Intellectual movements in the Arab world resist their reduction to cohesive schools consisting of common conceptual and theoretical grounds. It is difficult, if not impossible, to bring the works of several intellectuals under a common school, whether Marxists, phenomenologist, existentialists, or structuralists. The coordinates of Marxism, for example, once rooted in the Soviet-communist, as well as Arab nationalist, party-forms, underwent a process of transformation in the 1960s. Similarly, Arab intellectuals indebted to Sartrean existentialism could be seen as having had undergone a seismic shift when Sartre fell out of vogue with Arab intellectuals in the wake of the 1967 defeat. Intellectuals such as Georges Tarabishi, Lutfi al-Khuli, Muta’ Safadi, and Mohamad Amin al-Alim were heavily indebted to existentialism despite their divergent political commitments. What remains common in these intellectual pursuits is their aim to produce a new concept of history by positing new historical epistemologies. The two most illustrative figures are the Lebanese theoretician Mahdi Amel and the Moroccan philosopher and historian Abdallah Laroui, who both sought to transform the prevailing concept of history in Arab thought. In order to do that, they, separately, sought to revise contemporary Arabic theoretical practice in light of Marxist thought. Their interest in Arab thought, and its critique, was not to salvage it, but to transmute it into a modern critical discourse—a process referred to as a “Kantian revolution” by Amel, and a “Copernican revolution” by Laroui. This was to be accomplished not by mere conceptual translation of Marxian terminology into Arabic, but by thinking the antagonisms and deadlocks governing Arab post-colonial social formations and producing theoretical systems addressing them. In both Amel and Laroui, there is a confluence of the history of science with the science of history—between historical epistemology and historical materialism. However, their respective projects varied in philosophical orientation and scope, and diverted in key areas. Starting from the question of underdevelopment or temporal lag, they proceeded by defining the conceptual grounds using their own analytic categories of critique before building their theoretical structures. Their respective systems presented competing definitions of modernity and mapped different relations between the specific and the universal. In this paper, I aim to return to modern Arab intellectual debates to remap the coordinates of intellectual production. Taking Amel and Laroui as two exemplars, I explain the transformation of the conceptual categories in the work of some of the chief intellectual figures of the period.

The proposed paper is a critical examination of the intellectual history of Jabal Amel (South Lebanon) during over half a century, from the late 1920s through the early 1980s. I seek to explore the subject by exploring the role played by Hussein Muruwwa in the interaction between the Islamic heritage and secular and progressive ideas and concepts. Through this paper, I will show the intellectual and discursive processes of shaping a Lebanese Shiite political discourse by Muruwwa. First, I will elicit how the principles of Islamic turath, Socialism, liberalism, citizenship (muwatna), nationalism (wataniyya), democracy (dimuqratiyya), and feminism interacted through his ideas. Second, I will explore the modes through which Muruwwa understood these ideas and practices and how he helped in assimilating them into the local culture. Finally, I will answer why he assumed that these ideas/practices were critical to bringing about progress and modernity for the Shiites in Jabal Amel in particular, as well as for the entire Arab world.

The history of pre-mandate Palestine has been underexplored, leaving "entire centuries, whole social groups, and a wide range of fundamental issues... obscure" (Doumani, 1995). This paper aims to illuminate the intellectual and social history of early 19th-century Palestinian society through the writings of Hasan al-Husayni (d. 1811), a prominent Muslim scholar who served as Mufti of Jerusalem for almost 30 years. Unlike previous studies that heavily rely on court records, particularly in investigating the social history of Palestine (e.g., Doumani, 1990, 2017; Tamari, 2008; Tucker, 1988, 2008), this paper examines two other types of sources to explore the social and intellectual history of 19th century Palestine. Hasan al-Husayni left behind two books that constitute rich sources: his collection of fatwas and his biographical work. Following the precedent set by previous studies (e.g., Powers, 1990; Masud, 2009; Skovgaard-Petersen, 1997; Benzing, 1977), fatwas can provide us with a rich source of both social and intellectual history. They include conversations between laypeople seeking advice and scholars responding with references to Sharia sources. These questions and answers, as found in al-Husayni's fatwa collection, provide insight into social practices in early 19th-century Palestine and show colloquial language used by the laypeople. Furthermore, al-Husayni authored a book of biographies of Jerusalemite scholars from the 18th and early 19th centuries. His work not only provides biographical information about these scholars but also illustrates the scholarly relationships between Jerusalemite figures and other scholars in the Muslim world. It elucidates the teacher-student relationships among scholars and the travel undertaken by scholars to and from Jerusalem, shedding light on the cultural and social connections between Palestinian society and other societies in the region. By delving into the multifaceted sources provided by al-Husayni, this paper constructs the network of relationships between scholars from Jerusalem and those from other regions in the Islamic world. It argues that Jerusalem served as a scholarly center during the Ottoman period, fostering robust intellectual connections with other centers across Egypt, Syria, and North Africa. Additionally, the paper offers insights into early 19th-century Palestinian society and emphasizes the significance of new historical materials in enriching our understanding of social and intellectual dynamics in Palestine.

The complex structure of nationalism has given way to thinking that Islam and nationalism are mutually exclusive phenomena for a long time. This epistemological asymmetry is mainly based on the intellectual basis of nationalism, which originated from modern Western methodologies of social sciences, and its encounter with scientific methods of non-Western communities. However, a new dimension provided by the religious nationalism literature resulted in a reevaluation of nationalism and its epistemological asymmetry in different countries. This new dimension, which sees the possibility of a combination of nationalism and religion, was used in this study to understand the religious nationalism experience in the Late Ottoman Period through prominent intellectual and poet Mehmet Akif Ersoy’s essays in the famous Islamist magazine, Sebilü’r-reshad. In detail, this study analyses an under-explored aspect of the Islamist national poet, one of the most famous intellectuals of the late Ottoman period, and the author of the national anthem of modern Turkey: his understanding of religious nationalism. Then, the questions that need to be asked are “Did Mehmed Akif juxtapose Islam and Turkish nationalism? In other words, if so, how did he combine particularistic nationalism and universalist Islam? If there is a difference, how did Akif differentiate between nationalism and Islamism, and what kind of nationalism was he trying to avoid? How Akif reconstructed the concepts of Ummah, millet, country-vatan, and freedom-hurriyya, which all had meaning constructed throughout time and were influenced by religious norms. In other words, how these concepts were used differently from classical Islamic law and Qalam?” In order to answer these questions, I have benefited from two theories, which are “the theory of religious frontiers” and “the theory of multiplexity in Islam”, one is about nationalism and the other is about Islamic disciplines. The article argues that contrary to popular belief, Mehmet Akif Ersoy did not oppose nationalism but rather reinterpreted it in a way that supported it and harmonized it with the ontology, epistemology, and methodologies of Islam. In doing so, it will show to what extent the basic principles of nationalism are harmonized with Islamic law, theology, and Islamic ethics and how modern Turk-Islam synthesis was formed by Mehmet Akif.

More than a hundred and fifty books were published on morality in the last decades of the Ottoman Empire in Ottoman Turkish. The authors of these books came from various regions of the empire, were ethno-confessionally diverse, and subscribed to different yet fluid ideological politico-moral positions. Still, many shared a prescriptive and interventionist outlook as members of reform institutions who frequented the same institutions and social networks. Until recently, historiographic references to the Ottoman morality books portrayed them as expressions of social and political conservativism, loyalty, and piety. A new approach to the morality scripts and their authors is needed to understand the practice of writing and thinking on morality in the context of the Ottoman reform period’s social transformations and changing institutional structures. One way to distance ourselves from a normative, ahistorical, and static reading of these moral scripts would be to focus on things that are seemingly external to the content of these scripts: bureaucratic employment, proessfionalization, networks, and larger power relations. My presentation will examine the practice of writing on morality in the context of the imperial bureaucratic culture by focusing on networks based on institutional affiliations and the shifting grounds of state employment. I will focus on Mekteb-i Mulkiye as the formative context within which a network of moralists studied, taught, discussed morality, learned about their duty of being moral guides, and wrote morality books while working or seeking careers in the Ottoman bureaucracy. These networks included instructors, students, and administrators, whose political positions ranged from dissidents and exiles to conformists. Tracing the divergent (un)employment trajectory of a cohort of Ottoman moralists, this paper will demonstrate how the goal of advancing the moral conditions of the Ottoman public is entangled with the advancement of a bureaucratic career. This paper will utilize archival records (including personnel records), memoirs, and morality scripts. Juxtaposing archival records with autobiographies and morality texts will take us beyond a static approach to morality and expose, through the networks formed within the reform institutions, the social and economic meanings of writing on morality in the final decades of the empire.

This paper will address a gap in the study of Turkish nationalism, which rarely acknowledges the latter’s resistance against orientalism, less still its relationship with the coloniality of Ottoman rule, and highlight the overlapping and cooperation of orientalist and colonial discourses in the production of the nation’s other. To this end, this paper will consider nationalism, orientalism, and colonialism as historically situated discourses, both on a global scale and in the context of the Turkish nation-state, and focus on the early historical discourse of the latter, commonly known as the Turkish History Thesis, to tease out the ways in which the nation-state constructs those on its margins in temporal and spatial terms. Here, the Turkish History Thesis will be interpreted as a spatiotemporal discourse which is required to fulfill the requirements of the nation-state form and, to use Nandita Sharma’s terms, separate “people in place” from “people out of place” but is continuously challenged by its own Ottoman past as it attempts to conform to the only acceptable categories of the postcolonial world order. To develop this argument, the present paper will return to the foundations of the Turkish History Thesis and explore its earliest and most comprehensive expression in a monumental volume titled “The Outlines of Turkish History,” which was prepared under Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s indirect supervision and circulated for the first time in 1931. The analysis of this seminal text will first highlight the ways in which an orientalist gaze grounds European civilization in the Near East while pushing the Orient into the past, constructing a temporally defined tabula rasa in turn. This unresolved competition for space will then be extended to the so-called ethnoreligious minorities of the nation-state, who can challenge the latter on territoriality by laying claim to polities (and thereby histories) older than the history of any Turkish state in Asia Minor. In turn, this problem will be related to the Eurocentric discourse of orientalism and its involvement in the colonial practices of the Ottoman Empire, which will be considered in continuity with the nationalist discourse of the Turkish Republic. Finally, the paper will return to the spatiotemporal construction of the nation’s other and discuss the ways in which colonialism, modernity, and Eurocentrism displace and confine the so-called Oriental or Middle Eastern in a predetermined spatiotemporal framework as the nation-state attempts to displace this gaze by confining its other in the same idea.