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"Modernism (Art) Egypt."
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Islam and the cognitive study of colonialism: The case of religious and educational reform at Egypt’s al-Azhar
This article argues that the emerging Cognitive Science of Religion (CSR) provides a valuable new perspective on colonialism. CSR argues that humans are innately inclined towards certain types of religious belief (e.g., belief in spirit beings, belief in immortal souls) and certain types of non-utilitarian morality (e.g., belief in an obligation to care for kin, belief in an obligation to avoid ‘disgusting’ substances or behaviours). These innate inclinations underlie many religious and cultural traditions transformed by colonialism, including Islam. The article suggests that colonial power operates not only by suppressing traditional non-Western institutions but also by suppressing the natural inclinations underlying non-Western traditions. This claim is developed through a study of colonial efforts to transform Egypt’s al-Azhar, the world’s most influential institution of Islamic learning and scholarship. These efforts made al-Azhar into the centre of a global Islamic reform movement, which sought to integrate Islam with a colonial scientific-utilitarian worldview.
Journal Article
Surrealism in Egypt
In the thick of the Second World War, the Cairo-based Surrealist collective Art et Liberte were pioneering new art forms and mounting subversive exhibitions that sent shockwaves across local artistic circles. Born with the publication of their Manifesto Long Live Degenerate Art on December 22nd, 1938, the group rejected the convergence of art and nationalism, aligning themselves with a complex, international and evolving Surrealist movement spanning cities such as Paris, London, Mexico City, New York, Beirut and Tokyo. Art and Liberty created a distinct reworking of Surrealism, which provided a generation of disillusioned Egyptian and non-Egyptian artists and writers, men and women alike, with a platform for cultural reform and anti-Fascist protest. Surrealism in Egypt is the first comprehensive analysis of Art and Liberty's artworks, literature and critical writings on Surrealism. By addressing the group's long-lost and often misconstrued legacy, and drawing on a substantial body of previously unpublished primary documents and more than 200 field interviews, the author charts Art and Liberty's significant contribution towards a new definition of Surrealism.Moving beyond the polarizing dichotomies of Saidian Orientalism, this book rewrites the history of Surrealism itself - advocating for a new definition of the movement that reflects an inclusive vision of art history.
eBook
Living up to Her “Avant-Guardism”: H.D. and the Senescence of Classical Modernism
In a journal entry from 1957, H.D. writes that Adorno’s description of the aging of modernist music might easily apply to the fate of her own work in the post-war period: “Among other fascinating things, he [Adorno] says that Bartók ‘could not quite live up to his own avant-guardism’ [sic] […]. I felt the phrase applied, in a way, to myself and my Helen sequence” (H.D. 2015, p. 40). H.D.’s remark refers to her long poem, Helen in Egypt (1960), which, with its engagement with classical sources and epic themes, seemed to some to be a throwback to an earlier modernist period in which Pound, Joyce, Eliot and H.D. herself had looked to ancient models as a means of reinvigorating modern literature. What did it mean for H.D. to feel that her work had outlived its time, to be a first-generation modernist still writing in that mode after many of her peers and their achievements had passed into history? This article explores H.D.’s sense that her practice was at odds with contemporary demands for poetry to answer to immediate historical concerns. It also considers her case against the critics in letters, notes and in Helen in Egypt which contains its own defense of the relevance of classical modernism to the post-war present day.
Journal Article
When Science Became Western: Historiographical Reflections
While thinking about the notion of the “global” in the history of the history of science, this essay examines a related but equally basic concept: the idea of “Western science.” Tracing its rise in the nineteenth century, it shows how it developed as much outside the Western world as within it. Ironically, while the idea itself was crucial for the disciplinary formation of the history of science, the global history behind this story has not been much attended to. Drawing on examples from nineteenth-century Egypt and China, the essay begins by looking at how international vectors of knowledge production (viz., missionaries and technocrats) created new global histories of science through the construction of novel genealogies and through a process of conceptual syncretism. Turning next to the work of early professional historians of science, it shows how Arabic and Chinese knowledge traditions were similarly reinterpreted in light of the modern sciences, now viewed as part of a diachronic and universalist teleology ending in “Western science.” It concludes by arguing that examining the global emergence of the idea of Western science in this way highlights key questions pertaining to the relation of the history of science to knowledge traditions across the world and the continuing search for global histories of science.
Journal Article
Contemporary architecture of Cairo (1990–2020): mutational plurality of “ISMS”, decolonialism, and cosmopolitanism
Purpose>The purpose of this paper is to develop an analytical account on the contemporary architecture of Cairo with emphasis on the past three decades, from the early 1990s to the present. The paper critically analyses narratives of the plurality of “isms”, within architectural vocabulary and discourse, that resulted from the contextual particularities that shaped it.Design/methodology/approach>Three lines of inquiry are envisioned as overarching aspects of architecture: the chronological, the interventional and the representational. These discussions are underpinned by the discourse of decolonialisation and cosmopolitanism, posited sequentially by Frantz Fanon in The Wretched of the Earth (1961), and Ulrich Beck in The Cosmopolitan Vision (2004). The analysis expands to interrogate these two notions as prelude for reflecting on representations of selected projects: The Smart Village (2001); the Great Egyptian Museum (2002), Al-Azhar Park (2005), American University in Cairo New Campus (2008/2009), and the New Administrative Capital (2018).Findings>The investigation on the interventional and the representational levels via aspects of discursivity and contradictions highlights that decolonisation and cosmopolitanism are two inseparable facets in the architectural practice in Egypt’s 21st century. These indivisible notions are based on idiosyncratic core to human experience, which emerged from concurrent overturning historical and secular everyday life striving to suppress ideological supremacy.Research limitations/implications>Further detailed examples can be developed to offer discerning elucidations relevant to both notions of cosmopolitanism and decolonialisation.Originality/value>The paper offers novel theoretical analysis of Cairo’s most recent architecture. The reflection on the notions of decolonialisation and cosmopolitanism is a timely example of the complex cultural encounters that have shaped the Egyptian architecture, given the recent interventions by the “Modern State” that legitimised such notions.
Journal Article
Modernism, Egyptian Nationalism, and \other disorders of a revolutionary character\: H. D., Bryher, and Tutankhamun
Expanding on connections between modernist and postcolonial studies, this paper catts overdue attention to Egyptian nationalism and independence as important cultural contexts for modernist production. The 1922 decoration of Egyptian independence and 1923 opening of King Tutankhamun's tomb not only coincide historically with the 1922-1923 upwelling of modernist literature, they also make the politics of decolonization central to modernism's narratives of national identity and modernity itself. Viewing this period through the lens of H. D.'s \"Secret Name: Excavator's Egypt (circa 1925 A. D.)\" (1926), her unpublished sequel \"Hesperia,\" and Bryher's travel writing published in Life and Letters Today, this paper draws on new archival evidence to retheorize these writers' modernist responses to Egypt's independence and to the archaeohgical disputes over the tomb. Offsetting the absence of contemporary Egyptian politicians in these literary texts, representations of a resistant Egyptian landscape, language, culture, and art reveal the fundamental challenge Egypt's decolonization posed to American and Bntish identity. For both writers, unsettling natural and cultural encounters impelled them to recognize the living, not ancient, Egypt and to embrace an anti-imperial transnationality.
Journal Article
Modernity without Society? Observations on the term mujtamaʿ in the Islamic Journal al-Manār (Cairo, 1898-1940)
It is characteristic of modernity that people conceive of their social affairs as ordered in and by society. While the evolution of the idea of society is well-researched in Europe, it remains an open question how this idea evolved within the Islamic context. This article analyzes the contemporary Arabic term for society, mujtamaʿ, as it was used in the mouthpiece of Islamic modernism, the journal al-Manār (Cairo, 1898-1940). I show that \"society\" was already the dominant meaning of mujtamaʿ in the first issue of al-Manār. However, few of the authors tackle mujtamaʿ as a central concept of their texts; and the journal's editor, Muḥammad Rashīd Riḍā, predominantly used mujtamaʿ to mean something other than society. These findings, combined with Riḍā's interest in social questions, suggest that the idea of society was expressed from within the Islamic tradition in terms other than mujtamaʿ, most conspicuously umma.
Journal Article
The Egalitarian Face of Islamic Orthodoxy: Support for Islamic Law and Economic Justice in Seven Muslim-Majority Nations
The authors test two theories linking religion and economic beliefs in predominantly Muslim nations using data from national surveys of Algeria, Bangladesh, Egypt, Indonesia, Jordan, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia. Moral Cosmology theory posits that because the religiously orthodox are theologically communitarian in viewing individuals as subsumed by a larger community of believers subject to timeless laws and God's greater plan, they are disposed toward economic communitarianism, whereby the state should provide for the poor, reduce inequality, and meet community needs via economic intervention. Modernists are theologically individualistic in seeing individuals as having to make moral decisions in a temporal context and as responsible for their own destinies. As such, modernists are inclined to economic individualism, whereby the poor are responsible for their fates, wider income differences promote individual initiative, and government should not interfere in the economy. An alternate hypothesis, based on Islamic scripture's discussion of economic matters, limits the effect of orthodoxy versus modernism to the one clear economic directive of Islam: the state's responsibility to care for the poor. The authors find that Islamic orthodoxy-measured as the desire to implement Islamic law (the shari'a)-is associated with the broad economic communitarianism expected by Moral Cosmology theory.
Journal Article
Seen and Unseen: Visual Cultures of Imperialism
Seen and Unseen teases out and explores how visual mediums construct visual cultures that often create limited perspectives of certain issues and groups. This volume focuses in particular on the representation of Islam and Muslims. It deals with fixed and stereotypical visual representations and explores alternative and challenging visual representations that reconstruct and dismantle existing belief systems. It approaches the topic from a vantage point of diverse multiple perspectives. Covering issues from Brunei, Iran, Egypt, and England and cyberspace, the essays in this volume examine the visual cultures of how Islam and Muslims are understood, misunderstood, misrepresented, or even embraced visually. Scholars in this volume draw on historical paintings, books and their covers, photography, and news to demonstrate the diversity and sometimes contradictory visual cultures that construct and adhere meaning to how Islam and Muslim people are seen.Contributors: Hoda Afshar, Jared Ahmed, Syed Farid Alatas, Sanaz Fotouhi, Christiane Gruber, Layla Hendow, Raihana M.M., Bruno Starrs and Esmaeil Zeiny.
eBook