In the announcement of the shortlist of the 2020 Arabic Booker prize, the chair of the judging panel Muhsin al-Musawi described the majority of the novels on the list as being “historical fiction” and being “occupied with the oppressive effect of history, past and present, but they do not merely retell this history or current reality.” This illustrates the fact that the genre of historical fiction that appeared with the Nah?a and has seen a surge in recent decades, continues to hold sway over MENA literary production, reconfiguring notions of history, its frameworks and the archive and offering competing discourses of what constitutes historical consciousness. In this paper, I will be examining the historical fiction of the Morrocan intellectual and writer ?asan ?r?d (1962) specifically Rab?? Qur?uba (Cordoba’s Spring) 2018 and al-M?risk? (The Morisco) 2011 that was originally written in French Le Morisque and was translated into Arabic by ?Abdel-Kar?m al-Juwe??. I will be situating his historical fiction within his larger intellectual production and the various roles in which he has engaged with history and the production of historical knowledge, as he was the official historian of the kingdom of Morocco (November 2009-December 2010).Other ways he has engaged with historical knowledge production is by via his position as the director of the ?ariq bin Ziy?d studies and research centre, and as a consultant and frequent contributor to the Moroccan magazine Zamane that specializes in “historical research”. Positioning him in conversation with the Moroccan historian, intellectual, novelist and theorist ?Abdall?h al-?Arw? (1933-) and his historical epistemology of history, I argue that while both intellectuals’ positions stem from both a postcolonial critique of the “West” and its epistemes as well as a critique of Arab thought and a call for reform, ?r?d’s position calls for a greater engagement with notions of indigeneity.

Modern Arab Theater has become an important arena of cultural production in numerous countries of the Arab World. Modern playwrights have used native, traditional, foreign, and original stories as source material for their creative works. One of the most productive sources over the last century of dramatic writing for tragedy in Arab theater has been the pre-Islamic tale of the War of al-Basus, along with the medieval saga’s expansion of that story in Sirat al-Zir Salim Abu Layla Muhalhil bn Rabi`, focussing on the avenging anti-hero of the forty-year blood feud war. This paper examines a (growing) number of theatrical recastings of this story for the stage and small screen, and the literary, dramatic and social functions of tragedy which these works provide their contemporary audiences, geared for specific historical circumstances in which the piece was produced. In this fashion, we uncover some bases of the reproduction of Arab cultures from generation to generation, consider the cultural weight and legitimacy with which the roots of this story endow modern productions, and analyze the modern message or critique being offered by way of any specific adaptation of the tale. The works in question include MaSra` Kulayb (1947) by Muhya Din al-Hajj `Isa al-Safadi, al-Muhalhil (1962) by Muhammad `Abd al-Mun`im Radwan, Salim al-Zir (1967/1985) by Alfred Faraj, Harb al-Basus (1968) by `Ali Ahmed BaKathir, al-Zir Salim (1977) by Mahfoudh Abd al-Rahman, al-Muhalhil (first of a three part work for theater entitled Mawt al-Hakawati)(1988) by Muhammad Abu Matouq, Hadiqat al-Murr (1993) by Farouq Khurshid, al-Zir Salim (1993) by Ghannam (Sabir) Ghannam, Harb al-Basus (1999) by Shawqi `Abd al-Hakim, al-Zir Salim (2001) by Mamduh `Udwan, Kayd al-Basus (2002) by Darwish al-Asyuti, and Fakhkh al-Na`amah (2017) by Ahmad Siraj. These works span the Arab World, with versions from Palestine, Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Tunisia. The historical circumstances of the writing, and the internal content of some of these works suggest that they comment on various stages of the Palestinian and Israeli conflict, while others seem to comment on other major conflicts and events contemporary with their composition which may have precipitated the retelling of the ancient story to bring the functions of tragic drama to bear on the intended contemporary audience. This study attempts to analyze these various versions of the ancient story in their historical contexts, as literary and dramatic pieces, and and their function as tragedy for their contemporary cultures.

In his book Ibn Khaldun’s Philosophy of History, Muhsin Mahdi identifies Ibn Khaldun with the figure of the philosopher in Ibn B?jja’s Regime of the Solitary, a lonely rational investigator (f??i?) constantly in flight from ideological opponents and easily manipulated mobs. This image of the solitary philosopher was once identified as the appropriate metonymy for the condition of Islamic philosophy, allegedly a short-lived project stifled by the intransigence of Islamic religious thought and cultural incompatibility. This narrative has been largely debunked by modern scholarship but the question of the difficulty of the philosophical pursuit still looms in the background. This paper takes up the example of Ibn Khaldun’s status as an alienated historian and lonely rational investigator through his autobiography (al-Ta?r?f b? Ibn Khald?n wa ri?latihi gharban wa sharqan) as well as his reception in contemporary Tunisian fiction, in which his solitariness is repurposed. It aims to explore how in Ibn Khaldun’s self-narrative as well as in his afterlife in the fictional worlds of Hussein El-Wad’s and Kamel Riahi, political power, rather than cultural incompatibility, emerges as the limit experience of the philosophical pursuit (in the Foucauldian sense of the experience of both the condition of the intensification of something and its impossibility). In Ibn Khaldun’s autobiography and modern Tunisian texts, the political, rather than the cultural, represents the site of hope for philosophical thought as well as its alienating betrayal. Ibn Khaldun conceived of history as the locus of rational and moral education that can help political elites found and maintain prosperous polities. He devoted his career to this pedagogical role. His hopes were often undermined by short-sighted political expediencies forcing him into a life of constant exile. This life of ambition and disenchantment with power is taken up by the aforementioned authors, rendering Ibn Khaldun a morose critic of the irrationalities of the neoliberal state and its betrayal of its population. This paper investigates, then, the interplay between the philosophical and the political in Ibn Khaldun’s life and his cultural afterlife.

Until the 1950’s, the Armenian Genocide was either overlooked or discursively denied in Turkish literature. And in the 50’s, as the rise of socialist realist literature opened up a space for writers to distance themselves from the official narratives of the Turkish state and the deportation of Ottoman Armenians entered the discursive world of novels, the event became one of the many other disastrous events such as war and famine that the oppressed classes were subjected to throughout history. The singularity of the Armenian Genocide as a Catastrophe began to be mentioned in Turkish literature only after the 1990’s, coinciding with the emergence of public and political discussions on the concepts of identity and recognition. However, while trying to find a way to break the silence around what has been publicly called the “Armenian issue,” the first literary narratives on the subject were unable to go beyond a discursive recognition of the suffering of the Ottoman Armenians. The few novels that were written about the issue in the 2000’s linked that suffering to the present day by bringing the concept of confrontation into the literary world. All the same, those literary texts that were written with the intention to bear witness to the Catastrophe of the Armenians failed to ask the essential question at the heart of the event while building their narratives around the suffering of Armenian characters: What is it that Turkish literature can witness regarding the Armenian Genocide? Literature as a site of loss, trauma and mourning has been one of the main areas of interest for literary critics and scholars since the second half of the 20th century. Specialized fields such as trauma literature or literature of mourning have grown out of the need and desire to understand the world-shattering experience of loss that the survivors of events such as war, genocide, political oppression were going through in the aftermath of those calamities. And yet, we find almost nothing written on the perpetrator’s experience on this extensive body of trauma literature. By looking at the traces and symptoms of the Armenian Genocide in Turkish fiction this paper examines the nature of genocidal repression, its return and the textual unconscious in the literature of the perpetrator.

In 2016, in his speech at the opening ceremony of a new state television channel in English, TRT World, President Erdogan of Turkey said: “Until the lion tells his side of the story, the tale of the hunt will always glorify the hunter” to encourage producers promoting the “true” Ottoman legacy to younger generations. Now, TRT (Turkish state broadcaster) became the hub of television dramas about the Ottoman history such as Once Upon a Time in The Ottoman Empire: Rebellion (2012), Resurrection: Ertugrul (2014-2019), Ciragan Incident (2014), Filinta (2014-2016) and Payitaht: Abdulhamid (2017-). TRT-sponsored TV series apparently serve not only to support the neo-Ottomanist propaganda but also to pave a path to present a new cultural hegemonic ambition called as “New Turkey” by reconstructing the Ottoman past for the Turkish public.   This research will identify the social network and cultural production process of Turkish state-sponsored historical fictions while scholarly literature generally stresses on the content and impact of the series. My proposed research specifically focuses on the case of “Payitaht: Abdulhamid” which depicts the last decade of Sultan Abdulhamid II’s reign (r.1876-1909). In this TV drama, Abdulhamid II is depicted as an ideal ruler who is making an enormous effort to protect the Ottoman Empire against both internal and external threats. He was also known as a highly authoritarian reformer that pursued reform policy not only to modernize his empire but also consolidating his power for his one-man regime. Many believe that producers of the Payitaht attempt to represent Abdulhamid II as a ruler, who had very similar challenges that Erdogan allegedly faced by constructing parallelism on topics of this drama to the contemporary issues in Turkey. This study will explore social connections such as family ties, financial relations, and interest group between the production team and political authorities by mapping these interconnections to understand better how and through what mechanisms they attempt to shape the very narrative of 'New Turkey's history with television series.