E310 | The “nahda” is often seen as the beginning of the modern intellectual revival of the Arabs, when European Enlightenment ideas were adopted by Middle Eastern thinkers from the mid-nineteenth century onwards. In this podcast with Peter Hill, we discuss a circle of Syrian Christians in Damietta, Egypt who were actively translating Greek, Italian and French Enlightenment texts into Arabic in the first two decades of the nineteenth century, well before the start of the so-called nahda. Hill describes not only who these translators and patrons were, but also how this challenges diffusionist and connective conceptions of the intellectual history of the Middle East.
More at http://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2017/03/DamiettaNahda.html
Peter Hill is a Junior Research Fellow at Christ Church, University of Oxford, working on the intellectual history of the Arab world in the nineteenth century. He recently completed a D.Phil. thesis on utopian aspects of the cultural production of the Arab ‘Awakening’ (nahda), and their grounding in the social history of the Arab lands and Ottoman Empire in the long nineteenth century.
Nir Shafir is a historian of the Middle East whose research examines the intersections of knowledge production, religious practice, and material culture in the early modern world. He curates Ottoman History Podcast’s series on history of science in addition to being one of the co-founders of hazine.info, a website that explores the archives and libraries of the Islamic world. He is an assistant professor of history at UCSD.
Shireen Hamza is a doctoral student in the History of Science department at Harvard University. Her research focuses broadly on the history of science and medicine in the Islamicate Middle Ages, and more specifically on the history of women's health.
CREDITS
Episode No. 310
Release Date: 1 April 2017
Recording Location: Cambridge, MA
Audio editing by Shireen Hamza
Music: from Excavated Shellac - Munira al-Mahdiyya – Aldahre Kataâ Awsali; Hocine Slaoui – Yal Cahla
Special thanks to Kara Güneş for permission to use the composition "Istanbul"
Images and bibliography courtesy of Peter Hill available at http://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2017/03/DamiettaNahda.html
