Scientific Abstract

How and why did the colonial encounter produce an “Arab hero”? What does this experience tell us about the reconfiguration of sovereignty and authority in the region?

Starting from these more general questions, our project will contribute to a re-evaluation of the political dynamics of nineteenth-century colonization in the Muslim Mediterranean by focusing on entanglements between transregional developments and localized individual strategies. Combining methods and linguistic expertise from Middle East Studies/Islamwissenschaft with insights from history and anthropology, we understand sovereignty in the colony as incomplete, situational, and contested by different claimants.

Our research aims to uncover the small-scale negotiations of sovereignty and authority that played out against the background of colonization, using the itinerary of one of the most illustrious figures in modern Mediterranean history: Abd al-Qadir al-Jazairi (1808-83). Abd al-Qadir, today glorified as Algeria’s national hero, militarily resisted the French invasion of Algeria in the 1830s and built a polity under Morocco’s suzerainty before being labeled a rebel by the Sultan of Morocco. After his defeat by the French, Abd al-Qadir spent 1848-1852 as a prisoner in France and ultimately went into exile in Ottoman Damascus. Enjoying the benefits of both a French and an Ottoman pension, the support of a sizeable community of Algerian emigrants, transregional fame and social and religious authority, Abd al-Qadir soon acquired a new composite form of informal sovereignty in his chosen exile. For many of his contemporaries across religious, national and linguistic boundaries Abd al-Qadir represented an “Arab hero,” uniting forms of masculine virtue identified with competing images of past glory. The postdoctoral project, which forms the core of this research project, will focus on Abd al-Qadir’s itinerary beginning with his military defeat and examine the new forms of informal sovereignty that he acquired when he established himself as a local notable and global celebrity in Ottoman Damascus.

Unlike conventional biographical studies, Abd al-Qadir’s itinerary is taken here as a framework and analytical lens that allows systematic investigation into the impact of colonial expansion in the Muslim Mediterranean on the ground. By contextualizing and historicizing shifting forms of sovereignty, our project will analytically unpack structures and processes of power formation at play in the colonial age and identify spaces of local and (trans)regional intervention. We will present a multi-level analysis of Abd al-Qadir’s itinerary that covers perceptions and representations of him as well as his negotiations of sovereignty and authority under changing conditions and in different socio-cultural contexts. Our aim is to develop a more nuanced and dynamic understanding of the impact of colonialism as a process of reconfiguring authority and competition for sovereignty in relation to major transformations, reorganizations, and upheavals in the Muslim-majority societies of the southern and eastern Mediterranean.

We see our research as a contribution to a connected history of the Mediterranean, looking in particular at the dynamic relations between the Maghreb, the Middle Eastern Levant, and Western Europe, which have all too often been researched separately.