The full workshop description including abstracts and biographies is available for download here: Workshop description
Conveners
Islam Dayeh (Freie Universität Berlin, Zukunftsphilologie)
Lejla Demiri (Fellow of Europe in the Middle East ‐ The Middle East in Europe)
Feras Krimsti (Zentrum Moderner Orient)
Description:
The Ottoman lands witnessed in the eighteenth century a gradual decentralisation of power, marked by the relative independence of the provinces, vilâyet, and the appearance of local authorities. The empowerment of the provinces enabled the crystallization of forms of representation, political and cultural, particular to the provinces. As a consequence, identities were negotiated and new subjectivites forged. Writings from the provinces in this period exhibit a concern with what appears to be ethnic and religious difference, revolving around constructions such as Arabness, Turkishness, and various religious affinities. This novel eighteenth century social reality is particularly noteworthy, considering that central Ottoman authorities did not claim legitimacy on the basis of ethnic allegiance. Indeed, Ottoman authorities neither produced propaganda nor enacted laws that enforced ethnic demarcation. In fact, Ottoman authorities, unlike later nation‐states, seem not to have required from their subjects any sort of ideological loyalty or affiliation. Only with the relative independence of the provinces in the eighteenth century do we begin to observe the formation of social groupings and political interests expressed in the language of ethnic and religious difference.
Bearing this social reality in mind, the two‐day workshop seeks to cast light on the literary and intellectual cultures of the Ottoman provinces (Anatolian, Balkan and Arab) in the eighteenth century in order to explore the extent to which eighteenth century literary cultures were distinctive due to their provincial nature. In contrast to the theological and sociological approaches to so‐called inter‐religious relations and tribal conflicts in this period, the workshop aims to look more closely at how these ‘differences’ were actually imagined and negotiated in the intellectual production of the period. By ‘intellectual production’ we mean the broad range of writings that are, generically, neither documentary nor normative. This leaves aside, consciously, the vast and rich court‐archives as well as normative legal texts.
The workshop will therefore explore aspects of the production and function of difference in theological, philosophical, philological, historiographical and adab texts, whereby the focus will be on literary representation, semantic articulation and the mechanisms through which difference is negotiated. Such writings include those of ‘Abd al‐Ghanī al‐Nābulusī (1050‐1143/1641‐1731), an influential Damascene mystic and theologian; Abdallah Zakhir (d. 1748), a leading Christian author; Muṣṭafā al‐Bakrī (1099‐1162/1688‐1749); Murtaḍā al‐Zabīdī (1145‐1205/1732‐1791), a prominent scholar and lexicographer; ‘Abd al‐Raḥmān al‐Jabartī (d. 1825), an important historian; Muḥammad b. ‘Umar al‐Tūnisī (1204‐1274/1789‐1857), and other notable figures of significant intellectual impact. By carefully examining and comparing their literary production, the aim is also to search for common as well as contrasting themes, concerns, debates and terminology in the writings of this period. Furthermore, comparisons between and among Ottoman provinces and, in particular, comparison of Anatolian, Balkan, and Arab provinces during the eighteenth century could shed much light on how a decentralized empire functioned and how the provinces began to articulate, through language, forms of distinctiveness and difference. Rather than focusing on the assumed ‘factual reality’ of religious and racial difference in the period under study, the novelty of this workshop lies in its particular emphasis on the literary and conceptual mechanisms of producing difference and sameness. How is ‘difference’ constructed, manipulated and interpreted? What sort of language politics and theological hermeneutics are at stake? How do genealogies function and how do they assume epistemological authority? What types of texts are produced to this end and how do they relate to these new social realities and particularly of group formation and self‐demarcation?
By consciously refraining from reducing the richness of human cultural interaction in the eighteenth century to dichotomies such as Muslim‐Christian or Jewish‐Muslim or Muslim‐Muslim relations, or to colonially and racially charged categories such as African, Turk, Arab, Greek and Anatolian, the workshop takes as its point of departure the view that such religious and ethnic differences are constructions contingent upon shifting conceptual paradigms, intimately linked to modes of power and legitimation. The working hypothesis therefore is that such dichotomies and ethnic categories are not given realities but constructions in need of careful dismantling and analytical scrutiny. Did difference really make a difference?
Format:
In order to give each speaker enough time to present his or her work as well as to ensure a lively and fruitful discussion, each speaker will be allotted 45 minutes, which will consisting of:
30 min presentation and textual analysis
This will consist of an introduction, a discussion of the methodological issues at stake and a close examination of the source‐text(s) in the original language.
15 min discussion
Presentations can be given and discussed in English and in Arabic.
