Abstract
In 1890s Ottoman Syria and Egypt, at the height of the cultural movement referred to as the Arab Renaissance (nahḍa), the Arabic historical novels of Ottoman intellectual Jurjī Zaydān ignited a series of public debates around the writing of Islamic history in the form of the popular novel. His novels, collectively dubbed “The History of Islam Series,” were serialized in the prominent periodical al-Hilāl between 1892 and 1914. Through al-Hilāl, Zaydān, a Syrian émigré in Cairo from an Orthodox Christian background, made a name for himself as a writer, historian, and prominent man of letters. This dissertation investigates the role of the series and its novels as didactic spaces through which Zaydān negotiated Ottoman sociopolitical boundaries on the eve of the First World War. It is a historical study of the novels that combines the history and literature of the nahḍa with Islamic thought, Arabic and Islamic historiography, and the history of interreligious relations in the late Ottoman Empire and the modern Middle East. In this context, the novels act as a historical archive, not of the histories they recount, but of the period’s boundaries around religious difference and popular Ottoman ideas on belonging. The study illustrates how the novels reimagined Islamic history, the place of non-Muslims within its trajectory, and the collective struggle for Ottoman equality. Through discourse analysis of archival material, including letters, diaries, and periodical articles, and the study of classical and medieval Islamicate texts employed by Zaydān in the novels, this study reevaluates the intellectual economy that shaped religious, national, and imperial belonging at the turn of the twentieth century. I argue that, through narrative and serialization, the novels harnessed Islamic history and thought, challenging both Islamic and European epistemologies to contest new and existing sociopolitical boundaries around religion in the Ottoman Empire.