THE METAPHYSICS OF SIMILARITY AND ANALOGICAL REASONING

Ph.D. Thesis. University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa 2018

The Maghrib in the Mashriq

This book is about the impact of knowledge produced in the Islamic West on the Mashriq. Topics include the emergence and construction of the concept ‘Maghrib’, the role of travel in the transmission, reception and integration of locally produced knowledge, and the ways in which Maghribis in the Mashriq manifested their identity. The studies are of interest for understanding the complex dynamics between local and global intellectual contexts

To Hold the World Visible: Writing and History in the Work of Mohammed Dib

This dissertation proposes a broad reading of the work of the Algerian francophone writer Mohammed Dib, some 30 volumes of novels, poetry, stories, and nonfiction writing published between 1952 and 2003. It reads a tension in Dib's work between the visible, the immediately given details of life and transmissible structure of meaning, and the invisible, larger structures or processes that link disparate elements without being themselves describable. Such a tension can be translated into the languages of Islamic mysticism, phenomenology, or a philosophy of history, all discourses that guide the investigation of Dib's work. The dissertation proposes that for Dib an acknowledgement of the invisible as an underlying unity connecting its various manifestations, a flux of experience not divisible into separate categories of object and subject, or a course of events exceeding the control and grasp of definable actors does not lead to escapism or rejection of reality, but to a return to the visible, to increased attention to the details of everyday life and the observable world. The act of writing, for Dib, involves holding to the world, even though the words that link writer and reader are only shadows of the events they witness or the processes that produce them. The dissertation's first half focuses on Dib's writing technique and influence, situating him in 20th-century French and francophone literary theory, tracing his adoption of Arab-Islamic, North African, and Sufi literary and aesthetic traditions, and analyzing how conscious experience forms and dissolves in his presentation of landscape and in childhood. The second half turns to his treatment of historical events, mainly those of Algeria through the colonial period, the war of independence, the post-independence period, and the civil war of the 1990s. Dib's commitment to the perspective of the marginalized, search for a way of presenting history that does not condemn the details of everyday life to insignificance, and attention to the role of imagination lead to criticism of colonial, bureaucratic, and apocalyptic attitudes as attempting to escape the given world, and searches for a use of history that undoes, rather than reinforces, physical and symbolic acts of exclusion

Memory on the Boundaries of Empire: Narrating Place in the Early Modern Local Historiography of Yazd.

This dissertation traces the evolution of premodern historical writing about Yazd, Iran, in order to explore the changing function and utility of local history writing as a key means of engagement in imperial affairs. Yazd had been an important intellectual, religious, and economic center in Persianate empires since Mongol times, and its notable families commanded authority and influence at court. However, by the end of the Safavid era, in the seventeenth century, Yazd had lost this standing. This study understands this decline in terms of parallel transformations that reconfigured the city’s local social networks and elements of its urban morphology. It does so by comparing the different ways in which successive Yazdi authors channeled the history of the imperial realm through stories about Yazd’s own people and places. This study of Yazd’s local histories complicates the court-centered narrative of empire that has dominated scholarship on early modern Islamic empire and outlines a complementary history of the Islamo-Persianate world from its edge. It examines the strategies by which historians writing from the margins commemorated their city’s history as a means of constructing a local sensibility and, at the same time, a sense of orientation in the world outside local places. This project structures this exploration of Yazdi historiography around a series of sites across the city that the authors presented as being constitutive of local networks of actors and, also, of the mythologies that legitimated the authority of sacred kings and their universal empires. Each chapter is fundamentally concerned with the relationship between narrative, space, and memory, and each compares the webs of narratives that Yazdi authors embed in their commemorations of these sites. Toward this end, the project charts the evolution of local strategies for “centering” the city in the larger world by examining changes in the implicit discourse on universal empire, which Yazdi historians situated in their representations of local spaces. In this way, the dissertation maps these transformations in narrative strategy onto changes in the social and topographical features of Yazd and, furthermore, correlates these with shifts in patterns of interaction between the court and the city.PHDNear Eastern StudiesUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/95940/1/mancland_1.pd