Specters of Ancient Pasts and the Ends of History: The Arabic Discourse of Revival in the Tanzimat Era (1839–1876)

This dissertation is a study of the Arabic discourse of "revival" (iḥyāʾ) in Egypt and Greater Syria in the Tanzimat era (1839–1876), with a focus on elite cultural production in Cairo and Beirut. The dissertation has two aims: to argue that this discourse did not simply reproduce the ideologies of European colonialism and imperialism; and to analyze this discourse as the expression of a distinctive structure of historical experience. With regard to the latter aim, the argument is that this discourse formed a fraught and uneasy relationship with the past, and I argue that in doing so it expressed the tensions of the integration of regional economies into the new capitalist world market, and the hopes and anxieties of elites with regard to this process. Chapter 1 gives an overview of the historical context. Chapter 2 analyzes a text produced just before the Tanzimat era, to bring out the distinctiveness of the Tanzimat-era mode of engagement with the past. Chapter 3 argues that the Tanzimat era saw the development of a new concept of history in Arabic in the Tanzimat era that was integral to the structure of historical experience articulated by the discourse of revival. Chapter 4 argues that the discourse of revival was animated by a sense of the past as a field of potentialities that can be harnessed and mobilized; and that the discourse of revival sought to cultivate these potentialities in pursuit of a greater fullness of life that was taken to have existed in the past, and also as a defensive measure against the threat of European colonialism, which sought to exploit these same potentialities in its own interests.