Review: Orientalist Poetics: The Islamic Middle East in Nineteenth-Century English and French Poetry

2003 ◽  
Vol 57 (3) ◽  
pp. 402-403
Author(s):  
A. Gunny
Author(s):  
Joseph Ben Prestel

The introduction shows that the historical parallels between cities in Europe and the Middle East during the nineteenth century are an underresearched topic in history, demonstrating that Eurocentric tendencies have led to a separation between historical studies on cities in these two regions. It shows how a comparison between Berlin and Cairo contributes to the study of potential parallels between cities in Europe and the Middle East. It is in this context that the history of emotions opens up a new perspective. While older comparative studies have focused on the origins of urban change, the introduction argues that a history of emotions shifts the focus towards the study of how contemporaries negotiated urban change. In this way, the history of emotions helps to overcome Eurocentric pitfalls and offers the possibility of a more global urban history, in which the histories of Berlin and Cairo begin to speak to each other.


Author(s):  
Ahmed El Shamsy

This chapter turns to the changing means of cultural reproduction: the constitution of books as physical objects through the medium of print. The print revolution, inaugurated by Johannes Gutenberg (d. 1468), was central to the cultural formation of modern Europe. Within decades of Gutenberg's death, the technology of the printing press had also arrived in Istanbul, carried by Jewish refugees from Spain. Arabic books were not, however, printed in the Middle East in significant numbers until the eighteenth century, and it was only in the nineteenth century that print came to dominate the production of Arabo-Islamic literature. After discussing early printing in the Arab world, this chapter focuses on the evolution of the publishing industry.


Author(s):  
Michael Laffan

This chapter discusses the rise, largely in the nineteenth century, of a new form of populist authority that expanded the scope of Islamic activity beyond the reach of ever more marginalized courts. Indonesian Islam, supported in some instances by a growing native economy, moves away from court-mandated orthodoxy towards a closer connection with Mecca and the Middle East mediated by independent teachers. In some instances, these independent religious masters were able to prosper and to adapt to new modes of Sufi organization that saw the adoption of the tariqas in favor in the Ottoman Empire. By the century's end, the Naqshbandis in particular were exploring new ways of broadening their constituencies. These included somewhat controversial short-courses of instruction and the dissemination of printed materials that were increasingly available to a pesantren-schooled section of the public.


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