The Murder of the third Caliph, Uthman b. Affan, and the subsequent Civil War between Ali and Mu’awiya certainly constitute the first great rupture in Islamic Civilization. How were these events understood by writers at another moment of rupture – namely the encounter with western Europe? My paper analyzes the second volume of Taha Husayn’s Al-Fitna al-Kobra, the volume on “Ali and his sons.” Clearly all of the relevant characters, as Companions (and descendants) of the Prophet, have a rarified status that in many ways catapults them outside of history for Muslim writers. However, Taha Husayn, as a scholar trained in traditional Islamic and modern European sources and methods, has a unique perspective. Moreover, he was a part of the reformist Islamiyyat movement that reinterpreted early Islamic events in order to draw modern lessons. So what lessons does Taha Husayn draw? I am asking several questions: 1. How does Taha Husayn frame Ali’s succession and whether he should punish Uthman’s murderers? 2. How does he analyze the hope for a fresh start, albeit inaugurated in violence, of Ali’s caliphate and the descent into division and civil war? 3. How does he portray those who opposed Ali? 4. In what ways does his presentation of Ali and his sons engage with Sunni versus Shii polemic ? 5. How does he present the martyrdom of these first Shii Imams? Taha Husayn, along with other Islamiyyat writers, presented Islam as inaugurating an ideal democratic and just society; it was thrown off course by the fitna. The events of Ali’s caliphate are reminiscent of those currently unfolding in Egypt. A group rises up against a supposedly corrupt ruler and the new leader is supposed to right the wrongs of his predecessor, punish the perpetrators, and restore unity to the community. In the end no one is satisfied and efforts to legitimize their dissatisfaction only drive the divisions deeper. This raises additional questions: when is forgiveness weak? partisan? high minded? When the community has gotten off track, is it possible to be set right again, and if so, how and by whom? This paper builds on my earlier research on the medieval historiography of al-fitna al-kobra. It also serves as a bridge to a future project analyzing how the formative events of the early Islamic period are being re-interpreted and redeployed by contemporary scholars and commentators in light of the events of the Arab Spring.

This paper proposes an outline for a conceptual history of two modern Arabic words for revolution—-inqilab and thawrah—-that have taken center-stage in post-Arab Spring discourse. In current usage, thawrah is understood to mean a democratic, popular movement that engenders bottom-up change while inqilab designates a coup d’etat that enforces elite will upon the masses. This is evident, for example, in recent framings of attempts by entrenched political actors in post-Mubarak Egypt to impose constitutional reforms as an “inqilab against the thawrah,” implying a hijacking, thwarting and containment of the people’s revolution. This paper raises the diachronic questions of when and how inqilab and thawrah acquired their contemporary meanings over the 19th and 20th centuries, as well as posing a synchronic inquiry into the inescapability that characterizes these concepts’ relation to one another. Thawrah, inqilab and their derivatives often appear in texts together, posed in dialectical opposition, in dialogue, or used interchangeably. My readings of individual texts in their discursive contexts highlight this unique representational aspect of the concepts’ respective meanings and thereby lay the groundwork for theorizing its significance. My investigation into inqilab and thawrah traces their trajectories through semantic-ideological fields centered around a series of “revolutionary” events that starts with the Young Turks’ Constitutional Revolution, passing through the interwar nationalist uprisings and mid-century free officers’ coups, to end with the Arab Spring. I thus engage with a range of texts, including Ruhi al-Khalidi’s The Ottoman Revolution (1908), Qunstantin Zurayq’s The Meaning of the Nakba (1948), Gamal ‘Abd al-Nasser’s Philosophy of Revolution (1966), and ‘Azmi Bshara’s On Revolution and the Potential for Revolution (2012), in addition to drawing upon various Arabic lexicons. My analysis indicates that thawrah did not fully gain its contemporary conceptual baggage until the mid-20th century, when post-colonial Arab regimes framed their “revolutionary” state praxis as thawrah. Before then, thawrah was understood as chaotic popular revolt that was separate from inqilab, which had been a term of purchase used since the early 20th century to describe systematic structural (political and legal) change, only to be narrowed over the century’s latter half into a term for coup. My paper reveals the diverse discussions of thawrah and inqilab as similarly working to articulate a temporality that mediates and legitimates the transformative entrance of an inherited (Arab and/or Islamic) historical subjectivity into a universal teleology of progress at the site of the modern revolutionary event.

From Arendt to Agamben, the concept of ‘refugee’ pieced together a set of liminal problematics decisive for a savage genealogy of sovereignty in Europe. Refugee's nakedness was coupled with 'its' contentless presence. Refugee has no bearings; he is abandoned by God and Nation-State. In this paper, I will journey back in time to traverse ruins of Europe in order to to challenge the European identity machine. Starting with the occupation of Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1862 and ending with the Balkan Wars of 1912-3, Muslims were not only purged but also became 'muhajirs'. Ottoman archives deliberately make a distinction between refugee (mülteci) and muhajir populations. Muhajir is the person who migrates because he is not able to exist in his homeland as a Muslim. Refugee and Muhajir, and the latter’s invisibility, are this paper's subjects. Refugee, presented as a zero-point, is a creature of a political-theology like Muhajir. History remained indifferent to Muhajir. When Europe was returned to its ‘rightful owners’, ‘Muhajir’s were left without a history only to take upon themselves garbs of new nationalities. I will draw out the contours of an assemblage that is buried under the nationalization of Muhajir and the universalization of Refugee. Thus, Muhajir goes through a double abandonment: Muhajir, reduced to a transitional situation, gets erased from national histories. Secondly, for Muhajir to secure a future in the time of nation-states, he has to forget where he came from. But what made this forgetting possible? Why ‘Muhajir’ turned into an impossible name to bear? This paper is a study in concept history that thinks with Skinner and Foucault with a view to ‘emergence’ (Rheinberger and Haverkamp). Emergence theory starts not with conclusions, but historically intensive moments that reveal, in a nutshell, potentialities surrounding an event. Rather than retroprojecting from the national histories ‘a history of state formation’, I disenclose the historiographic conventions and givens. Muhajir gives us a chance to resist sociological reductionism of everything to social, and allows us to penetrate the historical ways of knowing oneself and others that are lost to present.