Gatekeepers of the Arab Past – Historians and History Writing in Twentieth Century Egypt - Hardcover

Di–capua, Yoav

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0520257324 ISBN 13: 9780520257320

Publisher: University of California Press, 2009

Synopsis

This groundbreaking study illuminates the Egyptian experience of modernity by critically analyzing the foremost medium through which it was articulated: history. The first comprehensive analysis of a Middle Eastern intellectual tradition, "Gatekeepers of the Past" examines a system of knowledge that replaced the intellectual and methodological conventions of Islamic historiography only at the very end of the nineteenth century. Covering more than one hundred years of mostly unexamined historical literature in Arabic, Yoav Di-Capua explores Egyptian historical thought, examines the careers of numerous critical historians, and traces this tradition's uneasy relationship with colonial forms of knowledge as well as with the post-colonial state.

About this title

Review:

"The book is extremely ambitious, and the reader will immediately appreciate ... Di-Capua's efforts in undertaking such a monumental task."--American Historical Review

About the Author:

Yoav Di-Capua is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin.

About this edition

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 0520257324
• ISBN 13: 9780520257320
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 414