Ibn Sīnā (980-1037 CE), the renowned physician-philosopher and polymath, lived a life of nonstop writing and constant traveling. Organizing his scholarly works was a task initiated by his disciples, continued by medieval biobibliographers, and grappled with by modern historians of philosophy and science. In my doctoral project I am interested in the interaction between two of his many fields of scholarship—namely, celestial natural philosophy, and mathematical astronomy. In my project I needed to establish a temporal relationship between Ibn Sīnā’s works on general physics, celestial physics, and astronomy to trace the development of his thought, and any major shifts in the key concepts of these fields in his corpora over time. I also needed to put Ibn Sīnā’s works in the social and political context where they were produced. I explore, for instance, possible correlations between the subject matter of Ibn Sīnā’s works and the locations in which they were produced. Detecting such correlations would open the way to investigate the underlying historical reasons such as patronage, existing intellectual traditions, networks of local or regional scholars, teaching those subjects, etc. In this three-part paper, I first show how, using two geographic information system (GIS) software, _ArcGIS Pro_ and _ArcGIS Online_, I scaffolded my research by visualizing Ibn Sīnā’s journey, scholarly production, and the political changes of his times on a multilayered, temporally dynamic map. The resulting animated, online map simulates the whereabouts of Ibn Sīnā, and the completion of his works as well as the shifting borders, and the rise and fall of the monarchies during his lifetime. In the second part of my paper, I show how the geospatial datasets that I produced in the mapping process allowed me to run a geospatial analysis on the _ArcGIS Insights_ platform to analyze the quantity of Ibn Sīnā’s scholarship on physics and astronomy across time and location. Finaly, I focus on Ibn Sīnā’s final city of residence, Isfahan, showing how I used GIS mapping to assess a claim made by the local historians of Isfahan who identified a domed building in the Dardasht quarter of the city as Ibn Sīnā’s teaching space during his stay in Isfahan. I detail the process of visualizing historical data from primary and secondary sources on a digital map to determine Ibn Sīnā’s whereabouts in the early 11th century Isfahan, and to examine the spatial relations of his places of residence and activity to the abovementioned building.

Muḥammad Amīn Fikrī’s 1878 book “Jughrāfiyat Miṣr” is often heralded as the first Arabic-language Egyptian book to approach Egypt’s geography in a European and territorial manner. This paper argues otherwise, positing instead that Fikrī’s contribution was built on a longer process of nineteenth-century geographical writing in Egypt that took an increasingly administrative and territorial turn. After revisiting the impact of Rifāʿah Rāfiʿ al-Ṭahṭāwī’s geographical writings and translations, this paper explores the little-studied geographical books of two mid-nineteenth-century Egyptian state officials, Muḥammad Qadrī Pasha and Muḥammad Mukhtār Pasha, that preceded and influenced Fikrī’s work. These texts represent early and important transformations in Egyptian approaches to their geography driven by the khedival state’s centralized and bureaucratized state-building efforts. They outlined multiple and contradictory conceptions of Egyptian territory that sought to delineate the bounds of Egypt proper as well as lands subjected to khedival administration and imperialism. They also illustrate early proto-nationalist formulations of Egyptian geography as the site of Egyptian progress and modernity within the confines of the khedival state. As such, the territorialization of Egyptian geography was not simply a consequence of translating and importing European approaches to political space but also a direct product of the growing administrative reach of the Egyptian state over its people and lands. By examining these geographical writings in their intellectual and political contexts, this paper further argues that the written word played a significant role in defining the Egyptian geo-body, highlighting the significance of non-cartographic representations of the geo-body to the territorialization of political space. To that end, nineteenth-century Egyptian officials engaged with the revival of Islamic geographical texts and their literary descriptions of Egypt to help naturalize the vague and inconsistent boundaries of Egypt as pre-existing territorial lines and define in the process the administrative bounds of the khedival state. As a result, Egyptian conceptions of their own political geography shifted away from that of a network of urban spaces connected to an administrative center toward that of a bounded, surface-of-the-earth spatial extension of the state. This paper concludes that the making of the territorial Egyptian geo-body as we know it today preceded the formal production of borders and challenges the historiographic notion that Egypt’s territorial scope was largely the product of British efforts and interests.

This paper examines the Syrian Geological Journal from 1978-2000 as a window into the construction of Syrian territory, suggesting expansions on the notion of territory as the “geo-body” of the nation. While the geographic concept of a geo-body introduced by Thongchai Winichakul has been applied to Arab countries, these studies tend to center on abstractly comprehensive representations of territory such as cartographic outlines and logos. The Geological Journal, however, renders the geo-body in physical-geographic terms by stitching it out of stone, water, metals, and chemical deposits; an early issue goes so far as to refer to geologists performing a national survey as “doctors” who restore the land’s body from implied colonial ravages “limb by limb,” bringing forth “wealth upon wealth for its sons.” As this language indicates, in the 1970s the journal and associated Syrian Geological Society were eager to place geologists at the center of the Ba‘th Party’s Arab Socialist development vision. The dual registers in which this eagerness is expressed reflect the plural territorial visions for Syria in play at the time: the Party terminology of al-qatr al-‘arabi al-Suri, indicating a subsection of an Arab whole, and the more typically romantic nationalist language treating land as a body and a parent. Over time, the geo-body represented in the journal’s pages pluralizes further. Coding each issue’s contents reveals a decline in the number and length of geological scholarly publications, and increases in advertisements from various government bodies, progress reports from minor Party officials, and material praising Hafez or Bashar al-Asad. While this shift is easily understood as reflecting the state’s increasing institutionalization of and imbrication with civil society organizations such as the Geological Society, the paper argues that it is productive to consider all the journal’s latter-day contents as composing a Syrian geo-body or -bodies too: still made up of stone and waters, but also numbers, a complex institutional terrain, and the President. Particularly in the context of the corporatist institutional style of Syrian statebuilding and the al-Asad personality cult, the appearance of these seemingly unrelated bodies in the pages of a geological journal can be read not merely as artifacts of the publication’s context but as revealing further dimensions of what it means to call territory the body of the nation.

This paper seeks to investigate the role of the Palestinian question in forming postcolonial identities in Algerian and Franco-Algerian communities from 1962 to 1982. This work connects the dual contexts of the unique aftermaths of the Holocaust and the foundation of the state of Israel in 1948, alongside Algerian society’s violent rejection of settler colonial society (1954-1962) and the departure of the vast majority of Algeria’s Jewish community to metropolitan France. How were Algerian Jewish and Muslim communities transformed by the global influences of Zionist and Arabist ideologies, in what ways did these interact with local instances of coexistence, migration and intercommunal anticolonial solidarity? I argue that this context produced a diverse set of engagements with the Palestinian crisis far beyond presumed Jewish-Israeli and Arab-Palestinian axes of identification, and acted as a vehicle for consistent reexamination and reformulation of Algerian anticolonial epistemologies. Through an intertextual historical analysis of intellectual, literary and archival sources from a variety of activist organisations, I highlight the ways in which Muslim and Jewish communities cooperated and invoked the Algerian revolution to articulate a diverse set of positions on settler colonialism, popular memory of local Muslim-Jewish coexistences, concepts of indigeneity and belonging, gender and affect in anticolonial politics, and cultural decolonisation in the era of ‘Third World’ internationalism. By focussing on the relationships between Muslim and Jewish actors, this paper contributes a new perspective on the Palestinian question in Algeria and France by resisting conventional categorisations that often disperse this body of sources between Jewish studies, Middle East studies, settler colonial studies, and the postcolonial history of Algeria and France. By highlighting the ways in which experiences of exclusion of dispossession under French colonialism motivated both Jewish and Muslim activists to engage with the Palestinian question, this paper hopes to counter the separatist narrative that histories of colonial racism and antisemitism must be viewed through a ‘competitive’ lens. Particularly in light of the conflict in Gaza, this paper hopes to highlight the dissident histories of Muslim-Jewish cooperation that have shaped the current landscape of Palestinian solidarity movements in both Europe and the MENA region.