Conceptual History of the Near East

Abstract

Conceptual history holds tremendous potential to address a central issue in Near Eastern Studies, namely the formation of modernity in the Near East, provisionally located between the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries. The encounter with European powers, primarily Britain and France, was a decisive historical factor in this formation; and European hegemony is, in fact, inscribed into the very concept of “modernity,” which we take as an historical, rather than analytical, concept. The conceptual formation of modernity in Arabic and Turkish was, however, a multilayered process; involving both ruptures and continuities, intersecting various temporalities, and incorporating concepts from several languages. To interrogate this multilayered process, we suggest the metaphor of the Sattelzeit (Saddle Period) as a heuristic tool, precisely because of its being tied to modernity. Finally, the article will show what conceptual history of the Near East has to offer to conceptual history more broadly.

The “Secular” in Post-1967 Islamist Thought; Revisiting Arab Intellectual History and Political Ideology towards 20th Century fin-de-siècle

“…Coined by the German historian Reinhart Koselleck, Sattelzeit is labelled as a threshold period, namely the period when "the past was gradually transformed into the present" (Zemmin and Sievert 2021, p. 11; see also Koselleck 2004), referring to the age of European modernity. By analogy, Zemmin and Sievert (2021) propose 1850-1950 as the Saddle period for the Near and Middle East; however, we may extend Sattelzeit to the post-war age, and especially after 1967, since major conceptual transformations took place. For the sake of our argument, we suggest that indigenous modernities were not solely imposed on the Arab-Muslim world but already existed or were being formed during that period not regardless of Western modernity but rather simultaneously with it.…”

“…Thus, this study does not take for granted modernity's European origin. We understand modernity in its plural form (Zemmin and Sievert 2021). Modernities and their ramifications were, undoubtedly, not just a European invention, even though colonialism was the historical process that globally consolidated European and Christian forms of modernity (Topal and Wigen 2019).…”

“…A common understanding of the past and historical progress oscillating between Islamic symbolism and secular ideas was created. This historical congruence is best portrayed in Hasan Hanafi (1935-2021, a professor of philosophy at the University of Cairo. Engrained with leftist phenomenology from his studies in France, he travelled to the USA, where he turned towards the idea of a revolutionary religion, stimulated also by Latin-American liberation theology.…”