The geographical and institutional locations of modern European scholarly practice are well known. Largely unknown and scarcely acknowledged are those practices of non-European historians, archaeologists, philosophers, critics, and philologists. Reading and engaging their work reveals histories of Arab thought distinct from those which have been narrated simply in relation to European knowledge and colonial depositories. By adjusting the sources from which modern Arab history is customarly produced, both the kind of materials and their location, the Arab world’s place in global intellectual history generally and the history of the global south in particular, becomes ever clearer. This paper accounts for one south-south intellectual encounter by following the anti-colonial poet, lawyer and translator Wadi’ al-Bustani (1888-1954), as he moved from Mount Lebanon to Cairo, Hudaydah, Bombay, Transvaal, and finally Haifa. Along with essays on Indian culture and translations of Rabindranath Tagore’s poetry and plays, Bustani spent decades translating and annotating Arabic renditions of the Mahabharata, the Ramayana, and Kalidasa’s Shakuntala. In 1947 he told an interviewer who had asked him why he had undertaken this task, that “the translations of India’s epics into European languages opened new doors in fiqh al-lugha, al-philologiyya. Today, if you look at any comprehensive English language dictionary you will see that many English words have their origins in Sanskrit. If we translate these texts into the Arabic language we will notice the same thing.” Bustani’s translations of and commentaries on these Indic texts and the philological project he saw himself a part of, speak to the new forms of knowledge that circulated in the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Drawing on the traces of Bustani’s life and work in the British, Israeli, and Indian archives, as well as his family’s personal papers in Lebanon, this paper demonstrates his place in the politics and literature of the Eastern Mediterranean and within an intellectual history that stretched across the Indian Ocean, and finally, the globe.

The paper discusses Asad Rustum and Constantine Zurayq’s work on the history of historiography, investigating its centrality to their pedagogical endeavours. It argues that in their writing and teaching, Rustum and Zurayq placed Arab and Islamic historiography in the middle of a civilizational sequence between the Greco-Roman tradition of history writing and that of Enlightenment Europe. Historiography, therefore, served as the vessel for bringing the Arab world into a narrative of global civilizational progress. And pedagogy, for Rustum and Zurayq, served as a tool for cementing this narrative into a collective consciousness. The paper begins with a history of historiography in its Arab/Arabic iteration, investigating when and how historiography was first taken up as a core component of students’ training in history at the Syrian University (SU) and the American University of Beirut (AUB) from the 1930s and until the late 1950s. It then discusses the professionalization of the historical discipline in the practice of Rustum who drew on methods of ’isn?d developed for the verification of ?ad?th, and analogized this Arabo-Islamic methodology to modern, ‘scientific’ European historiographical practices. The paper moves on to discuss how Zurayq embraced Rustum’s claims of a purportedly scientific Arabic historiography in order to narrate the key Arab role in civilization’s march towards modernity. Zurayq therefore establishes a genealogical lineage to his modern project of Arab nationalism. Pedagogy serves as both the vehicle, but also the incubator in which this project came to be developed and cemented into the collective consciousness of the educated elite. In examining how ideas are transformed and operationalized in curricula, I hope to expand the site and archive of intellectual history beyond published works and into pedagogical and administrative archives. Specifically, the paper draws on lecture notes, textbooks and other course material on the history of historiography at SU and AUB. I will read those sources in tandem with two monographs on the same topic: Rustum’s Mustalah al-Tarikh (1939) and Zurayq’s Nahnu wal-Tarikh (1959). Reading educational archives alongside published works reveals how ideas flow and develop across the classroom and the monograph.

The archives of the Nahdah have been vigorously revisited in the past decade in order to excavate either lineages of intellectual history, or to investigate our understanding of Arab literary history. Exemplifying the former are intellectual histories that reveal genealogies of concepts or modes of thought, as is the case with psychoanalysis, Darwinism, and Marxism; exemplifying the latter are literary histories that read the creation of new literary forms alongside not only the formation of the nation and nationalist thought, but to the blossoming of a capitalist world system. In this presentation, I will focus on the work of Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq to provide a bridge between the two disciplines of intellectual history and literary history. Approaching the work of al-Shidyaq, including his four volume, Leg Over Leg, as well as his journalistic work, I show how his intellectual project can give us lessons in literary criticism as well as historiography, and in doing so, approaches what Edward Said called “secular criticism.” I read al-Shidyaq’s negotiation of the concept of civilization alongside his attempts at writing a unique book like Leg Over Leg. In this way, we can simultaneously trace his participation in the intellectual field of the Nahdah, while also saving the text from the redundancies and reductions of a historiography premised on the paradigm of dependence and resistance. Finally, the paper ponders how this approximation of literary history and intellectual history invites us to see Arabic literature as part of the literary world, and modern Arab thought as part of World History.

This paper contributes to the growing scholarship on the formation of modern disciplines of knowledge which is at the intersection of nationalism and state-building. I trace the evolution of Persian Studies as a modern academic discipline in Egypt since the early twentieth century. The aim is to employ Persian studies as a case study of Eastern orientalism; second, to shed light on the long-overlooked Iranian contribution to modern Egyptian thought while examining how the state -as the main agent in structuring a scholarly discipline - has politicized the growing scholarship on Iran in Egypt. After the Iranian Revolution in 1979 exposed the knowledge vacuum on modern Iranian history and society, unprecedented growth in Persian academic programs and publications took place during the last three decades. I argue that the politically motivated demand for Persian Studies has expanded the field of Persian scholarship from focusing on medieval Persian literature to a contemporary Iranian politics and society. In studying the legacy of traditional study of classical Persian literature and in studying contemporary Iranian politics, Egyptian scholars utilized the Iranian experience to answer questions concerning Egyptian realities, and the Iranian trajectory inspired Egyptian scholars in their search for authentic modernity. Meanwhile, Persian Studies in Egypt, like most academic disciplines, have increasingly become vulnerable to the bureaucratization and politicization associated with the state’s control over higher education institutes and most of the publication industry