Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall, one of the pioneers and representatives of German orientalists, lived in Istanbul, in the capital of the Ottoman Empire for several years and held a position in the Austrian Embassy at the turn of the 18th century. One of his principal works, Geschichte des osmanischen Reiches (10 vols., 1827–1835), not only became a major source on the Ottoman Empire for Europeans but also for Ottomans. Throughout the 19th century many an Ottoman chronicler and historian engaged with this text, translated it, used it as a source but also took issue with what he wrote. In many ways, Hammer-Purgstall's work was influential in changing the form and content of history writing in the Ottoman Empire, which included universal histories written by a variety of Ottoman historians in the second half of the19th century. I argue that through such works that highlighted the clear connection between the rise of the modern world and the concept of the history of mankind, a reconfiguration of world history and a new kind of self-representation metamorphosed into a realignment of Ottoman history vis-a-vis orientalist writings. As such, orientalist very much became part and parcel Ottoman universal history writing as a genre that correlated with European universal histories. Indeed engaging with the particular texts of Europeans on the Ottoman Empire, Ottoman universal history writing meant a re-appraisal of the Empire and its modern practices. In this paper, I analyze this relationship through Ottoman universal histories that used the work of Hammer-Purgstall to discuss how the Orient wrote into Orientalism, became part of it and how it re-appropriated it.

If the study of personal, elusive aspects of human life requires the involvement of the researcher’s subjectivity, how can the reality of these aspects by approached in an unbiased way? How can we give an accurate account of it? What place should be given to subjectivity, which can at once serve and hinder research”? This paper is particularly interested in the study of Islamic mysticism and will attempt to answer these questions based on an analysis of the work of Louis Massignon (1883-1962), who went deep in the study of the life and works of Muslim mystics. Through contextual, biographical, and methodological lenses, I will define the particularity of his hermeneutic posture and the intention of his work. I will present how Massignon’s existential questions affect his vision of Islamic mysticism and analyze his ḥallājian vision of holiness, as well as the clear opposition he establishes between the path of al-Ḥallāj (d. 309/922), conceived as one of asceticism and suffering, and that of Ibn ʿArabī (d. 638/1240), whom he reproaches for suppressing the radicality of transcendence. I will analyze what the researcher’s view of his field of study carries, and I will bring to light the existential questionings and experiential experiences that affected his posture and his vision of this field in order to show how particular and situated it is. Since 1978, Saidian criticism has shown that "Western" Islamists are susceptible to misrepresentations of Islam, encouraging researchers to constantly re-evaluate their approach. Building upon this encouragement, this presentation will recall that the idea that the "science des religions" is "scientific" and therefore "neutral" is not self-evident: all knowledge is situated, subjective. Drawing on the writings of Michel de Certeau, Raymond Aron, Jacques Waardenburg, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and Omid Safi or Ramón Grosfoguel, I will question the claim to the universality of the scientific method. The presentation will propose a reflection on the conditions that make it possible, in the study of religion, to arrive at a more accurate understanding of reality, such as the awareness of the particularity of a researcher’s hermeneutic situation, the orientation of their research, the enunciation of their intention, the questioning of their own conceptual categories, and the distancing from their subject, so that subjectivity no longer deforms reality, but enlightens and reveals it.

Drawing on primary sources in Ottoman Turkish and English, such as governmental correspondence, memoranda, and published treatises, this paper examines conservative thought in Ottoman imperial governance during the period of state building known as Tanzimat (1839-1876) by focusing on the ideas of Ahmet Cevdet Pasha (1822-1895), one of the most influential Ottoman bureaucrats and intellectuals at the time. Historians of late Ottoman imperial rule have studied governance primarily as practice by emphasizing negotiation, bargaining, and the flexibility of imperial policy making. Yet the intellectual history of Ottoman governance in the context of the Tanzimat remains seriously understudied. This paper contributes to closing this gap by analyzing the ideas of provincial governance that Ahmet Cevdet developed in connection with his missions as a government inspector to the Ottoman Balkans and Anatolia during the 1860s within the framework of conservatism. Scholarship on Ahmet Cevdet has primarily analyzed his historical thought and his contribution to the codification of civil law. This paper moves beyond these studies by comparing Ahmet Cevdet’s perspectives on imperial governance with those of Edmund Burke (1729-1797) and Henry Maine (1822-1888), two prominent British conservative political thinkers, who wrote extensively about British rule in India. I argue that it is the emphasis on local customs, traditions, and practices as central elements of imperial rule that allows us to identify the ideas of Cevdet Pasha, Burke, and Maine as conservative. However, Cevdet Pasha’s vision of conservative governance differed from those articulated by Burke and Maine in important ways. On the one hand, Cevdet shared Burke’s conservative perspective on imperial governance in that he respected local customs and traditions and recognized that local institutions and elites needed to be incorporated into the running of a given province. Yet, while for Burke Indian society was comparable to and on the same footing with Western civilization, Cevdet viewed the provincial societies he encountered during his inspection tours as ‘not yet civilized.’ However, unlike Maine who dismissed Indian society as fundamentally different and incapable of civilizational uplift, Cevdet insisted that the local people were malleable to be ‘civilized’ and turned into loyal and useful subjects. Thus, Cevdet’s memoirs and inspection reports suggest that his version of conservative imperial governance was not adverse to change but rather sought to strike a balance between change for the sake of ‘civilizing’ these societies and the preservation of local customs, traditions and practices.

When attempting to establish the Algiers Regency in 1830, the invading French forces encountered a confounding problem. Knowledge about land tenure status in Ottoman Algeria remained diffuse. It was recorded in Turkish-language archives that had been destroyed or misplaced during the exiling of Hussein Pacha; held in the Algerian vernaculars of local memory; or simply left in flux, with the nomadic lifestyles of many communities mandating flexible borders and communal use. In this paper I return to the oft-discussed problem of land management in French Algeria, offering a new lens of analysis: the multilingualism endemic to Algerian society. By mid-century, the colony was home not just to indigenous populations who spoke Hebrew, Berber, and Arabic dialects, but also to a growing European settler population that expressed itself in Maltese or Italian as often as it did in French. I show how the francophone administration grappled not just with collecting diffuse forms of knowledge into a single official record, but also with representing that knowledge in a manner suitable to the multilingual populace. If the colony officially remained committed to administration in multiple languages, in practice it struggled to bridge the gap between local communicative practices and official bureaucratic processes. Notarial records and other files on land expropriation, maintained over a fifty-year period (1854-1895) by the Algerian national rail company, form the backbone of this study. These records underscore the ubiquity of colonial translation across the nineteenth century, illuminating the repetitive nature of the acts but also the insecurity of the interpreter corps. Military and judicial interpreters, officially certified to translate in such matters, mediated negotiations and signed these documents, but so too did language professors, merchants, and local grocers. And because the east-west rail axis cut indiscriminately across traditional landholding divides—urban versus rural, arable versus pasture, individually held versus communally used—it is particularly helpful in illuminating the extent to which the colonial administration failed to administer all its populations equally. The bureaucratic inconsistencies evident in supposedly identical expropriation processes highlight the extent to which official procedures and extemporaneous administration combined to ensure inequitable outcomes and entrench the settler colonial state.

Why did the Moroccan nationalist movement adopt an Arab-Muslim identity to demand independence? The main justification offered by the literature is sociological. The urban elite, mostly Arabic speaking and educated in religious institutions, created a space to promote its own culture as the national identity of the country after independence. It sidelined the Amazigh (Berber) identity, mainly rural, and departed from the common European model of nation-building based on the promotion of rural traditions as the new national culture. This paper challenges this monocausal explanation by relying on an interdisciplinary approach combining intellectual history and political theory. By analyzing the discourses of French officials and scholars under the Protectorate and of key Moroccan nationalists, the paper argues that the French Protectorate’s discourse on language, civilization, and race had a crucial effect on the way Moroccan nationalism came to be articulated. An excavation of the colonial archives (Archives berbères) reveals that the Moroccan Berbers were considered as a “good savage” waiting for a “civilization.” French colonial scholarship pictured French civilization in competition with the Arab-Muslim one in “civilizing” the Berbers. By racially distinguishing Arabs and Berbers—portraying Berbers as closer to the European race and, therefore, to the European civilization—the French colonizer instituted a paradigm of language, i.e., what language as a social category means, that the nationalist movement inverted but did not negate. The paper follows the uses of the ideas of civilization, race/ethnicity, and language during and after the Protectorate period, showing that Moroccan nationalism aimed to civilize the Berbers, using similar rhetorical methods as the French, notably claiming that Berbers came from the Middle East and were therefore ethnically Arab. The paper focuses on “Arabization,” understood by the French colonizer as the adoption by Berbers of the Arab-Muslim civilization (and thus had to be avoided at all costs), and put forward by the nationalist movement as the language policy that would revive the identity of the country and achieve cultural decolonization. The paper contributes to the literature on nation-building by showing that the Moroccan nation was not based on a national frame, but on a civilizational one, accepting the terms of the colonizer rather than challenging them. The paper concludes by highlighting how Amazigh advocates put forward the civilizational character of Amazighness in the 1970-80s, before promoting “Moroccaness,” comprising Arabity and Amazighness, that would finally become the main frame of national identity in the 2000s.

Focusing on the local printing and publishing activities revolving around Chinese Muslims’ travels to the Middle East in the early twentieth century, with a case study, this paper analyzes the relations between the travellers and Chinese Muslim’s local publications, Muslim intellectuals’ publishing practice, and the dissemination and readership of knowledge about the Middle East in China. It argues that the travelling to the Middle East provided resources for the Chinese Muslim publishing, and the knowledge produced during the travelling was spread among the local people through the publications and religious and non-religious assemblies, creating a local “social imagination” about the Islamic world. The early twentieth century witnessed a burst of encounters of Chinese Muslims and the Middle East. In the 1920s and 1930s, several Chinese Muslim intellectuals went to the Middle East for Hajj, education and cultural exchange. The travellers to the Middle East interacted with the Muslim press at the time, and the experience of different space-time provided them with writing inspirations and subjects. They formed a writing and translating group, who took advantage of their experience in the Middle East and expanded the international perspective of Chinese Muslim publishing. The publication and dissemination of the travelogues and news made it possible for the experience to reach wider Chinese audiences. With the help of the press and other means of publicity, the general public was also involved in the sharing of information about the Middle East. The travelogues and news, as a kind of Islamic culture spread in the Chinese language, played a role in the formation of collective identity among Chinese Muslims who were at the margins of the Islamic world. The experience of Zhao Zhenwu (1895-1938), a famous Chinese Muslim scholar, represented the trajectory of the travellers’ activities to the Middle East. They realized their own cultural accomplishment during the travel and constructed the active cultural communication network. With the case study of Zhao Zhenwu, this paper also shows the formation and significance of the cultural communication network of Chinese Muslim intellectuals.