Writing and Contesting History in Egypt and Syria in the Late-19th and Early-20th Centuries
Panel 034, 2009 Annual Meeting
On Sunday, November 22 at 8:30 am
Panel Description
This panel examines how Egyptian and Syrian writers understood and used history in the late- nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. In addition to providing fresh analysis of previously unexplored texts, writers, and themes, the panel’s papers engage with current understandings of modern history and historical methodologies. Our discussant and chair will contribute to these discussions.
Recent works have reexamined the evolution of modern historical writing in Egypt and Syria, increasing the scope for additional inquiry and debate. One contribution in particular links Egyptian historical writing, state-building and modernization.
Our panel advances scholarship on both historical inquiry and state and society in this period. We focus on four issues: (1) the professionalization of history, (2) the crystallization of methodological sensibilities (which were sometimes at odds with European sensibilities), (3) the relationship between historical studies and broader Arab intellectual discourse, and (4) the purposes for which historians wrote and used history.
Our first paper, [History as a Hobby in Interwar Egypt: Memoirs, Modernity and Muhammad ‘Abd al-Jawad], discusses the experimental approach of an amateur historian who wrote a major treatise on Dar al-‘Ulum, a biography and two memoirs. The author was a schoolteacher with little formal training as a historian, yet his works reveal particular ideas about what a ‘modern’ history should be.
[“And I saw no reason to chronicle my life”: Between the Autobiography and Diaries of Fathallah Barakat Pasha] contrasts Barakat’s daily diary and dictated autobiography to add to our understanding of both historical events and the construction of public and private personal narratives in this period. (Barakat was Wafd leader Saad Zaghlul's nephew and initially tipped to succeed him; his papers are held privately.)
Our third paper, [Egyptian and Syrian Views on the Historical Relationship between Islamic and Roman Law], analyzes three academic articles from 1929 written by prominent Egyptian and Syrian jurists. The articles argue strenuously against the European notion that early Islamic law borrowed from Roman law. They are windows into the mindset and methodologies of Islamic legal thinkers, showing their impact on popular and scholarly history.
Finally, [Contested Knowledge: Historiography in the 19th Century Arabic Science Journal, al-Muqtataf] argues that historiography in al-Muqtataf is contested and linked to resisting the colonial classification of nations as regressive or progressive. Egyptian and Syrian writers in al-Muqtataf involved themselves in re-writing histories of civilization and specific races and languages, presenting an alternate, more inclusive definition of what is civilized.
The historical writing of an amateur historian – Dar al-‘Ulum instructor Muhammad ‘Abd al-Jawad – gives scholars a window through which to examine how effendis viewed the past and ‘modern’ attempts to record it.
‘Abd al-Jawad’s most prominent work is the 900 page Taqwim Dar al-‘Ulum, which is part history, part yearbook. His historical works also include a biography of Shaykh al-Husayn Ibn Ahmad al-Marsafi and two memoirs of his childhood, one focusing on the village in which he was born and the other on life as a teenager in Cairo.
However, ‘Abd al-Jawad was professionally trained as a teacher, not a historian. He may not have been exposed to the ‘modern’ discipline of history until his first year at Dar al-‘Ulum, the higher school that trained shaykhs to be teachers. He spent the majority of his working life teaching in various government schools.
In scattered essays in the Taqwim and other publications, ‘Abd al-Jawad discusses his approaches to writing history, especially the importance he placed on recording the recent past. His (extremely rare) memoir Fi Kuttab al-Quriya contains an astoundingly detailed record – in words and pictures – of the rhythms and patterns of life in a small Egyptian village in the early twentieth century.
His often quirky historical pieces discuss topics of personal interest: events and practices he witnessed, institutions he attended, individuals he met. While he could not have met Shaykh Marsafi, who died in 1890, the shaykh was an early faculty member of his beloved alma mater, Dar al-‘Ulum. ‘Abd al-Jawad’s pieces contrast with those written by professionally-trained Egyptian historians of his generation, yet he clearly aspires to take part in these ‘modern’ attempts to record the past.
While the growing professionalization of history writing in early twentieth-century Egypt makes it tempting to focus only on the works of prominent professionals, a detailed examination of the historical output of a dedicated amateur such as ‘Abd al-Jawad gives scholars a window into alternative ideas about history, historiography and the past. What ‘Abd al-Jawad recorded in his histories, why he thought history writing was important and the methods he used to assemble his snapshots of the past all tell us more about what it meant to be a historian in interwar Egypt.
“And I saw no reason to chronicle my life”: Between the autobiography and diaries of Fathallah Barakat Pasha (1866-1933)
Fathallah Barakat Pasha, several-times Wafd minister and nephew to Saad Zaghlul, the famous nationalist leader, kept a meticulously detailed and thorough diary, writing on an almost daily basis. Towards the last year of his life he reworked the forty-seven volume mudhakirrat into a two-volume autobiography. Dictated to his secretary, the autobiography claimed not to be a historical record but a tool for its author to evaluate his life. However, the format and generic awareness that informs the composition of this work, especially by comparison to the diary, makes it clear beyond all debate, that the autobiography was very much intended for public dissemination. The aim of this paper would be to compare the way in which Fathallah Barakat Pasha constructed his life through these two very different works and to thus illuminate something of the nature of writing personal histories, both the public and private, in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Egypt.
The historical value of the diaries is immense and has been so far largely neglected. Both the autobiography and the diaries are held privately to this day and only a very small section of them has been previously made available to historians. Fathallah Barakat Pasha was a very close companion to his uncle, having been exiled with him to the Seychelles, and became widely regarded as the heir-apparent to the presidency of the Wafd, after Zaghlul’s death in 1927. The merits of examining the work as a source for the political history of the interwar period are obvious. However, the uniqueness of having both a diary and a manuscript of an autobiography (that was doubtlessly modeled on Taha Hussein’s al-Ayyam published the same year that Barakat dictated his) that differ so blatantly from one another means that it is crucial to examine the works as a document that can provide us with an illuminating understanding of the practice of personal history writing in inter-war Egypt.
In the 1930s and 1940s, Egyptian and Syrian jurists embarked on projects to revive and reform Islamic law. These jurists were not always trained in traditional religious institutions. Many jurists were trained in European-style law schools such as the French School of Law of Cairo. As a result of the creation of these schools, a generation of legal thinkers appeared who were versed in Islamic and European law and also in other fields of modern social science. Reformist jurists wrote about law but also debated with European academics over questions of legal philosophy and history. Such debates provide a window on the state of jurists’ social-scientific thinking and research methodologies.
Reformist jurists of Cairo and Damascus were eager to study Islamic law and legal history by utilizing methods and sensibilities acquired through their European-style educations. There were, however, points where the jurists refused to follow in the footsteps of European mentors. An example was in the their rejection of a European argument that Islamic law had been influenced by Roman law during its foundational period in the 8th-10th centuries. Arab jurists rejected this argument and derided the methods used to make it. Their discussions of the question provide insight into how jurists of the period thought about history and conceived of historical research methods.
This paper discusses a series of academic articles written by Egyptian and European jurists, from the early 1930s, on the question of Roman law’s influence on Islamic law. The paper will discuss what these articles reveal about the ideological mindset and the methodological capabilities of early-century Islamic legal thinkers. For example, I discuss how the jurists differed with European historians over the meaning of “evidence.” I discuss how they differed with European historians over the place of polemic in historical writing. And, I discuss how jurists proposed that certain research questions were “off-limits” for historical inquiry.
The paper follows a three-step progression. It introduces the educational and intellectual background of the revivalist jurists. It introduces the debate on Roman and Islamic law and the articles in-question. Finally, it comments on the articles, focusing on the aspects mentioned above. The central argument of the paper is that revivalist jurists of the interwar period fashioned themselves as jurists and historians, while they also crafted a methodology for research in legal history that borrowed from European methods but also differed from European methods.
