This paper focusses on a little-known group of translators of the early nineteenth century, who made some of the first Arabic translations of European Enlightenment writings. Based around the household of a wealthy Syrian Christian merchant in Damietta, Egypt, this circle translated Enlightenment scientific, fictional and historical works from Greek and other languages, through the 1800s and 1810s. Using the surviving manuscript translations, now scattered in various European and Middle Eastern libraries, and accounts from travellers and missionaries, I seek to answer the question of what was novel about this early and hitherto overlooked translation enterprise, and how it can revise our views of the later Nahda. The Damietta circle can potentially claim a number of ‘firsts’ in Arabic translation: the first translations of European novels, of Voltaire and Volney, of Enlightenment European work on the natural sciences. It might be tempting to write it into a familiar account of the advent of modernity, following on from the Napoleonic invasion of Egypt in 1798: modernity’s arrival would then be backdated by a few decades, from Mehmed Ali’s translation and printing project, which reached a peak in the 1830s and 1840s, to these Syrian translators of the 1800s and 1810s. But a closer examination of the contexts of the Damietta circle reveals elements that complicate this straightforward account of the arrival of modernity from Western Europe. Although they had contact with Western Europeans, including the French of the Napoleonic occupation, the Damietta translators were not working directly from English or French works, but largely from Greek translations of the eighteenth-century Modern Greek Enlightenment. They were linked to the Greeks by the ties of Orthodox Christianity as well as trans-Mediterranean trade, suggesting a circuitous Mediterranean route for the arrival of these ‘modern’ texts into Arabic. Meanwhile, Damietta in this period was already known as a centre of intellectual enquiry among both Muslims and Christians; and what evidence we have of the reception of the Damietta translations points less to a simple transmission of European sciences than to dialogue between them and pre-existing knowledge of subjects such as astronomy, physics or religion, leading to further creative intellectual work. As well as revising the standard periodisation of the Nahda, then, the example of the Damietta circle calls into question the notion of the early nineteenth century as above all an age of the transmission of knowledge from Western Europe to the Arab East.

This paper examines the manuscripts that were taught and studied, copied and commented upon, by scholars engaged in the gharib (‘less common’ or 'unusual') sciences like mathematics, logic, astronomy, and divinatory arts in 18th- and early 19th-century Cairo. Using biographical dictionaries from the period as well as manuscripts in the gharib sciences and commentaries on such texts, I examine the chains connecting people to texts in the broader Islamic scholarly context seeking to understand the proliferation of manuscripts in these subjects from this period. This period prior to Bonaparte’s invasion and occupation of 1798-1801 has been dismissed as an ‘age of commentaries’ suggesting that little new or valuable work was produced. The French occupation has been argued as playing a key role in bringing the sciences to Egypt, a claim first made by Bonaparte and his compatriots. I suggest an alternate reading of the commentary tradition and the pre-1798 landscape of al-'ulum al-ghariba, placing both in a social and intellectual context. I argue that authoring a commentary on an earlier work or another commentary (a supercommentary), functioned as a form of intellectual development and was also an effective means of attaching oneself to a prestigious author and text, and a significant cross-temporal community of others linked to that same text and author. Additionally, I use case studies of individuals and manuscript traditions to highlight the intellectual and moral values such as verification and simplification in scholarly practice of the gharib sciences. In conclusion, I suggest the value of re-integrating the gharib sciences into our analysis of the social and intellectual history of this period. The new periodization proposed in this panel suggests that rather than see disinterest in or distancing from scientific or rational thought preceding and even enabling European intervention, we might instead find evidence that pursuit of the sciences became more polarizing in Islamicate societies as a result of increasing European intervention and direct attempts to limit the authority of the ulama. More attention to active study of the gharib sciences among a prominent minority of intellectuals offers the potential to reframe our questions of “response”, “adaptation” or “rejection” of science in the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

In 1833, the well known Azharite, Shaykh Rifa'a al-Tahtawi (1801-1873), wrote a short biography of Peter the Great in a glossary to one of his translations, explaining what he believed were unfamiliar aspects of European geography, culture and society. In 1850 Ahmad al-Tahtawi (d. 1880) translated from French a book solely devoted to Peter the Great. The same year an Arabic manuscript was written by another Azharite, Shaykh Muhammad 'Ayyad al-Tantawi (1810-1861), who conveyed his impressions of Russia and Peter the Great's reforms. These early biographies of Peter the Great were the first of many that followed throughout the 19th century, in Egypt as well as in other regions of the Arab speaking world. They were read and sold decades later, and had a lasting impact on Arabic discourse and historical writing. Written decades before interest in Russia became significant in the Arab speaking world, these three early texts present a fascinating example of Arabic observations of Europe. Indeed, while the 19th century Arab Nahda has been the subject of much recent research, the rich Arabic discourse on European history written within it has not yet been adequately explored. This paper focuses on the shifting social and geopolitical context in which these texts were written and their authors' motivation in writing them. I will show how biographical writing – a long-standing, respectable genre in Arabic literature – was used to depict a European ruler, dead for over a century, exhibiting an early interest in aspects of European history in general and in Russian in particular. Most importantly, I argue, these biographies serve as a way for the authors to reflect upon their own societies, using Russia as an example to explore the notion of reform and progress. Indeed, these litterateurs were particularly intrigued with the huge importance the Tsar, depicted as the founder of modern Russia, placed on the acquisition of education and knowledge as a tool for reform (similar to that sought by the litterateurs themselves). I argue that their texts should be read as reflections of their writers upon their own societies and that these biographies offered the writers and their readers an opportunity to evaluate Peter the Great's reforms and Russia's "progress" without advocating imitation.

The centrality of ideas of ‘Western impact’ or ‘encounter’ to accounts of modernity in the Arab world have lost much of their hold, at least on scholarly views of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. But the notion of the period before ca.1850 as a ‘time before’ remains important for the role it played both for the thinkers of the nahda themselves, in their self-perceptions and appreciation of their own recent history (usually to its discredit), and for their subsequent interpreters in identifying what it was that the movement of the nahda in literature and culture (or those of islah in religion and tanzimat in politics) was reacting to. The long eighteenth century (of c.1700-1830s) in the Arab-Ottoman world, that is, was a time before the ‘reforms’ and ‘revivals’ that sought to rescue culture, state and religion from what would come to be thought of as ‘blind’, unthinking and stagnant ‘exclusive attachment to things inherited from our fathers’, as ‘Abduh would put it. Longstanding discussion of ‘eighteenth century revival and reform’, as well as the newer historiography of the early modern Ottoman empire, has done much to improve our understanding of this period. This paper takes up this question from the remoter margins of the region, to ask how scholars writing in both older and newer idioms, and travelling across both spiritual and political landscapes that were already experiencing momentous change in the century before 1850, envisaged the world around them. Beginning with the world of Husayn b. Muhammad al-Warthilani (ca.1713-79) from the Kabyle mountains of Algeria, as described in his rihla, Nuzhat al-anzar fi fadl ‘ilm al-ta’rikh wa’l-akhbar, the paper explores the continuities and creativities of Maghribi scholarly culture before ca.1850 in its engagements with and understandings of both regional and larger global forces of change, as evidenced by two very different figures, the Mauritanian traveller and ‘alim Ahmad ibn Tuwayr al-Janna al-Shinqiti (d.1848/9) whose account of his pilgrimage in ca.1830 gives a rare insight into the horizons of a scholar from the deep western Sahara, and in the life of the Ottoman-Algerian scholar, merchant and statesman Hamdan b. Uthman Hoca (c.1775-1840), a leading member of the Algiers elite at the time of the French conquest who travelled in England and France and ended his days in exile in Istanbul. All three were much attached to ‘things inherited’; but none lived in a world of closed ‘tradition’ unconcerned with change.