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Fondation Maison des Sciences de l'Homme
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Anglais
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Anglais
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Jan-Markus Vömel (Organisation de l'évènement), Anne-Cécile Schreiner (Organisation de l'évènement), Thomas Fassler (Publication), Jan-Markus Vömel (Intervention), Wael Abu-'Uksa (Intervention)
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Inalco
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CC BY-NC-ND (Attribution - Pas d’Utilisation Commerciale - Pas de Modification)
DOI : 10.60527/kqz2-zh61
Citer cette ressource :
Jan-Markus Vömel, Wael Abu-'Uksa. DECRIPT. (2026, 17 février). DÉCRIPT Séance 3 de l'axe Proche et Moyen-Orient : "Civilisation" as a Concept of Power: Genealogies of Modernity and the Politics of Universalism in Nineteenth-Century Arabic . [Vidéo]. Canal-U. https://doi.org/10.60527/kqz2-zh61. (Consultée le 4 novembre 2026)
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DÉCRIPT Séance 3 de l'axe Proche et Moyen-Orient : "Civilisation" as a Concept of Power: Genealogies of Modernity and the Politics of Universalism in Nineteenth-Century Arabic

Réalisation : 17 février 2026 - Mise en ligne : 19 février 2026
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Descriptif

This lecture reconstructs the rise of “civilisation” as a central political concept in nineteenth-century Arabic. Rather than treating civilisation discourse as a straightforward colonial import or a secondary reflection of European modernity, I argue that Arabic-speaking intellectuals and reformers fashioned tamaddun as a comprehensive concept—ethical, social, economic, and political—by reworking a dense premodern semantic repertoire under distinctly modern pressures. Using conceptual history and an onomasiological mapping of the vocabulary of civilisation (tamaddun, ʿumrān, taḥaḍḍur, tamaṣṣur), I show how tamaddun fused with the temporality of “progress” (taqaddum/taraqqī) and became a widely intelligible “collective singular,” capable of organising public discourse around a global scale of advancement and regression.


Placing Rifāʿa al-Ṭahṭāwī’s early theorisation of “civilisation” at the centre, I trace how his encounter with France interacted with medieval Arabic sources—geographers, historians, and philosophers (especially Ibn Khaldūn, al-Fārābī, and Miskawayh)—to produce a modern grammar of legitimacy. Civilisation discourse functioned as an instrument for justifying new institutions, educational programmes, and state practices, while simultaneously reshaping the political imagination through non-religious idioms of civic belonging.


The lecture concludes by foregrounding the ambivalence built into civilisation as a concept of power: it generated universalist and humanist language (citizenship, compatriots, the “human family”), yet it also entrenched exclusionary hierarchies that could legitimise domination externally and reorder authority internally—an ambivalence that remains crucial for understanding how civilisational narratives operate in international order.

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