In 1544, less than a decade before he was appointed Professor of Mathematics and Oriental Languages at the recently established College Royal in Paris, Guillaume Postel published his De orbis terrae concordia in which he declared a single world government and a universalist world religion. The king of France would initiate this new world order after leading a successful crusade against the Muslims of the Ottoman empire, preparing the world for the second coming of Christ, the new Enoch whose arrival had been prophesied millennia early in ancient Egypt and preserved in the Corpus Hermeticum. My paper situates Postel's political and religious thought at the origins of the emerging academic study of the Middle East in sixteenth century Europe. In 1936 Postel had been sent as the official interpreter of the French embassy to Suleiman the Magnificent during which time he began collecting Arabic and Hebrew manuscripts related to his esoteric interpretation of religion and world history. He subsequently traveled to Palestine and Syria from 1548 to 1551 and returned with the Arabic astronomical works of al-Tusi, and Hebrew and Aramaic Kabbalistic texts including the Sefer ha-Zohar, Sefer Yetzirah, and the Sefer ha-Bahir (which he translated into Latin and published in 1552). Postel's scholarship illustrates how the origins of Middle East studies were influenced by biblical studies, fascination with the "eastern" sources of esoteric knowledge, and the fusing of Renaissance intellectualism and French nationalism. His seminal Linguarum duodecum characteribus differentium alphabetum introductio (published in 1538) was one of the earliest comparative studies of Semitic languages and literature, including Syriac and Ethiopic. His stated goal was to demonstrate the common origins and fundamental harmony of all human languages, and to provide the means to decipher secret messages encoded in certain texts collected in fifteenth-century Florence. Using philology, the intellectual-social historical approach of the annals school, and a genealogical analysis of knowledge transmission, my paper examines the relationship of Postel's writings to his travels and contacts in the Middle East, his understanding of Renaissance learning, and his position vis-?-vis the royal court in Paris. Such an investigation shows how the earliest European study of the Middle East, severely limited in its range and selection of examples, was tied to ambitious nationalistic goals and a view of culture and religion that was becoming pervasive in sixteenth-century Europe.

This paper explores and makes a definitive connection between European colonial representations of the Middle East and later early 20th century US representations which borrowed heavily from colonialist motifs and yet created a newer, more abstract and undefined "Orient" geared toward consumerism and yet still based on a colonial hierarchy. The paper's specifics rely heavily on the "body" of the belly dancer as an "authentic" representation of Middle Eastern culture on display for consumption by an increasingly mobile and modern US consumer public. By tracing the roots of belly dancing through key historical figures like promoter Sol Bloom and specific US events of the late 19th/early 20th century like the Chicago World's Fair, and the development of the amusement park, the colonial apparatus is clearly visible throughout suggesting a deliberate, public, political and problematic history of misrepresentation.

"I am now the most important man in the entire Ottoman Empire. I have returned the Holy Cities to the true believers; I have carried my victorious armies to places where the power of the Grand Signor was not know, and to places whose people had still not heard of gunpowder." Muhammad Ali's 1825 boast to his French military advisor, Georges Douin, proved prophetic. Less than ten years later, Muhammad Ali's Egyptian armies had campaigned, not only in the Hijaz and Sudan, but fought in Greece, Yemen, and Syria. Historians have followed such military campaigns to articulate a purposeful and progressive plan in which the Pasha of Egypt sought to extend his control over regions outside of Egypt in order to create a rival imperial base to the Ottoman sultan in Istanbul. Yet, this "master plan" for political ascendancy within the Ottoman system also relied on an emphasis of diplomatic equity in which Muhammad Ali attempted to place himself on a equal setting with the Ottomans within the European diplomatic corp. The rebuff of French diplomats by Husayn, the Dey of Algiers, in 1827 and successive raids against French shipping in the Mediterranean initiated a diplomatic crisis that King Charles X, dominated by domestic issues, was reluctant to press beyond a word of wars. Yet, this crisis presented Muhammad Ali with the opportunity to establish the diplomatic equity he sought in European circles. By 1829, Muhammad Ali approached French Foreign Minister Polignac and offered to invade Algeria. Polignac quickly accepted the offer with promises of financial and material support and in January 1830, the French government announced that Egyptian forces would avenge French honor and protect French shipping. Yet, by February 1830, the government of Charles X was forced to back away from their alliance with Egypt due to popular anger and European ridicule. This paper will examine the diplomatic preparations for an Egyptian invasion and occupation of Algeria, in which Muhammad Ali attempted to present himself as, not only an equal to the Ottoman sultan, but to articulate Egypt as rating great power status among European foreign ministries.

NAMING THE LOCAL COSMOPOLITANS: HADHRAMI ARABS AND ASIATIC OTTOMANS OF DUTCH INDONESIA The Dutch colonial state imposed a system of law and government, which divided the subject population into three broad racial categories in its attempt to render "the fluid and confusing relationships" of Indonesia into sufficiently static and useful categories of control . According to the State Regulation passed in 1854, the Chinese, Arabs and the Indians were considered as "foreign easterners" (vreemde oosterlingen) and exempt from the rights that were granted to the Europeans and natives. The anomaly of the Dutch case was further strengthened as the Japanese, unlike the Arabs, Chinese and Indians, were entitled to European status. My paper aims to analyze how the Hadhrami Arabs challenged the already established categories of rule in Dutch colonial government by appealing to Ottoman consuls for obtaining Ottoman citizenship in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Claiming Ottoman citizenship by virtue of birth or descent, the Hadhramis of Indonesia alleged for European status against the Dutch colonial authorities, who initially categorized them under the status of foreign easterners. Trying to carve for themselves an alternative space within the fluid boundaries of rule imposed by the colonial government, the Hadhramis presented themselves as Ottoman citizens and efficaciously challenged the Dutch colonial authorities. As the Hadhramis legitimated their claims for European status upon the idea of citizenship, the Dutch government introduced yet another distinction between "Asiatic" and "European" Ottomans and asserted that the Hadhramis were not entitled to European status for they fell into the former category. Studying the asymmetrical relationship between this one transregional community with the Dutch and Ottoman Empires, I'll complicate the ways in which notions of subjecthood and citizenship were deployed to contest/legitimize the already established categories of rule in Indonesia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By making a thorough analysis of the correspondences between Ottoman consuls in Batavia and the imperial center, I aim to demonstrate the rapidly changing vocabularies and discourses on both sides and argue that the Ottoman local agents did in fact efficaciously challenge the colonial government and created an alternative lacuna to articulate the claims of the Hadramis for Ottoman citizenship.