Arab History and the Nation State: A Study in Modern Historiography, 1820-1980.

• Author: Haddad, Mahmoud

This is an interesting and provocative work written by an Arab historian about Arab historians of the modern nation-state. Youssef Choueiri begins his book with the bold statement that "modern Arabic thought has not yet found its historian" (p. xi) and proceeds to show how "most Arab historians have increasingly tended to devote their academic research to the past of their own national states" (p. xvi).

The author identifies two phases in the development of modem Arab historiography. An early phase from 1820 to 1920 was followed by a later lasting from 1920 to 1980. The earlier was the phase of pioneers and amateurs who were working under the influence of both traditional and European concepts and ideas. Thus they appropriated theoretical formulations of Locke, Voltaire, and Montesquieu alongside those of Ibn Khaldun. What characterized this period and the histories of its pioneers like Rifa a al-Tahtawi, Salim al-Bustani, Ilyas Matar, Jurgi Yanni or Khayr al-Din al-Tunisi was the beginning of an awareness of a well-defined territorial unit governed by a quasi-Western state. This was a distinct break with medieval Muslim annalists and chroniclers, from al-Tabari to al-Maqrizi, who were usually concerned with Islamic history irrespective of geographical boundaries. What is fascinating in this section of the book is the different ways historians belonging to different traditions tackled the transformation. While the Egyptian historian al-Jabarti (1753-1825), an Azharite alim of the old school, considered Muhammad Ali, the founder of modem Egypt, a heretic who violated the norms of religion, al-Tahtawi (1801-1873), also an Azharite alim, who visited Europe and came under its influence, became the ideologue of the pasha and considered him his ideal ruler.

Moving on to the historiography of geographical Syria during the same period, Choueiri believes that it was the Egyptian occupation in the 1830s which first unified the country politically and economically, albeit under Western influence. The subsequent Ottoman modernizing measures of the Tanzimat which introduced relatively secular laws permitted history-writing that appealed to Syrian patriotism. The development of local geographical consciousness at this stage, however, did not lead to the shunning of the larger, still acceptable indigenous supra-national framework of political identity. Thus, local patriotism did not try to detach itself from the Ottoman state, but rather renewed its...