From the 1820s onwards, “progress” and “civilisation” gained extensive use in Arabic and evolved as comprehensive concepts. “Progress” conveyed the power of development and “civilisation” referred to the aspired-to future. The key use of “civilisation” was to establish a new form of legitimacy used to justify new institutional practices, values, and customs. Using Rifāʿa al-Ṭahṭāwī’s early theorisation of “civilisation” in the late 1820s as its starting point, this article tracks how medieval Arabic conceptions of the term influenced his theory, while also elaborating on the course and transformation of “civilisation” over time. The article traces the prehistory of the modern concept by mapping the semantics of words such as tamaddun, ʿumrān, taḥaḍḍur, and tamaṣṣur, all of which characterise different aspects of civilisation. It examines the sources al-Ṭahṭāwī drew on in constructing his conception of civilisation and problematises the idea that it is a notion wholly imported from France. The article’s diachronic analysis of “civilisation” uncovers its antecedents as represented in al-Ṭahṭāwī’s works, which intertwine the classical Greek, Hellenist, Arab, and modern European traditions.

The article sheds light on the intellectual biography and theology of Khrīsṭufūrus Jibāra (d. 1901), a Christian Eastern Orthodox archimandrite who had a falling out with the church because of his controversial beliefs. Jibāra was born in Damascus and lived in Beirut, Cairo, Moscow, New York and Boston. He believed that harmonization between Christianity, Judaism and Islam would provide a remedy for religious conflicts and was a precondition for peace. Living in the second half of the nineteenth century, Jibāra developed a unique political theology that was shaped against a background of religious conflicts in Greater Syria, the Ottoman state policy of Pan-Islamism, and the global religious reaction to secularism. Influenced by ancient anti-Trinitarian Christian traditions and by contemporary puritan Unitarian theology, he developed a doctrine that he called ‘the straight path’, which challenged traditional Islam, traditional Christianity and secularism. His unique views shed light on the transreligious postulations of the reformist Islamic movement and present an exceptional attempt to reform Eastern Orthodox Christianity.

This article focuses on questions of religiosity in the works of the Aleppine Christian scholar Fransis al-Marrash (1836–74), one of the leading figures of the Arab nahda (cultural revival). It presents the characteristics of al-Marrash’s concepts of true and false religion, and how these concepts relate to his theory of civilization. The article concludes that al-Marrash’s preoccupation with these concepts resulted in the formulation of contested modes of religiosity and a particular perception of reformed religion.

This article employs the methodology of conceptual history to contest two of the most common theoretical approaches dominating our understanding of modernity in the field of Middle Eastern studies. The first approach relies on the assumption of incompatibility between modernity and Islam and captures Arab modernity using concepts such as ‘adoption’. The second understands Arab modernity through concepts such as ‘imitation’, contending that it is a legacy of Western imperialism. This article challenges both theories by examining the genealogy of tamaddun (civilization, being civilized), a pivotal concept used in nineteenth-century Arabic to imagine modernity. The genealogy of tamaddun elucidates that medieval paradigms derived from the concept of madina (polity) were rediscovered, reimagined, and reused in the context of the rise of the nation-state and the challenge of Western imperialism. The article suggests understanding Arab modernity and its critique from within, rather than outside of, the temporality of the historical condition.

This article endeavours to bring to the English reader unpublished historical sources about Frankish figuers in the fourteenth century biographical dictionary al-Wāfī bil-wafayāt. This work, one of the largest biographical dictionaries in the history of the genre in Arabic, was written by Khalīl b. Aibak Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn, al-Ṣafadī who was born in 1297 to a Mamluk father and a respected amir of the Mamluk military troops in Ṣafad. This article analyse nine biographies of Frankish historical figures and endeavours to answer the question: how original were al-Ṣafadī’s biographies on Frankish princes?