"Civilisation” as a Concept of Power: Genealogies of Modernity and the Politics of Universalism in Nineteenth-Century Arabic
Guest: Wael Abu-'Uksa, Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor), Department of Political Science, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Title: "Civilisation” as a Concept of Power: Genealogies of Modernity and the Politics of Universalism in Nineteenth-Century Arabic
Abstract:
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.
Date, time: February 17, 2026, 2:00 p.m. to 4:00 p.m.
Place: Fondation Maison des sciences de l'homme, 54 boulevard Raspail, 75006 Paris (room B1-01).
Format: hybrid
Coordination of the Middle East and Near East Focus Area (WP6): Laetitia Bucaille (Inalco), Gilles Dorronsoro (Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne), Alia Gana (Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne), Valentina Napolitano (IRD), Rima Sleiman (Inalco). Avec Jan-Markus Vömel, postdoctorant, programme DÉCRIPT.
Registration for the seminar is open until February 16 at 4 p.m.: