Archives, Museums and Collecting Practices in the Modern Arab World

Sonja Mejcher-Atassi, John Pedro Schwartz

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317178835
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Études des musées

Collecting has a long tradition in the Middle East but the museum as a public institution is relatively new. Today there are national museums for antiquities in most Arab countries. While in some cases the political and social climate has hindered the foundation of museums, with existing collections even destroyed at times, the recent museum boom in the Gulf States is again changing the outlook. This unique book is the first to explore collecting practices in archives and museums in the modern Arab world, featuring case studies of collecting practices in countries ranging from Egypt and Lebanon to Palestine, Jordan, Iraq and the Gulf, and providing a theoretical and methodological basis for future research. The authors are also concerned with investigating the relationship between past and present, since collecting practices tell us a great deal not only about the past but also about the ways we approach the past and present conceptions of our identities. Collections can be textual as well, as in the stories, memories or events selected, recalled, and retold in the pages of a text. As interest in memory studies as well as popular and visual culture grows in the Arab World, so collecting practices are at the heart of any critical approach to the past and the present in that region. The book will be of great interest not only to scholars and students of the modern Arab world but also to professionals in museums and collections in the region, as well as around the world.

PART I
Local Representations of Modernity

Chapter 1
Collecting the Nation: Lexicography and National Pedagogy in al-nahda al-‘arabiyya

Nadia Bou Ali

The importance placed on the periodization of Nahda for reading Arab history has enforced a sense of discontinuity and rupture on the ‘Arabs’ that is not only a characteristic of modernity itself but endemic to the Nation as a historical form. The fixation on the questions of decline and progress in twentieth-century Arab debates attests to the potency of the Nahda narrative for Arab thinkers and historians of the Middle East in their discussions of history and their positioning of the Arabs in ‘world history’.¹ I argue in what follows that the Nahda functions as an archive for the ‘Arab nation’ and thereby ‘Arab history’. The problematics of the Nahda are thereby themselves the problematics of the nation for the Arabs as is the case for all other national imaginaries and their respective enlightenments.

As an archive bearing the meaning of arkhe,² the place and time of commencement and beginning or ‘commencement and commandment’,³ the Nahda consigns together the corpus of Arab History in modern time. As such it has become the historical moment of the autogenetic inception of ‘modern Arabs’. It is autogenetic in the sense that there is no real beginning and end for this presumed moment in time although it has been allocated to the span of years between the mid nineteenth-century and the early twentieth. Nahda underlies conceptual notions like ‘the Arab mind’, ‘Arab thought’, ‘Adab’, ‘Arab subjectivity’, ‘Arab identity’, and ‘Arabism’. Although it has been translated as Renaissance or Awakening – I choose not to translate it here and keep it as a proper name – it in fact travels within the Enlightenment narrative (of time, history, and civilization) that places the Arab in the position of translator and preserver of ancient knowledge. This position of translator is intrinsic to the European Enlightenment and attests to the modern Enlightenment fiction that claims that total translatability is even possible. In other words, the shadow of the spectre of Europe in which the Arabs dwell necessitates their position as translators. Translation, as Walter Benjamin writes, is ‘posited on the central kinship of languages, it is marked by a distinctive convergence’.⁴ It assumes that languages are familiar to one another ‘a priori and apart from all historical relationships, interrelated in what they want to express’. The position of translator places the Arab in a supplementary position to other languages. It is only through the reference to a pure language that a multiplicity of languages can exist, a point which the myth of the tower of Babel centres on. Thus, the Arabic language and any other language are fragments of one vessel or amphora, as Benjamin calls it. Their existence attests to the incompleteness of all languages and poses an obstacle to the Western metaphysical desire for total translatability. In other words, Benjamin invokes the amphora precisely because it does not exist. As such this Arabic language, the fragment of the vessel, comes to define, through the Nahda, the Arab nation, itself one of the many modern kingdoms of language and presence. This, however, happens through a specific perception of the past in relation to the present.

The schism that the Nahda institutes in the Arab conception of time manifests in the binaries that continue to propagate in reading Arab history, dualities such as: modern/premodern, civilized/uncivilized, and awakening/decline. This schism is in fact a symptom of the Nahda’s acting as an archive. It ‘shelters itself from the very memory which it shelters’.⁵ Thus, the polarities it has instituted in Arab thought, without which modern Arab thought would not exist, are always already there without having to be interrogated for their origin. By holding the power to interpret itself only through itself, the Nahda functions as an archive, and like the archive has the ability to deconstruct itself from within. It places a series of claims that set the grounds for any attempt to think Arab history. Its inherent contradictions and incommensurabilities form a moment of fracture – as does the Enlightenment in Europe – from which emerges a seemingly coherent national narrative constituted by a set of enduring propositions: the Arabs take the position of translators and preservers of knowledge in the history of world civilization; the Arabs lost their knowledge in the age of decline spanning from the end of the fourteenth century onwards; and the Arabs have been victimized by a series of unfortunate events such as the burning of libraries, the vagrancies of time, and the invasions by others.

When read through the contemporary revisions of Enlightenment thought and recent studies of the Greek, Indian, and Balkan histories, the Nahda reveals itself to be a mythistoricization⁶ through which history itself is formed and constantly reformed for the Arabs. Its ability to erase its own founding texts from the national imaginary has relegated into absence the works of the supposed nineteenth-century forefathers, the patriarchs of the archive. In other words, the texts and bulk of literature that are said to have made up the Arab Nahda have been excluded from Arab national pedagogies. The reason for this is because the literary project that has been taken to define ‘Arab’ nineteenth-century thought, once seen as an archive and once interrogated for the messianic promise of progress and civilization that it carries, shows that the future anticipated by nineteenth-century intellectuals is not really our present. Or in other words, the literary nature of Nahda reveals that the Arab nation that is always yet to come might itself be the only possible nation for the Arabs. The extraction of Arabic literature from the collective memory that is defined by the sameness of the Nahda, its arkhe, might as well be an impossible act. However, for the case of the Arabs, whose national promise has never coalesced in the form of an (non-hyphenated) Arab Nation for the future, but rather always an Arab Nation in an ancient past that speaks a language of an elsewhere, language as such emerges as the only nation in their various presents (the nineteenth century and today). It is no coincidence that Ibrahim al-Yaziji (1847–1906), one of the ‘founding fathers’, exclaimed in 1882 that ‘not only is language the mirror of the nation, language is the nation.’⁷

The question was and still is, how can the Arabic language, as the mirror of those who speak it, be both a national language and a universal one. In other words, how could the language be both a language of the nation and a language befitting modernity? The proposed response by nineteenth-century intellectuals was with a lexical engagement with the language: the history of Arab civilization was to be written in terms of adab or literature and the laws of Arab culture instituted in the laws of grammar. Nineteenth-century intellectuals from Mount Lebanon along with numerous other scholars, writers, historians, Ulama, and Muʽallimun (pedagogues) from other Arabic speaking parts of the Ottoman Empire, proposed a narrative for a collective Arab identity through the metaphor ‘language is the mirror of the nation’.⁸

Around the same time, the American Missionaries in Beirut, like Eli Smith, were interested in the Arabic ‘race’ (jins) because its language, like its ruins, ‘told the secrets of history and had the key to ancient knowledge’.⁹ This position, given to Arabic as well as Hebrew within European Orientalist philology, placed intellectuals in the nineteenth century in an anachronistic position in which they had to fend for themselves.¹⁰ ‘While the Europeans have acquired their language from civilization’, contended Shidyaq, ‘we have acquired our civilization from our language’.¹¹ This almost messianic sentiment, of the civilization that is always already yet to come, placed Arab intellectuals in the ultimate position of translation from which the Arab as a national category became possible in modern times. The nineteenth-century literary movement has left us an extensive archive constituted of dictionaries, encyclopaedias, and lexicons. These, along with other works, translations, and treatises on history and society, constitute the arche and techne of national memory insofar as they have the propensity, once given voice, to control a past that they themselves imagine.¹² Engaging with the archive as subject rather than archive as source¹³ shows how the lexicographical turn that has been generally overlooked in scholarship on Arab history is the first instance of formation of the imaginary institution of the Arab nation. It is important, though, to keep in mind that the logic of Nahda unfolds into a unique project only retroactively. Thus, I am interested in approaching the archive not as a source of evidence of a Nahda that has happened, but as a process through which society re-thinks itself at the cross-section of colonialism, modernity, and nationalism. In the nineteenth century, the debates on language and the philosophy of language take a turn towards correction and pedagogy. From this concept, there occurs a shift from thinking of the philosophy of language to its translation into a national pedagogical project.

Needless to say, nation is enduringly co-incidental with modernity; it claims the grounds of differentiation between dreams and reality, reason and irrationality,¹⁴ form and meaning, and language and society.¹⁵ The words al-watan (the nation), al-dawla (the state), al-hay’a al-ijtima‘iyya (society) and al-‘arab (the Arabs) emerge hand in hand with the lexicon, the dictionary, and the encyclopaedia in the nineteenth century. They take on certain meanings through which the Arab – like the Greek and the Indian – becomes a ‘lexicographical replacement of the imaginary body of the king’, and begins to delineate a contentious political space that would later on be called a national body.¹⁶

The nation and its accompanying enlightenment are constituted through what Stathis Gourgouris calls a process of ‘Phantasiebildung’,¹⁷ one which weaves itself based on the presumption of past existence of a national community. As conceptual ontological categories, ‘nation’ and ‘Enlightenment’ exist precisely because they do not exist. In order to think through these two categories, one must embark from the premise of their non-existence; their simulacra nature in the Baudrillardian sense.¹⁸ This makes it possible to weave together the law and order of the Arab nation, its pedagogical matter that proposes mastery over all of history (in the geopolitical nation form) and over all knowledge (in its Nahda).

To illustrate the arguments proposed about the Nahda and the lexicographic turn I look here at the works of Butrus al-Bustani (1819–1883) and Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq (1804–1887). They are two leading nineteenth-century intellectuals who have been continuously placed centre-stage by historians of the Nahda. Their works offer us a reading of the multivalent and untotalizable Nahda from within the intersection of the philosophy of language and the national pedagogic project.

Bustani and Shidyaq in Context

Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq (1804–1887) and Butrus al-Bustani (1819–1883) have been considered ‘founding fathers’ of the Nahda although their works have disappeared from national pedagogy. Their position as forefathers goes further to show how the archive only keeps and classifies documents through a privileged topology, which in truth is a form of domestication, as Derrida explains: ‘the archontic principle of the archive is also a principle of consignation of gathering together.’¹⁹ Thus, the Nahda archive provides both a law and a place for an Arab nation.

Born into Maronite families in Mount Lebanon of the Ottoman Empire, Bustani and Shidyaq converted their religion: Shidyaq to Islam and Bustani to Protestantism. I point to the issue of conversion because it provides a suitable idiom for the times in which Bustani and Shidyaq lived and the circumstances of their writing. During their time, there was a vested interest in comparing societies and human cultures that were presumed to have emerged from one source as there was an interest in comparing religions, skin colour, races, and most importantly languages, through translation based on the same presumption. This comparative stance sets the ground for conversion and translation together as idioms of making the ‘Arab self’ a place in world history and the history of civilization.

Butrus al-Bustani witnessed the missionary work in Beirut and Mount Lebanon. He worked on the translation of the Bible with Eli Smith, one of the founders of the Syrian Protestant College in Beirut.²⁰ Durin...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Notes on Editors and Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• List of Figures
• Introduction: Challenges and Directions in an Emerging Field of Research
• PART I: LOCAL REPRESENTATIONS OF MODERNITY
• PART II: COLLECTING PRACTICES, HISTORIOGRAPHIC PRACTICES
• PART III: FROM INSTITUTIONAL TO ARTISTIC PRACTICES OF COLLECTING
• Index