by Bonine, Michael E. ; Amanat, Abbas; Gasper, Michael Ezekiel
10. Ibid. Montagne attributes this sentiment to “the French man in the street.”
11. De Gaulle, Mémoires de Guerre, 1:112.
12. Brown, “Many Faces of Colonial Rule in French North Africa,” 171–91; Burke, “Morocco and the Middle East,” 70–94.
13. Mashriq refers to Arab countries east of Libya, starting with Egypt, and hence the Arab states of the eastern Mediterranean.
14. See McDougall, History and the Culture of Nationalism in Algeria; Touati, “Algerian Historiography in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries,” 84–94.
15. Jacques Berque, Le Maghreb entre deux guerres, 9. Also see Berque’s Arabes d’hier à demain.
16. See for instance Berque, “Qu’est-ce qu’une tribu nord-africaine?” 22–34.
17. Leimdorfer, Discours académique et colonisation.
18. See for example Lorcin, Imperial Identities.
19. See Journal Officiel de la République Algérienne 79 (December 1, 2002): 6. For Moroccan and Tunisian foreign ministries, see http://www.maec.gov.ma; http://www.diplomatie.gov.tn/site/index.php, both accessed April 10, 2011.
20. See “La Banque mondiale disposée à consolider sa coopération avec la Tunisie,” La Presse (April 30, 2006); “Mab‘ūth rubā‘al-wisāta li al-sharq al-awsat yuqarrir al-tanahhī,” al-Sahāfa (April 30, 2006).
21. The illiteracy rate has been steadily decreasing since independence. Central Intelligence Agency, 2008 World Factbook.
22. For instance, in 1995, al-Akhawayn University in Ifrane (Morocco) opened its doors. Its curriculum stands out as having a more Anglo-American orientation than any other university in the Maghrib. I counted three courses with “Middle East” in their titles.
23. See Brett, “Colonial Period in the Maghrib and Its Aftermath,” 291–305; Johnson, “Algeria,” 221–42; Laroui, L’histoire du Maghreb; Sahli, Décoloniser l’histoire; Wansbrough, “Decolonization of North African History,” 643–50.
24. See Histoire Générale de la Tunisie; Slim, Mahjoubi, Belkhodja, and Ennabli, L’Antiquité; Djaït, Talbi, Dachraoui, Dhouib, M’Rabet, and Mahfoudh, vol. 2, Le moyenâge; Guellouz, Masmoudi, and Smida, vol. 3, Les temps modernes, 941–1247 H./1534–1881; Kaddache, L’Algérie médievale.
25. For example, see Julien, Histoire de l’Afrique du Nord: Tunisie, Algérie, Maroc.
26. I refer here to the Arab League (1945–), the Organization of the Islamic Conference (1971–), the Organization of African Unity (1963–2002), and the Non-Aligned Movement (1955–). Morocco left the OAU in 1984, and it is the only country in Africa that is not a member of the African Union (2002–).
27. Filali, Le Maroc et le monde Arabe. The book, which put the blame for the failure to build the Maghrib on Algerian leaders, elicited a vigorous response in Algeria. See, for instance, Mohamed Said, “Oui l’Algérie est en droit de revendiquer un rôle regional,” El-Watan, Part I, September 10, 2008, and Part II, September 12, 2008. Both authors are former high-level diplomats.
28. French statisticians tend to collapse the two, especially when they evaluate the number of “Muslims” in France.
29. Not all French citizens who migrated there are able to be reminded of their place of origin as a group. For instance the Italians, Poles, Portuguese, and Hungarians are generally treated as individuals. Their “group identity” seldom is remembered in public discourse. The maghrébins seem to have benefited from the rise of power of the socialists with François Mitterrand and the formation of associations such as “SOS Racisme.”
30. The concept of integration informs French social and political discourse and policies. It is based on an insistence on notions of difference, which produce the cultural otherness of immigrants and their French-born children (theoretically full citizens) as a way of explaining their socioeconomic and political disenfranchisement.
31. See Hannoum, Colonial Histories, Post-Colonial Memories.
32. The Maghribi media has tended to describe the mostly West African migrants who cross the Maghrib on their way to Europe as Africans.
33. See the article “Middle East Warriors Renew Demand to Recognize their Organization” in the Algerian newspaper Al-Khabar, August 14, 2008.
Chapter 5
1. Said, Orientalism, 1.
2. Ibid., 3.
3. I provide a review of the three-decade-old debate in Varisco, Reading Orientalism. See also Irwin, For Lust of Knowing.
4. al-‘Azm, “Orientalism and Orientalism in Reverse,” 376.
5. Said, Orientalism, 328.
6. Goldammer, Der Mythus von Ost und West, 10–11.
7. Such repetition of nonsense syllables is used in a number of languages to indicate people who cannot be understood. In the highland valley of al-Ahjur in Yemen, villagers would refer to those who spoke another language or difficult dialect as laghallaghallaghal.
8. Romm, Herodotus, 95–96.
9. Hay, Europe, 4.
10. Said recognizes the importance of the “revolution in Biblical studies” but chooses not to focus on this. In his list of possible Orients, he gives precedence to Freud, Spengler, and Darwin (none of whom said very much about the Orient) without any mention of pilgrims, saints, or theologians. Said, Orientalism, 17, 22.
11. Ibid., 58.
12. Ibid., 42.
13. Of course I am talking about mainly the Mediterranean World, Europe, and Western Asia in the earlier periods, as there were other ecumenisms in East Asia and South Asia. With the later spread of peoples and of these monotheistic religions, the Holy Land becomes a center for adherents throughout the world.
14. It is reported by the patriarch Sophronius that he personally took Umar ibn al-Khattab, whose Muslim army has just conquered Jerusalem, to the dung heap where the temple had been and this is where Umar determined a mosque should be built. See Wilken, Land Called Holy, 237.
15. Obenzinger, American Palestine, 4, cites this text as “one of the most popular books ever written by a missionary.”
16. Thomson, Land and the Book, xvi.
17. Ibid., xiii.
18. Ibid., 403.
19. Howard, Writers and Pilgrims, 43.
20. For a Muslim perspective on the holiness of Jerusalem, see the discussion in Matthews, “Palestine, Holy Land of Islam,” 171–78, of a work by Burhan al-din Ibn al-Firka in 1477 C.E. Although some later Muslim writers, such as Ibn Taymiyya, denigrated Christian Jerusalem as a site for Muslim worship, there was earlier an entire literature on the merits (fadâ’il) of the holy city for Muslims; see Frankel, “Muslim Pilgrimage to Jerusalem in the Mamluk Period,” 63–87.
21. Wilken, Land Called Holy, 11.
22. Interest in Holy Land travel has been keen by scholars and bibliographers over the past two centuries. For general bibliographic information on travelers, see Bevis, Bibliotheca Cisorientalia; Röhricht, Bibliotheca Geographica Palaestinae; and Weber, Voyages and Travels in Greece. For accounts of early Christian pilgrims, see Hunt, Holy Land Pilgrimage in the Later Roman Empire, A.D. 312–460; Maraval, Lieux saints et pèlerinages d’Orient; Wilken, Land Called Holy; and Wilkinson, Egeria’s Travels. Hachicho, “English Travel Books About the Arab Near East in the Eighteenth Century,” provides an excellent starting point for English texts from the eighteenth century. For British travel accounts of the nineteenth century, see Damiani, Enlightened Observers and Tibawi, British Interests in Palestine; American travelers are discussed in Moshe Davis, American and the Holy Land; Finnie, Pioneers East; Obenzinger, American Palestine; Schueller, U.S. Orientalisms; and Tibawi, American Interests in Syria. For female Western travelers, see Melman, Women’s Orients; Yoshihara[0], Embracing the East.
23. This is reported in Röhricht, Bibliotheca Geographica Palaestinae in 1890, so the number is no doubt higher today after a century of research.
24. Ben-Arieh, “Geographical Exploration of the Holy Land,” 83.
25. Melman, Women’s Orients, 7.
26. Wilkinson, Egeria’s Travels.
27. It is
clear that the work is a compilation of sources, many from eyewitness accounts. Howard, argues that this text is a “new kind of work, a summa of travel lore which combined the authority of learned books and guidebooks with the eyewitness manner of pilgrim and travel writers.” Howard, Writers and Pilgrims, 58.
28. Mandeville, Travels of Sir John Mandeville, 43.
29. The sultan, who was said to be fluent in French, speaks to Mandeville: “You ought to be simple, meek and truthful, and ready to give charity and alms, as Christ was, in whom you say you believe. But it is quite otherwise. For Christians are so proud, so envious, such great gluttons, so lecherous, and moreover so full of covetousness, that for a little silver they will sell their daughters, their sisters, even their own wives, and no one keeps his faith to another: and you so wickedly and evilly despite and break the Law that Christ gave you.” Ibid., 107–8. The contrast between lax local Christians and admirably devout Muslims is also found in the pilgrimage account of the thirteenth century Brocardus; see Howard, Writers and Pilgrims, 32.
30. Said, Orientalism, 157.
31. The two nineteenth-century French Holy Land travel accounts, those of Chateaubriand and Lamartine, are driven by ego more than by devotion and are atypical of the genre even for the nineteenth century. See Said, Orientalism, 169–79. As Murphey remarks in critique of Said’s assumptions about pre-nineteenth-century non-colonialist authors, they “drank at Pierian springs of another description.” Murphey, “Bigots or Informed Observers?” 291.
32. The first edition of Flaubert’s notes on his travels appeared in 1910, but this was expurgated; see Flaubert, Voyage en Égypte for a recent edition of the original letters. Lockman wrongly assumes that Flaubert wrote one of the “influential accounts of travel in the Levant.” Lockman, Contending Visions of the Middle East, 69.
33. Kinglake, Eothen, 3.
34. Twain, Innocents Abroad, xvii.
35. Said, Orientalism, 158.
36. Clarke, Travels in Various Countries of Europe, Asia, and Africa, vol. 2, p. x.
37. Varisco, “Archaeologist’s Spade and the Apologist’s Stacked Deck.”
38. Quoted in Parker, Early Modern Tales of Orient, 177.
39. Said, Orientalism, 208.
40. Said (ibid., 151) wrongly states that Muir’s two major works “are still considered reliable monuments of scholarship.” In fact twentieth-century scholars such as Gibb, Watt, and even Lewis had repudiated the missionary bias of Muir. For a critique of Muir’s ethnocentric cleansing of Muhammad, see Varisco, Islam Obscured, 81–113.
41. Thomson, Land and the Book, 345.
42. The reference is to the Gospel account, for example, Matthew 10:10, where the twelve disciples are sent out to “the lost sheep of Israel.”
43. Thomson, Land and the Book, 346.
44. Ibid., 347.
45. Ibid., 679.
46. Other travelers expressed similar sentiments. Taylor states that “Jerusalem is the last place on the world where an intelligent heathen would be converted to Christianity,” adding for emphasis that he would “at once turn Mussulman.” Taylor, Lands of the Saracen, 19.
47. James Turner Barclay, a Disciples of Christ missionary who lived in Jerusalem in the 1850s, explicitly targeted (without much success) Palestinian Jews. Barclay focused on converting Jews as eschatological fulfillment. See Blowers, “ ‘Living in a Land of Prophets,’” 498–99. In Barclay’s 1860 “The Welfare of the World Bound Up in the Destiny of Israel,” he predicted a novus ordo seclorum in which the total conversion of Israel was imminent. As Obenzinger notes, “The millennialist mania to appropriate Palestine was at the farthest, most radical end of a continuum of reading and writing sacred geography, but the impulse to seize ‘my undying property’ was also embodied by less feverish travelers.” Obenzinger, American Palestine, 56–57.
48. Thomson, Land and the Book, 228.
49. Ibid., 20.
50. Ibid., 255.
51. The operative word “filth” is common in Western accounts of nineteenth-century Palestine. For example, Taylor complains, “Jerusalem, internally, gives no impression but that of filth, rain, poverty, and degeneration.” Taylor, Lands of the Saracen, 77.
52. Thomson, Land and the Book, 388.
53. Ibid., 27.
54. Ibid., 369.
55. Ibid., 255.
56. Ibid., 369.
57. Ibid., 370. For further perspectives on the belief that the Bedouins were the cause for desertification in the region, see Diana Davis, Chapter 8, this volume.
58. In addition to the Nusayriya mentioned above, Thomson believes that the villagers of Alma may stem from the Kenites. Thomson, Land and the Book, 272.
59. Ibid., 275.
60. Ibid., 278.
61. Ibid., 294.
62. Ibid., 322.
63. Coon, Story of the Middle East.
64. Thomson, Land and the Book, 683.
65. Twain, Innocents Abroad, 24.
Chapter 6
1. Hodgson, Venture of Islam, 60–61.
2. Fernand Braudel similarly noted the ecological and economic exchanges linking the arid lands from Central Asia to the eastern Mediterranean, claiming: “The chain of deserts between the Atlantic and China is divided in two by the high Iranian plateaux; to the west lie the warm deserts; to the north and east the cold deserts. But there is a continuity between these barren spaces and their caravan traffic.” See Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, 171. The pioneering work of Joseph Fletcher on Islamic networks likewise emphasized the cultural exchanges that integrated Central Asia and the Middle East. See Fletcher, Studies on Chinese and Islamic Inner Asia.
3. Here I refer to the world Robert Canfield has called “Turko-Persia.” See Canfield, Turko-Persia in Historical Perspective.
4. Lewis and Wigen, Myth of Continents, 177.
5. Soucek, History of Inner Asia, 150. For an excellent critique of this perspective, see McChesney, “ ‘Barrier of Heterodoxy’?” 231–67.
6. See Hopkirk, Great Game; Hopkins, “Bounds of Identity,” 233–54; Mojtahed-Zadeh, Small Players of the Great Game.
7. See Najmabadi, Story of the Daughters of Quchan; Kashani-Sabet, Frontier Fictions.
8. Turan is supposedly derived from Tur and according to the Shahnama, Tur was the name of emperor Faridun’s eldest son, and hence, Turan was the land ruled by Tur.
9. Firdawsi, Shahnama.
10. Le Strange, Lands of the Eastern Caliphate, 433. Also see, Frye, Heritage of Central Asia, 243.
11. Crossing the Oxus was a difficult task not to be taken lightly. The thirteenth-century Muslim geographer Yaqut recounted in his voluminous geographical dictionary, Mu‘jam al-Buldan, how on a journey from Marv, he and his companions nearly died from the cold, the snow, and the ice they endured on the river. See Le Strange, Lands of the Eastern Caliphate, 444–45. See for instance the sixteenth-century illustrated manuscript page of Mirkhvand’s Rawzat al-Safa showing Mirza Abu‘l Qasim crossing the Oxus with a sense of fear and caution.
12. Other common English spellings for Qara Qum (Black Sands) are Kara-Kum, Karakum, and Kara Kum.
13. Létolle, “Histoire de l’Ouzboi, cours fossile de l’Amou Darya,” 195–240; Létolle, Micklin, Aladin, and Plotnikov, “Uzboy and the Aral regressions,” 125–36. Also see Konchin, “La Question de l’Oxus,” Annales de Géographie, 496–504.
14. Le Strange, Lands of the Eastern Caliphate, 455.
15. Ibid., 456–57.
16. See Bahadur Khan, Shajara-yi Tarakima, vol.1, 221, 312, vol.2, 207, 291.
17. I’timad al-Saltana, Tatbiq-i Lughat-i Jughrafiyihi-yi Qadim va Jadid-i Iran, 24.
18. Konchin, “La Question de l’Oxus,” 496–504.
19. Reclus, Earth and Its Inhabitants, 193–219. Also see Raphael Pumpelly Papers (1864–1912), MSS Pumpelly, Part 1, Box 2, Transcaspian and Turkestan Notebooks, the Huntington Library; Pumpelly, Explorations in Turkestan, 291–98.
20. Pumpelly, Explorations in Turkestan, 294.
21. Ibid., 295.
22. As Palmira Brummett has noted in a recent essay on the Ottoman Empire, “In the early modern era conceptual divisions of space and time were not primarily linear and did not lend themselves to precise territorial demarcation.” See Brummett, “Imagining the Early Modern Ottoman Space,” 26.
23. Roemer, “Safavid Period,” 217.
24. Khvandamir, Tarikh-i Habib al-Siyar, 294.
25. Ibid., 36. Balk is located in northern Afghanistan.
26. Barthold, Four Studies on the History of Central Asia, 136; Roemer, “Successors of Timur,” 126–27. On the little explored subject of the Safavids and Uzbeks, see Dickson, “Shah Tahmasp and the Uzbeks.”
27. Soucek, History of Inner Asia, 182.
28. Barthold, Four Studies on the History of Central Asia, 144.
29. Hidayat, Sifaratnama-yi Khvarazm, 27.
30. In the early seventeenth century, the task of administering and preserving order on this imperial frontier was entrusted to Faridun Khan (d. 1621), the governor of Astarabad. Faridun Khan’s campaigns against the Turkmen during this time are related in afathnama (book of victory) penned by Muhammad Tahir Bistami with the title Futuhat-i Fariduniya. Interestingly, the author of Futuhat-i Fariduniya makes no mention of the Oxus or Ab-i Amuya and instead provides a more modest view of the Atrak and Gurgan rivers as the boundaries and eastern frontiers of Iran. See Bistami, Futuhat-i Fariduniya. See also, Barthold, Four Studies on the History of Central Asia, 146.
31. In 1841, Major James Abbott estimated that there were 700,000 slaves in the Khanate of Khiva, roughly one-third of the total population. In the city of Khiva alone there were 30,000 Persian and 12,000 Herati slaves. See Marvin, Merv, the Queen of the World, 181.
32. The yurt, the traditional dwelling of Central Asian nomads, usually is a round structure of wooden poles covered by felt. Nineteenth-century European and Persian sources offer varying estimates of Turkmen populations according to the number of tents or yurts. Population figures may be found in Fraser, Narrative of a Journey into Khorasan in 1821 and 1822; Burnes, Travels into Bokhara; Anonymous, “Safarnama-yi Bukhara;” Arminius Vámbéry, Travels in Central Asia; FO 60/379, “Report by Ronald Thomson on the Toorkoman Tribes Occupying Districts Between the Caspian and the Oxus,” Tehran, February 29, 1876; Marvin, Merv, the Queen of the Word; Moser, Travers l’Asie Centrale.