Histoire ottomane by Renaud Soler
This paper is a french translation and commentary of the part of Evliyā Çelebī's Seyahatnāmesi wh... more This paper is a french translation and commentary of the part of Evliyā Çelebī's Seyahatnāmesi which is dedicated to his travel between Luksor and Aswan in 1671.
Traduction en français de Martin Riexinger « “Der Islam begann als Fremder, und als Fremder wird ... more Traduction en français de Martin Riexinger « “Der Islam begann als Fremder, und als Fremder wird er wiederkehren” : Muḥammad b. ʿAbd al-Wahhābs Prophetenbiographie Muḫtaṣar sīrat ar-rasūl als Programm und Propaganda », Die Welt des Islams, 2005, n° 35, p. 1-61
Accès en ligne : https://journals.openedition.org/trivium/6402
Avant-propos du n°70 d'Arabica consacré à la vie du prophète Muhammad
Histoire contemporaine by Renaud Soler
La Ḥāfiẓiyya est une confrérie soufie de taille modeste, installée dans le sud du gouvernorat de ... more La Ḥāfiẓiyya est une confrérie soufie de taille modeste, installée dans le sud du gouvernorat de Giza depuis le XIXe siècle. Cette petite confrérie, affiliée à la Ḫalwatiyya, confrérie plus ancienne et aujourd’hui l’une des plus importantes d’Égypte, contribue à l’organisation de la vie religieuse locale par ses pèlerinages et ses rassemblements. La famille de son cheikh fondateur, ʿAbd al-Ḥāfiẓ (m. 1303/1886), dirige toujours la confrérie et a acquis une notabilité locale, au point d’exercer des fonctions politiques et d’arbitrage importantes.
Une étude de terrain a permis de montrer l’ancrage d’une mémoire collective dans des pratiques confrériques héritées de l’enseignement du cheikh et ses descendants, se réclamant elles-mêmes de la tradition de la Ḫalwatiyya. Un manuel de soufisme, la Hidāyat al-rāġibīn fī al-sayr wa-l-sulūk ilā malik al-mulūk rabb al-ʿālamīn [La Bonne direction pour ceux qui désirent cheminer vers le Roi des rois Seigneur des mondes], assume ce rôle de transmission écrite ; l’étude de la tradition orale révèle quant à elle le travail de la mémoire et la formation d’une identité confrérique locale et originale.
Faire l’histoire de la Ḥāfiẓiyya conduit à évoquer l’histoire sociale des campagnes égyptiennes et à comprendre comment s’articule l’identité locale d’une modeste confrérie de Moyenne-Égypte avec une tradition confrérique plus large et pluriséculaire.
Two significant Sufi works have been transmitted from the Ottoman era until the 19th-and 20th cen... more Two significant Sufi works have been transmitted from the Ottoman era until the 19th-and 20th century Egyptian countryside. First represented within the al-Azhar milieu, along the initiatory chains of the Ḫalwatiyya from the mid-18th century on, they then counted among the most sought-after sources for a number of Sheikhs who, after their training at the al-Azhar mosque, would then return teaching in the provinces. Brotherhoods were often founded after the death of the latter by their children, who would capitalize on their father’s legacy: his charisma, his works, and, sometimes his wealth and social status.
Far from being a homogeneous milieu of illiterate peasants, the Egyptian countryside was profoundly diverse, which has enabled the Sufi sheikhs up until this day to have at command numerous cultural intermediates among the craft workers, merchants and state officials, in order to spread out the Sufi culture. This fieldwork research helps us find in the Sufi practices the singular trace of these works, which are too often presented as thought merely abstract or theoretical, while they have consistently provided instructions to organize communal meetings and words for the daily prayers.
Published in Francesco Chiabotti, Eve Feuillebois-Pierunek, Catherine Mayeur-Jaouen, Luca Patrizi... more Published in Francesco Chiabotti, Eve Feuillebois-Pierunek, Catherine Mayeur-Jaouen, Luca Patrizi (ed.), Ethics and Spirituality in Islam. Sufi Adab, Leiden, Brill, 2017, p. 649-668.
Two Sufi books of the Ottoman period recently presented by Rachida Chih, the Tuḥfat al-ikhwān (" The Treasure of the Brothers ") by Aḥmad al-Dardīr (d. 1786) and the Sayr wa-l-sulūk ilā malik al-mulūk (" The Walk and the Journey towards the King of Kings ") by Qāsim al-Khānī (d. 1697),2 hold a prominent place in the literary heritage of a small Egyptian Sufi brotherhood, as they have never ceased to be present in its collective memory and to influence its religious practices. This brotherhood, the Ḥāfiẓiyya, a discrete branch of the better known Khalwatiyya,3 is located in Middle Egypt near al-ʿAyyāṭ at the southern tip of the Giza governorate. These two texts give us the opportunity to study in detail the relationship between the literary foundations of a brotherhood and its everyday life. Adab, the literature organizing the social and religious behavior of Sufis, is often described as abstract and normative, but this study reveals a more complex relationship with both the memory and practices of the brotherhood. Were the Ḥāfiẓiyya founded in the middle of the nineteenth century by Shaykh ʿAbd al-Ḥāfiẓ ʿAlī (d. 1886)? The hagiographic texts and testimonies that have been collected all agree on this point, but this claim is historically erroneous.4 Although specialists knew about this shaykh previously, they had no idea that a Sufi brotherhood had appeared and claimed his legacy. This region of Egypt remained for a long time difficult for researchers to access. We can now rely on our field studies, which have been conducted on this brotherhood since 2013, and on the access we gained to manuscripts and rare prints.
This article deals with three variations of a panegyric dedicated to Saint Theodore the Oriental,... more This article deals with three variations of a panegyric dedicated to Saint Theodore the Oriental, a saint venerated by the Egyptian orthodox Coptic Christians, especially in Upper Egypt: A manuscript version preserved in the late Ottoman period, a printed version from the inter- war period and a contemporary record. We will shed light upon the Middle Arabic used in the manuscript version, and discussed the genesis of the text, we will focus on the editorial process as a reinvention and a bifurcation inside the textual tradition. With respect to orality, it will manifest itself in the recitation as a unique performance, as well as in the weft of the texts as a fantasized model and a trace of the older performances.
À partir des élaborations bergsoniennes sur le concept de durée, découvert par Charles Péguy dans... more À partir des élaborations bergsoniennes sur le concept de durée, découvert par Charles Péguy dans l’Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience, Matière et mémoire, et par le philosophe et poète musulman indien Muhammad Iqbal dans L’Évolution créatrice, les deux hommes engagèrent une réflexion sur l’expérience du temps au fondement de la modernité. Le concept de durée, celui d’habitude, sont ainsi engagés dans une réflexion sur l’histoire : le capitalisme et la déchristianisation, voilés par le mythe du progrès chez Péguy ; la domination impériale et la modernisation sur un modèle occidental chez Iqbal. Tous deux sont alors conduits à repenser les données fondamentales de leur foi : pour renouer avec l’expérience religieuse authentique, à rebours du desséchement de la vie spirituelle qu’ils craignent dans la modernité, ils appellent à se déshabituer des routines du dogme et à retrouver l’alliance de spirituel et de temporel qui caractérisait la prédication du Christ ou la fonction prophétique en islam, désormais considérée comme une disposition de toute âme humaine.
Cet article est une relecture de l’œuvre de l'historien et bureaucrate Rifāʿa Rafīʿ al-Ṭahṭāwī (1... more Cet article est une relecture de l’œuvre de l'historien et bureaucrate Rifāʿa Rafīʿ al-Ṭahṭāwī (1801-1873) qui la situe dans son moment historique, un moment où l’Égypte est encore un État dynastique lié à l’Empire ottoman, où les historiens travaillent à l’intérieur de l’édifice des sciences religieuses et de l’historiographie islamiques et où la modernité occidentale prend les atours du régime de la monarchie de Juillet et de l’histoire de Guizot et de Gibbon.
MIDEO, 2021
Faraḥ Anṭūn was one of the great animators of Arab intellectual life at the end of the 19th cen... more Faraḥ Anṭūn was one of the great animators of Arab intellectual life at the end of the 19th century and in the first quarter of the 20th century. He was born in Tripoli in 1874 in a Greek Orthodox family and later emigrated
to Egypt where he launched his own newspaper, al-Ǧāmiʿa, of which he was the main contributor between 1899 and 1910. He published articles on various subjects, as well as translations, and serial novels. These texts reveal a utopian project of refoundation of the Orient, which evolved over the years. At the turn of the 20th century, Faraḥ Anṭūn translated Renan’s Life of Jesus, first published in French in 1863. A comparison of the French version with the Arabic translation shows how Farāḥ Anṭūn imagined the resurrection of the East based on a dogma-free natural religion built on fraternity and tolerance, and spread by the example of Jesus, a divine personality who confined to
perfection.
Orientalisme by Renaud Soler
Les historiens de l’archéologie biblique sont unanimes pour désigner un homme, Edward Robinson, ... more Les historiens de l’archéologie biblique sont unanimes pour désigner un homme, Edward Robinson, comme leur illustre prédé-cesseur, et le fondateur de la discipline. Ce pasteur américain, orientaliste et grand voyageur, naquit en 1794 et mourut en 1863. Auteur de nombreux ouvrages, porté au pinacle par les sociétés savantes d’Amérique et du Vieux Continent, il connut la gloire de son vivant. Il fut ensuite progressivement oublié, à partir du début du XXe siècle, lorsque l’archéologie franchit un nouveau seuil épistémologique, pour devenir une simple figure pionnière, un glorieux ancêtre d’une période héroïque. Étudier la constitution de l’histoire de l’archéologie biblique, la formation d’une mémoire collective partagée par les archéologues, permet ainsi de voir surgir peu à peu la figure mythique d’Edward Robinson.
Il est néanmoins nécessaire de reconsidérer la vie du savant américain, en passant outre les simplifications du travail de la mémoire : reprendre ses ouvrages, relire les travaux de ses contemporains et prédécesseurs permet de saisir pour lui-même le moment constitutif de l’archéologie biblique, dans les années 1830, sans le juger à l’aune de critères de scientificité beaucoup plus tardivement élaborés, et sans commettre ce péché irrémissible de l’anachronisme. On voit alors se dessiner une archéologie biblique qui se développa en étroite connexion avec les sciences de son temps, sciences naturelles d’une part, sciences humaines et religieuses d’autre part.
L’archéologie biblique fut d’emblée pensée, reconnue et pratiquée comme discipline scientifique, qui n’était pas encore ce que nous appellerions, aujourd’hui, de ce nom. Mal dégagée des questionnements religieux et apologétiques, prisonnière encore d’un certain regard sur l’Orient, elle tient pour un moment insigne de l’histoire des sciences et des savoirs. La Palestine telle que nous nous la représentons fut, en grande partie, produite par Edward Robinson et les archéologues qui lui succédèrent dans la redécouverte de la Terre sainte.
Alphonse Dupront analysed in Le mythe de croisade the survival of the idea of Crusade until the c... more Alphonse Dupront analysed in Le mythe de croisade the survival of the idea of Crusade until the contemporary era. In this history, the 19th century has a special interest, since it actualized this latent virtuality of the western collective consciousness, and gave it new directions. The rediscovery of Palestine was made possible by the conjunction of very different factors such as the revolution in transportation, the rise of European imperialism, or the internal reforms in the Eastern countries (Egypt and the Ottoman Empire). The episteme of the Western sciences was also transformed by the emer- gence of new disciplines (biology, geology, philology), and the gradual formation of archaeology. The Christian and biblical Holy Land was rediscovered by the biblical archaeologists, and its image disseminated well beyond the scholars and learned men. This article studies some of the mechanisms of dissemination of these discourses, overall in the protestant world, and points to the connection to the birth of the Zionist movement: it has given more and more importance to the matter of the land, which has become in the 20th century the main issue, and has largely used not only results from the biblical archaeology, but also its methods for naming and framing the terri- tory. Thinking about the birth of a Western protestant way of seeing the Holy Land lets us understand better the relations between Israel and the West since World War II, and we must finally remember of Alphonse Dupront’s wider project, who tried to promote history as a psychoanalysis of the western collective consciousness and consequently a way of mutual understanding. This article is a contribution to such a project.
Comptes rendus by Renaud Soler
GRIL, Denis, REICHMUTH, Stefan, SARMIS, Dilek (dir.), The Presence of the Prophet in Early Modern and Contemporary Islam. Volume 1: The Prophet Between Doctrine, Literature and Arts: Historical Legacies and Their Unfolding, Leyde, Brill, 2022, 716 p.
Uploads
Histoire ottomane by Renaud Soler
Accès en ligne : https://journals.openedition.org/trivium/6402
Histoire contemporaine by Renaud Soler
Une étude de terrain a permis de montrer l’ancrage d’une mémoire collective dans des pratiques confrériques héritées de l’enseignement du cheikh et ses descendants, se réclamant elles-mêmes de la tradition de la Ḫalwatiyya. Un manuel de soufisme, la Hidāyat al-rāġibīn fī al-sayr wa-l-sulūk ilā malik al-mulūk rabb al-ʿālamīn [La Bonne direction pour ceux qui désirent cheminer vers le Roi des rois Seigneur des mondes], assume ce rôle de transmission écrite ; l’étude de la tradition orale révèle quant à elle le travail de la mémoire et la formation d’une identité confrérique locale et originale.
Faire l’histoire de la Ḥāfiẓiyya conduit à évoquer l’histoire sociale des campagnes égyptiennes et à comprendre comment s’articule l’identité locale d’une modeste confrérie de Moyenne-Égypte avec une tradition confrérique plus large et pluriséculaire.
Far from being a homogeneous milieu of illiterate peasants, the Egyptian countryside was profoundly diverse, which has enabled the Sufi sheikhs up until this day to have at command numerous cultural intermediates among the craft workers, merchants and state officials, in order to spread out the Sufi culture. This fieldwork research helps us find in the Sufi practices the singular trace of these works, which are too often presented as thought merely abstract or theoretical, while they have consistently provided instructions to organize communal meetings and words for the daily prayers.
Two Sufi books of the Ottoman period recently presented by Rachida Chih, the Tuḥfat al-ikhwān (" The Treasure of the Brothers ") by Aḥmad al-Dardīr (d. 1786) and the Sayr wa-l-sulūk ilā malik al-mulūk (" The Walk and the Journey towards the King of Kings ") by Qāsim al-Khānī (d. 1697),2 hold a prominent place in the literary heritage of a small Egyptian Sufi brotherhood, as they have never ceased to be present in its collective memory and to influence its religious practices. This brotherhood, the Ḥāfiẓiyya, a discrete branch of the better known Khalwatiyya,3 is located in Middle Egypt near al-ʿAyyāṭ at the southern tip of the Giza governorate. These two texts give us the opportunity to study in detail the relationship between the literary foundations of a brotherhood and its everyday life. Adab, the literature organizing the social and religious behavior of Sufis, is often described as abstract and normative, but this study reveals a more complex relationship with both the memory and practices of the brotherhood. Were the Ḥāfiẓiyya founded in the middle of the nineteenth century by Shaykh ʿAbd al-Ḥāfiẓ ʿAlī (d. 1886)? The hagiographic texts and testimonies that have been collected all agree on this point, but this claim is historically erroneous.4 Although specialists knew about this shaykh previously, they had no idea that a Sufi brotherhood had appeared and claimed his legacy. This region of Egypt remained for a long time difficult for researchers to access. We can now rely on our field studies, which have been conducted on this brotherhood since 2013, and on the access we gained to manuscripts and rare prints.
to Egypt where he launched his own newspaper, al-Ǧāmiʿa, of which he was the main contributor between 1899 and 1910. He published articles on various subjects, as well as translations, and serial novels. These texts reveal a utopian project of refoundation of the Orient, which evolved over the years. At the turn of the 20th century, Faraḥ Anṭūn translated Renan’s Life of Jesus, first published in French in 1863. A comparison of the French version with the Arabic translation shows how Farāḥ Anṭūn imagined the resurrection of the East based on a dogma-free natural religion built on fraternity and tolerance, and spread by the example of Jesus, a divine personality who confined to
perfection.
Orientalisme by Renaud Soler
Il est néanmoins nécessaire de reconsidérer la vie du savant américain, en passant outre les simplifications du travail de la mémoire : reprendre ses ouvrages, relire les travaux de ses contemporains et prédécesseurs permet de saisir pour lui-même le moment constitutif de l’archéologie biblique, dans les années 1830, sans le juger à l’aune de critères de scientificité beaucoup plus tardivement élaborés, et sans commettre ce péché irrémissible de l’anachronisme. On voit alors se dessiner une archéologie biblique qui se développa en étroite connexion avec les sciences de son temps, sciences naturelles d’une part, sciences humaines et religieuses d’autre part.
L’archéologie biblique fut d’emblée pensée, reconnue et pratiquée comme discipline scientifique, qui n’était pas encore ce que nous appellerions, aujourd’hui, de ce nom. Mal dégagée des questionnements religieux et apologétiques, prisonnière encore d’un certain regard sur l’Orient, elle tient pour un moment insigne de l’histoire des sciences et des savoirs. La Palestine telle que nous nous la représentons fut, en grande partie, produite par Edward Robinson et les archéologues qui lui succédèrent dans la redécouverte de la Terre sainte.
Comptes rendus by Renaud Soler
Accès en ligne : https://journals.openedition.org/trivium/6402
Une étude de terrain a permis de montrer l’ancrage d’une mémoire collective dans des pratiques confrériques héritées de l’enseignement du cheikh et ses descendants, se réclamant elles-mêmes de la tradition de la Ḫalwatiyya. Un manuel de soufisme, la Hidāyat al-rāġibīn fī al-sayr wa-l-sulūk ilā malik al-mulūk rabb al-ʿālamīn [La Bonne direction pour ceux qui désirent cheminer vers le Roi des rois Seigneur des mondes], assume ce rôle de transmission écrite ; l’étude de la tradition orale révèle quant à elle le travail de la mémoire et la formation d’une identité confrérique locale et originale.
Faire l’histoire de la Ḥāfiẓiyya conduit à évoquer l’histoire sociale des campagnes égyptiennes et à comprendre comment s’articule l’identité locale d’une modeste confrérie de Moyenne-Égypte avec une tradition confrérique plus large et pluriséculaire.
Far from being a homogeneous milieu of illiterate peasants, the Egyptian countryside was profoundly diverse, which has enabled the Sufi sheikhs up until this day to have at command numerous cultural intermediates among the craft workers, merchants and state officials, in order to spread out the Sufi culture. This fieldwork research helps us find in the Sufi practices the singular trace of these works, which are too often presented as thought merely abstract or theoretical, while they have consistently provided instructions to organize communal meetings and words for the daily prayers.
Two Sufi books of the Ottoman period recently presented by Rachida Chih, the Tuḥfat al-ikhwān (" The Treasure of the Brothers ") by Aḥmad al-Dardīr (d. 1786) and the Sayr wa-l-sulūk ilā malik al-mulūk (" The Walk and the Journey towards the King of Kings ") by Qāsim al-Khānī (d. 1697),2 hold a prominent place in the literary heritage of a small Egyptian Sufi brotherhood, as they have never ceased to be present in its collective memory and to influence its religious practices. This brotherhood, the Ḥāfiẓiyya, a discrete branch of the better known Khalwatiyya,3 is located in Middle Egypt near al-ʿAyyāṭ at the southern tip of the Giza governorate. These two texts give us the opportunity to study in detail the relationship between the literary foundations of a brotherhood and its everyday life. Adab, the literature organizing the social and religious behavior of Sufis, is often described as abstract and normative, but this study reveals a more complex relationship with both the memory and practices of the brotherhood. Were the Ḥāfiẓiyya founded in the middle of the nineteenth century by Shaykh ʿAbd al-Ḥāfiẓ ʿAlī (d. 1886)? The hagiographic texts and testimonies that have been collected all agree on this point, but this claim is historically erroneous.4 Although specialists knew about this shaykh previously, they had no idea that a Sufi brotherhood had appeared and claimed his legacy. This region of Egypt remained for a long time difficult for researchers to access. We can now rely on our field studies, which have been conducted on this brotherhood since 2013, and on the access we gained to manuscripts and rare prints.
to Egypt where he launched his own newspaper, al-Ǧāmiʿa, of which he was the main contributor between 1899 and 1910. He published articles on various subjects, as well as translations, and serial novels. These texts reveal a utopian project of refoundation of the Orient, which evolved over the years. At the turn of the 20th century, Faraḥ Anṭūn translated Renan’s Life of Jesus, first published in French in 1863. A comparison of the French version with the Arabic translation shows how Farāḥ Anṭūn imagined the resurrection of the East based on a dogma-free natural religion built on fraternity and tolerance, and spread by the example of Jesus, a divine personality who confined to
perfection.
Il est néanmoins nécessaire de reconsidérer la vie du savant américain, en passant outre les simplifications du travail de la mémoire : reprendre ses ouvrages, relire les travaux de ses contemporains et prédécesseurs permet de saisir pour lui-même le moment constitutif de l’archéologie biblique, dans les années 1830, sans le juger à l’aune de critères de scientificité beaucoup plus tardivement élaborés, et sans commettre ce péché irrémissible de l’anachronisme. On voit alors se dessiner une archéologie biblique qui se développa en étroite connexion avec les sciences de son temps, sciences naturelles d’une part, sciences humaines et religieuses d’autre part.
L’archéologie biblique fut d’emblée pensée, reconnue et pratiquée comme discipline scientifique, qui n’était pas encore ce que nous appellerions, aujourd’hui, de ce nom. Mal dégagée des questionnements religieux et apologétiques, prisonnière encore d’un certain regard sur l’Orient, elle tient pour un moment insigne de l’histoire des sciences et des savoirs. La Palestine telle que nous nous la représentons fut, en grande partie, produite par Edward Robinson et les archéologues qui lui succédèrent dans la redécouverte de la Terre sainte.
The Battle of Badr (2/624), the first major victory of the Muslims led by Muḥammad and the only battle explicitly named in the Qur'an, is a key event in early Islam. Mentioned in Sura 3, verse 123, and associated with the exegesis of Sura 7 al-Anfāl (The Booty), the Battle of Badr has been the subject of numerous memorial constructions over the centuries. Used in various historical conflicts, it serves as a repertoire of actions and discourses in different contexts of confrontation. The BADR project aims to study the evolution of accounts of this battle and their use in Islamic societies, from their earliest traces in texts to their contemporary reinterpretations.