In the wake of the Ottoman Empire's nineteenth-century reforms, as guilds waned and new professions emerged, the scholarly 'estate' underwent social differentiation. Some found employment in the ...state's new institutions as translators, teachers and editors, whilst others resisted civil servant status. Gradually, the scholar morphed into the public writer. Despite his fledgling status, he catered for the public interest all the more so since new professionals such as doctors, engineers and lawyers endorsed this latest social role as an integral part of their own self-image.
This dual preoccupation with self-definition and all things public is the central concern of this book. Focusing on the period after the tax-farming scholar took the bow and before the alienated intellectual prevailed on the contemporary Arab cultural scene, it situates the making of the Arab intellectual within the dysfunctional space of competing states' interests known as the 'Nahda'. Located between Empire and Colony, the emerging Arab public sphere was a space of over- and under-regulation, hindering accountability and upsetting allegiances.
The communities that Arab intellectuals imagined, including the Pan-Islamic, Pan-Arab and socialist sat astride many a polity and never became contained by post-colonial states. Examining a range of canonical and less canonical authors, this interdisciplinary approach to The Making of the Modern Arab Intellectual will be of interest to students and scholars of the Middle East, history, political science, comparative literature and philosophy.
Muhammad ibn Ali al-Sanusi (1787-1859)Christian Wouters (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)Savant, maître soufi, fondateur d’une confrérie, la Sanusiyya, et arpenteur infatigable des territoires de l’Islam maghrébin ...et arabique, le charismatique Muhammad ibn Ali al-Sanusi al-Khattabi al-Hasani al-Idrisi al-Majahiri (1787-1859) est beaucoup plus que la somme généalogique de ses « noms d’attache » ou nisba. Ces derniers l’ancrent assurément dans l’Ouest algérien où le toponyme al-Sanusi est d’usage répandu, plu...
Is today’s recentering of the Palestinian “intellectual field” around NGO-activism and at the expense of a (muted) marxist rearguard imputable to political as well as social islamist militancy ? Why ...has the hegemonic presence of “Islam” in the Palestinian “public sphere”, not generated “new Muslim intellectuals”, whose exegetic commitment on the global scene does not preclude national and secular commitments ? Is it because the Palestinian “civil society” has been hindered, since the breakout of the second Intifada, by the disintegration of those infrastructures and institutions granted by the Oslo process and forced into emergency-driven actions—making it difficult for more autonomous discourses, of whatever tendency, to emerge ? This paper approaches these questions by deconstructing, in the Palestinian case, the prerequisits of an intellectual sphere; by delineating the structural constraints under which these actors labour; last, by illustrating their polarisation in the debate over suicide operations.
La reconfiguration aujourd’hui du « champ intellectuel » palestinien autour de l’activisme non-gouvernemental et au détriment d’une ancienne garde marxiste s’explique-t-elle par un militantisme ...islamiste, politique autant que social ? Pourquoi la présence hégémonique de l’« islam » dans « l’espace public » n’a-t-elle pas généré de « nouveaux intellectuels musulmans », ceux dont l’engagement exégétique sur une scène globalisée ne préjuge pas de leur engagement national et séculier ? Est-ce parce que la « société civile » palestinienne, grevée par la désagrégation, en 4 années d’Intifada, d’infrastructures et d’institutions difficilement consenties par le processus d’Oslo, se confine à une action dictée par l’urgence, rendant difficile l’apparition de tendances plus ancrées dans une discursivité autonome, quelle qu’elle soit ? Déconstruisant, pour le cas palestinien, les attributs usuels de la réalité intellectuelle, l’article souligne les contraintes structurelles sous lesquelles œuvrent les acteurs et illustre leur polarisation à l’aune du débat sur les attentats suicide.
Mandated Memory Dyala Hamzah
Voices of the Nakba,
09/2021
Book Chapter
Nicola Ziadeh (1907–2006) and Anis Sayigh (1931–2009) were ubiquitous Palestinian public intellectuals of the second half of the twentieth century, whose voices could be heard on the Arab world’s ...major broadcasting networks,¹ whose pens defined or shaped the columns of its press,² and who devoted a lifetime to building the institutional pillars of Palestinian culture and, in equal measure, the Arab national project. They became fixtures of the Beiruti public sphere – at a time when Egypt, long the throbbing heart of the Nahda, was demanding that its intellectuals serve the Nasserite state – and of Palestinian resistance that came
PDF
