The Ottoman Government and the Sanusiyya: A Reappraisal

1989 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 91-106 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michel Le Gall
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
North Africa ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
North African ◽  
World War ◽  
French Colonialism ◽  
French Colonial

The historiography of the Sanusiyya, if one can apply such a term to the literary crop of roughly a century dealing with this North Africantarīqa(pl.turuq, Sufi brotherhood), falls into three distinct categories. The earliest writings appeared in the 1880s, thirty years after the tariqa had taken root in Cyrenaica (then the Ottoman province of Benghazi). The works of French authors such as Charmes, Rinn, Duveyrier, Le Chatelier, and co-authors Depont and Coppolani were all marked by the concerns of the French colonial and protectorate authorities in Algeria and Tunisia. According to Duveyrier, a Saharan explorer of repute and the crudest exponent of this group's views, not only were the Sanusis a band of fanatics given to murdering innocent missionaries and explorers, but they were also in the vanguard of the turuq inspired by the Pan-Islamic rhetoric of the Ottoman sultan and aligned against French colonialism in Muslim North Africa. Only this combination of factors could account for the pervasive and determined resistance to French policies in the region. Along with the Sanusiyya, Duveyrier singled out for attack a North African sheikh and confidant of the Ottoman sultan, Muhammad Zafir al-Madani. Charmes, Rinn, Le Chatelier, and Depont and Coppolani, while less vitriolic in their tone, certainly had the same general approach. The analysis of this “Algerian school” was dismissed at the turn of the century by two eminent Orientalists, Christiaan Snouck Hugronje and Carl Heinrich Becker.3A generation later, European fears of the turuq diminished in the wake of World War I, as new ideologies and forces came to dominate a transformed Pan-Islamism. This notwithstanding, some of the suppositions of the early French authors were adopted by later scholars and have since been quoted and requoted.

Debating the “Jewish Question” in Tunisia

2020 ◽  
Vol 46 (3) ◽  
pp. 31-54
Author(s):  
Chris Rominger
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Jewish Question ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
North African ◽  
World War ◽  
Minority Politics ◽  
Zionist Movement ◽  
Colonial Archives ◽  
French Colonial ◽  
African Perspective

In Tunisia, the end of World War I and the return of Muslims and European settlers from the front brought attacks against local Jews who had been exempt from conscription under French colonial rule. French commentators spoke of a “Jewish question” fueled by Muslim fanaticism and Jewish profiteering, obscuring their own divisive attitudes and policies. Colonial archives and the popular press, however, reveal that this was far from a monolithic sectarian concern. Jews responded to violence with a variety of transnational political visions. I explore how some Jews reaffirmed their loyalty to France, while others highlighted colonial hypocrisies. Others turned to solutions such as US protection or the Zionist movement. This Tunisian story, with its unique colonial arrangement and legal ambiguities, foregrounds an oft-overlooked North African perspective on the global questions of identity, nationalisms, and minority politics at the end of World War I.

Press Propaganda and Subaltern Agents of Pan-Islamic Networks in the Muslim Mediterranean World prior to World War I

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Odile Moreau
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
World War I ◽  
North Africa ◽  
World War ◽  
Subaltern Studies ◽  
Resistance Movements ◽  
The Press ◽  
Mediterranean World ◽  
History Of

This chapter explores movement and circulation across the Mediterranean and seeks to contribute to a history of proto-nationalism in the Maghrib and the Middle East at a particular moment prior to World War I. The discussion is particularly concerned with the interface of two Mediterranean spaces: the Middle East (Egypt, Ottoman Empire) and North Africa (Morocco), where the latter is viewed as a case study where resistance movements sought external allies as a way of compensating for their internal weakness. Applying methods developed by Subaltern Studies, and linking macro-historical approaches, namely of a translocal movement in the Muslim Mediterranean, it explores how the Egypt-based society, al-Ittihad al-Maghribi, through its agent, Aref Taher, used the press as an instrument for political propaganda, promoting its Pan-Islamic programme and its goal of uniting North Africa.

Race, Work, and Disability in Progressive Era United States

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Lawrie
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Progressive Era ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
Assembly Lines ◽  
Actuarial Science ◽  
World War ◽  
Antebellum Era ◽  
Black Bodies ◽  
Mental Testing ◽  
Twentieth Century America

Throughout U.S. history, the production of difference, whether along racial or disability lines, has been inextricably tied to the imperatives of labor economy. From the plantations of the antebellum era through the assembly lines and trenches of early-twentieth-century America, ideologies of race and disability have delineated which peoples could do which kinds of work. The ideologies and identities of race, work, and the “fit” ’ or “unfit” body informed Progressive Era labor economies. Here the processes of racializing or disabling certain bodies are charted from turn-of-the-century actuarial science, which monetized blacks as a degenerate, dying race, through the standardized physical and mental testing and rehabilitation methods developed by the U.S. army during World War I. Efforts to quantify, poke, prod, or mend black bodies reshaped contemporary understandings of labor, race, the state, and the working body.

scholarly journals Bilad al-Brazil: The Importance of West African Scholars in Brazilian Islamic Education and Practice in Historic and Contemporary Perspective

Religions ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 131
Author(s):  
Ayodeji Ogunnaike
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
North Africa ◽  
West African ◽  
Islamic Education ◽  
World War ◽  
Middle Passage ◽  
Urban Centers ◽  
Sudan I ◽  
Intellectual Traditions ◽  
Contemporary Perspective

While it is well established now that the middle passage did not entirely separate Africans who were forcibly brought to the Americas from their home cultures and traditions, these connections are often studied and understood in the form of survivals or ancestral memory. This paper argues that in major urban centers in Brazil until around the time of World War I, West Africans not only managed to recreate Islamic communities and intellectual traditions, but maintained important contacts with their homelands. In much the same way that scholars have argued that the Sahara constituted an avenue of exchange and connection between North Africa and Bilad al-Sudan, I argue here that the Atlantic Ocean was not an insurmountable barrier but provided opportunities for African Muslims to extend the traditions of Bilad al-Sudan into Brazil—albeit to a much lesser extent.

The Edwardians and the Making of a Modern Spanish Obsession

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kirsty Hooper
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Primary Source ◽  
Source Material ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
World War ◽  
Popular Imagination ◽  
Concert Halls ◽  
Material History ◽  
British People ◽  
Industrial Investment

What did the Edwardians know about Spain, and what was that knowledge worth? The Edwardians and the Making of a Modern Spanish Obsession draws on a vast store of largely unstudied primary source material to investigate Spain’s place in the turn-of-the-century British popular imagination. Set against a background of unprecedented emotional, economic and industrial investment in Spain, the book traces the extraordinary transformation that took place in British knowledge about the country and its diverse regions, languages and cultures between the tercentenary of the Spanish Armada in 1888 and the outbreak of World War I twenty-six years later. This empirically-grounded cultural and material history reveals how, for almost three decades, Anglo-Spanish connections, their history and culture were more visible, more colourfully represented, and more enthusiastically discussed in Britain’s newspapers, concert halls, council meetings and schoolrooms, than ever before. It shows how the expansion of education, travel, and publishing created unprecedented opportunities for ordinary British people not only to visit the country, but to see the work of Spanish and Spanish-inspired artists and performers in British galleries, theatres and exhibitions. It explores the work of novelists, travel writers, journalists, scholars, artists and performers to argue that the Edwardian knowledge of Spain was more extensive, more complex and more diverse than we have imagined.

The First Italo-Ethiopian Clash over the Control of Eritrea and the Origins of Rome’s Imperialism

2021 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 88-112
Author(s):  
Nikolaos Mavropoulos
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Red Sea ◽  
North Africa ◽  
Balance Of Power ◽  
World War ◽  
The Mediterranean ◽  
Colonial Policies

In the wake of Italy’s unification, the country’s expansionist designs were aimed, as expected, toward the opposite shore of the Mediterranean. The barrage of developments that took place in this strategic area would shape the country’s future alliances and colonial policies. The fear of French aggression on the coast of North Africa drove officials in Rome to the camp of the Central Powers, a diplomatic move of great importance for Europe’s evolution prior to World War I. The disturbance of the Mediterranean balance of power, when France occupied Tunisia and Britain held Cyprus and Egypt, the inability to find a colony in proximity to Italy, and a series of diplomatic defeats led Roman officials to look to the Red Sea and to provoke war with the Ethiopian Empire.

Decolonization and Migration

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maud S. Mandel
Keyword(s):  
North Africa ◽  
North African ◽  
Social Actors ◽  
The North ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
French Colonial ◽  
Colonial Policies ◽  
And Migration ◽  
Jewish Populations ◽  
The Way

This chapter builds on the link between French colonial policies and Muslim–Jewish relations in the metropole by tracing how decolonization throughout North Africa changed the way a diverse set of social actors, including French colonial administrators, international Jewish spokesmen, and a wide range of indigenous nationalist groups conceptualized Jewish belonging throughout the region. It argues that the process led to the emergence of the “North African Jew,” a category to which no individual ascribed but that worked rhetorically to unite the diverse Moroccan, Tunisian, and Algerian Jewish populations into a collective often understood to be in conflict with “North Africans,” “Muslims,” or “Arabs.”

Tsar Power

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul K. MacDonald ◽  
Joseph M. Parent
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
World War

This chapter analyzes Russia's ambivalent responses to decline at the turn of the century. Overall, Russian pursued retrenchment policies that helped lay the foundations for its resurgence after World War I, but retrenchment was accelerated by blundering into the Russo-Japanese War and undermined by the Bosnian crisis. Structural conditions, such as the belief that the conquest calculus rewarded attack, help explain why retrenchment was hard to maintain, but many of the errors were self-inflicted by a recalcitrant tsar, who was at odds with much of mass and elite opinion.

The Past in Common: Modern Ruins as a Shared Urban Experience of Revolution-Era Moscow and Petersburg

Slavic Review ◽  
2006 ◽  
Vol 65 (4) ◽  
pp. 712-735 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gregory Stroud
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Private Property ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
World War ◽  
Old Regime ◽  
Urban Experience ◽  
The Past ◽  
A Site ◽  
Intellectual Movement

In this article, Gregory Stroud considers the modern ruin as a site of common urban conversation and identity for large, diverse, and otherwise fractious populations of Petersburg and Moscow residents. Stroud argues that what began at the turn of the century as a relatively narrow nostalgic intellectual movement anxious over the perceived modern loss of timeless beauty and value exploded with the frustrations of the Christmas holiday during World War I into a common boulevard conversation concerning the loss of holiday, ritual, authenticity, and habit. The failure of the old regime to satisfactorily engage this conversation and to offer meaningful solutions would render such nostalgia into a biting critique of autocracy, mass consumerism, private property, and shopkeeper capitalism.

scholarly journals INTRODUCTION

2014 ◽  
Vol 46 (4) ◽  
pp. 653-656
Author(s):  
Mustafa Aksakal
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Middle East ◽  
World War I ◽  
North Africa ◽  
The United States ◽  
Political Movements ◽  
World War ◽  
New States ◽  
History Of ◽  
School Curricula

Scholars of the Middle East and North Africa are only too familiar with the momentous changes set in motion by the events of World War I. Given the number of new states and political movements that emerged in the war's aftermath, it seems only fair to describe it as “the single most important political event in the history of the modern Middle East.” Elizabeth F. Thompson recently likened the war's impact on the Middle East to that of the Civil War in the United States. To be sure, the passing of a century hardly proved sufficient for coming to terms with the legacy of either war. In fact, analyses and discussions of World War I in the Middle East have remained highly politicized, in school curricula, in academia, and in popular culture and the arena of public memory. History and historical interpretations are always contested, of course, and there is little reason to believe that accounts of World War I in the Middle East and North Africa will become less so anytime soon.

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