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- Convenors:
-
Haya Bambaji-Sasportas
(Ben-Gurion University of the Negev)
Haggai Ram (Ben Gurion University )
Dror Zeevi (Ben Gurion University)
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- Chair:
-
Omri Paz
(Ben Gurion University of the Negev)
- Location:
- Sala 0.06, Edifício I&D, Piso 0
- Start time:
- 16 July, 2015 at
Time zone: Europe/Lisbon
- Session slots:
- 2
Short Abstract:
By examining the transfer of knowledge to the Ottoman and post-Ottoman Middle East, we demonstrate how European ideas were negotiated by local elites and given new meanings. Colonial modernity in the region was a product of a complex web of entangled histories and of cultural translation.
Long Abstract:
This panel is concerned with the cultural transfer and movement of different kinds of knowledge to the Ottoman and post-Ottoman Middle East. The panel includes four papers that are committed to the following two interrelated assumptions: (1) the transfer and/or movement of culture and knowledge in colonial and postcolonial contexts were reciprocal, meaning that Europe was reshaped in the colonies even as colonial subjects were engaging with the categories of colonizers; and (2) colonial subjects have shown not only possibilities of accepting or rejecting the knowledge and structures asserted by Europe, but also the possibility of changing the meaning of the basic concepts themselves. Accordingly, each paper presented in this panel focuses on a particular body of knowledge, demonstrating how this knowledge was transferred to the ottoman and post-Ottoman worlds and the extent to which it was accommodated-cum-translated to local circumstances and current power relations. Knowledge about sexuality and desire, law and criminality, addiction and intoxication, nationalism and political theory, was not only used by different elites, but in being used, it was also given new meanings. Our panel thus provides a vista into the nature of colonial modernity in the Middle East and the ways in which this modernity was/is a product of a complex web of entangled histories.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Paper short abstract:
The Ottoman legal reforms (mid-19th century) are usually described as an adoption of French laws and procedures explained in terms of westernization. This paper portrays the change as a move from a reactive judicial system into an activist one, which did not waive Ottoman legal concepts.
Paper long abstract:
The Ottoman legal reforms of the mid-19th century are usually described as an adoption of French laws and procedures. Furthermore, these changes are usually explained in terms of westernization. This paper portrays the change as a move from a reactive judicial concept to an activist one. In other words, the legal reforms were an outcome of a learned decision and a venue shopping.
The French inspired criminal courts established in the 1840s and the 1858 Ottoman Criminal Code did not carry with it waiving of Ottoman legal concepts. On the contrary, Judges were still the same personal serving in the Ottoman Sharia courts, and trained within the Ottoman legal school. The rule of evidence did not change. And the whole legal language remained pretty much the same. These phenomena were overseen until recently because studies focused on the written law, known as "law in the books."
Most strikingly is the fact that the Ottoman moral ethic of the law, aimed at protecting the weak, was amplified with the reforms, allowing the imperial government greater intervention in its subjects' lives. Criminal justice, policing, and incarceration are usually understood as a means aimed to impose tighter control over the masses. The legal reforms reinforced the conviction legal thinkers held that they hold the higher moral grounds.
Paper short abstract:
I will relate the complex views of the historian Elie Kedourie and the ways he negotiated, internalized and discussed cardinal European modern ideals, while exploring his Jewish Baghdadi background in explaining the inner conflicts contradictions and dialectics embedded in his historical writings.
Paper long abstract:
This presentation relates to the compound views of the intellectual and historian Elie Kedourie. The multifaceted and multicultural background that shaped him as a descendant of one of the Jewish elite families in Baghdad of the 1930' and 1940', can explain this complexity. Kedourie was shaped by British colonialism and its encounter with Middle East Jews. His Jewish-Arab tradition and culture were wedded to and embedded in Englishness, while his professional scholarship reflected a modernist approach to history and to its hegemonic Eurocentric and temporal narrative. This approach is evidenced by using modernist terms and methodologies in his historical writings on the Middle East, as well as in his critique on some of the political ideals of European modernity such as Imperialism, Liberalism, Nationalism and British Orientalism. Kedourie discussed these issues from diverse points of view while fracturing common boundaries of acceptable categories. He was an anti-colonial conservative who politically and epistemologically preferred Empire over Nationalism. He severely discussed Nationalism through its multifaceted and dialectical connections to Imperialism and religion. He was an Orientalist, but anticipated Said's critique of Orientalism. What is more, he was committed to religious Jewish life but at the same time was an anti-Zionist who preferred Jewish existence in the European diaspora. To wit, many of Kedourie's views corresponded to current critical evaluations and epitomize the extent to which European ideas were negotiated and internalized by native, including Jewish Middle Easterners.
Paper short abstract:
I examine the knowledge about hashish in Palestine-Israel as a link in a chain of "travelling theories." Arriving from Europe's colonies, it spurred the racialization-cum-orientalization of marginalized groups, Palestinians and Mizrahi Jews, excluding them from the dominant (Jewish) community.
Paper long abstract:
This article is concerned with the history of hashish in Palestine-Israel from the beginning of the 1920s. It examines how the "hashish problem" was defined and constructed, and the discourses that developed around it in Mandatory Palestine and the State of Israel. I explore the extent to which hashish came to be loaded with ethnic and racial meanings that have had nothing to do with the substance itself, nor with its actual psychoactive effects. To that end, I examine the knowledge about hashish in Palestine-Israel as a link in a chain of "travelling theories," knowledge that was developed and popularized elsewhere, then assimilated and adapted to local conditions and specific power relations in its new environment. This knowledge should be traced back to colonial encounters with indigenous peoples for whom cannabis was an important constituent in everyday recreational, devotional and medicinal practices. In these encounters hashish and its consumers were racialized and criminalized. Once this knowledge arrived in Palestine from various colonies and the metropoles, where it had already been used to stigmatize minority groups, it was applied to its principal consumers; Palestinians and new Jewish emigrants from Muslim countries (Mizrahim). Although neither of these groups were excessive hashish consumers, and although the drug problem in Israel was comparatively marginal, this knowledge was integrated into the meaning-making activity whose main objective was to exclude these subaltern groups from the dominant community and prevent assimilation of "Oriental" customs and habits in the Jewish state.