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.
