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Writing history in the Maghreb (7th-20th centuries)

Écrire l’histoire au Maghreb (VIIe-XXe siècle)

كتابة التاريخ في البلدان المغاربية (القرن السابع ألقرن العشرون)

Authors, texts, manuscripts

Auteurs, textes, manuscrits

مؤلفون، نصوص، مخطوطات

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Published on Tuesday, November 28, 2023

Abstract

Studies in Arab historiography generally focus on the Middle-East marginalizing the North African contribution, with the exception of Ibn Khaldūn. The aim is therefore to highlight the Maghreb intellectual production in offering researchers the opportunity to showcase authors and works of all kinds to renew the history of the Maghreb. The vast chronological framework aims to bring together medievalists, modernists and contemporaneists, all too often separated: while focusing on the intense medieval production, the symposium will be an opportunity to emphasize the continuities of these genres for the modern period and the colonial period, sources which are either understudied or only through French-language sources.

Announcement

10-11 juin 2024

General presentation and context

Twenty years after the colloquium entitled "Écritures de l'histoire du Maghreb" (El-Moudden et al., 2007), the TariMa project - Ecrire l'histoire au Maghreb aux périodes modernes et contemporaine (CollEx-Persée funding 2022-2024), the Centre Jacques Berque and its partners organize a new international scientific meeting on Maghreb Arabic-speaking historiography. While the 2004 symposium took stock of renewed historical production in the Maghreb after independence, focusing on national identities and collective memory, this new meeting will highlight historiography based on an older scholarly tradition. From the medieval period to the twentieth century, the authors of chronicles (aẖbār), dictionaries (ṭabaqāt), hagiographies (manāqib), genealogies (ansāb), compilations of sources, geographical descriptions (ẖiṭaṭ) and travel narratives (riḥla) illustrated a “traditional” way of writing history. Far from a rigid division into determined genres, this symposium proposes to understand the authors' historiographical project, focusing on the context, content and materiality of these works.

Since the works of orientalists in the colonial period, particularly in Morocco (Lévi-Provençal, 1922), only few studies were specifically devoted to these historians in the Maghreb (Ibn Sūdā, 1960, Abdesselem, 1973) or in France (Berque, 1978). These works sometimes remain imbued with the negative tone of early French writings: they recall the indignity of historical narrative (ta'rīẖ) in the hierarchy of sciences, the repetitive nature of writing and the systematic reuse of second-hand material. From Europe, knowledge of these sources, essential to the history of the Maghreb, remains confined to a few privileged authors, enjoying rare translations into French or European languages.

This symposium aims to seize the opportunity of a new context: on an epistemological level, new modes of reading, inspired by historical anthropology, have renewed the way we read these documents, paying attention to their material and codicological dimensions. The renewal of manuscript sciences marked a new stage in our knowledge of these texts: over the last twenty years, critical editions (taḥqīq) of unpublished sources have multiplied in the Maghreb. These editions are circulating more widely in Maghreb bookshops and beyond on the internet. The massive digitization of manuscripts in international and Maghreb libraries adds to the online presence of digital copies of these editions, promoting new uses in digital humanities. Finally, international research seems to have responded in a more committed way to the call from Maghrebi historians in the 1960s to use local and not just European sources to write the history of the Maghreb.

Objectives of the colloquium

Studies in Arab historiography generally focus on the Middle-East marginalizing the North African contribution, with the exception of Ibn Khaldūn. The aim is therefore to highlight the Maghreb intellectual production in offering researchers the opportunity to showcase authors and works of all kinds to renew the history of the Maghreb. The vast chronological framework aims to bring together medievalists, modernists and contemporaneists, all too often separated: while focusing on the intense medieval production, the symposium will be an opportunity to emphasize the continuities of these genres for the modern period and the colonial period, sources which are either understudied or only through French-language sources.

The final target is to show the different ways in which history is written in the Maghreb, starting with the texts themselves, across their context, the narrative techniques employed, the technical production of a manuscripts and now its digitalization. This symposium aims to highlight the historical dimension of a wide range of narratives sometimes classified in different genres (annalistic, biographical, genealogical, hagiographic...). It will also provide an opportunity for the various players working on these works (historians, philologists, scientific publishers, translators) to meet and discuss common issues.

Axes and scope of papers

Proposals may address one or more of the following themes, from one or several axes, as long as they report on work on one or more manuscript(s) or text(s) in a local language (literal or vernacular Arabic, Amazigh, Hassani, etc.):

  • composed between the medieval period and the 20th century,
  • in one of the Maghreb countries (Mauritania, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya)
  • with a historical narrative or memorial project in a significant part.

As the final step of a project focusing on manuscripts and digital humanities, this symposium encourages contributions to take into account new technical approaches to these texts (lexicometry, automatic language processing, digitization and handwriting recognition, etc.), without any obligation.

1. Authors and their context: social identity, personal project and relationship to power

In line with Konrad Hirschler's work (2006) combining the study of social context and literary dimensions in order to identify the authors' agency, axe integrates the following points:

  • The biography and backgrounds of these authors, the well-known figure of the court historian, from city scholars to local ones, of any origin.

  • The interactions between the texts and their cultural environment, the debates or questions that gave rise to them, the influence of confreres', legal or dynastic traditions, the role of events on their writing and choice of form, the popularity of certain types of narratives, such as the need for recapitulation in times of crisis (Shaztmiller, 1982), the legacies maintained from the genre of the sīra or the literature of ḥadīṯ from classical Islam, ruptures and invention of new form of narratives.

  • The political roles of these works: dynastic political projects, defense of a social group, genealogical legitimization, constitution of legal evidence, affirmation of a region's autonomy, promotion of a religious doctrine or zāwiya.

2. Writing: narration, sources and theories of history

This section looks at the narrative itself, analyzing writing processes from the following angles:

  • Writing the event, the status and definition of narrative units (ẖabar), that of digressions or anecdotes, the hierarchization and arrangement of facts, the presence of the supernatural or miraculous.
  • The literary dimension of texts: analysis of style, presence of versification, all literary techniques and their influence on the shaping of historical information.
  • The relationship with sources and intertextuality: compilation and citation of documentary sources (Bora, 2019) or other authors, cutting, falsification or rearrangement of facts, quality of historical information.
  • Analysis of the authors' personal imprint will be particularly valued in a literature that has often been said to be factual and objective in appearance. This can take the form of a general interpretation of history: analysis of the driving forces behind history, choice of chronological framework (continuity or rupture between dynasties or periods), and geographical framework (national framework, place of empires or relations with foreign countries).
  • The hybrid character of genres that are sometimes artificially separated, and the entanglement of history, genealogy, biography and hagiography (al-Qablī, 1998); the link between the very form of the narrative and the theory of history that derives from it (al-Qadi, 1995)

3. Texts and manuscripts: conservation, publishing and digital humanities

A final focus on the material dimension of texts and their relationship with archival corpora, refers to :

  • The conservation of these manuscripts throughout the periods, their distribution in Maghrebian and foreign libraries, the constitution of public and private collections in the Maghreb.

  • Scientific edition in a variety of contexts: training for publishing work in the Maghreb, the context of publication (university diploma, voluntary project, official publishing enterprise), the linguistic and codicological challenges of these editions, editorial policies.

  • The advantages and limitations of digital humanities: the preservation of these texts through digitization, their distribution on the Internet, experiments in automatic text extraction and content processing (lexicometry, automatic language processing, etc.).

Practical details

Proposals for papers should be sent to the following address colloque.historiographie.maghreb@gmail.com, and should include :

  • Title and abstract (approx. one page)
  • Author's surname, first name, affiliation and position
  • Contact e-mail address

by January 31, 2024.

Papers may be submitted in Arabic, French or English. Selected participants will be notified in February. Participation fees will be covered by the organizers to the extent of their means.

A publication project will be submitted to participants at the end of the symposium.

The symposium will be trilingual (French-Arabic-English).

Coordination

Antoine Perrier (CNRS, Centre Jacques Berque), antoine.perrier@sciencespo.fr

Places

  • Centre Jacques Berque
    Rabat, Kingdom of Morocco

Event attendance modalities

Full on-site event


Date(s)

  • Wednesday, January 31, 2024

Information source

  • Antoine Perrier
    courriel : antoine [dot] perrier [at] sciencespo [dot] fr

License

CC-BY-4.0 This announcement is licensed under the terms of Creative Commons - Attribution 4.0 International - CC BY 4.0 .

To cite this announcement

Antoine Perrier, « Writing history in the Maghreb (7th-20th centuries) », Call for papers, Calenda, Published on Tuesday, November 28, 2023, https://doi.org/10.58079/1c8r

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