Sailing the Modern Episteme: Al-Tahtawi on the Mediterranean (original) (raw)
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COLONIALITY, MODERNITY AND EUROPEAN KNOWLEDGE IN AL-TAHTAWI'S TAKHLIS AL-IBRIZ FI TALKHIS BARIZ
La rivista di Arablit, 2018
This paper examines the attitude towards European coloniality expressed in one of the earliest Nahdawist 1 works. It argues that this attitude is inextricably connected to the problematics of indigenizing European modernity and the consequent epistemological effects of this process. The discussion is centered on al-Ṭahṭāwī's text because of its foundational status, thus highlighting the strategies of assimilation that al-Ṭahṭāwī employs in his account of his visit to France (1826-1831). Mignolo's coloniality/modernity complex serves as the theoretical basis for tracking the various discursive strategies used by al-Ṭahṭāwī to negotiate the difficulties posed by the political mandate of his patron, Muḥammad 'Alī Bāšā (b. 1769, d. 1849), who endeavored to indigenize, strategically and selectively, European modernity. ( message Haifa Alfaisal to request article)
Hafıza, 2020
An Imam in Paris (Takhlīṣ al-ibrīz fī talkhīṣ Bārīz, 1832), the famous travelogue that was written by Rifā'ah Rāfi' al-Ṭahṭāwī, has often been studied as a work that puts forth the observations of an Arab traveler about the Western culture that he had little familiarity with. However, East and West are not always described as two opposite poles in the travelogue. In fact, al-Ṭahṭāwī sometimes draws attention to similarities between the French and Arabs and emphasizes that Turks and Arabs are different from each other. In order to historically contextualize al-Ṭahṭāwī’s observations, this study will first examine various French sources. Most of these sources claimed that many students who came from Egypt to Paris such as al-Ṭahṭāwī were Turks. Furthermore, Edme-François Jomard and Pierre Nicholas Hamont, both of whom played a key role in al-Ṭahṭāwī’s education when he was in Paris, argued that Turks halt the progress of civilizations. The second section will give a close reading of al-Ṭahṭāwī’s work. In particular, sections in An Imam in Paris in which al-Ṭahṭāwī describes his views on Turks and the French will be examined. The conclusion of this essay will emphasize that critics need to examine how Arabic sources from the nineteenth century represent Turks to understand these sources’ vision of Westernization and modernization.
REPRESENTATIONS OF THE WEST IN AL-TAHTAWI, AL-HAKIM, AND AWAD
Global Journal of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences , 2020
The paper investigates the representations of the West in three Egyptian texts written in Arabic. These are Rifa'a al-Tahtawi's A Paris Profile, Tawfiq al-Hakim's A Sparrow from the East, and Louis Awad's Memoirs of a Scholarship Student within the framework of the Postcolonial theories of Franz Fanon, Edward Said, and Homi Bhabha. Instead of a confrontation between the West and the East along the lines of Fanon and Said, the three texts reveal the possibility of a dialogue, enriching the attempt at introducing Modernity along European lines in Egypt which was made by Muhammad Ali in the early years of the nineteenth century. The dialogue, however, rests upon paradigms other than Bhabha's notion of Third Space. Hence, the three texts challenge the dichotomy devised by Fanon, the stereotypes identified by Said and the fluidity and vagueness of identity propagated by Bhabha.
165_Arabic_Thought_Beyond_the_Liberal_Age_Nadia_Bou_Ali.25452912.pdf
This world is a comedy to those that think, a tragedy to those that feel. — Horace Walpole Arabic Thought Beyond the Liberal Age can be viewed as a culmination of the feverish explosion of what has been called " Nahda studies " in the past decades. The compulsion to re-enact the Nahda is declared in fidelity to Albert Hourani's legacy for the intellectual history of the Arabic speaking world. However, the editors, Jens Hanssen and Max Weiss, in their distinctly postcolonial theoretical framing of the book, depart radically from the tradition of intellectual history Hourani worked within. In this regard, the volume can be seen to pay homage to Hourani by bidding him farewell. Although presented as the proceedings of a conference held at Princeton University in Hourani's honor (October 2012), the plan for an intellectual history of Arabic thought proposed by the editors is tethered to their framing in the introduction, which will be the main object of scrutiny here. Due to its significance, this review will focus primarily on the problematics posed by the editors' theoretical framing of the intellectual history of the Nahda, and only secondarily on the individual contributions included in the volume. For it is in the introduction that the editors lay down a framework for rethinking Arabic intellectual history through positing the Nahda as a global concept (37). In their introduction, Weiss and Hanssen lead the reader down a winding path upon which the historical and the logical are intertwined in a thorny thicket of references: