The Philological Present: Reading The Arabic Nineteenth Century

Journal of Arabic Literature 47 (2016) 169-207
brill.com/jal
Review Essay

The Philological Present:
Reading the Arabic Nineteenth Century
Review Essay of Four Books
Jeffrey Sacks
University of California, Riverside
jeffrey.sacks@ucr.edu
Dana Sajdi. The Barber of Damascus: Nouveau Literacy in the Eighteenth-Century

Ottoman Levant. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013. xv + 280 pages. Index to
p. 293. $27.95 paper; $60.00 cloth.
Marwa Elshakry. Reading Darwin in Arabic. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014.
viii + 418 pages. Index to p. 439. $27.00 paper; $45.00 cloth.
Hala Halim. Alexandrian Cosmopolitanism: An Archive. New York: Fordham University
Press, 2014. xviii + 445 pages. Index to p. 459. $65.00 cloth.
Deborah Starr. Remembering Cosmopolitan Egypt: Literature, Culture, and Empire. New
York: Routledge Curzon, 2009. xiii + 190 pages. Index to p. 197. $44.95 paper; $150.00
cloth.
In a passage in Orientalism, Edward W. Said recalls us to Marxs discussion of

Oriental despotism in relation to both capitalism and British colonialism,
and its differentiating, explosive violence.
Now, sickening as it must be to human feeling to witness those myriads

of industrious patriarchal and inoffensive social organizations disorga-
nized and dissolved into their units, thrown into a sea of woes, and their
individual members losing at the same time their ancient form of civili-
zation and their hereditary means of subsistence, we must not forget that
these idyllic village communities, inoffensive though they may appear,
had always been the solid foundation of Oriental despotism, that they
koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 6|doi 10.1163/1570064x-12341312

170 sacks
restrained the human mind within the smallest possible compass, mak-
ing it the unresisting tool of superstition, enslaving it beneath the tradi-
tional rules, depriving it of all grandeur and historical energies.1
Calling upon the poetic word when Orientalism presses his handMarx cites
Goethes verses, should this torture then torment us / since it brings us greater
pleasure?he proposes that the losses, and the force of social violence, are
absorbed into the promise of revolution. Marx: The question is, can mankind
fulfill its destiny without a fundamental revolution in the social state of Asia?2
Reading Marxs The British Rule in India (1853), Said underlines the language
to which Marx was constrained in order to write of India, the very vocabu-
lary he found himself forced to employ.3 The lexical dimension of this force is
underlined in Saids reading:
In part, of course, Marx was concerned with vindicating his own the-
ses on socio-economic revolution; but in part he seems to have had
easy resource to a massed body of writing, both internally consolidated
by Orientalism and put forward by it beyond the field, that controlled any
statement made about the Orient.4
The controlling field of these statements is, Said writes, philological. Marx
wrote after the philological revolution of the early nineteenth century, and
in its wake, where language is suddenly read as historical, in what Said called
the new historical (as opposed to sacred) consciousness, where philology, as
a historical discipline for the comprehension of language, is a reconstituted
theology of a culturally particular kindwhat Said has taught us to read as
a secular-Enlightenment myth whose outlines are unmistakably Christian.5
That language, in relation to the relatively earthbound experiences of
war, colonialism, imperialism, economic oppression, love, death, and cultural
exchange, forms a constraint in relation to writing and thought, is a principal
thesis of the critical writing of Said, in Orientalism and elsewhere.6 In Said one is
never simply free, and one does not write freely, in whatever language, because
one already does so in relation to more than one past and present, more than
1 Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1978), 153.

2 Ibid., 155.
3 Ibid.
4 Ibid.
5 Ibid., 152, 126, 114, 115.
6 Ibid., 271.

The Philological Present 171
one event of colonial violence, and more than one institutional and lexical
inheritancenone of which will simply have been overcome, transcended, or
left behind. This is as true of the European texts Said reads in Orientalism as it
is of those non-European texts and contexts of which the Orientalists wrote
and of which they continue to write. And Orientalism, then, is not simply an
act of misrepresentation, however forceful such acts will have been, and what-
ever their effects, but a pervasive form of linguistic and social violence. Put dif-
ferently, Orientalism is a name for the institution of philological categories in
the colonies, and in more than one colonial language and literary institution.
One locus of such violence is the Arabic nineteenth century, where, through
an iterated and differentiating practice of translation, between and within
languages, the terms for doing language are transformed. In the nineteenth
century, all of sudden, to write is to write historically, and it is to understand
oneself and ones language in historical terms, as in, for example, Rifah Rfi
al-ahws Takhl al-ibrz f talkh Brz (Cairo, 1834), Burus al-Bustns
Khubah fi db al-arab (1859), and, differently, Amad Fris al-Shidyqs
al-Sq al al-sq (1855). In this philological-historical reorganization of lan-
guage, the immediate, if also distant, past appears as a moribund time of death
and loss. It is a time of decadence and decline, of stasis and non-generative
repetition.7 This understanding, I wish to underline, is at once Orientalist and
historical: it installs divisions between temporal periods and it understands
language in terms of succession and persistence, life and death, movement and
stasis, belonging and rupture. Here, language grows and changes, as if it were
a natural-historical object, even as language belongs, throughout, and most
essentially, to itself: it never stops being what it is. And this understanding
is equally, Said has taught us, philological: Orientalism is, among other things,
the philological institution of historical categories. Philology in the colonies,
then, as Said gives us to read it, is the institutionalization of the terms for the
formation of national-historical, which is also to say Orientalist, literary insti-
tutions. The work under review here contributes to a critique of such institu-
tions, and it does so in a way which compels the attention of scholars in more
than one field of literary and historical studies, and in more than one national-
colonial language.
7 A most illuminating critique of this understanding, and its effects in literary and historical
interpretation, is presented in Muhsin J. al-Musawi, The Medieval Islamic Republic of Letters:
Arabic Knowledge Construction (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2015).

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Indeed, it is only today (in the present of philology) that we can conceive of
the loss of the gods.8 This reminder from Marc Nichanian, in his powerful
intervention Mourning Philology, recalls for us the forceful philological effects
of auto-ethnography. And it is from this work that I draw the title of the pres-
ent essay, in the present of philology.9 Philology in the colonies imparts the
loss of a pastif also of a language and of our tonguethat will already have
been lost, and which is to be restored through philological practice, a past that
is already mediated in philological terms.
And since in foreign lands, as Hlderlin would say, we have almost lost
our tonguelost the language of the godswe need philologists, obvi-
ously, in order to restore it to us. The philologists will give language back
to us. No doubt about it: the mythological gods are philological gods.
But to restore a language philologically is, for us, who have arrived late, to
establish and confirm the loss of it.10
With the institution of the past as lost, a self-colonization takes place, an

internalization of Orientalism and its categories, where Every historical
object became philological by its nature.11 Nichanian pursues the reading
he offers of Armenian letters and poetry, and also religion and art, through
Said (in Orientalism) and Michel Foucault (in The Order of Things), and this
reading underlines what is, for Nichanian, an excess and a generalization
of philological, Orientalist terms.12 The becoming-philological of historical
objectsunderlined in the passage in Nichanian I have cited hereis equally,
as Nichanian also makes clear, the becoming-historical of objects in general.
And it is this historicity of objects that comes to be imparted in the Arabic
8 Marc Nichanian, Mourning Philology: Art and Religion at the Margins of the Ottoman
Empire, trans. G. M. Goshgarian and Jeff Fort (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014), 3.
9 Ibid., 6.
10 Ibid., 3.
11 Ibid., 75, 76.
12 See Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New
York: Vintage, 1970), 293: Empiricityand this is equally true of natural individuals and
of the words by which they can be namedis henceforth traversed by History, through
the whole density of its being. And consider also the discussion of Nichanian (and
Foucault, among others), in relation to philology and history, pursued by Gil Anidjar in
Against History, in Marc Nichanian, The Historiographic Perversion, trans. with an after-
word by Gil Anidjar (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 125-159.

nineteenth century and its fallout, through a complex reorganization in the

categories of literacy (in Dana Sajdis The Barber of Damascus), knowledge
(in Marwa Elshakrys Reading Darwin in Arabic), literature (in Hala Halims
Alexandrian Cosmopolitanism: An Archive), and language (in Deborah Starrs
Remembering Cosmopolitan Egypt). It is this reorganizationa harsh reorder-
ing of terms in linguistic practicethat sets the terms, if never simply, of lan-
guage and writing in the texts considered in the work under review here. And
what this work teaches is that the terms of philological practicethe terms
of the philological recognition of timewill hardly have passed away, giving
place to our shared and dividedand dividingpresent. If Sajdi, Elshakry,
Halim, and Starr give, differently, a critique of national-colonial languages and
literary institutions, their work equally engages a critique of the present and
the asymmetrical violence that is imposed across it. It is this critiquea cri-
tique of institutional-philological violence, if you willthat is the stake of this
new, inventively conceived, and thought-provoking scholarship.
He spoke, and reveals himself to us, in his own voice, in a book that he freely
authored of his own will and in his own way (4), Dana Sajdi writes of Shihb
al-Dn Amad Ibn Budayr, the eighteenth-century Levantine barber whose
chronicle is the object of her study. The six chapters of this study elaborate
this claim in detail, and yet the book equally points elsewhere, to the twelfth
and thirteenth centuries (122), and to the nineteenth century and the nahah.
A reading of the latter is presumed throughout, and is directly addressed when
the chronicle, in Ibn Budayr, becomes a platform of interrogation:
Although not radical in his vision of societyindeed, he implicitly

invokes an older, more pristine social and moral orderhe turns the
chronicle from a complacent text to a platform of interrogation. Viewed
from this perspective, Ibn Budayr and his chronicle may be seen to antici-
pate a definitive new figure of the nineteenth century and his equally
definitive text: the public intellectual of al-Naha (the Arab Renaissance)
and his newspaper article. (5)
Yet Ibn Budayrs text, one is given to read, was not singular, but rather a symp-
tom of a phenomenon (5): it points to other historical writing in the eighteenth
century. He was joined by other authors whose social backgrounds were quite
unusual for the genre of the chronicle: a couple of Sh farmers from southern
Lebanon, a Samaritan scribe from Nablus, a Sunni court clerk from im, a
Greek Orthodox priest from Damascus, and two soldiers also from Damascus
(6). The new form of language practiced in this writing, which Sajdi names

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nouveau literacy, is explained in relation to changing economic, political,

and social forces. It is a literary-linguistic effect of the new order of the eigh-
teenth century (59). In this order, a new historical writing, a new practice of
language, reading, and authorship, and a new understanding of history and an
experience of ones relation to the past, emerge. This emergence gives place
to authorship and a new kind of being, which pursues its relation to sociality
through a new performance of language. Consequently, Sajdi writes, their
authorship is impelled by, and was a product of, their desire to negotiate for
or win new social positions (8). Alongside this, one may underline that this
phenomenontheir authorshiptakes place, in the reading Sajdi pursues,
in history. It is at once an effect and a rewriting of a new understanding of
being in relation to temporality.
The newness Sajdi wishes to describe, where an older form of historical
writing is appropriated to a new circumstance, is, she underlines, entirely
new. In their appropriation of the scholarly form and in their adding spe-
cial seasoning from their own backgrounds, these authors offer not the accus-
tomed chronicle written by the lim but something entirely new (10). This
stark newness points to a firm break with the past and with an older, Arabic-
Islamic legacy. The Arabic chroniclefrom which Ibn Budayr borrowed, in a
certain way, and from which, Sajdi underlines, he broke
Is about the establishment and legitimization of the Islamic order.

Organized annalistically by the Islamic Hijri date, the main subject of
the chronicle is the accomplishments (and predicaments) of Muslim rul-
ers whose very existence, and hence preservation, ensures the continu-
ing existence of an Islamic polity. The ulam were the other buttress of
that political order. As the bearers of Islamic knowledge, the guardians
of religious and moral values, and the promulgators and executioners of
Islamic law, their very existence was predicated on that of the state. As
such, it is natural that the religious scholars would emerge as the primary
authors of the chronicle. (6-7)
While Sajdis reading suggests, compellingly, a relation between the new

order she describes and older practices of writing and languagean insight
to which I return belowthis new order is also figured as a stark end: the
eighteenth-century scholar Ibn Kannn, for example, was the last Levantine
lim to have authored a chronicle (52). Whether coincidentally or not,
Sajdi further writes, Ibn Kannn (the proud owner of a remodeled recep-
tion hall and an enchanted reveler and picnicker) was the last Levantine
lim known to have written a chronicle. The ulam hegemony over the

production of historical knowledge was finally completely broken; their

monopoly over time had ceased (77). This break with the past is read
both as a liberation (With the breaking of the ulam monopoly over the
production of the contemporary chronicle, the language of the chronicle
is liberated from the literary convention set up by the ulam themselves,
which distinguished between the textual spaces appropriate to the classical
and colloquial registers [111]) and a release. One is released from the past
through the institution of authorship, an argument rendered through a discus-
sion of the older genres of the classic annalistic chronicle and the biographi-
cal dictionary, each of which owes their basic form to the institution of the
isnd, itself formed in relation to the compilation of the adth. Minimally, in
Sajdis reading, and with this release, the eighteenth-century chronicles she
studies are called upon to appear as a privileged site through which the past is
read as what the present is not.
The authority of a historical report derived [in the classical annalistic

chronicle] from its isnd, from the chain of authority to which it was shack-
led. With the passage of time, the chains grew too long and too unwieldy
to carry around, and their presence ceased to be formally required in
the chronicle. However, in order to legitimate historical knowledge, the
burden of demonstrable authority remained. To legitimate himself as a
historian, an author still had to demonstrate, by academic training and
professional reputation, his possession of a pedigree of authorities. So
to authorizethat is, to make ones knowledge publica historian had
to have been himself authorized by previous scholars. In other words, a
historian had to be a transmitter of the knowledge of preceding authori-
ties before he could legitimately be an author. In our eighteenth-century
Levantine chronicles, this is not the case [my emphasis]. Our new histo-
rians present no [my emphasis] credentials or authorization; they have
somehow been released [my emphasis] from having to establish that spe-
cial link to previous authorities. Unhampered [my emphasis] by the pro-
cedure of authorization by the scholarly community, present and past,
the historian independently emerges as an author. (116-117)
It is about this emergencean event that is rendered in Sajdis reading as

starkly new, and yet as still, if paradoxically, historicalthat I wish to ask.
The situating of a stark break with the past in the eighteenth century
(In our eighteenth-century Levantine chronicles, this is not the case) locates
The Barber of Damascus in relation to a series of interpretive and historiograph-
ical debates in the discipline of Arabic studies. Throughout this fieldand

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in more than one disciplinethe nineteenth century is a privileged site for

what continues to be called a modernization or secularization of language
and reading. If an earlier generation of scholars, in Albert Houranis Arabic
Thought in the Liberal Age (1962), Ibrahim Abu Lughods The Arab Rediscovery
of Europe (1963), and not solely there, located the modern and the secular
in the Arab world as events that historically emerged in the nineteenth century
and in relation to European colonialismwhere the modern and secular
will have been learned from EuropeSajdi locates each of these as effects of
local histories: in society, politics, economics.13 One of the main points of this
study, Sajdi writes, asking us to attend closely to what follows, is precisely to
dissociate book authorship from technical literacy (9). And she locates the
modern and secularwhat she glosses throughout The Barber of Damascus
as being on the side of critique, autonomy, individuality, the self, and
authorshipin the eighteenth, and not in the nineteenth century, to histo-
riographically displace this older reading. Modernitydefined in whichever
terms, and if in the terms Sajdi privilegesis to have been a local and autono-
mous event, prior to formal and informal European colonization. In offer-
ing this argument, Sajdi follows the interpretive staging presented perhaps
most compellingly in Peter Grans Islamic Roots of Capitalism (1979)a text
which sought to displace the hermeneutic centrality of the French conquest
of Egypt in 1798 as the singular point through which the modern and secu-
lar are to have emerged in Arabic cultureand which has been elaborated
in Nelly Hannas In Praise of Books (2003).14 Yet one may ask of Sajdis reading
whether the trend in Arabic studies, literary and others, toward an attention
to the local and the particular, if not also the autonomous, and not solely
in the eighteenth century, displaces the violence of European categories? Why
ought one privilege the authority of a free subject in relation to language
and the past? (Free from the obligation to establish before his peers the elite
pedigree of authority, it becomes possible for anyone to become a historian
[117]). Why ought one privilege liberation, and what Sajdi calls the story of
the liberation of the chronicler from the burden of history (117)?15 What forms
13 Albert Hourani, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age, 1798-1839 (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1983 [1962]); Ibrahim Abu Lughod, The Arab Rediscovery of Europe: A
Study in Cultural Encounters (London: Saqi, 2011 [1963]).
14 Peter Gran, Islamic Roots of Capitalism (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1998 [1979]);
Nelly Hanna, In Praise of Books: A Cultural History of Cairos Middle Class, Sixteenth to the
Eighteenth Century (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2003).
15 The full passage reads: The history of the contemporary chronicle is therefore about the
transformation of a literary-historiographical genre and of the rules of scholarship as well

of knowledgehistorical and otherand language are privileged through

such an understanding? What is the stake of this privileging when it comes
to be affirmed in historiographical practicewhere the past appears, like the
isnd, as if it were a shackle. And, finallyand, perhaps, firstlywhat kind
of translation does this privileging carry out? To put the question I wish to ask
differently, what kind of violence is being imparted when eighteenth-century
Arabic-language texts are translated into these quite particular Englishand
also German and French, or whereverwords: free, liberated, autonomous?
Perhaps the most brilliant intervention of The Barber of Damascus is offered
through Sajdis presentation of the editing and publication of Ibn Budayrs text.
The presentation of the problem of reading in relation to the editing of this
text is a central moment in the overall argument and architecture of the book,
because in underlining this texts centrality as a historical source for the study of
the eighteenth-century Levant, it discreetly stages Sajdis intervention in rela-
tion to historiographical practice. The published chronicle of the Damascene
barber Shihb al-Dn Amad Ibn Budayr is one of the sources most widely used
by modern historians of the eighteenth-century Levant. The chronicle was
edited and abridged in the late nineteenth century by the Damascene scholar
Muammad Sad al-Qsim (d. 1900), who, in his own words, refined the lan-
guage and content of the chronicle (10). This editing practice is read, through
a careful, meticulous reading of the sole manuscript copy of Ibn Budayrs text,
over against the nahah, which Sajdi glosses in the following terms: Over a
century elapsed between the time when Ibn Budayr wrote and al-Qsim edited
his text. And it was not just any century, but one that brimmed with revivalism
and reformist activities. Whether due to state imposed reformslike those
of Muammad Al (d. 1849) in Egypt or the Ottoman Tanzimat (1839-1876)
or revival efforts by civilian actors, things changed significantly. Although
state reforms are not irrelevant, what is of concern here are the reform efforts
of al-Naha, the social and cultural phenomenon of the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries, a period characterized by deliberate efforts
toward linguistic, intellectual, and spiritual rejuvenation (178-179). The nahah,
Sajdi writes, also occasioned a practice of linguistic reformulationa broad
and pervasive relocation and reinscription of languagewhat Sajdi, follow-
ing a particular tradition of scholarship, calls linguistic reform. During the
time al-Qsim was writing, the movement for linguistic reform had already
begun. The motive for this particular aspect of the reform was not only the
standardization of the Arabic language but also the Arabization of foreign
as the transformation of audience/readership. Above all, as we shall see, it is a story of the

liberation of the chronicler from the burden of history (117).

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words, simplification of syntax, and derivation of vocabulary for new scientific

and social concepts (179). Al-Qsims editing, which attempts to normalize
the text (180), practices the imperatives of linguistic reform in the Arabic
nineteenth century: it subjugates the unruly language of Ibn Budayr, which
included forms of spoken Arabic and rhymed prose, to the domesticated for-
mal requirements of modern Arabic. In this domestication Ibn Budayrs text
comes to exemplify a heritage, and what takes place with the editorial prac-
tice of al-Qsim is, Sajdi writes, the transformation of history from reports
on current events into a document about heritage or a collection of legacies
(175). In a way that parallels his Qms al-sint al-shmiyyah (Dictionary
of Damascene Crafts), effectively, an ethnography of the Damascus bazaar
(176), al-Qsim performs a temporal ethnographic self-writing: it writes the
present by locating the past firmly in another time. By the time al-Qsim was
writing, the famed traditional crafts of Damascus were likely already disap-
pearing, thus impelling the scholar to document them and their practitioners
as folkloric legacies (176). In Ibn Budayrs chronicle, this takes the form, in
al-Qsim, of the appearance of the past as turthas heritage. In short, the
text passes from the realm of news to the realm of turth, that is, Heritage
(181). The presentwhich is to be new and modernis separated off from the
past, which is now to belong to another time: to history.
The reading Sajdi offers of the institution of turth as a category, through
the language practices of the Arabic nineteenth century, participates in a cri-
tique of the nahah, and of the language practices it privileged, which has
been offered, in different ways, in recent Anglophone scholarship in Arabic
studies. The contemporary chronicle was now a thing of, and a source for the
past. Indeed, al-Naha was by definition responsible for the birth of the mod-
ern idea of turth, which is to be sought and recovered (204), Sajdi writes.
In the wake of Timothy Mitchells Colonising Egypt (1988), and with Stephen
Sheehis Foundations of Modern Arab Identity (2004), Joseph Massads Desiring
Arabs (2007), Omnia El Shakrys The Great Social Laboratory (2007), Kamran
Rastegars Literary Modernity between the Middle East and Europe (2007), Elliott
Collas Conflicted Antiquities (2007), Samera Esmeirs Juridical Humanity (2011),
Wilson Chacko Jacobs Working Out Egypt (2011), Shaden Tageldins Disarming
Words (2011), Ziad Fahmys Ordinary Egyptians (2011), and others,16 Sajdis
16 Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991 [1988]);
Stephen Sheehi, Foundations of Modern Arab Identity (Gainesville: University Press of
Florida, 2004); Joseph Massad, Desiring Arabs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2007); Omnia El Shakry, The Great Social Laboratory: Subjects of Knowledge in Colonial
and Postcolonial Egypt (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007); Kamran Rastegar,

discussion of the institution of turth as a historical and ethnographic

category points to what Sheehi has called the emerging, and perhaps now
consolidated, field of nahah studies.17 This renaissance, Sajdi elabo-
rates, baptized Modern Standard Arabic as the appropriate textual language,
constructed the idea of a past Golden Age, and encouraged the search for
Heritage (207-208). And through the reading of this construction, The Barber
of Damascus appears, finally, and if only on the last page of its Conclusion, as
a genealogy.
So, in accounting for al-Naha, rather than seeing it as a moment of

sudden radical rupture, a history of nonhistory, it may be more fruitful to
examine it as a phenomenon with a genealogy. Instead of considering the
introduction of print as an abrupt beginning that marginalized the tradi-
tional lim and undermined his hegemony, let us view it as a technology
that was habilitated to both complete and discontinue preexisting pat-
terns and practices. (211)
And yet the recognition of the time of the present as a time of freedom
(no research or scholarship of past authorities was necessary; nor did the
author have to link his work to that of a learned predecessorthe author of
the contemporary chronicle wrote on the authority of his own I. Neither did
the authors literacy have to extend to a command of classical Arabic; the con-
temporary chronicle freed itself [my emphasis] of the obligations of correct
Arabic and could acceptably be written in whatever degree of colloquial the
author chose [140]) temporally translates a series of categories. If the freedom
of the author and his literacy mirrors that of the eighteenth century, a century
which, we are told more than once, broke with the past (with the breaking of
the ulam monopoly over the production of the contemporary chronicle, the
Literary Modernity between the Middle East and Europe: Textual Transactions in Nineteenth
Century Arabic, English, and Persian Literatures (New York: Routledge, 2007); Elliott
Colla, Conflicted Antiquities: Egyptology, Egyptomania, Egyptian Antiquity (Durham:
Duke University Press, 2007); Samera Esmeir, Juridical Humanity: A Colonial History
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011); Wilson Chacko Jacob, Working Out Egypt:
Effendi Masculinity and Subject Formation in Colonial Modernity, 1870-1940 (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2011); Shaden Tageldin, Disarming Words: Empire and the Seductions
of Translation in Egypt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011); and Ziad Fahmy,
Ordinary Egyptians: Creating the Modern Nation Through Popular Culture (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2011).
17 Stephen Sheehi, Towards a Critical Theory of al-Nahah: Epistemology, Ideology and
Capital, Journal of Arabic Literature 43 (2012), 269-298.

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language of the chronicle is liberated from the literary convention set up by the
ulam themselves [111]), and, as Sajdi underlines in relation to the authors
of the commoner chronicles she discussesthey managed to break the
hegemony of the Muslim learned elite (36), then the reading of language
mirrors the reading of history itself. The presenthere, the eighteenth cen-
turybreaks with the past to be what it is, and it is through this rupture that
language is compelled to become both legible and temporally recognizable.
And yet The Barber of Damascus also suggests that language may be read dif-
ferentlyas something other than an instrument or an end: This is what our
nouveau literates did: they used language as an instrument, and not an end in
itself (112). Sajdi shows that the form of the chronicle gave to Ibn Budayr the
I and its possibility, if not also its freedom and liberation. If the popular epic
gave Ibn Budayr a model after which to frame the events of history, the con-
temporary chronicle gave [my emphasis] him the room to be. The chronicle
gave [my emphasis] Ibn Budayr the possibility of the I, the authority to speak
in his own voice (158). This authority, and its possibility, then, is not simply his
own. It is an authorityand an authorial comportment and practicethat
will never simply have closed itself off from the language practices upon which
it draws in order to be what it is. This is a point on which, as I read The Barber
of Damascus, with and against the grain of its language, Sajdi is quite clear.
As for the question of what the chronicle did for Ibn Budayr: with its authorial
I, the chronicle allowed him to speak [my emphasis] (173). Yet how does one
read, in a text which privileges authorship and authorityand in a text which
privileges freedom, autonomy, and liberationthe non-authority and non-
autonomy, in relation to language, which Sajdi recalls, a certain non-belonging
of a self to itself or its time? To install authorship, language had to draw on a
past, or, differently, it had to break itself off from a pasta break which, Sajdi
shows, language is not able to stop repeating. If historiography has to privilege
sharp breaksin, for example, a discussion of the new order of the eighteenth
century (59)one may ask whether history may be read differently, and one
may ask whether such a reading would still be historical. It is not that historical
reading would give voice to or represent voices which had remained silent or
which have been silenced (thus far, I have posited the chronicles of the non-
ulam as an effect of changed social positions, a change that prompted these
previously silent individuals to negotiate in or for new positions, whether anx-
iously or complacently, through their authorship of chronicles [103-104]), but
that it would refuse to decide on the timehistorical or otherof its objects.
If Ibn Budayrs chronicle points to a disturbanceHis book, which repre-
sents the new voice of the commoner in the field of historiography, was itself
a disturbance in the literary order (20)it is perhaps in its non-absorption or

its non-domestication into the time of its writing, that it becomes a literary
disruption (34)an event of language that neither represents nor privileges
a bold subjective I (164), but that gives us, its readers, to read language, and
perhaps also the act or event that reading is, differently.
Through a discussion of what she calls reading Darwin in Arabic, Marwa

Elshakry opens a reflection on the transformations in the category ilm, or
knowledge, a word which, in the Arabic nineteenth century, came to render
science, and she does so as she suggestively points to the ways in which other
words were constrained to relate themselves to new meanings and practices,
for instance the category adab, which has come to be rendered as literature,
and which, in the nineteenth century, came to imply new norms of civil-
ity and a new kind of moral science (19). Elshakrys discussion of ilm turns
equally upon a finely wrought consideration of translation and reading, nei-
ther of which yield certainties, but which displace understandings of cer-
titude, identity, self-belonging, and authenticity. Through her discussion of
the process through which Darwins ideas traveled in Arabic (4), Elshakry
opens a reading where ideas are neither imposed from an outside nor internal-
ized by colonized subjects, but where what is at stake is language, translation,
and reading: what she calls a process. In this reshaping of the problem
away from a reflection on the history of ideas, a conception formalized and
privileged in Houranis classic work, and toward an engagement with language,
and the problems of translationElshakrys intervention displaces and rein-
vents the terms of historiographical debate and writing. In this new way of
looking at a problemand one may underline that Elshakry cites Paul de
Mans discussion of Walter Benjamin, where, as Elshakry cites de Man, trans-
lation shows in the original a mobility, an instability, which at first one did
not notice (5-6)the force of colonial violence is neither mitigated nor sub-
tracted out, but is given to be thought differently, in relation to the instability
de Man has taught us to read.18 In this instability, Darwin does not appear
as a coherent locus of linguistic sense, which came, belatedly, to be translated
into Arabic. Rather, his name becomes one site among others at which a series
of interpretive problems is played out. This way of reading dislocates the orig-
inarity of his text, and his text becomes an extended system of meanings,
18 See Paul de Man, Conclusions: Walter Benjamins The Task of the Translator, in The
Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 82.

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where reading does not come later to Darwin but is already implicated in
what Darwin, and his writing, between languages, is and does. In short, this
approach to reading Darwin is one that views him not as the template against
which to measure subsequent readings but rather as part of an extended sys-
tem of meanings, references, and significations. Tracing the web of meaning
produced by these readings is central to what this book sets out to do (6).
The readings Elshakry pursues open by discreetly indexing a social and polit-
ical valance with which they are engaged, and which the reading of Darwin
in Arabic mediated. Both men [Faris Nimr and Andrew Dickson White] saw
understanding the laws of nature as compatible with religious belief and nec-
essary for the formation of an educated society whose citizens could question
authority when needed and yet still accept the rationale and rule of law (2-4).
Yet if producing political and social docility forms a backdrop to reading Darwin
in Arabic, what one might call a scientific political theologyDarwins early
Arabic readers were often conscious of their public audience: they were pub-
lic men of science, supporting public measures, safeguarding the public good,
and so forth. Yet they were always part and parcel of a generation of literary
elite who spoke in the name of their masses while still considering themselves
a class apart (23)the texts Elshakry considers impart a historical reading
of language and practices of knowledge, which newly alter what it means to
know in Arabic. Responding to an article by Shaykh Ysuf al-Dijw on the rela-
tion between science and religion, and in the fallout of Isml Mahars 1928
Arabic translation of Darwins The Origin of the Species, Mahar underlined
that al-Dijw had misunderstoodor perhaps just missedwhat he took to be
clear distinctions: It seems the good Shaykh al-Dijwi, retorted Mazhar in an
article entitled Faith in God, does not know the difference between science,
knowledge, and ethics [al-ilm, al-maarifa wa al-adab]pointing out the pro-
found reorientations that the concept of ilm and allied forms of knowledge
had long been undergoing (297).19 Through close readings of figures in Arabic
letters who mediated and carried out the reading of Darwin in Arabicfrom
Fris Nimr and Yaqb arrf, the editors of the journal al-Muqtaaf, which was
founded in Beirut in 1876 and which later moved to Cairo (While in Egypt,
they also continued to engage in the sweeping reformulation and conceptual
transformation of the notion of ilm, Elshakry underlines [73]), to Jaml
al-Dn al-Afghn, Muammad Abduh, Shibl Shumayyil, usayn al-Jisr,
19 Compare, alongside Frantz Rosenthal, Knowledge Triumphant: The Concept of Knowledge

in Medieval Islam (Leiden: Brill, 1970), the compelling intervention of Michael
Chamberlain, Knowledge and Social Practice in Medieval Damascus, 1190-1350 (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1994).

Francis Marrsh, Salmah Ms, Isml Mahar, and othersReading Darwin

in Arabic traces the institution and historical force of new ways of know-
ing. Categories that had not been rigidly separable from one anotherilm,
adabare translated and recoded in relation to a colonial idiom and practice
of language, where the pastand if also the word dn, an Arabic word with
a complex history, and which was now compelled to render religioncame
to be newly understood in philological and historical terms.20
This way of knowing is mediated through language, and, in Elshakry, trans-
lation. Through Elshakrys reading an attention to translation displaces a privi-
leging of origins (Rather than mining readings of Darwin in order to measure
them against the original texts, this book explores the array of interpreta-
tions, inspirations, and intellectual metatexts that were generated and that
encompassed social thought, political commentary, pedagogy, theology, and
law [5]), to underline how the reading and translation of Darwin occasioned
new, natural-philosophical and theological understandings of world and time.
Following the resolution of many contemporary Protestant theologians,
Elshakry writes of Nimr and arrf,
They also held that the process of evolution was itself evidence of design
in nature, and they clung tenaciously to a faith in the unity of nature,
natural laws, and scientific method. If one held that nature was a unified
system of being, operating under fixed laws and investigated by scientific
proofs, and under the providence of divine benevolence, then there was
no reason, they believed, for religion and science to come into conflict.
Wherever possible, the two authors stressed the harmony of the laws of
nature with Gods laws. (43)
But if this harmony points to a new understanding of unitythe unity of

nature, natural laws, and scientific methodit is one that equally redraws
boundaries, installing new divisions and hierarchically organized differences.
Again and again, in the texts under consideration in this book, the lines that
20 On transformations in the category religion in relation to Christianity, see Talal

Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993). Differently, on the philological inven-
tion of world religions, see Tomoko Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions: Or, How
European Universalism Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 2005), and, in relation to language, Maurice Olender, The Languages
of Paradise: Race, Religion, and Philology in the Nineteenth Century, trans. Arthur
Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009 [1992]).

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separate and divide knowledge from religion, religion from literature, litera-
ture from language, and language from science are redrawn.
Elshakry stages her discussion of reading in relation to rising international
literacy rates and the subsequent expansion of a global print culture (7), and
this expansion is enacted, in linguistic details, through the journals and books
she studies. Reading is considered in relation to a series of transformations in
the Arabic nineteenth century.
The rise of an Arabic press in the late nineteenth century similarly created
new relations. These new reading networks were both cross-confessional
and transregional. They brought the Muqtataf group together with Jamal
al-Din al-Afghani and Muhammad Abduh. American and British mission-
aries had viewed the press as a potent tool of civilization and a powerful
means of conversion, while Muslim scholars saw it as an effective agent
of transregional Muslim reform. Shattering former conventions of read-
ing, transcribing, and collecting texts (above all, in a society dedicated
until then to chirography and the palimpsestic codex), the print press
forged novel literary and material networks, circulating ideas much fur-
ther afield than just the Arab worldnow linking Beirut, Cairo, Tripoli,
and Istanbul with London, Paris, New York, and Buenos Aires. (22)
Something entirely new is taking place in language, Elshakry underlines

Shattering former conventions of reading, transcribing, and collecting
textsand this newness is itself exemplified in the writing practice of the
journal itself. The journals appeal owed something to its deliberately easy and
comprehensible prose. We shall endeavor to write it in simple language, acces-
sible to everyone, the editors write in 1876 (32). And this editorial practice,
Elshakry further writes, understands itself as having had to leave behind what
it newly recognizes as traditional and classical. The journal was thus one
of the first to deploy a new prose style in Arabic that eventually overthrew its
more traditional classical rival. As its editors later wrote, a newspaper should
be written in a language that could be understood by laymen as much as the
learned, adding: We shall therefore seek to select correct and familiar words,
simple phrases and uncomplicated expressions (32). If through its simplifi-
cation language is rendered in historical termsElshakry writes of the editors
of Al-Muqtaaf that Their aim was to introduce to an Arabic-reading audience
the wider (both practical and theoretical) charms of science, avoiding when-
ever possible a narrow scholasticism (32)then Reading Darwin in Arabic
discreetly militates against this historical way of reading language, showing

how, through and with translation, language does something other than that
at which it aims (Their aim was to introduce, A newspaper should be writ-
ten, We shall endeavor to write it). Rather than merely simplifying things, to
give place to a reader who would understand himself or herself by recognizing
himself or herself as a reader of languageI read it, and when I understood
it, I felt a great joy, Jurj Zaydn wrote of reading Al-Muqtaaf (32)what hap-
pens in translation is a repeated and pervasive, if also unruly, transformation
in categories. And this translation leaves neither the original nor the transla-
tionnor the presumed simplicity of the readerintact.
One dimension of this transformation is indexed through the writings on
materialism of Shibl Shumayyil and Jaml al-Dn al-Afghn, where the dis-
tinction between science and knowledge, which had earlier been privileged
by Edwin Lewis at the Syrian Protestant College, becomes a locus of inter-
pretive difference. Lewis, a Harvard graduate and professor of geology and
chemistry at the college (65), divided knowledge, marifah, from science,
ilm, installing a distinction that came to be proliferated in the Arabic lan-
guage. Lewis delivered the commencement address at the College in 1882, and
the address, given in Arabic under the title Al-ilm, al-marifa wa al-hikma
(Science, knowledge, and wisdom), was essentially a reflection on the nature
(and limits) of science. In that respect it could be seen as a typical mission-
ary translation projectturning ilm, the broadest word in Arabic for knowl-
edgeinto science. Knowledge (marifah) announced Lewis, is not science
(ilm), for while the former involved the patient and thorough accumulation
of observations or facts, the latter was a superior epistemological system of
inquiry since it involved both the gathering of facts and, through induction,
the formulation of causal theories (65). And this divisionbetween ilm and
marifahwas supplemented by a second, between ilm and ikmah (wisdom),
by which he meant divinely ordained truth (66). Through Lewis a distinc-
tion between knowledge of things human and knowledge of things divine
(66) is installed both through and in relation to the other differences Elshakry
reads, and this cluster of distinctions is read, differently, in Shumayyil and
al-Afghn. For Shumayyil, who was shaped by American missionary culture
and its educational outlook, the universe was not governed by intelligence,
purpose, or final causes but only by natural law (103, 108). And this understand-
ing is attributed by Shumayyil, and through his translations of Ludwig Buchners
lectures on Darwin, to Darwin. Shumayyil praised Darwin in particular for his
scientific approach to the problem of life and foras he saw itputting aside
ideas of final causes (108). It is in relation to this question that al-Afghns
al-Radd al al-dahriyyn (Refutation of the Materialists) is published in an

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Arabic translation supervised by Muammad Abduh. Al-Afghns reading,

in its Persian original and in its Arabic translation, links Darwin and his mate-
rialism to older Arabic philosophical debates. In this way, the eleventh-
century Abu Hamid al-Ghazali, among others, spoke of those who professed
the dahr (al-qawl bi-al-dahr), meaning those who believed in the eternity
of the world and who denied, as a result, resurrection and afterlife (121). For
al-Afghn, Elshakry writes, neither Darwin nor these modern materialists
were terribly novel. Afghani regarded them as an extension of the ancient
Greeks and hence felt that they posed the same kind of challenge to religious
truth as had faced the classical Arabic philosophers who had undertaken
the project of harmonizing Greek science with Muslim theology (122), and
this older debate is mobilized in al-Afghn as a part of a broader critique of
European colonialismal-Afghns al-Radd al al-dahriyyn had first been
published in an Urdu translation in Calcuttawhere Darwins name was a
way of attacking the alternative represented by Ahmad Khan, with his policy of
collaborating with the British in India (124). Moving in more than one direc-
tion at oncereiterating a new understanding of ilm while also affirming a
new conception of history, religion, and civilizationlanguage undoes its sub-
ordination to contextual, and if also historical, cultural, or linguistic grounds.
This understanding of history is pointed to in Nimr and arrf (They
remained committedas they had in Beirutto demonstrating the value of
scientific progress and pedagogy for civilization [83]), as it was in al-Afghn
and Abduh (Yet they also drew on new discourses of society and world civi-
lizations [124]), and it becomes, in Shumayyil, a way of reading al-Afghn by
causing himand if also particular understandings of knowledgeto belong
to the past. Nevertheless, Shumayyil made it quite clear that he considered
Afghani, as he put it, a philosopher of old, quite untrained in the new sci-
ences and essentially unqualified to pronounce on modern materialism (123).
And, further,
Lacking the proper training, thought Shumayyil, men like Afghani could
raise objections but could not provide adequate scientific proofs. For
Shumayyil, Afghani was the real imitator, merely following conventional
opinion. In short, Afghanis conception of science (ilm) was at odds with
the one promoted by men like Shumayyil. For Afghani, science (ilm) was
a corpus of knowledge that made reference to a tradition of texts, proce-
dures, arguments, and practices that aimed to incorporate rather than
repudiate the past. For Shumayyil, by contrast, it was a system of inves-
tigation, experimentation, and discovery that implied a de facto break
with, and hence a repudiation of, the past. (123)

This repudiation of the past works in sync with a commitment to an Ottoman

polity and a new understanding of religion (Elshakry pointedly underlines
that, Like other political reformers at that time, in other words, Shumayyil
was arguing for the emergence of an Ottoman civic identity, united in loyalty
to the sultan and transcending confessional lines [114]), an understanding
that renders the relation between the transformations Elshakry reads and the
political order, even as these understandings extend beyond this order and its
time, placing in question a harsh distinction between the Ottoman and post-
Ottoman, or the colonial and pre-colonial.
Shumayyils historicismone he also shares with Abduh and others
becomes a tacit and explicit backdrop to the reflection on nature which read-
ing Darwin in Arabic occasioned, as in, for example, the work of usayn
al-Jisr, a prime intellectual exponent of Ottoman theological modernism
(132). Through a stunning reading, Elshakry shows that al-Jisr, through a staged
debate between a believer and a materialist, argues that the alim trumps
the materialist by arguing partly though reason and partly through appeal
to evidence of Gods design in natureusing the evolutionists own empiri-
cal arguments against his interlocutor and showing how he too must come
to admit the evidence in favor of a prime mover or a first cause (i.e., God) in
nature (140). Al-Jisrs argument is structured like that of al-Ghazls Tahfut
al-falsifah, and in so doing, Elshakry writes, al-Jisr demonstrates the contin-
ued richness of the kalam tradition (148). What remains decisive, for al-Jisr, is
where one comes down on the existence of God (148), and this coming down
is read, in Elshakry, through al-Jisrs following of the post-Avicennian modal
logic and classical Ashari arguments:
Al-Jisr constantly asks for demonstrable evidence, and in doing so he

is basically following the general parameters of post-Avicennian modal
logic: indeed, it is Imam al-Razi to whom al-Jisr turns above all, following
much of the twelfth-century thinkers own logical formulations and phil-
osophical theology in these matters. He combines this with a recourse to
classical Ashari argumentsfollowing al-Ghazali specificallyon the
existence and attributes of God as well as on the nature of matter and
the role of causality in nature. (148)
Moving from discussions of the law (sharah), practices of Quranic exegesis,

and the literal and figural interpretation, tawl (150) of the Quran, to cosmol-
ogy and theology (For the latter in particular [the Arabic theologians], the
notion of the temporality [huduth] of the universe was critical [152]) and
older traditions of disputation (jadal and munarah) (155), Elshakry shows,

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through a series of close readings, how an older series of terms and catego-
ries come to be rearticulated and differently restaged through the debates that
opened in the reading of Darwin in Arabic.
This restaging is read, in Elshakry, as an incorporation (Yet what is striking
from our perspective is to see how easily he [al-Jisr] could incorporate con-
temporary evolutionary thought within this broader discursive framework and
how smoothly Darwins own ideas could be fitted and assessed within it [140])
and a fusion (140). Yet this fusion is also a harsh event relocation, where a
series of older Arabic terms are called upon to become recognizable in rela-
tion to a series of new debates in a colonial context. Yet the Risala, Elshakry
writes of the text of al-Jisrs she is reading, formed part of the new theology
in another and more specific sense: for as the bulk of the work shows, it was
in fact intended to meet the challenges to faith posed by the modern sciences
(156). And in relation to these challenges, al-Jisr sought, above all, to empha-
size the rationality of Islam and highlighted its demand for evidentiary cer-
tainty in matters bearing on scriptural interpretation (153). Elshakry gestures,
in reading al-Jisr on this point, to other Muslim thinkersSayyid Ahmad Khan
and Jaml al-Dn al-Afghn, but also Shibli Numani and Muhammad Iqbal
in India and the Ottoman Izmirli Ismail Hakki (156)and she shows not only
that al-Jisr elaborates older Arabic terms in a new way, but that his writing also
appropriates these terms into a new kind of historical reflection and mode of
reading. For the names and texts to which he gestures, and which his own text
mimesfor example, al-Ghazls Tahfut al-falsifahare now summoned
to be understood in a new historical, philological sense: they belong to a past
and form a civilizational resource upon which one is able to draw in order to
write of and in the present. It is not only that al-Jisr participates in a tradition,
but that his writing alters the terms of what it means to speak of tradition at
all, because it renders tradition in relation to, and through, the historicizing
practice compelled in reading Darwin in Arabic. In al-Jisr, and also elsewhere,
what appears as tradition becomes something that is only accessible through
the reconfiguration of terms Elshakry elaborates.21 If al-Jisr, was, then, anti-
evolutionary (Again, however, he stressed that at each point they were cre-
atedin the sense of being guided by a divine handand not evolved [154])
and antimaterialist (In the opening pages, we hear echoes of what would
later prove to be the thrust of al-Jisrs antimaterialism [149]), his text scripts a
21 Consider, in a text which may be read as a counterpoint to Elshakrys, the illuminating

discussion of tradition offered in Aamir R. Mufti, Enlightenment in the Colony: The Jewish
Question and the Crisis of Postcolonial Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2007).

relation to time, and historicity, in which readers of his textand of the texts
of al-Afghn, Shumayyil, Abduh, and othersare schooled.
For Abduh, modern science and Islam were essentially moving along the
same path, that of the advance of civilization (165), Elshakry writes as she
addresses the work of this towering figure, who was among the first of the
ulama to advocate a reconciliation of modern scientific knowledge with reli-
gious texts (165). Abduh, like al-Jisr, privileged a conception of natural law in
relation to an understanding of the world and causality. Elshakry writes that
Abduh defined sunna in terms of what we might now call natural law.
The universe has laws (sunan), evidences of which are to be found every-
where in nature, from the composition of precious stones and other
rocks and the development of plants and animals to the composition
and disposition of natural bodies. Quoting other verses from the Quran
on creationsuch as God created the sun and the moon to lighten our
paths and organized their cycles so we could count the years, and this he
did for those who desire to learn and follow the path of truthAbduh
concluded that he who has knowledge of the order (nizam) of creation
and of existence (wujud) knows the truth (in other words, the divine
truth) of the laws of life. (173)
Yet Abduh also distinguished, as through his discussion of miracles, between

scientific laws and natural law, the sunan of God:
His discussion of miracles was therefore another way to get at the

natureand limitsof scientific laws themselves. Such laws, he argued,
did not constitute a fundamental ontological reality: they were merely
deductions from observed reality. His ontological skepticism thus allowed
him to clarify the distinction between scientific laws and the sunan of
God. For while there might exist exceptions to the former in the shape
of miracles (though Abduh was quite cautions in what he counted as a
miracle itself), there were no exceptions to Gods laws, whose ultimate
truth or reality was fundamentally unknowable to humans. (174)
And this unknowability was communicated in relation to a new understanding

of language and a new pedagogy.22 The terms Abduh privileges, in Elshakrys
22 Elshakry notes: As this brief sketch suggests, Abduhs career developed in large part
thanks to the rise of new media and organizations, such as newspapers, publishing
houses, and modern libraries and schools as well as salons and associations. Abduhs own

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gloss, are historical onesthe scholastic, the classicaland they impose

harsh divisions, even as they become imparted to a new mass readership
(180). It is not that the past was scholastic or classicalneither of these
terms are intelligible prior to the Arabic nineteenth centurybut that the past
came to appear newly so, as Abduh sought to overcome the stagnation (192)
of the present, and as he privileged, in order to do so, a new conception of
education and a new understanding of the word tarbiya, in relation both to
the securing of a national domestic order and the production of healthy,
hygienic, well-behaved, moral, and productive subjects (197).
The production of such subjects is imparted through the reflection on time
and history in Abduh, and it participates in the emergence of a fundamental
reconceptualization of the notion of Islam itself (183). This new understand-
ing is traced, in Elshakrys argument, through a reading of Abduhs response
to the fallout of the well-known debate between al-Afghn and Ernest Renan
on science and Islam. For the latter, Islam was a fundamental impediment to
modern forms of knowledge philosophy, and scienceand hence the prime
cause of the decline of Muslim polities (183), and al-Afghn responded by dis-
tinguishing between religion and its adherents. He distinguished between
Islam and Muslimsor between the religion itself and the character, man-
ners, and aptitudes of those who held the faith (183). This distinction points
to a new understanding of civilization (For the first time, Muslim theologians
began to speak of Islam as a kind of civilization, pointing to the past gran-
deur of its political and intellectual accomplishments by way of illustration
and to the contributions that these achievements made to the development
of Western civilization itself [183]), an understandingas Said, and, now,
Nichanian, have taught usthat is philologically produced. This understand-
ingwhere Islam becomes a civilizationis elaborated in Abduh in his-
torical terms. Abduhs interest in civilizational progress was thus tied to a
new language of human evolution. In turn, this helped to create a new his-
torical narrative around the idea of the rise and fall of Muslim civilization
(185). Abduh reads this narrative in relation to a more traditional conception
of islah, or reformthe need for perpetual moral guidance of the community
of believers (185), and this need is read in relation to both Europe and Islam.
ideas took shape in these forums, and they affected his writing: for instance, he repeatedly
mentions the need for an easy, didactic style that can override the narrow scholastic and
classical lexical concerns of contemporary theologians (171-172).

He believed that the current state of Europe showed that the excessive
pursuit of science alone, while ignoring the necessary role of religion in
society, led to civilizational malaise. The search for an authentic knowl-
edge tradition and its attendant sociomoral order thus formed the back-
drop to the modern interest in the Muslim classical past and played a
significant role in discussions of the Arab Renaissance (Nahda) of the
time. (185)
Through Abduhs writing, Islam is to become itself by becoming a religion,

and by recognizing itself in particular kinds of ways: it must be what it is by
negotiating a relation to Europe, science, language, and a past, one said, now,
to be on the side of tradition (Abduhs rejection of traditional methods of
instruction went back to his own experiences as a schoolboy in Tanta, in Lower
Egypt [194]). Thinking history, and the present, newly, in terms of the past
glories of Islamic civilization (201), language, in the texts Elshakry studies,
becomes a site at which more than one restagingin relation to knowledge
and through its inscription into a social orderis given to be read.
One may read this inscription, finally, through the incisive discussion of
adab offered in Elshakrys reading of Isml Mahar. Mahar, who had trans-
lated the first five chapters of Darwins Origin of Species in 1918 (253), was able
to act as a publicist for modern evolutionary studies while seamlessly reviv-
ing older cosmological traditions and in the process transforming their signi-
fication (263). Identifying with DarwinMazhars 1918 Darwin resembles
how Mazhar would come to see himself: a rationalist in search of metaphysi-
cal truths and a deist finding God in nature (266)Mahar privileged what
Elshakry felicitously calls a transcendental positivism. Elshakry explains as
follows: Yet Mazhar is if anything a study in paradoxes: for even as he never
tired of advising his fellow countrymen to avoid the dangers of mixing science
with religion, he himself addressed the ways in which Darwins natural phi-
losophy could also serve as an argument for the existence of God. His own
positivist commitments sharpened rather than diminished his sense of the
metaphysical: examining the conditions and therefore the limits of knowl-
edge led to an interest in the transcendental itself (277-278). Reading Mahar
in relation to Al Abd al-Rziqs al-Islm wa-ul al-ukm (1925) and h
usayns F al-shir al-jhil (1926)Elshakry underlines that usayn pub-
lished a study of pre-Islamic poetry that challenged traditional interpretations
of the Quran, describing certain stories as myths and arguing for a new kind
of literary criticism of scripture (287)Elshakrys staging of these texts sug-
gests that Mahars writing points to a reorientation in relation to ilm as Abd
al-Rziqs does in relation to fiqh (jurisprudence) and sharah, and usayns

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in relation to shir (poetry) and adab.23 This reorientation is historical and

philological, and through it, both education and the judiciary should be free
from religious interference (287), a freedom which promisesin Mahar and
throughout the texts read by Elshakrya future that is decisively linked to
science. His eyes set on an Arabic future, Mazhar wanted Arabs to abandon
purely metaphysical deliberations of their predecessors and embrace a posi-
tivist philosophy, albeit with transcendental overtones, alongside a modern
education that would pave the way toward a scientific future (291). But to
solicit this future Mahar had to read the past in particular kinds of ways
the introduction to his 1928 translation of Origin of Species read and cited the
ninth-century polymath al-Ji, whose Kitb al-ayawn had strong theo-
logical overtones (268) and which was not so much a zoological treatise as
an exercise in adab literature (269), alongside Ikhwn al-af and Amad
ibn Muammad Miskawayhs Tahdhb al-akhlq, which had been published
in Cairo in 1871. Reading the past newly, in terms of a new idiom and a series
of terms (Novel genealogies such as these were proving increasingly popu-
lar, and they were intended to show how Arab civilizations of the past had
contributed to the universal progress of science [270-271]), and if in clear
and accessible prose (252), reading Darwin in Arabic occasions a new stag-
ing of language, of the past, and of what was newly understood as tradition.
On the one hand, He, Elshakry writes of Mahar, wanted both to revive the
[Arabic] language and to help create a modern scientific vocabulary in Arabic.
In this, he reflected the ambitions of a new generation of Arabic modernists
who sought to demonstrate not only the flexibility and potential of Arabic
itself but also its connections to their own past traditions of thought (276).
And yet those connections and past traditions of thought are already, as
Elshakry has so meticulously and carefully shown, not ones own (their own
past traditions of thought), but given only through and in relation to acts of
translationacts that respond to a philological-translational imperative of
sortsto which one is conscripted in language.24
23 See, on usayn, in relation to an overcoming of metaphysics and the formation of

a discipline of reading, al-Bath an al-manhaj f al-naqd al-arab al-adth (Cairo: Dr
al-Sharqiyyt, 1993). And consider, differently, and in terms of a relation between litera-
ture studies and theology, Fayal Darrj, al-adthah al-mutaqahqirah: h usayn
wa-Adns (Ramallah: Muwn, 2005).
24 I borrow the word conscripted from David Scott, Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of
Colonial Enlightenment (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004).

The institution of Orientalist categoriesand the new understanding of his-

tory through which these categories are givenset the terms for what came
to be rendered as literary history, Arabic and others, and one legacy of this
setting of terms is imparted through the discourse of Alexandrian cosmo-
politanism (39), which Hala Halim considers in her stunning intervention
Alexandrian Cosmopolitanism: An Archive. Through deconstructive read-
ings (53) of the canonical triumvirate (Constantine Cavafy, E. M. Forster,
and Lawrence Durrell) alongside Bernard de Zogheb, a virtually unpublished
Alexandrian author of Syro-Lebanese background (53), Halim traces a gene-
alogy of Alexandrian cosmopolitanism in relation to its complicities with
European colonialism and the promise of a future, which the textual, histori-
cal, and social archive she considers opens. Alexandrian cosmopolitanism,
I contend, Halim writes, was a Eurocentric colonial discourse that perched
the city precariously between quasi and pseudo, multiply Europeanizing its
diversity in a gesture of appropriation while ambivalently placing it under the
sign of Levantine to impute a shifty derivativeness (3). Yet the book also offers
readings of a broad range of texts and events in relation to this discoursethe
Stoics and Immanuel Kant, Saids critique of Alexandrianism as a rarefied lit-
erariness (18) in The World, the Text, and the Critic, the founding of the newspa-
per Al-Ahrm in 1876 in Alexandria, before it moved to Cairo, by two Lebanese
brothers, Silim and Bishara Takla (23), h usayns Mustaqbal al-thaqfah
al-ilmiyyah f Mir, the work of the historians Jaml al-Dn Shayyl and al-Sayyid
Abd al-Azz Slim on medieval Alexandria, the novelist and critic Edwr
al-Kharr, whose texts recoup from the citys archive histories of interethnic
coexistence, and cross-confessional solidarity, in the underprivileged quarters
that complicate facile binaries of colonizer and colonized as they also make
the literary imaginary of Alexandrias cosmopolitanism more hospitable to the
icons and idioms of components of both Coptic and Islamic so long over-
looked in canonical texts (282), the Arabic translations of Cavafy rendered
by the great Iraqi poet Sad Ysuf, and Cavafys meeting with the neoclassical
Egyptian poet Amad Shawq (113)to mention only several threads of the
archive Halim recovers. Through a patient accumulation of texts, Alexandrian
Cosmopolitanism shows what it also argues: that cosmopolitanism emerges
through an archival site that remains, like E. M. Forster, both divided and dis-
continuousHalim underlines, in contrast to later memoirists of Alexandria,
Forsters self-dividedness (278)and, she argues, in relation to the sociopo-
litical (44).

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As the twentieth century wore on, Cavafythe modern Alexandrian Greek

whose poetry harked to the Graeco-Roman citywould be positioned as
figurehead of the dominant narrative of the citys cosmopolitanism (21-22),
and this cosmopolitanism reconfigures the past in particular kinds of ways: it
points to and shares in a historiographical narrative (20). The sine qua non
of the dominant narrative of Alexandrian cosmopolitanism as a quasi-colonial,
largely Hellenizing discourse is that it associates the multiethnic, multicon-
fessional, polyglot composition of the citys population in the modern period
with the Hellenistic one, whereby the modern city is often cast as recapitulat-
ing an ancient one (20). Halim defines this historiography in greater detail in
the following terms, relating the privileging of the Hellenistic to the erasure of
the Arabo-Islamic period:
The time span harked back to might fluctuate, at its most inclusive
tracing a millennium from the founding of the city to late antiquity, and
the terms usedPtolemaic, Hellenistic, Graeco-Romanvary depend-
ing on the constituency giving voice to the narrative and the additional
cultural inflections it introduces; but all accounts overlap in the inclu-
sion of the Ptolemaic period. In its barest form, that account is instantly
recognizable by the blanking out of the Arabo-Islamic period, coded as a
moment of decline, a millennial rupture. (20)
And this blanking out, Halim underlines, is repeated through another histo-
riographical sleight of handwhere the decline of the past is interpretively
reproduced through a particular reading of post-independence Egypt, where
Alexandria appears as a city in decline, in this case fallen victim to nation-
alism, the members of foreign colonies having departed, thus depleting that
space of its cosmopolitanism (22). Halims reading becomes, differently, a
reading of cosmopolitanism through the archive she assemblesan approach
mirrored, in particular ways, in Sajdis reading of literacy in the eighteenth-
century Levant and in Elshakrys reading of the transformation of the category
ilm through reading Darwin in Arabic. In each, a privileging of Europe as
a site of origination and as a locus for interpretive and theoretical insight is
placed in question, even as that placing in question is read and pursued dif-
ferently, and to different effect. Halim renders a critique of this privileging
through the notion of the archive: I do not propose or espouse a rigid defini-
tion of cosmopolitanism in this book: instead, I have chosen to elicit it from the
archive I deal with, proceeding from the premise of a given tradition, national
included, against but also through which cosmopolitanism is defined (9). The
archive does not become a locus for temporal or historical-philological legiti-

mation or recognition, or of lexical belonging or coherency, but a site through

which a concept is formed, giving the conceptual to be read in relation to
its imbrication with language, and through its relation to the social and politi-
cal. The cosmopolitan, in Halim, is read, and heralded, through its relation to
earlier twentieth-century political and social movements and formsfrom
Bandung, the Afro-Asian movement, to the nonalignment movement (9)
and in relation to forms of social activism and collective struggle and its rela-
tion to the Arab Spring: in Wisconsin, London, Madrid (9).
In the reading of Cavafy pursued by Athanase G. Politis, Halim underlines
in the books first chapter a privileging of Hellenism works to supersede and
contain difference. The dominant theme in the account, ultimately, is not so
much the intermixing of cultures, because ethnic difference is superseded by
and contained within the Hellenic cultural matrix of Hellenophones (57).
Depositing the question of containmentone which, in Halims work, has
broad social and political implicationsHalim reads Cavafy over against a
simultaneous repetition and displacing of Orientalist legacies in poetic writ-
ing. In light of the 1970s critical stances that Hellenize the city through a
Cavafy oblivious to Egyptianness and hence go on to barbarize postcolonial
Alexandria, I dwell on things Egyptian, whether Pharaonic, Coptic, or mod-
ern, and vestigial Arabo-Islamic elements in Cavafys texts, and, where rele-
vant, to draw into the discussion Egyptian responses to Cavafy (60). Reading
Cavafys Orientalism and its transformations in timeWhile it is impera-
tive to tip the balance of readings that construe Cavafy as disinterested in all
things Egyptian, Arab, and Middle Eastern, it would be a mistake to overlook
not only the presence of a certain orientalist strain in his texts but also the
tension that this creates with his attunement and receptivity to Egyptian,
Arab, and Middle Eastern elements (71)Halim underlines, in a way which
echoes Saids reading of Marx, the Orientalist paradigms which echo even
in his own work (71). Cavafys mute masses, Halim writes, seem almost
too ready an index of an Orientalist conception of an eternal Egypt, a land
of stasis and immutability read as a land of death, one that is the reverse of
a Europe given to rationality and progress (80), and this reading points to
others. If the Asian-as-barbarian (part of the classical binary Greek-vs.-
barbarian) was not consistently, in Cavafy, the denigrated Other (95), there
is, in the poetic writings, another Asia. Yet here is another Asia, an Asia
that belongs to an Islam construed [emphasis in the original] in the poem as
an antithesis of Christianity, and, in its capacity as an Islamic Asia becomes
the most abject Other (95). Later in life Cavafy wrote of a need to acquaint
European countries (especially Western ones) with the contemporary Arab[ic]
literature of Egypt and the outlook of contemporary Arab writers vis--vis the

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currents of European art; and also to convey to the European nations what
specific contribution Arab writers in Egypt have to offer to these trends, by
means of translation (but translation done most carefully), perhaps an Arab
contributiona contemporary Arab perspectivemight be translated into
foreign works and somehow naturally transformed in a way that the condi-
tions of adaptation demand, thus becoming valuable outside the boundaries
of Egypt and beyond the borders of the Arab world (116). This need points to
a preponderance of anticolonial perspectives and instantiations of affin-
ity with Egypt in his later texts (119) as it sits adjacent to a persistence of
Orientalism in his writing, an adjacency which allows Halim to underline the
paradoxical quality of Cavafys text in relation to a more cosmopolitan attun-
ement to otherness and other textualities (119). Receiving and giving more
than one legacy, Beyond authorial intentionality, Cavafy was heir to a catho-
licity of intellectual traditions, sometimes mutually reinforcing, at other times
antagonistic (119), where a corpus of writing teaches, both with and against it
all, a repetition of Orientalism in poetic statement.
This repetition is construed, differently, in Forster (in chapter 2) and Durrell
(in chapter 3). If, in Forster, there is a privileging of the historiographical para-
digm around the discourse on Alexandrian cosmopolitanism Halim has taught
us to read, in Durrell there is an iteration of a domesticating, neocolonial
Levantinism. To extrapolate from Cromers account, the distinction between
the Levantines and the Syrians rests on the perception that the former are
self-serving whereas the latter can be induced to act in the service of British
colonial authority, and Durrell, as I see it, would take this colonial geneal-
ogy of Levantine and give it a new, neocolonial lease on life, extending it into
the postindependence period in which the Quartet was published (202). In
Forster, Halim points to the narratological undergrid of his account [in his
Alexandria: A History and a Guide] and its sources both spiritual and cultural
(123), to offer a close, intricate readingas in her discussion of Durrell
of Forsters account of the spiritual in relation to the standard paradigm of
arching over from a Hellenistic golden age of Alexandria to a modern city con-
structed in Hellenized terms while bracketing out the Arabo-Islamic period
(123), and of his consonance with readings of the cosmopolitan as post-
ethnic and post-national. If Forsters words have a contemporary ring that
resonates with recent scholarship about cosmopolitanism, this is because
in his construction of Alexandrias heritage the city epitomizes a valorized
hybridity, specifically here racial (bastardy and miscegenation), as an anti-
dote to nationalisms based on the ethnocentrism that have spawned ethnic
cleansing (127). Separating Alexandria from EgyptForster writes that it is a
situation unique in Egypt, and the Alexandrians have never been truly Egyptian

[the emphasis has been added by Halim] (131)in relation to post-Enlighten-

ment rationalism (133), Halim traces the staging of Islam in Forster in relation
to the colonial aesthetics and politics she studies. Through a reading of Islam,
in Forster, in relation to the Greek-into-Arabic translation movement in ninth-
and tenth-century Baghdad, and the way in which these Muslim philosophers
[al-Kind, al-Frb, Ibn Sn, and Ibn Rushd] adapted and appropriated that
heritage for their own purposes (143) and the transmission of classical and
Neoplatonic philosophical works, as seen in the figure of Plotinus, of whose
Enneads Forster remarks, Alexandria produced nothing greater (144), and
through a reading of Forsters topography of Alexandria and his oblivious-
ness to non-European(ized) areas of the city (151) and the older traditions to
which that topography points, Halim underlines the ways in which Alexandria
is read on Orientalist aesthetic ground (152). Although not hagiographic
about modern Alexandria, as previously noted, in bracketing out medieval
Alexandria Forster also follows a paradigm of arching over from the Hellenistic
and late antique period to the modern (153-154), and this arching over points
to terms at once aesthetic, historical, and philologicalthe historical philo-
logical reading privileged in the fallout of the European Enlightenment, and if
also, differently, and as Halim suggestively remarks, of the Arabic nineteenth
century. Through a reading of Forsters reading of Cavafy and his relationship
to Mohammed El-Adl and his Notes on Egypt (Indeed, Forster goes to great
lengths in his report on Egypt to clear Islam from stereotypical imputations,
albeit without fully revising the narrative about it in Alexandria [175]), Halim
traces what continue to be ambivalencies in Forsters writing, even as this writ-
ing iterates a textual-curatorial move that participates in the production of
exclusivist (European) narratives of cosmopolitanism (161), suggesting a form
of literary analysis that declines to appropriate that ambivalence into the
coherency of a single, simple, totalizing reading. Bracketing the question of
authorial intentionality, the dichotomy in Forsters account that my analysis
has brought out should not be reduced to a single reason but rather ought to
be accounted for, she writes, by a set of issues that likewise need not be all of
a piece (177).
This ambivalence is significantly muted in Durrell, whose Alexandria
Quartet shares inand affirmsthe terms of a neocolonial political order.
The point I wish to make is not solely that whatever signs of impend-
ing decolonization the Quartet bears are refracted back onto the Egypt
of the mid-1930s and 1940s from the late 1950s time of writing when the
country had gained its independence, and that representing intimations
of the end-of-empire per se does not warrant a novels designation as

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postcolonial. Rather, it is my wager that the text looks forward to, as it

tries to conceive of and conjure up, a neocolonial afterlife of older impe-
rial forms. It is in this sense that I reinterpret the Quartets much-vaunted
cosmopolitanism as a hybridity that the text construes as potentially
threatening but also as ultimately amenable to perpetuating the decolo-
nized nations dependency (181).
I do not wish to deny the Quartets modernist experimentation, Halim con-

tinues, but to urge that this too be read within the framework of a belated
permutation of colonial discourse (181). Such permutations touch upon Islam
(Islam constitutes a formidable stumbling block for those formed by the
Judeo-Christian tradition, in Egypt where the substratum of thought is so pro-
foundly and aggressively Muslim [184]), and, through Durrells Levantinism,
work to place Greece on the side of Europe over against Egypt and Islam.
Indeed, Durrells oeuvre had been faulted for a paternalistic (quasi-)colonial
attitude toward Greece and Greeks; but I maintain that within the world of the
Quartet allusions to things Greek are favorably coded as European (187). If,
in the Quartet, there is a relentless denigration of Islam and Muslims (190),
the text equally points to the declining force and authority of Britain in the
coloniesa reading of aesthetic form in relation to colonialism that is in sync
with Halims non-totalizing form of reading. Where the uncanny breaks out
is in the marked cultural loading of the description of space and topography,
in the superstitions and hysteria that beset the Alexandrian exemplars of the
city, and in the political conspiracy, which, through the mimicry and dou-
bling, undermine the subjectivity of British narrators and point to the limits of
their knowledge and power over the Orient (191). On the side of sects, super-
stition, and palm reading (197), Alexandria shares, in Durrell, in a cultural
ambivalence (197) which is equally a form of epistemic and historicalif not
ontologicaldesignation. These qualities are to tell us what Alexandria is.
The installing of divisions inside Egypt and between Egypt, Islam, Greece, and
Europe, and through the transfer of Durrells staging of a proto-Zionist con-
spiracy to the Copts, forges a fictional division within the region, as it alienates
a rooted community by contriving solidarity between it and a movement that
sought to establish a new settler colony on Arab lands (219). Advocating a sec-
tarian politics along colonial lines, the Quartet does not allow for any adum-
bration of a more just, self-determining, and sovereign society as it does not
even gesture toward the existence of a subaltern (222)and a colonial series
of terms is affirmed through a novelistic practice that reads the present, and
past, by riveting each to an Orientalist legacy.

These terms are read somewhat differently in de Zogheb, whose work

is the subject of the fourth chapter of Alexandrian Cosmopolitanism. De
Zogheb was the author of eleven libretti, most of which remain unpublished,
written in pidginized Italian (226), and Halim turns to read four of them.
Here, as throughout Alexandrian Cosmopolitanism, a biographical summa-
tion is offered, which links the work to the life of the author, complicating
the terms of life in relation to writing. A Greek Catholic family who origi-
nated in Damascus, the Zoghebs are thought to have settled in Egypt in the
early nineteenth century, an ancestor, it is speculated, having worked with the
French during the Napoleonic occupation (227). Setting de Zogheb against
the broader contours of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and their
legacies, Halim writes of de Zoghebs queer orientation (227) in relation to a
reading of sexuality in the Arab world (231), where, with the advent of colo-
nial modernity, intellectuals in the region, albeit often writing in resistance
to Orientalism and its construction of Arab sexuality, hotly debated issues
of sexual desire (232), though, as Joseph Massad has compelling argued,
the terms civilization and culture privileged, pluralized, and proliferated
in Orientalism.25 This contextualization of de Zogheb is read in relation to
language (By his own admission, he was trilingual; his other two languages
[alongside English] were French and Italian. His weakest language was Arabic,
his colloquial Greek inflected, and his knowledge of classical Arabic virtually
nonexistent, as was typical of a certain Europeanized Levantine background,
as distinct from Arabophone Syro-Lebanese [230]), a reading which situates
de Zogheb, if peripherally, and in a way which mirrors and departs from Halims
reading of Cafavy, in relation to Arabic. Considered in relation to the formation
of the theater in Egypt in the nineteenth century, de Zoghebs libretti offered
a pidginization, a complex interlacing of languages (What is at stake, Halim
writes of a single passage in de Zogheb, is a partially Italianized rendition of
the French translation of Wuthering Heights, Les Hauts de Hurlevent [246]),
and an anagrammatic riddle play: solving some of the linguistic riddles that
the libretti present by thinking in terms of anagrams is one solution (248).
Writing during the period immediately preceding and following decoloniza-
tion (251), de Zoghebs libretti are at once socially and politically dissonant
and assonant (254), a double gesture Halim reads in relation to form. This
linguistic form is indivisible from the queered Alexandrian Levantine con-
tent, Halim underlines (258). Parodying and repeating Orientalist figures, de
25 See also Joseph Massad, Desiring Arabs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), upon
which Halim draws in this passage.

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Zogheb, Halim also argues, perpetuates the Orientalist motifs he parodies.

The argument is offered as follows: And therein lies the rubthat in the ser-
vice of Alexandrian Levantine camp a bizarre perpetuity is lent this trope in an
age of dissolution of empire and the project of decolonising the mind, in
Ngugi wa Thiongos phrase (264). Stalled and unable to reply to the context
and violence of the Algerian war, which he also obliquely addressesde
Zogheb lived in France for some 20 years, including in the early 1960s, his
writing is at once an act of depoliticization (If the librettis camp, qua camp,
makes a persuasive case for queerness, the texts poetics are ultimately under-
mined by their depoliticized take on Levantinism [269]) and it is read, through
Said, in relation to the political and social forms of constraint that also gave
place to the libretti as aesthetic, cultural, and political, if also linguistic, events.
A final section of the book points to an Alexandrian archiveand an archive of
Alexandrian cosmopolitanismin the Arabic language, one signaled through-
out the book in various ways, and through the work of Edwr al-Kharr, whose
writing, Halim offers, rearticulates cosmopolitanism in a radically different
idiom, distancing it from Eurocentric complicity and simultaneously imag-
ining a more tolerant, pluralistic nation (198)a reading pointed to, in the
books closing pages, through a discussion of a radically different cosmopoli-
tan orientation (311), an elaboration of which is to be offered in future writing.
Remembering Cosmopolitan Egypt considers the transformation of categories

of belonging and linguistic and cultural understanding in the fallout of the
nineteenth century and the legacies of decolonization. Drawing upon a series
of late twentieth-century films and writings in Arabic and Hebrew, Deborah
Starr reads the legacies of juridical, colonial, and older forms of violence in
relation to linguistic, literary, and cinematic practice. This violence is staged in
the following terms:
Since as early as the seventeenth century, European powers interpreted

clauses in the Capitulation treaties with the Ottoman Empire to grant
them the right to protect the interests of particular religious minor-
ity communities: the Russians claimed rights to intervene in internal
Ottoman affairs to protect the interests of Orthodox Christians, while
the French claimed such privileges over Catholics, and the British
over the Druze and Jews of the Levant. (20)

Pointing to later nineteenth-century juridical acts in the Egyptian colonial

state, which transformed older understandings of collective belonging in the
Ottoman notions of the millet and the ifah, Starr underlines a new setting of
terms and relations which occasioned the formation of a new series of catego-
ries: I trace how Ottoman notions of communal difference such as millet and
taifa were replaced by the oppositional, binary discourses majority-minority
and native-foreigner, signified by the rise of the terms aqaliyya and ajnabi-
yya, respectively (16). In the texts Starr considers, writing takes place in and
through the fallout of this transformation, as it attempt[s] to illuminate a lost
world (25), even as the legacies of the Arabic and Ottoman nineteenth century
obliquely persist in the texts she considers. The nineteenth will have been a
philological century, then, and, as Sajdi, Elshakry, and Halim also show, one
that will never have simply disappeared into a historical archive or a clearly
delimited past. Its terms continue to inform literary writing, transformations
in language and culture, and the wordsin whatever languageupon which
one is able to draw in order to speak and write.
Addressing itself, in part, to what Starr calls the IsraeliPalestinian con-
flict, Remembering Cosmopolitan Egypt promises a sharing given through
literary comparison. In the choice of texts, Starr further writes, pointing
to this conflict, if still not to its relation to European and colonial legacies,
and if also to quite particular, Zionist, settler-colonial acts and practices,
Remembering Cosmopolitan Egypt acknowledges the significant impact the
IsraeliPalestinian conflict has had on the region and the lives of its inhab-
itants. However, it also attempts to look beyond the reductive terms of the
conflict to a cosmopolitan past shared by Muslims, Christians, and Jews in
nineteenth and twentieth century Egypt (25). If Remembering Cosmopolitan
Egypt does not read the question of Palestine in the terms I have pointed
to hereterms argued in Edward W. Saids The Question of Palestine (1979),
and also elsewhere, and through his discussion of the relation of Zionism to
Orientalism and philologyit does recall us to the shared and divided con-
texts, and forms of linguistic indeterminacy, which inform literary writing
and cinematic production.26 If one wishes that this text had not conceived of
the IsraeliPalestinian conflict as a conflict, but had allowed it to be thought,
rather, as an asymmetrical imposition of violenceviolence carried out by
Zionists and through the Zionist ideology against Palestiniansas a strategy
and practice of settler colonialism, and as a locus for the harsh transformation
of terms and understandings of language, religion, history, and place, Starrs
26 I point here to Edward W. Said, The Question of Palestine (New York: Vintage, 1979).

202 sacks
intervention does recall us to the urgency of attending to languageand

languagesin a context where various forms of reflection, and political and
social analysis, all too often quickly skip over language in order to get to what
seem to be far more urgent matters. Language, after all, is called upon to render
events and practices legible in particular ways, and Starr contributes impor-
tantly to destabilizing that compelled legibility.
The loss of a cosmopolitan past works as a distinct locus in Remembering
Cosmopolitan Egypt, as it does, differently, in the texts Starr considers. Reading
language, and languages, after the cosmopolitan era had ended and the
population of foreign minorities in Egypt had dwindled (37), Starr considers
what takes place with literature, and with filmic productions, in the fallout of
this loss. Reading the recuperation and negotiation of loss while reiterating the
demise (86) of cosmopolitanism in Egypt (European Colonialism played
a defining role in enabling the minorities with foreign nationalities to flour-
ish, and to succeed economically. Conversely, anti-colonial nationalism played
a role in the demise of cosmopolitanism in Egypt [23]), Starr underlines, at
the same time, a privileging of an understanding of the cosmopolitan in rela-
tion to a critique of parochial nationalism (26), as she figures colonialand
colonizingviolence through what she, here, also calls conflict: the conflict
between Colonialism and Egyptian Nationalism (57). Through a close read-
ing, in chapter 3, of Edwr al-Kharr, Starr suggestively considers the poetic
valance of his texts, where topography becomes a locus for a dismemberment
of the work and a dislocation of a privileging of the state form. Rather than
cosmopolis, Starr writes in a consideration of al-Kharrs City of Saffron,
Alexandria is reduced to fragmentsto neighborhoods and even buildings
within them (51). And this fragmentation is read in terms of an antithetical
relation to the cosmopolitan.
The city as an entirety exists merely as an abstract concept represented

through Mikhails youthful encounters with it. Although the environ-
ment Mikhail inhabits in City of Saffron has a diverse population, the
novels representation of the city could be characterized as local and
parochial, in other words, as the antithesis of the cosmopolitan. (51)
The relations between Copts and Muslims (52) are discussed as relations of
commonality and forms of interaction, suggesting a form of non-cosmopol-
itan cosmopolitanism, a cosmopolitanism given through local acts of writ-
ing, and practices of being with otherspractices that take on a political
valance in al-Kharrs Girls of Alexandria (53). Al-Kharr, Starr writes, links
Jerusalem and Ramallah and Nazareth and al-Khalil to state and colonial,

racialized violence in Palestine, Egypt, France, South Africa, and the United
States (54). She cites al-Kharr:
Their small yellow tanks knew what they had to do; they shot bullets
from their old-fashioned long cannons and hundreds fell in the great
square outside the Winter Palace; the sirens of their black cars wailed as
they were barricaded in front of the Sorbonne; they dragged trained and
vicious dogs by their leather leads to maul black legs in Johannesburg or
by the Mississippi. (55)
Giving to us this prescient citation, and translating it for us, Starr reads these
pages in Edwr al-Kharr in relation to universalist, transnational political
affiliation, and revolutionary activity (54).
Staged over and against the literary city of E. M. Forster, C. P. Cavafy, and
Lawrence Durrell (33) and the myth of cosmopolitan Alexandria perpetu-
ated by literature in Western languages from Plutarch to Lawrence Durrell
(35), readings of Edwr al-Kharr, Ibrhm Abd al-Magd (whose Ambergris
Birds stages a small act of resistance to repressing the memory of Alexandrias
cosmopolitan history [69]), and Youssef Chahine, suggest an imbrication
of the legacies of colonial practices with the reorganization of identities and
the relations between languages. The richness of unexpected juxtapositions,
self-referentiality, and playful blurring of boundaries define Chahines art-
istry, and destabilize rigid notions of identity and place in his work (78),
where Alexandria is, Starr writes, a locus for a nostalgic desire for recovery:
Alexandria is the repository of nostalgia, the lost irrecoverable cosmopoli-
tan space (82). This nostalgia is read, in Starr, in relation to what she calls a
non-essentializing politics.27 Abdel Meguids and al-Kharrs novels, Starr
elaborates, attempt to reclaim the cosmopolitan moment within the context
of Egyptian cultural memory, and, as I argue, offer an authentic and locally
specific alternative to parochial ethno-linguistic nationalism (76), a post-
colonial Egyptian pluralism to supplant colonial cosmopolitanism (100)a
reading which, if however salient, redoubles the categories Starr seems to
wish to place in question. Opposing ethno-linguistic nationalism to the
27 Referencing al-Kharr and Abd al-Magd, Starr writes that Their work reformulates the
characterizations of Alexandrian cosmopolitanism perpetuated by Lawerence Durrell,
and, to a lesser extant by E. M. Forster and other writers of European languages. Their
response is a non-essentializing, local and particular re-formulation of the cosmopolitan
myth. Their writing, although nostalgic for elements of coexistence and tolerance, is also
critical of the colonial system in which cosmopolitanism thrived in Egypt (76).

204 sacks
non-essentializing, the local, and the particular, seems, in a double gesture,

to place both series of terms outside of a relation to the Orientalist corpus and
its field: the field installed, linguistically and institutionally, in and through the
nineteenth century. If the work Starr has considered returns to cosmopolitan
Egypt, one would not wish to read this return as nostalgiac, but rather, as
an event of return and recapitulation, which is equally chosen and unchosen:
a return to, a rehearsal of, and a having it out with a colonialand a philo-
logical and Orientalistinheritance. For cosmopolitan Alexandriaas
Starr also showsis not a chimera (37) but a differentiated and repeated
linguistic, rhetorical, and poetic event. It is an event whichagain, in rela-
tion to Orientalism and philology, and, as Starr underlines, colonial and state
juridical violenceimpacts and imparts itself to language, and languages,
including the Arabic language. The Arabic and Hebrew texts Starr reads, and
as her intervention also shows, demonstrate this: that the writings of the late
twentieth century will never have left the nineteenth century behind. Older
colonial and other legacies are repeated in language, and in aesthetic form
a point to which Starr also returns, and which her elaboration compellingly
gives us to read.
The final three chapters of Remembering Cosmopolitan Egypt offer a his-
torical and cultural sketch and consider the Hebrew language work of Yitzhaq
Gormezano Goren and Ronit Matalon. Gormezano Gorens work, Starr writes,
reflects an anti-parochial, cosmopolitan urge (122)one which occasions,
she also writes, an ambivalent (122) relation to Zionism. This relation is read
through the authors retention and displacement of his family name following
his familys departure from Alexandria to Israel in 1951.
Yitzhaq Gormezano Goren was born in 1941 in Alexandria. At the age of

ten he immigrated to Israel with his family. In the process of integrating
into Israeli society, the authors family shed the nameGormezano
connecting them to the place from which their ancestors had issued gen-
erations earlier. Like many other immigrants to Israel in those years, they
adopted a nameGorenthat signified acceptance of their new Israeli-
Hebrew identity. As an artist, the author has chosen to embrace both
names, rejecting the radical rupture with the past signaled by discarding
Gormezano, without rejecting the Israeli-Hebrew identity that the name
Goren signifies. (123)
Through a reading of Gormezano Gorens Alexandrian Summer (1978), a novel

set in Egypt and staged in relation to the new site at which the authors family
had come to live, the novel addresses matters of race and religion, Orientalism

and its internalization.28 Placing each of these categories in play in relation to

representation (Starr writes of the third in the three-novel series she sketches
that the novel reflects on the nature of authorial voice and on the act of rep-
resentation through the narrated events [124]), the novel destabilizes binary
constructions, hesitantly positing converted Levantine identities with the
power to subvert the essentialized categories of Arab and Jew, colonizer and
colonized (124). Staging an afterlife of more than one multilingual, cosmopol-
itan context and place, the multilingual texture of Sephardi speech in Turkey,
Egypt, and Israel, finds expression in Gormezano Gorens Israeli-Hebrew litera-
ture (123), as Gormezano Goren, through his representation of anti-Semitic
violence, effectively perpetuates Orientalist discourses and a Zionist view
of Jewish history while his work also opens the possibility for a more com-
plex representation of the interactions among the various groups represented
(128). Through a close discussion of the staging of British colonizing force in
relation to Jews and Arabs, and in relation to Egyptians, Muslims, and Jews,
and reading this force in relation to the reconfiguration of these relations in
a colonial context, Starr considers Gormezano Gorens figuring of the sum-
mer of 1951 in Alexandria as the beginning of the end (132). If an older time
has come to a closea reading which mirrors the understanding of history
pointed to in the changing of the authors family nameAlexandrian Summer,
as Starr reads it, both declines and carries out this closure, inviting a reflec-
tion on the ways in which literary writing may occasion a principled refusal
to decide.
The writing of Ronit Matalon in The One Facing Us (1994) forms the occa-
sion for the books final chapter. Considering Matalon in relation to an impera-
tive of cultural integration (136) in the Israeli state (Jewish immigrants were
asked to shed the trappings of their dispossessed, neurotic Diaspora past, in
order to normalize themselves as healthy citizen-subjects of the Jewish state
[136]), Starr reads this novelistic writing in relation to Levantinisms weak-
nesses, particularly the ambivalence of its complicity with colonialism or colo-
nizing discourse (139). Framing the novel by the visit in 1979 of 16-year-old
Esther to her uncle Jacquo Cicurel in Cameroon (139), Matalon refigures the
term Levantine outside of the exclusive, binary, othering realm of Israeli
political discourse (140), as, Starr writes, she explores the ambivalent place
of Levantine characters in colonial discourses, inferring parallels between
Levantines as colonial subjects on both sides of the divide (145). Seeking to
28 The Jewish characters in the novel, including the narrator, Starr writes, fundamentally
see themselves as European, and display a deep internalization of Orientalist attitudes
toward native Egyptians (124-125).

206 sacks
reconjure and rewrite a Levantinism through its colonial inscription and its
relation to languagesand through the divisions between and within the
languages it perpetuatesMatalon, and also Gormezano Goren, point to a
complicity in relation to the political and social orders to which readers of
Remembering Cosmopolitan Egypt are recalled. To read this complicity would
be to read the ways in which languageand languagesare imbricated in
relation to colonial force. If this force compels, in one of its vectors, a histo-
ricizing reflectiona reflection on language that privileges the historical as
a category, where the past disappears and draws away, to become, simply,
the pastthen the reflection on the relation between older and later writ-
ing claims the attention of scholars in the disciplines of literature studies. If
one must speak of the past in such termsIn the years following the 1956
Suez conflict, foreign minorities began leaving Egypt in large numbers. The
cosmopolitan society immortalized by Western literature disappeared (40)
it would be only in order to insist on the non-stable, dissonant time of lan-
guage, and of writingan instability and a dissonance one is also given to
read through the texts considered here, and through Starrs consideration of
them. To write of the past, and to write of languageas in Sajdis The Barber
of Damascus, Elshakrys Reading Darwin in Arabic, and Halims Alexandrian
Cosmopolitanismwould be to do so in relation to a knowledge that the past
does not simply draw away, but that it persistently interrupts the time of the
present. To learn to read language differently, in relation to this interruption,
has been one of the lessons offered by the texts under review here. Lingering
with it gives to us a reading that remains with the historicity of language, while
not appropriating language as a legible object. To think this interruption in
relation to the formation of objects of study in the disciplines of Arabic studies,
and in the fields of literature studies more broadly, remains the greatest chal-
lenge and provocation of the work reviewed here, where these objects decline
to be what they arewhere objects fail to domesticate themselves within a
temporal horizon, and where this failure is neither a loss to be mourned nor
a privation to be corrected, but a divided and dividing event. Sajdi, Elshakry,
Halim, and Starr suggest, differently, that rather than having left the past safely
behind, the time of the writing they considerand if also our own time
remains that of the philological present. It is not a present of tranquil self-
understanding, but one whereby time is already problematic. Interrupting
historical-philological domestication, and refusing the stately time of readerly
legitimation, writing, in the broadest sense, and in the texts considered in the
work reviewed here, refuses the closure of languageand of collective social
and political struggle, and social and political formin the domesticating and

totalizing forms promised in linguistic understanding. This refusal points to

the question of which Marx wrote in the pages Said cited in Orientalism, and
in what remains, still, the decisive question of our own time: The question is,
can mankind fulfill its destiny without a fundamental revolution in the social
state of Asia?

The Philological Present: Reading The Arabic Nineteenth Century

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Journal of Arabic Literature 47 (2016) 169-207

Dana Sajdi. The Barber of Damascus: Nouveau Literacy in the Eighteenth-Century

In a passage in Orientalism, Edward W. Said recalls us to Marxs discussion of

Now, sickening as it must be to human feeling to witness those myriads

koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 6|doi 10.1163/1570064x-12341312

1 Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1978), 153.

Journal of Arabic Literature 47 (2016) 169-207

Journal of Arabic Literature 47 (2016) 169-207

With the institution of the past as lost, a self-colonization takes place, an

Journal of Arabic Literature 47 (2016) 169-207

nineteenth century and its fallout, through a complex reorganization in the

Although not radical in his vision of societyindeed, he implicitly

Journal of Arabic Literature 47 (2016) 169-207

nouveau literacy, is explained in relation to changing economic, political,

Is about the establishment and legitimization of the Islamic order.

While Sajdis reading suggests, compellingly, a relation between the new

Journal of Arabic Literature 47 (2016) 169-207

production of historical knowledge was finally completely broken; their

The authority of a historical report derived [in the classical annalistic

It is about this emergencean event that is rendered in Sajdis reading as

Journal of Arabic Literature 47 (2016) 169-207

in more than one disciplinethe nineteenth century is a privileged site for

Journal of Arabic Literature 47 (2016) 169-207

of knowledgehistorical and otherand language are privileged through

as the transformation of audience/readership. Above all, as we shall see, it is a story of the

Journal of Arabic Literature 47 (2016) 169-207

words, simplification of syntax, and derivation of vocabulary for new scientific

Journal of Arabic Literature 47 (2016) 169-207

discussion of the institution of turth as a historical and ethnographic

So, in accounting for al-Naha, rather than seeing it as a moment of

Journal of Arabic Literature 47 (2016) 169-207

Journal of Arabic Literature 47 (2016) 169-207

Through a discussion of what she calls reading Darwin in Arabic, Marwa

Journal of Arabic Literature 47 (2016) 169-207

19 Compare, alongside Frantz Rosenthal, Knowledge Triumphant: The Concept of Knowledge

Journal of Arabic Literature 47 (2016) 169-207

Francis Marrsh, Salmah Ms, Isml Mahar, and othersReading Darwin

But if this harmony points to a new understanding of unitythe unity of

20 On transformations in the category religion in relation to Christianity, see Talal

Journal of Arabic Literature 47 (2016) 169-207

Something entirely new is taking place in language, Elshakry underlines

Journal of Arabic Literature 47 (2016) 169-207

Journal of Arabic Literature 47 (2016) 169-207

Arabic translation supervised by Muammad Abduh. Al-Afghns reading,

Journal of Arabic Literature 47 (2016) 169-207

This repudiation of the past works in sync with a commitment to an Ottoman

Al-Jisr constantly asks for demonstrable evidence, and in doing so he

Moving from discussions of the law (sharah), practices of Quranic exegesis,

Journal of Arabic Literature 47 (2016) 169-207

21 Consider, in a text which may be read as a counterpoint to Elshakrys, the illuminating

Journal of Arabic Literature 47 (2016) 169-207

Yet Abduh also distinguished, as through his discussion of miracles, between

His discussion of miracles was therefore another way to get at the

And this unknowability was communicated in relation to a new understanding

Journal of Arabic Literature 47 (2016) 169-207

gloss, are historical onesthe scholastic, the classicaland they impose

Journal of Arabic Literature 47 (2016) 169-207

Through Abduhs writing, Islam is to become itself by becoming a religion,

Journal of Arabic Literature 47 (2016) 169-207

in relation to shir (poetry) and adab.23 This reorientation is historical and

23 See, on usayn, in relation to an overcoming of metaphysics and the formation of

Journal of Arabic Literature 47 (2016) 169-207

The institution of Orientalist categoriesand the new understanding of his-

1 Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1978), 153.

19 Compare, alongside Frantz Rosenthal, Knowledge Triumphant: The Concept of Knowledge

20 On transformations in the category religion in relation to Christianity, see Talal

21 Consider, in a text which may be read as a counterpoint to Elshakrys, the illuminating

23 See, on usayn, in relation to an overcoming of metaphysics and the formation of