2020 Winning Titles
WINNING TITLE
ELECTRIC NEWS IN COLONIAL ALGERIA
BY ARTHUR ASSERAF
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Examining a range of sources in multiple languages across colonial society, Electric News in Colonial Algeria offers a new understanding of the spread of news. News was a whole ecosystem in which new technologies such as the printing press, telegraph, cinema and radio interacted with older media like songs, rumours, letters and manuscripts. The French government watched anxiously over these developments, monitoring Algerians’ reactions to news through an extensive network of surveillance that often ended up spreading news rather than controlling its flow. By tracking what different people thought of as news, this history helps us reconsider the relationship between time, media and historical change.
Runner up Titles
MODERN THINGS ON TRIAL: ISLAM’S GLOBAL AND MATERIAL REFORMATION IN THE AGE OF RIDA, 1865-1935
BY LEOR HALEVI
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS
Leor Halevi tells the story of the Islamic trials of technological and commercial innovations of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He focuses on the communications of an entrepreneurial Syrian interpreter of the Shari’a named Rashid Rida, who became a renowned reformer by responding to the demand for authoritative and authentic religious advice. Upon migrating to Egypt, Rida founded an Islamic magazine, The Lighthouse, which cultivated an educated, prosperous readership within and beyond the British Empire. To an audience eager to know if their scriptures sanctioned particular interactions with particular objects, he preached the message that by rediscovering Ialsm’s foundational spirit, the global community of Muslims would thrive and realize modernity’s religious and secular promises.
Through analysis of Rida’s international correspondence, Halevi argues that religious entanglements with new commodities and technologies were the driving force behind local and global projects to reform the Islamic legal tradition. Shedding light on culture, commerce and consumption in Cairo and other colonial cities, Modern Things on Trial is a groundbreaking account of Islam’s material transformation in a globalising era.
FRIENDS OF THE EMIR: NON-MUSLIM STATE OFFICIALS IN PREMODERN ISLAMIC THOUGHT
luke b. yarbrough
cambridge university press
The caliphs and sultans who once ruled the Muslim world were often assisted by powerful Jewish, Christian, Zoroastrian and other non-Muslim state officials, whose employment occasioned energetic discussions among Muslim scholars and rulers. This book reveals those discussions for the first time in all their divrsity, drawing on unexplored medieval sources in the realms of law, history, poetry, entertaining literature, administration, and polemic. it follows the discourse on on-Muslim officials from its beginnings in the Umayyad empire (661-750) through medieval Iraq, Egypt, Syria and Spain to its apex in the Mamluk period (1250-1517). Far from being a fixed, changeless part of Islam, views about non-Muslim state officials were devised, transmitted and elaborated at moments of intense competition between Muslim and non-Muslim learned elites. At other times, Muslim rulers employed non-Muslims without eliciting opposition. The particular shape of the Islamic discourse on an this issue is comparable to analogous discourses in medieval Europe and China.
SHORTLISTED TITLES:
THE LIFE OF THE RED SEA DHOW: A CULTURAL HISTORY OF SEABORNE EXPLORATION IN THE ISLAMIC WORLD
BY DIONISIUS A AGIUS
I B TAURIS
Few images are as evocative as the silhouette of the Arab dhow as, under full sail, it tacks to windward on glittering waters of the Red Sea before moving across the face of the rising or setting of the sun. In this authoritative new book, Dionisius A. Agius offers a lucid and wide-ranging history of the iconic dhow from post-medieval to modern times. Traversing the Arabian and African coasts, he shows that the dhow was central not just to commerce but to the vital transmission and exchange of ideas. Discussing trade routes, shoals and wind patterns, spice harvest seasons and the deep and resonant connection between language, memory and oral tradition, this is the first book to place the dhow in its full and remarkable cultural contexts.
A MONUMENT TO MEDIEVAL SYRIAN BOOK CULTURE: THE LIBRARY OF IBN ΆBD AL-HᾹDῙ
BY KONRAD HIRSCHLER
EDINBURGH UNIVERSITY PRESS
In the late medieval period, manuscripts galore circulated in Middle Eastern libraries. yet very few book collections have come down to us as such, or have left a documentary trail. This book discusses the largest private book collection of the pre-Ottoman Arabic Middle East for which we have both a paper trail and a surviving corpus of the manuscripts that once sat on its shelves: the Ibn Άbd al-Hādī Library of Damascus. The book suggests that this library was part of the owner’s symbolic strategy to monumentalise a vanishing world of scholarship bound to his life, family, quarter and home city.
AGE OF COEXISTENCE: THE ECUMENICAL FRAME AND THE MAKING OF THE MODERN ARAB WORLD
BY USSAMA MAKDISI
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
Ussama Makdisi reveals a hidden and hopeful story that counters the image of the Middle East which so often appears in the headlines. It shows how a region rich with ethnic and religious diversity created a modern culture of coexistence amid Ottoman reformation, European colonialism and the emergence of nationalism.
Moving from th enineteenth century to the present, this groundbreaking book explores, without denial or equivocation, the politics of pluralism during the Ottoman Empire and the post-Ottoman Arab world. Rather than judging the Arab world as a place of age-old sectarian animosities, Age of Coexistence describes the forging of a complex system of coexistence, which Makdisi calls the ‘ecumenical frame’. He argues that new forms of antisectarian politics, including examples of Muslim-Christian political collaboration, crystallised to make and define the modern Arab world, reminding us that religious diversity does not automatically lead to sectarianism.