A PORTRAIT OF AN IRAQI NOVELIST AS A YOUNG MAN, 1948 - 1950

In 1946 Shim‘on Ballas joined the illegal Iraqi Communist Party (henceforth: the ICP).(1) He was 16 years old. He recalls how his bourgeois family objected to his becoming a member of a party comprised of “these barefooted people,” while he came to feel solidarity with, and value the opinions of, Iraqis of various classes through his party activities. Ballas recalls his participation in the Wathba, a series of demonstrations which protested the government’s pro-British policie

On Noble and Inherited Virtues: Discussions of the Semitic Race in the Levant and Egypt, 1876–1918

This article examines new notions about race, ethnicity and language current in modern movements of Arabic literary and cultural revival. I argue that the Arab print market before World War I adopted the racial category of the Semite as highly relevant to Arab ethnicity and language, but the philological and literary significations of the term subverted the negative constructions affiliated with the Semitic races in Western race theories. Combining elements from the study of linguistics, religion, and political philosophy, Arabic journals, books, and works of historical fiction, created a Semitic and Arab universe, populated by grand historical figures and mesmerizing literary and cultural artifacts. Such publications advanced the notion that the Arab races belonged to Semitic cultures and civilizations whose achievements should be a source of pride and rejuvenation. These printed products also conveyed the idea that the Arabic language and Arab ethnicity can create ecumenical and pluralistic conversations. Motivated by the desire to find a rational explanation to phenomena they identified with cultural and literary decline, Arab authors also hoped to reconstruct the modes with which their Semitic and Arab ancestors dealt with questions relating to community and civilization. By publishing scientific articles on philology, literature, and linguistics, the print media illustrated that Arabic itself was a language capable of expressing complex scientific concepts and arguments

Book Review: Il Kwang Sung, Mamluks in the Modern Egyptian Mind: Changing the Memory of the Mamluks, 1919–1952

Il Kwang Sung wrote a fascinating work. Written in a lucid and accessible style, and grounded in a rich and interdisciplinary archive, Sung’s work explores the ways in which modern Egyptians imagined the Mamluk past before the rise of Gamal Abdel Nasser (Jamāl ʿAbd al-Nāṣir) to power. The book convincingly argues that there was no one, stable, memory of the Mamluk Sultanate and the Mamluks in Ottoman Egypt. Rather, different groups of politicians, intellectuals, and writers presented their own versions of the Mamluks in Egypt

The Colonized Semites and the Infectious Disease: Theorizing and Narrativizing Anti-Semitism in the Levant, 1870–1914

This article studies the ways in which Arab intellectuals in Egypt and the Levant wrote about modern anti-Semitism during the four decades preceding the demise of the Ottoman Empire. This period is often described as the era of the Arab Nahda (revival); it refers to an era when Arab thinkers and writers showed great interest in the Arabic language, Islamic history, and Arab culture and consumed European literary and philosophical works. Arab intellectuals in this period wrote about Jewish affairs. They protested the persecution of Jews in Eastern and Western Europe and compared anti-Jewish racism to an infectious disease that spread in Europe’s cities and destroyed the fabric of its democracy, especially during the Dreyfus affair. I argue that these very pro-Jewish positions were connected to several conversations about the Arab self. Since the Arabs were categorized as Semites in European racial discourses, the meanings ascribed to the term were of utmost important to them. Arab writers also connected their discussions of anti-Semitism to their broader interest in science; as anti-Semitism seemed to have reflected a remnant from the medieval past, Arab writers wondered why this phenomenon prevailed in modern and scientific Europe. As Ottoman subjects witnessing the colonization of Egypt and North Africa, Arab intellectuals underscored the fact that Europe, whose intellectuals and politicians critiqued the persecution of Christians in the Ottoman Empire and argued that their colonization brought justice to persecuted minorities, was treating its minorities in a horrific fashion. Lastly, as Arab thinkers demanded linguistic and cultural rights within the Ottoman Empire and demanded to curb the powers of autocratic rulers, they were interested in Europe’s most glaring failed emancipation. Their reflections, moreover, could help us theorize the present moment, when Jews and Muslims struggle together against purist and racist movements in the US and in Europe