EUME
2011/ 2012

Mostafa Minawi

Ottomans on the Verge: Trans-imperial Arab Elites of Istanbul (1885-1915)

Mostafa Minawi holds a Bachelor's degree in Engineering and Business Management from McMaster University (1997) and an MA in History from the University of Toronto (2005). His PhD dissertation in the joint History and Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies program at New York University is entitled "Lines in the Sand: the Ottoman Empire's Policies of Expansion and Consolidation along its African and Arabian Frontiers (1882–1902)". It is based on Ottoman, British, Bulgarian, American and Syrian archival material and explores Istanbul's policies towards the empire's southern frontiers in the late 19th century. Geographically, Minawi's research focuses on the eastern Sahara and western Arabia. In present day terms, the eastern Sahara includes portions of Nigeria, Niger, Chad, Cameroon, Sudan, and Libya. Western Arabia corresponds roughly to the present-day Province of Hijaz in Saudi Arabia. At the heart of Minawi's project is a reevaluation of the conventional view of a defensive and inwardly looking Ottoman Empire in the last two decades of the 19th century. By focusing on Ottoman inter- and intra- imperial relations in Africa and Arabia after the Conference of Berlin (1884–85), his dissertation shows that the Ottoman government was engaged in an aggressive, multifaceted, and multi-focal competitive strategy along the empire's southern frontiers.

Ottomans on the Verge: Trans-imperial Arab Elites of Istanbul (1885-1915)

During the EUME-fellowship, Minawi will expand on his doctoral dissertation by investigating the lives and careers of some of the individuals who were the driving force behind Istanbul's new policies on its southern frontiers. They were mostly Europe-educated Arab-Ottomans who were part of the elites of Istanbul and who became caught between multiple identitarian currents during a time of fast-changing political and sociological reality in the late 19th-century Ottoman Empire.