Pub Date : 2021-12-28DOI: 10.1163/22138617-12340271
D. Mclellan
{"title":"The Myth of Western Civilization. The West as an Ideological Category and Political Myth, written by Enrico Ferri","authors":"D. Mclellan","doi":"10.1163/22138617-12340271","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/22138617-12340271","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":35837,"journal":{"name":"Oriente Moderno","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48611966","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-12-28DOI: 10.1163/22138617-12340266
Belkacem Belmekki
The reformist endeavour famously known as the Aligarh Movement, initiated by the prominent Muslim intellectual Sir Sayyid Aḥmad Ḫān in the wake of the fateful happenings of 1857, indisputably represents a significant modernist movement among Indian Muslims in nineteenth-century British India. Despite having a limited base among the community, given its elitist character, the role that this movement played in shaping the Muslims’ destiny during the twentieth century cannot be overstated. As a reformist project, this movement set as its main objective the remodelling of the Muslim mindset as well as the resuscitation of the hitherto moribund community to bring it back to the mainstream. In line with this intention, the reform-minded Sayyid Aḥmad put forward an elaborate three-pronged scheme. This article, therefore, seeks to shed light on the Aligarh’s ambitious programme which targeted every aspect of Muslim life, political, religious and socio-cultural.
{"title":"A Nineteenth-Century Blueprint for Recasting the Muslim Mindset in British India","authors":"Belkacem Belmekki","doi":"10.1163/22138617-12340266","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/22138617-12340266","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000The reformist endeavour famously known as the Aligarh Movement, initiated by the prominent Muslim intellectual Sir Sayyid Aḥmad Ḫān in the wake of the fateful happenings of 1857, indisputably represents a significant modernist movement among Indian Muslims in nineteenth-century British India. Despite having a limited base among the community, given its elitist character, the role that this movement played in shaping the Muslims’ destiny during the twentieth century cannot be overstated. As a reformist project, this movement set as its main objective the remodelling of the Muslim mindset as well as the resuscitation of the hitherto moribund community to bring it back to the mainstream. In line with this intention, the reform-minded Sayyid Aḥmad put forward an elaborate three-pronged scheme. This article, therefore, seeks to shed light on the Aligarh’s ambitious programme which targeted every aspect of Muslim life, political, religious and socio-cultural.","PeriodicalId":35837,"journal":{"name":"Oriente Moderno","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46540604","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-12-28DOI: 10.1163/22138617-12340275
S. Sibilio
{"title":"Surrealismi arabi 1938-1970. Il Surrealismo e la letteratura araba in Egitto, Siria e Libano, written by Arturo Monaco","authors":"S. Sibilio","doi":"10.1163/22138617-12340275","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/22138617-12340275","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":35837,"journal":{"name":"Oriente Moderno","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44432364","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-12-27DOI: 10.1163/22138617-12340262
N. Shafir
The Phanariots — Grecophone Christian elites who ruled the Danubian principalities in the eighteenth century — were the only non-Muslims in the Ottoman Empire who claimed power by virtue of their command of the Turkish language. Why were they the rare exception and what does their story reveal about the ways in which power and language were intertwined in the early modern Ottoman Empire? The implicit power relations embedded in the Turkish language are rendered visible in a unique text written in 1731 in which Constantine Mavrocordatos, a Phanariot prince, attempted to school his younger brother in Turkish through a series of twelve, play-like dialogues. The dialogues did not aim to teach the formal grammar of Turkish but to demonstrate the power of speech by familiarizing the reader with the eloquent and witty repartee of Ottoman bureaucrats. Through an analysis of the text — which includes reestablishing its authorship and date of composition — the article examines the Phanariots’ liminal position in Ottoman governance, especially in the newly ascendant imperial bureaucracy, through the prism of language. In doing so, it also rewrites the place of the Mavrocordatos family in the story of the Enlightenment in the Ottoman Empire.
{"title":"Phanariot Tongues: The Mavrocordatos Family and the Power of the Turkish Language in the Eighteenth-Century Ottoman Empire","authors":"N. Shafir","doi":"10.1163/22138617-12340262","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/22138617-12340262","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000The Phanariots — Grecophone Christian elites who ruled the Danubian principalities in the eighteenth century — were the only non-Muslims in the Ottoman Empire who claimed power by virtue of their command of the Turkish language. Why were they the rare exception and what does their story reveal about the ways in which power and language were intertwined in the early modern Ottoman Empire? The implicit power relations embedded in the Turkish language are rendered visible in a unique text written in 1731 in which Constantine Mavrocordatos, a Phanariot prince, attempted to school his younger brother in Turkish through a series of twelve, play-like dialogues. The dialogues did not aim to teach the formal grammar of Turkish but to demonstrate the power of speech by familiarizing the reader with the eloquent and witty repartee of Ottoman bureaucrats. Through an analysis of the text — which includes reestablishing its authorship and date of composition — the article examines the Phanariots’ liminal position in Ottoman governance, especially in the newly ascendant imperial bureaucracy, through the prism of language. In doing so, it also rewrites the place of the Mavrocordatos family in the story of the Enlightenment in the Ottoman Empire.","PeriodicalId":35837,"journal":{"name":"Oriente Moderno","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49416609","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-12-27DOI: 10.1163/22138617-12340264
L. Berardi
During the nineteenth century, the Ottoman fashion of looking at archaeological relics, present in large quantities in the territories of the Empire, deeply changed. This paper examines the reports of three Ottoman travellers who visited European countries in the early Tanzimat period. They introduced a new conceptualization of antiquities that stemmed from the direct observation of ancient monuments and museums in Italian cities. My argument is that the experience of travelling in Italy was one of the factors that contributed to shaping the new perception of antiquities that was emerging among the Ottoman elite.
{"title":"“They Call Them Antiḳa”. Ottoman Travellers in Italy and the Idea of Antiquities in the Early Tanzimat Period","authors":"L. Berardi","doi":"10.1163/22138617-12340264","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/22138617-12340264","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000During the nineteenth century, the Ottoman fashion of looking at archaeological relics, present in large quantities in the territories of the Empire, deeply changed. This paper examines the reports of three Ottoman travellers who visited European countries in the early Tanzimat period. They introduced a new conceptualization of antiquities that stemmed from the direct observation of ancient monuments and museums in Italian cities. My argument is that the experience of travelling in Italy was one of the factors that contributed to shaping the new perception of antiquities that was emerging among the Ottoman elite.","PeriodicalId":35837,"journal":{"name":"Oriente Moderno","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46278915","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-12-27DOI: 10.1163/22138617-12340261
A. Topal
Parallel to Arab Nahḍah, Ottoman modernization program is associated with the Tanzimat, a period of drastic social, political and institutional transformation. The word tanẓīmāt itself, however, merely means “regulations” or “reorganization” and very little has been done in investigating the conceptual or ideational foundations of Tanzimat reforms. The question at stake here is how these series of reforms were justified and legitimized within the Ottoman political culture. Accordingly, this paper focuses on reform debates among Ottoman bureaucrats and statesmen in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and proposes the concept and doctrine of taǧdīd (renewal) as a key to understanding Ottoman reform and religious transformation. Ottoman reformers at the turn of 19th century resorted to the doctrine of centennial renewal in order to both criticize the moral shortcomings of Ottoman political system and legitimize innovation. Within this logic, Ottoman reformist sultans and politicians have frequently been referred to as muǧaddids, that is restorers. This paper will present an account of the concept of taǧdīd based on Ottoman political and historical writing from the period. I argue that Ottoman reform was inseparable from the logic of religious revival and that Ottoman debates should be considered as part of and discussed in relation to the 18th-century Muslim revivalism which has attracted growing attention in the last decade.
{"title":"Political Reforms as Religious Revival: Conceptual Foundations of Tanzimat","authors":"A. Topal","doi":"10.1163/22138617-12340261","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/22138617-12340261","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000Parallel to Arab Nahḍah, Ottoman modernization program is associated with the Tanzimat, a period of drastic social, political and institutional transformation. The word tanẓīmāt itself, however, merely means “regulations” or “reorganization” and very little has been done in investigating the conceptual or ideational foundations of Tanzimat reforms. The question at stake here is how these series of reforms were justified and legitimized within the Ottoman political culture. Accordingly, this paper focuses on reform debates among Ottoman bureaucrats and statesmen in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and proposes the concept and doctrine of taǧdīd (renewal) as a key to understanding Ottoman reform and religious transformation. Ottoman reformers at the turn of 19th century resorted to the doctrine of centennial renewal in order to both criticize the moral shortcomings of Ottoman political system and legitimize innovation. Within this logic, Ottoman reformist sultans and politicians have frequently been referred to as muǧaddids, that is restorers. This paper will present an account of the concept of taǧdīd based on Ottoman political and historical writing from the period. I argue that Ottoman reform was inseparable from the logic of religious revival and that Ottoman debates should be considered as part of and discussed in relation to the 18th-century Muslim revivalism which has attracted growing attention in the last decade.","PeriodicalId":35837,"journal":{"name":"Oriente Moderno","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43676299","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-12-27DOI: 10.1163/22138617-12340260
E. Benigni
This collection of essays explores the trajectories taken by texts, individu-als and ideas across the geographic and intellectual space of the Eastern Mediterranean during the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries. Moving the concept of Renaissance away from its traditional chronological canonization, which corresponds to the early modern period, the volume challenges established approaches for the study of modernity in non-European regions and particularly in the Eastern Mediterranean. The title of the issue, The Multiple Renaissances , deliberately engages with the idea of renaissance-revival, here used in the plural form and intended as a mobile concept that travelled across languages, periods and places. The essays contained in the volume draw on recent studies that recast the Mediterranean in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries within a complex rather than looking at it as a “site of a derivative and defensive modernity”.2 Overall, the volume show how a d’historicité , by of resurgence, religious new perceptions of temporality the Ottoman stream
{"title":"The Multiple Renaissances: Revival, Temporality, and Modernity across the Eastern Mediterranean, 1700-1900","authors":"E. Benigni","doi":"10.1163/22138617-12340260","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/22138617-12340260","url":null,"abstract":"This collection of essays explores the trajectories taken by texts, individu-als and ideas across the geographic and intellectual space of the Eastern Mediterranean during the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries. Moving the concept of Renaissance away from its traditional chronological canonization, which corresponds to the early modern period, the volume challenges established approaches for the study of modernity in non-European regions and particularly in the Eastern Mediterranean. The title of the issue, The Multiple Renaissances , deliberately engages with the idea of renaissance-revival, here used in the plural form and intended as a mobile concept that travelled across languages, periods and places. The essays contained in the volume draw on recent studies that recast the Mediterranean in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries within a complex rather than looking at it as a “site of a derivative and defensive modernity”.2 Overall, the volume show how a d’historicité , by of resurgence, religious new perceptions of temporality the Ottoman stream","PeriodicalId":35837,"journal":{"name":"Oriente Moderno","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49065740","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-12-27DOI: 10.1163/22138617-12340263
S. Guth
This article reviews some key concepts of the Arab(ic) Nahḍah with the aim of highlighting the usefulness of a more genuinely linguistic, i.e., grammar- and etymology-oriented approach for a deeper understanding of some basic features of the foundational period of Arab modernity. My contention and starting-point is that the Nahḍah was, among other things, an era in which the Arab subject came to sense its own agency. This is reflected not only in the many phenomena we are used to associate with the Nahḍah — the emergence of the intellectual, of critical journalism, of historicism, sentimentalism, new literary genres, etc. — but also in the morpho-semantics of key Nahḍah terminology. I argue (a) that the self-referential t-morpheme that features in many words signifying important Nahḍah concepts, such as taraqqī, taqaddum, or tamaddun, can and should be seen in the same light, i.e., as an indicator of a new emphasis on the self. Moreover, I argue that both the grammatical form of the new vocabulary (e.g., the -iyyah suffix for abstracts, verbal nouns, the causative patterns of form II and IV) and its “original”, “basic” (root) meanings underline (b) secularisation and the concomitant centrality of the human being, as well as (c) proactivity, energetic verve, and creativity, i.e., the subject’s being a cause of change in time (hence history). Thus, each new conceptual term is a little ‘Nahḍah in a nutshell,’ containing the very essence of Nahḍawi thought and the actual experience of feeling “modern”.
{"title":"Morpho-Semantic Evidence of Emerging Subjectivity in the Language of the Nahḍah — A Proposal","authors":"S. Guth","doi":"10.1163/22138617-12340263","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/22138617-12340263","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000This article reviews some key concepts of the Arab(ic) Nahḍah with the aim of highlighting the usefulness of a more genuinely linguistic, i.e., grammar- and etymology-oriented approach for a deeper understanding of some basic features of the foundational period of Arab modernity. My contention and starting-point is that the Nahḍah was, among other things, an era in which the Arab subject came to sense its own agency. This is reflected not only in the many phenomena we are used to associate with the Nahḍah — the emergence of the intellectual, of critical journalism, of historicism, sentimentalism, new literary genres, etc. — but also in the morpho-semantics of key Nahḍah terminology. I argue (a) that the self-referential t-morpheme that features in many words signifying important Nahḍah concepts, such as taraqqī, taqaddum, or tamaddun, can and should be seen in the same light, i.e., as an indicator of a new emphasis on the self. Moreover, I argue that both the grammatical form of the new vocabulary (e.g., the -iyyah suffix for abstracts, verbal nouns, the causative patterns of form II and IV) and its “original”, “basic” (root) meanings underline (b) secularisation and the concomitant centrality of the human being, as well as (c) proactivity, energetic verve, and creativity, i.e., the subject’s being a cause of change in time (hence history). Thus, each new conceptual term is a little ‘Nahḍah in a nutshell,’ containing the very essence of Nahḍawi thought and the actual experience of feeling “modern”.","PeriodicalId":35837,"journal":{"name":"Oriente Moderno","volume":"98 5","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41245051","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-12-27DOI: 10.1163/22138617-12340265
E. Benigni
This article focuses on the image of the past in two translations produced in the contexts of the Arab Nahḍah and of the Italian Risorgimento. The first translation is the Italian rendering of ʿOmar ibn al-Fāriḍ’s mystical poems, published in 1872 by Pietro Valerga (1821-1903). The second is the Arabic translation of the Iliad, published in 1902 by Sulaymān al-Bustānī (1856-1925). Both translators refer to the past as a translation strategy: Pietro Valerga reads Ibn al-Fāriḍ through the verses of Petrarch and, in his work’s introduction, emphasizes the transmission of medieval Arab poetry to Italy; Sulaymān al-Bustānī reconstructs the world of the Iliad through Arabic poetic tradition and compares Greece to the ǧāhiliyyah (pre-Islamic age). The article sheds light on the potential of translation as a space of re-imagination of the past and invites us to read the works as two distinct, yet akin, attempts to express original interpretations of Italian and Arabic literary histories based on syncretism and cross-cultural translatability.
{"title":"“Metempsychosis” and “Marvelous Affinities”: Re-Imagining the Past in the Ilyāḏah by Sulaymān al-Bustānī (1904) and in the Divano di ʿOmar ben al-Fared by Pietro Valerga (1874)","authors":"E. Benigni","doi":"10.1163/22138617-12340265","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/22138617-12340265","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000This article focuses on the image of the past in two translations produced in the contexts of the Arab Nahḍah and of the Italian Risorgimento. The first translation is the Italian rendering of ʿOmar ibn al-Fāriḍ’s mystical poems, published in 1872 by Pietro Valerga (1821-1903). The second is the Arabic translation of the Iliad, published in 1902 by Sulaymān al-Bustānī (1856-1925). Both translators refer to the past as a translation strategy: Pietro Valerga reads Ibn al-Fāriḍ through the verses of Petrarch and, in his work’s introduction, emphasizes the transmission of medieval Arab poetry to Italy; Sulaymān al-Bustānī reconstructs the world of the Iliad through Arabic poetic tradition and compares Greece to the ǧāhiliyyah (pre-Islamic age). The article sheds light on the potential of translation as a space of re-imagination of the past and invites us to read the works as two distinct, yet akin, attempts to express original interpretations of Italian and Arabic literary histories based on syncretism and cross-cultural translatability.","PeriodicalId":35837,"journal":{"name":"Oriente Moderno","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"64583289","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}