has been cotemporaneous if not coextensive with the task of tracing the diffusion of Western concepts and their influence on the historical trajectory of different communities in the region. Intrinsic to both the endogamous and diffusionist models is a reified notion of ideas emanating from the West and of traditions grounded elsewhere, as things transmitted, traded and passed along through space and through time, respectively. Even in disagreement, the models contribute to a stark binary scheme for sifting the authentic from the foreign, secular from the religious, Muslim from Christian, and the universal from the particular. While these binaries are not entirely absent from the work of late Ottoman writers, they served as signposts for making sense of and navigating the changing social landscape of the period rather than the precocious denotation of the closed-off, balkanized identities that intellectual history made them to be over the preceding century. This paper explores ?Abd al-Ra?m?n al-Kaw?kib?’s attempts to construct a critical science of politics at the beginning of the twentieth century. A native of Ottoman Aleppo, al-Kaw?kib? emigrated to Cairo in the late 1890s. al-Kaw?kib? would spend the next few years traveling beyond the Eastern Mediterranean heart of the Ottoman Empire reaching as far as Karachi in British India and Harar in Ethiopia. The essays he published during the period—later collected under the title The Characteristics of Despotism—have often been read, despite his own explicit statements, as translations of Western political theories about tyranny and democracy thinly masking a critique of the Hamidian regime. While some of the vocabulary derived from European political philosophy, al-Kaw?kib?’s essays tried to convey the social reality of the places he visited into a generalizable theory of politics in what he termed “Eastern societies.” To accomplish this, he turned to the Arab press for a mode of political thinking amenable to the empirical reality of these societies. It was the nascent field of journalism, he argued, that embodied political thought in the Arab world. The paper explores al-Kaw?kib?’s project and how the material practices of translation and adaptation germane to the work of Arab newspapers guided his attempts to construct a critical science of politics.