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Abstract
This article resurrects an old and well-known problem of periodization: locating the beginning of the modern period in the Middle East. In the past quarter of a century or so it has been the focus of a debate that, though seldom articulated or presented as such, stands at the core of studies of the modern era. Two basic approaches have been offered. One, often described as Orientalist, has suggested that the modern period in the Arab Middle East was ushered in by Napoleon's invasion in 1798. Those who adopt this approach find a clear correlation between the invasion, emblematic of ‘the impact of the West’, and the beginnings of modernization and progress in a stagnant Middle East. The other, revisionist stance raises serious doubts about this correlation and suggests other timetables according to which modernity had its roots in the region itself or in continued interaction with the West before the arrival of the French revolutionary army. The article suggests a third option which takes into account new approaches to history that view modernity itself as a set of historical phenomena created mainly by and through the colonial encounter.
Notes
I would like to thank the participants of the conference Twentieth Century Historians and Historiographies of the Middle East held at Boğazic¸i University in May 2002 for their insightful comments on an earlier version of this article, which was presented there. I would also like to thank Nimrod Hurvitz, Sam Kaplan, Afsaneh Najmabadi, Amy Singer and the readers at MHR for their assistance and comments on the earlier draft.
Notes
1. Napoleon Bonaparte only became known as ‘Napoleon’ some time after his expedition to Egypt. Thus, chronological precision demands that we refer to him as ‘Bonaparte’. However, as most writing on this chapter in history—from Egyptian primary school textbooks to scholary academic article—refers to this expedition as ‘Napoleon's Invasion’, and the name has acquired an almost iconic status. I have decided to retain the anachronism at the expense of historical acdcuracy.
2. Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York, 1983), p.17.
3. Dipesh Chakrabarty calls this concept ‘historicism’; see Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, 2000), p.7.
4. Fabian, Time and the Other, pp.8–11. Fabian offers the example of Volney's travels to the Levant as an example. See also Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, pp.7–8.
5. Fabian defines ‘coeval’ as ‘of same age, duration or epoch’ (Time and the Other, p.31).
6. Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, p.8.
7. I am grateful to Tami Sarfatti for sharing with me some of the findings of her work on the Description de l'Egypte and its influence on nineteenth-century France.
8. Peter Gran, ‘Tahtawi in Paris’, Al-Ahram Weekly, 10 Jan. 2002. Rifā c a Rāfi c al-Tahtāwi (1801–1873), an Egyptian scholar, was sent to Paris with the first missions of Egyptian students and wrote several books about this experience.
9. H.A.R. Gibb and Harold Bowen, Islamic Society and the West: A Study of the Impact of Western Civilization on Moslem Culture in the Near East (Oxford, 1967 [1950]), p.1.
10. Bernard Lewis, The Arabs in History (London, 1956), p.166.
11. Bernard Lewis, The Emergence of Modern Turkey (Oxford, 1961).
12. Bernard Lewis, The Middle East and the West (London, 1964), p.34.
13. Bernard Lewis, The Muslim Discovery of Europe (New York, 1982), pp.50–51.
14. Bernard Lewis, The Shaping of the Modern Middle East (Oxford, 1994), pp.31, 34.
15. Lewis, Arabs in History, p.166. Until the appearance of Jane Hathaway's The Politics of Households in Ottoman Egypt (Cambridge, 1997), the assumption that Egypt's élite prior to Napoleon's invasion was Mamluk remained unchallenged.
16. Lewis, The Discovery of Europe, p.51.
17. P.J. Vatikiotis, The Modern History of Egypt (London, 1969), p.37.
18. Nancy Elizabeth Gallagher, Approaches to the History of the Middle East: Interviews with Leading Middle East Historians (Ithaca, 1997), p.59.
19. Muhammad c Abd al-Rahim Mustafa and Mustafa Fahmi al-Daqmiri, Ma c ālim fi tarīkh Misr al-hadīth (Cairo, 1953). The analysis of Egyptian textbooks here owes a great deal to Gabriel Piterberg, ‘The Tropes of Stagnation and Awakening in Nationalist Historical Consciousness: The Egyptian Case’, in Israel Gershoni and James Jankowski (eds.), Rethinking Nationalism in the Arab Middle East (New York, 1997), pp.42–62. See also Ehud Toledano, ‘Lishkoakh et he-avar ha-osmani shel Mitsrayim’, Jamā c a, 1 (1997), pp.67–87.
20. The Asiatic Mode of Production involves self-sustaining villages, on the one hand, and a distant government that employs tax collectors, on the other. The producing classes are thus cut off from the exploiting élite, and therefore the tensions necessary for an overthrow of the system are absent.
21. Shlomo Avineri, Karl Marx on Colonialism and Modernization (New York, 1969), p.15. Avineri points out that Engels seems to have had the same ideas (pp.16, 52). See also Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, p.8: ‘The country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future.’
22. Maxime Rodinson, Marxism and the Muslim World (London, 1979), p.10.
23. Immanuel Wallerstein, Hale Decdeli, and Reşat Kasaba, ‘Incorporation of the Ottoman Empire into the World Economy’, in Huri Islamoğlu-Inan (ed.), The Ottoman Empire and the World Economy (Cambridge, 1987), pp.88–97; Immanuel Wallerstein, ‘The Ottoman Empire and the Capitalist World Economy: Some Questions for Research’, Review, 2 (1979), pp.389–401; idem, ‘The Rise and Future Demise of the World Capitalist System: Concepts for Comparative Analysis’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 16 (1974), pp.387–415.
24. Huri Islamoğlu-lnan and Cağlar Keyder, ‘Agenda for Ottoman History’, in Huri Islamoğlu-Inan (ed.), The Ottoman Empire and the World Economy (Cambridge, 1987), pp.42–62.
25. Huri Islamoğlu-lnan and Cağlar Keyder, ‘Agenda for Ottoman History’, in Huri Islamoğlu-Inan (ed.), The Ottoman Empire and the World Economy (Cambridge, 1987), p.60. A slightly different approach was offered by Peter Gran in The Islamic Roots of Capitalism: Egypt, 1760–1840 (Austin, TX, and London, 1979), pp.32–3, 152. Gran suggested that a trend towards capitalism similar to the one that occurred in Europe was evident in eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century Egypt and that it was internal developments rather than Napoleon's invasion that brought about the downfall of the Mamluks and created new realities of power.
26. See, for example, Benjamin Braude, ‘International Competition and Domestic Cloth in the Ottoman Empire, 1500–1650: A Study in Underdevelopment’, Review 2 (1979), pp.437–51. Braude finds indications of peripheralization as early as the late sixteenth century. See also Reşat Kasaba, The Ottoman Empire and the World Economy (Albany, NY, 1988), pp.11–35, placing the beginnings of incorporation, at least of the western provinces of the empire, in the second half of the eighteenth century; Ariel Salzmann, ‘The Age of Tulips: Confluence and Conflict in Early Modern Consumer Culture (1550–1730)’, in Donald Quataert (ed.), Consumption Studies and the History of the Ottoman Empire, 1550–1922 (Albany, NY, 2000), pp.83–106, and Quataert's own conclusions, Huri Islamoğlu-lnan and Cağlar Keyder, ‘Agenda for Ottoman History’, in Huri Islamoğlu-Inan (ed.), The Ottoman Empire and the World Economy (Cambridge, 1987), pp.10–11; Beshara Doumani, Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700–1900 (Berkeley, 1995), pp.52–3.
27. Edhem Eldem, ‘Istanbul: From Imperial to Peripheralized Capital’, in Edhem Eldem, Daniel Goffman, and Bruce Masters, The Ottoman City between East and West (Cambridge, 1999), p.196.
28. Albert Hourani, A Vision of History: Near Eastern and Other Essays (Beirut, 1961), pp.36–7.
29. Hathaway, The Politics of Households.
30. Toledano, ‘Lishkoakh et he-avar ha-osmani shel Mitsrayim’.
31. Kenneth M. Cuno, ‘The Origins of Private Ownership of Land in Egypt’, International Journal of Middle East Studies, 12 (1980), pp.245–75. See also idem, The Pasha's Peasants: Land, Society and Economy in Lower Egypt, 1740–1858 (Cambridge, 1992), mainly p.198: ‘My view differs significantly from the conventional one, which emphasizes discontinuity. In it the French expedition and the rise of Muhammad Ali are believed to have brought Egypt into contact with the West, thereby inaugurating an era of progressive change out of which a modern nation emerged. The choice of periodization in that view and in my own is therefore connected with the way change is conceptualized. My approach was to assume that nineteenth-century developments might be explained in terms of Egypt's own past as in terms of external forces. I sought, in other words, to conceive of change as a process influenced partly but not necessarily decisively – or even at all times – by interaction with Europe. For the study of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the perspective required for my approach could be achieved only by escaping the bounds of the conventional periodization.’
32. Cuno, The Pasha's Peasants, p.245.
33. Marshall Hodgson, The Venture of Islam (Chicago, 1974), Vol. 1, pp.50–52.
34. Muhammad Sabri, Tarīkh Misr: min Muhammad c Ali ila al- c asr al-hadīth (Cairo, 1996), p.26. Saadallah Suriyal Yusuf, Al-mu c allim fi'l-tarīkh (Cairo, 2002), pp.157–86, presents a very critical view of the French invasion and offers a relatively lengthy discussion of Egyptian resistance to occupation but retains the very detailed description of the important impact of the invasion on Egyptian politics, society, and culture.
35. Sabri, Tārikh Misr, p.29: ‘fahadathat min jarrā'i dhalika hazza c anīfa fi al-bilād tamakhkhadat c anha al-fikra al-istiklālīya allati zaharat malāmihuha fi c asr Muhammad c Ali’ watajallat fi c asr Ismācīl’. See also c Abd al-Mun c im Gharib, Al-muhīt fi al-dirāsāt al-ijtimā c iyya: Misr wa'l-watan al- c Arabi (Cairo, n.d.), pp.53–5.
36. For example, Layla c Anān, Al-hamla al-faransiyya fi mahkamat al-tarīkh (Cairo, 1992).
37. Shimon Shamir, ‘’Or va-esh’: hapulmos be-mitsrayim c al hamashma c ut hahistorit shel plishat Bonapart’, Alpayim, 20 (2000), pp.9–35; Hilmi al-Namnam, Al-Misriyun wa-hamlat Bonābart (Cairo, 1998).
38. Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, p.7.
39. For a summary and an excellent discussion of the changing concept of modernity see Timothy Mitchell, ‘The Stage of Modernity’, in idem (ed.), Questions of Modernity (Minneapolis and London, 2000), pp.1–34. See also Thongchai Winichakul, Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-Body of the Nation (Honolulu, 1994).
40. For a summary and an excellent discussion of the changing concept of modernity see Timothy Mitchell, ‘The Stage of Modernity’, in idem (ed.), Questions of Modernity (Minneapolis and London, 2000), p.2. See also Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, p.17.
41. There is also ample evidence to the contrary: that notable groups of this kind existed in Middle East societies from the Middle Ages onward.
42. Bernard S. Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India (Princeton, 1996), p.4.
43. Bernard S. Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India (Princeton, 1996), pp.5–15. See also Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London and New York, 1991), pp.163–85.
44. Anderson, Imagined Communities, p.162. See also Mitchell, ‘The Stage of Modernity’, pp.16–20.
45. Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, p.17.
46. Edward Said, Orientalism (London, 1985), p.122.
47. Bernard Cohn, An Anthropologist among the Historians and Other Essays (New Delhi, 1987), pp.228–9.