My paper studies how ideas about sectarianism, coexistence, and interfaith relations are reflected in the literary works of Farah Antun (1874-1922) and Ishaq Shami (1888-1949). While Antun was a Christian-Orthodox Lebanese who wrote in Arabic, and Shami was an Arab-Jew who was born in al-Khalil (Hebron) and wrote in Hebrew, their texts convey similar ideas regarding the ways in which religious minorities can survive in nation states and multiethnic empires. Both authors convey much admiration to multiethnic and multi-religious empires, and express concerns from racism, chauvinism, and oppression of religious groups. Antun’s historical novel, The New Jerusalem (Urshalim al-Jadida) takes place during the Arab conquest of Jerusalem (637 AD). It focuses on Iliya, a devoted Christian, who falls in love with Esther, a Jewish woman who comes to Byzantine Palestine from Alexandria. Iliya saves Esther when a Christian mob discovers her religious identity and attempts to lynch her. During the course of the novel, Palestine is conquered by the Muslims, and Iliya grows to appreciate their faith and decides to join the Arab forces. I will demonstrate how Antun, who believed that the Ottoman Empire should be supported by the Arabs as the protector of the Middle East from colonialism, projected his pro-Ottoman views onto the medieval Arab past and how he called for social justice and equality within an imperial framework. Ishaq Shami's novella, The Last Keeper of the Mosque (Shomer ha-Misgad ha-Aharon) opens in Palestine of the early 1920s, but takes its readers to Bulgaria during the Balkan wars. It deals with Haj Sadiq, a mosque's keeper and an imam, who lives in a Bulgarian village, and tries to come to terms with the rise of ethnocentric nationalism, as more and more Muslims around him disappear and migrate, and as he become suspect in the eyes of his Christian neighbors. Haj Said is eventually lynched by a local angry crowd. Shami's attempt to narrate the pains of Haj Sadiq conveys his sorrow for the fate of minorities in nation states (as opposed to multiethnic empires). Moreover, he indicates that this sort of ethno-nationalism will also destroy Muslim-Jewish relations in Palestine. I focus on the scenes of lynch and mob violence in both texts to show how both authors argued that religious persecution was not motivated by dogma but rather by ignorance and sadism. I likewise explore the political solutions both authors presented for the question of religious minorities.

In this talk, I will explore two relatively forgotten Arab historical representations of Zenobia, Queen of Palmyra. I will focus on two historical novels named after the queen, Salim Bustani’s novel Zanūbia, published serially in al-Jinān in 1871-1872, and Zanūbia, Malikat Tadmur, by Muhammad Farid abu-Hadid (1941). By placing these two novels side-by-side, I hope to draw out shifting notions of gender, nation, and literary form. In this talk, I will argue that Bustani, who turned his literary attention to the historical novel after experimenting with the national romance in al-Huyām fi Jinān al-Shām (1869-1870), uses the form of the historical novel in order to stake a claim for a new Arab identity rooted precisely in its potential as a crossroads. If al-Huyām fi Jinān al-Shām was, as Stephen Sheehi has argued, preoccupied with a confrontational attitude towards Europe and the West, Zanūbia is Bustani’s attempt to use history in order to imagine other possibilities. Bustani, in his historical preface, highlights Palmyra’s place as a crossroads of ancient civilizations, and its queen as a figure who embodies a cross-cultural ethos literally and figuratively, in which she “gathers in her breast the wisdom of the Greeks, the science of the Romans and the letters (ādāb) of the Syrians, and has learned the Latin language, and knows well the Greek and Syriac language and perhaps – who knows (ma adrāna) even Arabic as well” (29) – even her physical features are described as being in the middle between white and tan (29). On the other hand, for Abu-Hadid writing in an Egypt under British rule, the novel’s subject matter becomes fodder for an Arab nationalist discourse that claims Zenobia as a fighter of European oppression, while producing a prescriptive paradigmatic femininity in which the queen’s roles as a wife and lover takes precedence. What can these two texts, written seven decades apart, contribute to scholarship in history and literature that engages with shifting notions of the nation, gender and the novel form?

My paper explores how literary modernity in Ottoman Turkish and Arab literatures played out in the historical novels of the Syrian Christian author Jurji Zaydan (1861-1914) and Turkish author Ahmet Hikmet Muftuoglu (1870-1927) at the beginning of the twentieth century. The historical novels of these authors were serialized in the journals Al-Hilal in Egypt and Tasvir-i Efkar in the Ottoman Empire. I argue that through fiction, both authors use historical settings as analogy for existing hierarchies of gender and race at the beginning of the twentieth century in Egypt and the Ottoman Empire. Women’s seclusion, education, rights, freedom and roles in society were crucial debates among intellectuals both in Cairo and in Istanbul at the beginning of the twentieth century. By analyzing how Zaydan and Muftuoglu treat these issues in their fiction, we can discern their views on women’s rights and roles as influenced by the increasingly active female voices of the “women’s press” in the Ottoman Turkish and Arab public spheres. By looking at the ways in which serialization shaped the way fiction is presented, we see the emergence of new avenues in which ideas on social issues and modernity were transmitted to the public. The paper thereby attempts to show how Zaydan and Muftuoglu, writing serialized and popular works of fiction as male intellectuals, repeat/validate some gender stereotypes and hierarchies while criticizing and attempting to modify others. At the turn of the century, these issues were widely discussed and prominent in the public spheres of Istanbul and Cairo, and by analyzing these fictional works in their context, we can trace how these debates are reflected in the realm of serialized, popular historical fiction.

The well-known nineteenth century Ottoman novelist, journalist,and “public intellectual” Ahmet Midhat Efendi mostly wrote fictions with contemporary settings, but there were a few exceptions. Of these, the majority were set in the later eighteenth century, during the reign of the first “modern reforming”sultan, Selim III. This paper considers two such works, Dunyaya Ikinci Gelis yahut Istanbul'da Neler Olmus (Rebirth; or, What Happened in Istanbul) and Yeniceriler (Janissaries). These novels are both romances and picaresques: They paint a vibrant image of everyday life in Istanbul, including its taverns and places of entertainment, as well as of remote corners of the Empire; at the same time they address the plight of unprotected women and orphans, and the corrosive effects of slavery (both male and female). Ahmet Midhat Efendi is known as both a modernizer and a defender of conservative social mores. These historical novels, set at the dawn of the Ottoman great age of reforms, provide an invaluable window into the analysis of an important late nineteenth century intellectual and publicist around interlocking questions of cultural authenticity and integrity, pervasive corruption, lack of economic growth, and the so-called “woman question.”