Periodic Reporting for period 1 - ConcTrad (A Conceptual History of 'Tradition' in the Modern Arab World: Egypt and Greater Syria in the 19th and 20th Centuries)
Période du rapport: 2023-08-10 au 2025-08-09
Tradition is a key analytical concept in the study of Islam, Muslims, and the Middle East in western academia. In late 19th and early 20th-century European discourses, the concept elicited negative connotations, such as stagnation, backwardness, and irrationality. In recent decades, scholars have revised these earlier conceptions of tradition, foregrounding the ability of a tradition to adapt and change. This reformulated understanding of tradition undergirds Talal Asad’s theorization of Islam as a “discursive tradition,” an analytical approach that has dominated the field of Islamic studies for decades. Yet in Arabic, there is no single equivalent to the Anglophone concept “tradition.” Indeed, several distinct Arabic terms, including taqlīd, turāth, sunna, naql, and others, are often equated with “tradition,” even though their usages, histories, political mobilizations, temporalities, counter-concepts and affective valences differ from each other as well as from the Anglophone concept. This project proposes to undertake a diachronic and synchronic analysis of the semantic network of Arabic concepts often equated with the Anglophone concept “tradition” in Egypt and Greater Syria in the 19th and 20th centuries.
The larger aims of the project are two-fold: First, to integrate the experiences and worldviews reflected in Arabic concepts into the analytical vocabulary that structures the study of Islam, Muslims, and the Middle East in western academia. In this endeavor, the project pushes against the tendency in the academy to universalize European experiences and concepts, while still recognizing the historical entanglements between Arabic and European-language concepts.
Second, the project aims to deepen scholarly understandings of the history of Arabic concepts that are commonly associated with the Anglophone “tradition,” and to explore whether and how Arabic-speaking Muslims articulated their understanding of Islam through these concepts. This long term aim of this research is to reformulate scholarly understandings of the analytical concept of “tradition” in Islamic and Middle East studies.
The larger aims of the project are two-fold: First, to integrate the experiences and worldviews reflected in Arabic concepts into the analytical vocabulary that structures the study of Islam, Muslims, and the Middle East in western academia. In this endeavor, the project pushes against the tendency in the academy to universalize European experiences and concepts, while still recognizing the historical entanglements between Arabic and European-language concepts.
Second, the project aims to deepen scholarly understandings of the history of Arabic concepts that are commonly associated with the Anglophone “tradition,” and to explore whether and how Arabic-speaking Muslims articulated their understanding of Islam through these concepts. This long term aim of this research is to reformulate scholarly understandings of the analytical concept of “tradition” in Islamic and Middle East studies.
The methodology employed in this study derives from the conceptual history approach developed by the German historian Reinhart Koselleck (1923-2006). Concepts, Koselleck contends, are indexes and factors of historical change, revealing the influence of other concepts and of the materiality of social, economic, and political transformations. He sees social history and conceptual history as deeply interrelated and as exceeding each other, theorizing the perceived differences between these related realms. This project builds on Koselleck’s articulation of temporality, emotion, and counter-concepts in his development of conceptual history. According to Koselleck, non-linear and cyclical temporalities may coexist with linear temporalities. He describes the complex copresence of different meanings through the image of “temporal layers.” Koselleck’s emphasis on multiple and converging temporalities is a crucial insight that allows me to productively examine the temporalities that inhere in Arabic concepts of “tradition,” where for example cyclical temporalities, such as decline and revival, may coexist with more linear temporalities, such as progress and regression. Koselleck’s delineation of the significance of counter-concepts (i.e. semantic opposites through which concepts derive their meaning) is another aspect of his theory that I draw on in my analysis. I investigate when, whether, and how certain Arabic concepts came to be understood as the opposite of those expressing modernity (ḥadātha) or contemporariness (mu‘āṣara), and of other counter-concepts that may arise in my research.
My analysis focused on the semantic network of the Arabic concept "turāth" in the late twentieth century Arab world. In Arabic and Islamic studies, turāth has elicited growing attention as a key concept in twentieth-century intellectual history. Scholars have approached the concept through two main lenses. First, turāth has been viewed as a textual archive that was constructed during the nahḍa, or Arab Renaissance, serving as an ideological resource for the construction of identities, such as Arab nationalism, and for forging an indigenous modernity. Joseph Massad emphasizes the presentism that is reflected in this concept, where it is a past accessed and remade in the present that has a political, social, and cultural effect. Specifically, he demonstrates that the textual archive that came to be perceived as turāth was not a mere revival of a premodern heritage; instead, it was actively shaped and interpreted in the present to reflect contemporary anxieties about Arab sexual morality, themselves a product of European colonial hegemony, as well as of European taxonomies of space and time. Second, scholarship on turāth has analyzed its location within late twentieth-century Arab intellectual debates, highlighting the anticolonial resonance of the concept. For instance, Yasmeen Daifallah and others connect the emergence of the metaphysical concept of turāth (not the term itself) to the epistemic rupture precipitated by colonial modernity in the early nineteenth century. She avers that this “politically and epistemically violent encounter with European military and scientific strength” transformed the set of knowledges that comprised the Islamic tradition from existing just as a living practice also into a past heritage—something to be reclaimed and re-engaged, or forgotten and overcome. This intellectual and cultural heritage became a “marker of difference and identity” which was rooted in a “mode of life and thought” that was distinct from Europe. From this vantage point, turāth was mobilized as a political and anticolonial concept, distinguishing Arab identity and politics from Europe.
My analysis focused on the semantic network of the Arabic concept "turāth" in the late twentieth century Arab world. In Arabic and Islamic studies, turāth has elicited growing attention as a key concept in twentieth-century intellectual history. Scholars have approached the concept through two main lenses. First, turāth has been viewed as a textual archive that was constructed during the nahḍa, or Arab Renaissance, serving as an ideological resource for the construction of identities, such as Arab nationalism, and for forging an indigenous modernity. Joseph Massad emphasizes the presentism that is reflected in this concept, where it is a past accessed and remade in the present that has a political, social, and cultural effect. Specifically, he demonstrates that the textual archive that came to be perceived as turāth was not a mere revival of a premodern heritage; instead, it was actively shaped and interpreted in the present to reflect contemporary anxieties about Arab sexual morality, themselves a product of European colonial hegemony, as well as of European taxonomies of space and time. Second, scholarship on turāth has analyzed its location within late twentieth-century Arab intellectual debates, highlighting the anticolonial resonance of the concept. For instance, Yasmeen Daifallah and others connect the emergence of the metaphysical concept of turāth (not the term itself) to the epistemic rupture precipitated by colonial modernity in the early nineteenth century. She avers that this “politically and epistemically violent encounter with European military and scientific strength” transformed the set of knowledges that comprised the Islamic tradition from existing just as a living practice also into a past heritage—something to be reclaimed and re-engaged, or forgotten and overcome. This intellectual and cultural heritage became a “marker of difference and identity” which was rooted in a “mode of life and thought” that was distinct from Europe. From this vantage point, turāth was mobilized as a political and anticolonial concept, distinguishing Arab identity and politics from Europe.
My research has demonstrated that in the modern and contemporary Arab world, turāth is a highly contested concept, the object of diverse engagements and mobilizations by various scholars, intellectuals, politicians, and idealogues. Yet, it is also a relatively recent concept on the Arab intellectual scene, having undergone a semantic expansion in the first decades of the twentieth century, from a mere synonym of irth (inheritance) to a potent term expressing the idea of an intellectual heritage pregnant with political, intellectual, and cultural possibilities in the present. By the 1980s and 1990s, turāth was ubiquitous in Arab intellectual debates, primarily as a lens through which to critique the perceived failure of postcolonial Arab states and ideologies by modernist and liberal thinkers. Less commonly invoked in the arguments of Islamists and Salafism, turāth became widespread through the writings of modernist Arab intellectuals like Hasan Hanafi and Muhammad ‘Abid al-Jabiri as they sought to discover the reason for the malaise of the modern Arab world and offer a resource for intellectual and political revival. Given the pervasiveness of this concept in Arab intellectual writings in the last decades of the twentieth century, it is perhaps not surprising that religious scholars associated with the Islamic university of al-Azhar in Egypt have embraced the term and made it their own. Yet, my research shows that their reconceptualization of turāth deserves attention for what it suggests about how traditionally trained Muslim scholars not only seek to make themselves relevant to a broad set of debates and discussions, weighing in on these intellectual debates, but also how those such debates influence how Azharī scholars fashion their religious authority, identity as scholars, and their notion of the Islamic tradition. My analysis has also demonstrates how turāth relates to other concepts in its semantic network, including manhaj, taḥqīq, tajdīd, and iṣlāḥ. Further qualitative and quantitative research is still needed on related Arabic concepts, such as naql, Sunna, ḥadīth, taqlīd in the nineteenth and twentieth century in order to chart the diverse networks, meanings, and mobilizations of the semantic field of “tradition” in the modern Arab world.