While Namik Kemal (1840-1888) is recognized as an important literary figure in late Ottoman history who is still read and remembered in Turkey today, his thought remains poorly understood. The subtleties of his philosophical and political project have not fared well in 20th-century historiography, which preferred to cast him and his fellow Young Ottomans as partaking of the same “modernizing” impulse as the statesman-reformers of the Tanzimat era. Sherif Mardin's 1962 book "The Genesis of Young Ottoman Thought" initiated the work of drawing out the crucial differences among these thinkers, and recent work by scholars of both the late Ottoman period and the European Enlightenment have further prepared the ground for a reconsideration of Namik Kemal's legacy. In this paper, I focus closely on Namik Kemal's concept of “natural law,” a concept that illuminates his intellectual bond with both Enlightenment and Islamic thought. Through close readings of several articles he wrote for the journal Ibret (1870-73), I draw out the parallels and divergences between his and Montesquieu's accounts of natural law. To make sense of Namik Kemal's interest in Montesquieu and other French Enlightenment thinkers, I make use of Dipesh Chakrabarty's approach in his 2000 book "Provincializing Europe" and revisit Sherif Mardin's reading of Namik Kemal to argue for a new interpretation of his thought and its significance in late Ottoman intellectual history.

Works on Arab history at the turn of the twentieth century often focus on how the Arabs interacted with European powers, but seldom study how they interacted with or perceived East Asia. Following some recent pioneering scholarship on Arab-Japan connections during this period, this paper seeks to examine the Arab perception of East Asia through the lens of an important historical event—the first Sino-Japanese War (1894-95). This event, which fundamentally changed the power relations between China and Japan at the turn of the twentieth century, has been the subject of numerous studies, but mainly in the context of East Asian history. Its impact outside the region has rarely been dealt with. What was the response from the Arab world to a seemingly faraway warfare in East Asia? What was the image of East Asia in the eyes of Arab intellectuals before and after the war? How did Arab intellectuals form their perceptions of East Asia? And what were the effects of these perceptions on the following historical developments of the Arab world? These are the major questions I investigate in this paper. I argue that although Arab intellectuals meant to seek inspiration from the rise of Japan and drew lessons from the decline of China for their struggle against European powers, their source of information about East Asia was still often mediated by European languages and modes of knowledge production. European Orientalist writings on China and Japan were picked up by Arab intellectuals of the time and formed an indirect impact on the Arab perception of East Asia. Hence, the title of my paper—mediated imaginations. Exploring such a topic can shed new light on how ideas flew from one periphery to another among non-Western peoples during the high tide of Western global expansion. It hopes to deepen our understanding of world history at large and add to an emerging historiography of transnational scholarship. This paper is primarily based on archival Arabic newspaper reports on the first Sino-Japanese War in the leading newspapers of the time, such as al-Muqtataf. I place these materials in the context of the Arab intellectual awakening and their understanding of the world at the turn of the twentieth century.

Arab constitutionalist movements of the twentieth century failed to realize objectives set out by intellectuals of the Arab Awakening. Among them, al-Tahtawi attempted to expand upon ideas which influenced the Ottoman Hatt-? Hümayun (1856) and Ahd al-Aman (1857) and Tunisian constitution (1860) as instruments of revival for Arab-Muslim civilization. His writings primarily described constitutions as instruments of restrain against tyranny, but also empowered educated elites that would contribute to national prosperity. Such were the aims of reformists in North Yemen (Mutawakkilite Kingdom of Yemen 1918-1962) which shaped the discourse of opposition to Zaydi Imam Yahya Hamid al-Din, leading to the revolt of February 1948. Correlation of ideas formulated by intellectuals of the Awakening and those espoused by Yemeni reformers in the 1940s saw continuity of thought transcending the Islamic sectarian schism. Failures of the constitutionalist movement in North Yemen were many, but few will acknowledge a fundamental failure to empower the people within the movement and the Sacred National Charter (SNC). This paper will examine ideas regarding the relationship between ruler and ruled put-forth by reformists in North Yemen (1940s) by analyzing the text of the Sacred National Charter as translated by the British Government in Aden and Professor J. Leigh Douglas. Analysis of the SNC text will provide insight to the ideas of major influence as well as the degree of influence exerted by the suspected authors of the document, the Muslim Brotherhood. My work aims to contribute to the understanding of the roots of Arab constitutionalism in the early twentieth century, its successes and failures. In addition, writings by al-Farabi, al-Tahtawi, al-Kawkabi, and other Arab writers such as the Egyptian Khalid Muhammad Khalid and organizations like the Muslim Brotherhood under Hasan al-Banna will help provide a better understanding of the origins and development of reformist ideas that influenced Yemen’s movement. While this historical precedent influenced events of the 1962 revolution establishing the Yemen Arab Republic and ending a thousand years of Imamic rule, the paper will focus on major failures of the 1948 coup to restructure the persistent condition of people as subjects (ra’iyah) within the context of relations between ruler and ruled. Some observers have argued the constitutionalist movement failed from the start due to its lack of contact with the masses, a similar argument was formulated by reformers against Imam Yahya.

In December of 1980, the Egyptian judge and public intellectual Tariq al-Bishri (b. 1933) used his slot as a featured speaker at the Center for Arab Unity Studies’ annual conference in Beirut to come out, so to speak, as a neo-Islamist. Having been regarded for over a decade as a pillar of Egypt’s nationalist Left as well as a leader of its new generation of scientific-socialist historians, al-Bishri argued in Beirut that the Arab nationalist project must negate its secular character and incorporate Islam as a central element in order to survive in Egypt. He insisted that achieving independence required the re-structuring of the modern Arab knowledge hierarchy to replace its foreign wafid (imported) elements—-its secular principles, especially—-with native mawruth (inherited) epistemic and moral structures, the most important of which, al-Bishri significantly asserted, is the shari’a. Delivered at a historical moment when the question of basing Egyptian legislation on shari’a law formed the battlefront between the then-waning Arab nationalist current and burgeoning political Islamist movement, al-Bishri’s emergence in favor of shari’a marked his defection from the Egyptian Left and the beginning of his life as a so-called Islamist thinker. In contrast to the description common to both Arab and Western scholarship of his metamorphosis as a naqla (shift) or hijra (emigration) to a reformist strand of wasati (mainstream) Islamism that grew out of the Muslim Brotherhood, my paper argues that the Islamist direction taken by al-Bishri and many thinkers of his generation in the late 1970s constituted an evolution of Arab nationalism itself, rather than a bona fide defection to another intellectual tradition. Beginning with al-Bishri’s socialist writings in the mid-1960s, I delineate a nationalist trajectory that reached Islamist conclusions on its own by the late 1970s, well before the rise of the wasati Brothers. Indeed, al-Bishri and his contemporaries were driven by a purpose all their own: the revision and revival of the post-colonial nationalist project that they had spent their careers building and defending until its shocking 1967 defeat against Israel and subsequent collapse over the Sadat era. As my interview with al-Bishri and analysis of his work reveal, his generation’s concerns with the religious-cultural heritage (turath), authenticity (asala), and civilizational independence, which together comprise the basis of their neo-Islamist positions, were not new but, in his own words, “had an interior basis” in the nationalist project that they were bequeathed as young men.