Primordial History, Print Capitalism, and Egyptology in Nineteenth-Century Cairo
Primordial History, Print Capitalism, and Egyptology in Nineteenth-Century Cairo

Author: Adam Mestyan

Publisher: IFAO

Published: 2021-04-01

Total Pages: 186

ISBN-13: 2724708091

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How old is the world? This question was a central problem for Muslims, Christians, and Jews in the face of the new scientific discoveries in the nineteenth century. This book introduces the answer from a Muslim point of view, outside of official institutions. The extended introduction - a microhistory in the Middle East - explores the life and oeuvre of a forgotten Egyptian intellectual and poet, Mustafa Salama al-Naggari (d. 1870). Next, A. Mestyan provides the English translation and Arabic transcription of the surviving fragments of al-Naggari's manuscript, The Garden of Ismail's Praise. This is a universal history of Egypt, written while the Suez Canal was under construction to praise the governor Khedive Ismail (r. 1863-1879). The author advocates a unique solution to computing the period of primordial history, before the Deluge, in the age of steam and print. Al-Naggari's alternative Nahda voice is available for the first time in this edition.

Evolutionary Theories and Religious Traditions
Evolutionary Theories and Religious Traditions

Author: Bernard Lightman

Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press

Published: 2023-11-21

Total Pages: 376

ISBN-13: 0822990075

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Before the advent of radio, conceptions of the relationship between science and religion circulated through periodicals, journals, and books, influencing the worldviews of intellectuals and a wider public. In this volume, historians of science and religion examine that relationship through diverse mediums, geographic contexts, and religious traditions. Spanning within and beyond Europe and North America, chapters emphasize underexamined regions—New Zealand, Australia, India, Argentina, Sri Lanka, Egypt, and the Ottoman Empire—and major religions of the world, including Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, and Islam; interactions between those traditions; as well as atheism, monism, and agnosticism. As they focus on evolution and human origins, contributors draw attention to European scientists other than Darwin who played a significant role in the dissemination of evolutionary ideas; for some, those ideas provided the key to understanding every aspect of human culture, including religion. They also highlight central figures in national contexts, many of whom were not scientists, who appropriated scientific theories for their own purposes. Taking a local, national, transnational, and global approach to the study of science and religion, this volume begins to capture the complexity of cultural engagement with evolution and religion in the long nineteenth century.

Antique Dealing and Creative Reuse in Cairo and Damascus 1850-1890
Antique Dealing and Creative Reuse in Cairo and Damascus 1850-1890

Author: Mercedes Volait

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2021-05-25

Total Pages: 303

ISBN-13: 9004449884

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The commodification of Islamic antiques intensified in the late Ottoman Empire, an age of domestic reform and increased European interference following the Tanzimat (reorganisation) of 1839. Mercedes Volait examines the social life of typical objects moving from Cairo and Damascus to Paris, London, and beyond, uncovers the range of agencies and subjectivities involved in the trade of architectural salvage and historic handicraft, and traces impacts on private interiors, through creative reuse and Revival design, in Egypt, Europe and America. By devoting attention to both local and global engagements with Middle Eastern tangible heritage, the present volume invites to look anew at Orientalism in art and interior design, the canon of Islamic architecture and the translocation of historic works of art.

The Global Bourgeoisie
The Global Bourgeoisie

Author: Christof Dejung

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2019-11-26

Total Pages: 396

ISBN-13: 0691189919

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The first global history of the middle class While the nineteenth century has been described as the golden age of the European bourgeoisie, the emergence of the middle class and bourgeois culture was by no means exclusive to Europe. The Global Bourgeoisie explores the rise of the middle classes around the world during the age of empire. Bringing together eminent scholars, this landmark essay collection compares middle-class formation in various regions, highlighting differences and similarities, and assesses the extent to which bourgeois growth was tied to the increasing exchange of ideas and goods. The contributors indicate that the middle class was from its very beginning, even in Europe, the result of international connections and entanglements. Essays are grouped into six thematic sections: the political history of middle-class formation, the impact of imperial rule on the colonial middle class, the role of capitalism, the influence of religion, the obstacles to the middle class beyond the Western and colonial world, and, lastly, reflections on the creation of bourgeois cultures and global social history. Placing the establishment of middle-class society into historical context, this book shows how the triumph or destabilization of bourgeois values can shape the liberal world order. The Global Bourgeoisie irrevocably changes the understanding of how an important social class came to be.

Teaching Ancient Egypt in Museums
Teaching Ancient Egypt in Museums

Author: Jen Thum

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2024-02-13

Total Pages: 281

ISBN-13: 1003850618

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Teaching Ancient Egypt in Museums: Pedagogies in Practice explores what best practices in museum pedagogy look like when working with ancient Egyptian material culture. The contributions within the volume reflect the breadth and collaborative nature of museum learning. They are written by Egyptologists, teachers, curators, museum educators, artists, and community partners working in a variety of institutions around the world—from public, children’s, and university museums, to classrooms and the virtual environment—who bring a broad scope of expertise to the conversation and offer inspiration for tackling a diverse range of challenges. Contributors foreground their first-hand experiences, pedagogical justifications, and reflective teaching practices, offering practical examples of ethical and equitable teaching with ancient Egyptian artifacts. Teaching Ancient Egypt in Museums serves as a resource for teaching with Egyptian collections at any museum, and at any level. It will also be of great interest to academics and students who are engaged in the study of museums, ancient Egypt, anthropology, and education.

Modern Arab Kingship
Modern Arab Kingship

Author: Adam Mestyan

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2023-08-08

Total Pages: 352

ISBN-13: 0691249350

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How the “recycling” of the Ottoman Empire’s uses of genealogy and religion created new political orders in the Middle East In this groundbreaking book, Adam Mestyan argues that post-Ottoman Arab political orders were not, as many historians believe, products of European colonialism but of the process of “recycling empire.” Mestyan shows that in the post–World War I Middle East, Allied Powers officials and ex-Ottoman patricians collaborated to remake imperial institutions, recycling earlier Ottoman uses of genealogy and religion in the creation of new polities, with the exception of colonized Palestine. These polities, he contends, should be understood not in terms of colonies and nation-states but as subordinated sovereign local states—localized regimes of religious, ethnic, and dynastic sources of imperial authority. Meanwhile, governance without sovereignty became the new form of Western domination. Drawing on previously unused Ottoman, French, Syrian, and Saudi archival sources, Mestyan explores ideas and practices of creating composite polities in the interwar Middle East and, in doing so, sheds light on local agency in the making of the forgotten Kingdom of the Hijaz, Jordan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Syria, the first Muslim republic. Mestyan considers the adjustment of imperial Islam to a world without a Muslim empire, discussing the post-Ottoman Egyptian monarchy and the intertwined making of Saudi Arabia and the State of Syria in the 1920s and 1930s. Mestyan’s innovative analysis shows how an empire-based theory of the modern political order can help refine our understanding of political dynamics throughout the twentieth century and down to the turbulent present day.

The Thousand and One Nights: Sources and Transformations in Literature, Art, and Science
The Thousand and One Nights: Sources and Transformations in Literature, Art, and Science

Author: Ibrahim Akel

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2020-04-28

Total Pages: 363

ISBN-13: 9004429034

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The Thousand and One Nights does not fall into a scholarly canon or into the category of popular literature. It takes its place within a middle literature that circulated widely in medieval times. The Nights gradually entered world literature through the great novels of the day and through music, cinema and other art forms. Material inspired by the Nights has continued to emerge from many different countries, periods, disciplines and languages, and the scope of the Nights has continued to widen, making the collection a universal work from every point of view. The essays in this volume scrutinize the expanse of sources for this monumental work of Arabic literature and follow the trajectory of the Nights’ texts, the creative, scholarly commentaries, artistic encounters and relations to science. Contributors: Ibrahim Akel, Rasoul Aliakbari, Daniel Behar, Aboubakr Chraïbi, Anne E. Duggan, William Granara, Rafika Hammoudi, Dominique Jullien, Abdelfattah Kilito, Magdalena Kubarek, Michael James Lundell, Ulrich Marzolph, Adam Mestyan, Eyüp Özveren, Marina Paino, Daniela Potenza, Arafat Abdur Razzaque, Ahmed Saidy, Johannes Thomann and Ilaria Vitali.

Oasis ottomanes
Oasis ottomanes

Author: Nicolas Michel

Publisher: IFAO

Published: 2023-11-14

Total Pages: 242

ISBN-13: 2724710274

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This book explores the position of the Dakhla and Kharga oases within Ottoman Egypt as well as the whole empire. It intends to contribute to the reflection on the characteristics and limits of Ottomanity as seen by the inhabitants of a region which, from Cairo, seemed remote and isolated. It is based on several sets of private archives, largely unpublished, supplemented by travelogues and by modern literature. Despite their remoteness from the Nile Valley and a unique environment, the Oases were integrated in the same administrative and judicial frame as the rest of Egypt. Taxation was specific as were the primarily agricultural resources. Because of the threat of Beduin raids, the Oases housed a large garrison. The book studies the impact of this military presence upon the Oasian society from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, and the gradual erasure of Ottoman peculiarities, then of their memory during the nineteenth century.

Arab Patriotism
Arab Patriotism

Author: Adam Mestyan

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2020-11-03

Total Pages: 372

ISBN-13: 0691209014

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Arab Patriotism presents the essential backstory to the formation of the modern nation-state and mass nationalism in the Middle East. While standard histories claim that the roots of Arab nationalism emerged in opposition to the Ottoman milieu, Adam Mestyan points to the patriotic sentiment that grew in the Egyptian province of the Ottoman Empire during the nineteenth century, arguing that it served as a pivotal way station on the path to the birth of Arab nationhood. Through extensive archival research, Mestyan examines the collusion of various Ottoman elites in creating this nascent sense of national belonging and finds that learned culture played a central role in this development. Mestyan investigates the experience of community during this period, engendered through participation in public rituals and being part of a theater audience. He describes the embodied and textual ways these experiences were produced through urban spaces, poetry, performances, and journals. From the Khedivial Opera House's staging of Verdi's Aida and the first Arabic magazine to the 'Urabi revolution and the restoration of the authority of Ottoman viceroys under British occupation, Mestyan illuminates the cultural dynamics of a regime that served as the precondition for nation-building in the Middle East. --

The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry
The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry

Author: Joel Beinin

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2023-11-10

Total Pages: 208

ISBN-13: 052092021X

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In this provocative and wide-ranging history, Joel Beinin examines fundamental questions of ethnic identity by focusing on the Egyptian Jewish community since 1948. A complex and heterogeneous people, Egyptian Jews have become even more diverse as their diaspora continues to the present day. Central to Beinin's study is the question of how people handle multiple identities and loyalties that are dislocated and reformed by turbulent political and cultural processes. It is a question he grapples with himself, and his reflections on his experiences as an American Jew in Israel and Egypt offer a candid, personal perspective on the hazards of marginal identities.