ConcTrad · A Conceptual History of 'Tradition' in the Modern Arab World: Egypt and Greater Syria in the 19th and 20th Centuries

A Conceptual History of 'Tradition' in the Modern Arab World: Egypt and Greater Syria in the 19th and 20th Centuries

Tradition is a key analytical concept in the study of Islam, Muslims, and the Middle East in western academia. In late 19th and early 20th-century European discourses, the concept elicited negative connotations, such as stagnation, backwardness, and irrationality. In recent decades, scholars have revised these earlier conceptions of tradition, foregrounding the ability of a tradition to adapt and change. This reformulated understanding of tradition undergirds Talal Asad’s theorization of Islam as a “discursive tradition,” an analytical approach that has dominated the field of Islamic studies for decades. Yet in Arabic, there is no single equivalent to the Anglophone concept “tradition.” Indeed, several distinct Arabic terms, including taqlīd, turāth, sunna, naql, and others, are often equated with “tradition,” even though their usages, histories, political mobilizations, temporalities, counter-concepts and affective valences differ from each other as well as from the Anglophone concept. This project proposes to undertake a diachronic and synchronic analysis of the semantic network of Arabic concepts often equated with the Anglophone concept “tradition” in Egypt and Greater Syria in the 19th and 20th centuries. The larger aims of the project are two-fold: First, to integrate the experiences and worldviews reflected in Arabic concepts into the analytical vocabulary that structures the study of Islam, Muslims, and the Middle East in western academia. In this endeavor, the project pushes against the tendency in the academy to universalize European experiences and concepts, while still recognizing the historical entanglements between Arabic and European-language concepts. Second, the project aims to deepen scholarly understandings of the history of Arabic concepts that are commonly associated with the Anglophone “tradition,” and to explore whether and how Arabic-speaking Muslims articulated their understanding of Islam through these concepts. This long term aim of this research is to reformulate scholarly understandings of the analytical concept of “tradition” in Islamic and Middle East studies.

Текст от CORDIS, на английски · Данни: CORDIS, © Европейски съюз