Bedouins, blacks, and the bringers of Islam: the Arabs in late Ottoman encyclopaedic literature, 1876–1928
Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: Late Ottoman Turkish perceptions of the Arabs emerged within an intellectual climate that emphasized Western-defined notions of progress and ‘civilization’ as a hegemonic ideal. As previous works have emphasized, these intellectual premises often led the late Ottoman elites to view the empire’s Arab population through the lens of an Ottoman Orientalism, which cast them into the position of an ‘uncivilized Other’ and foregrounded the need of an Ottoman civilizing effort towards them. This article studies late Ottoman encyclopaedic literature, a genre displaying the intellectual spirit of its time, and analyses portrayals of the Arabs and Arabness found therein. After briefly engaging with the question of how collective designators used for the Arabs transformed over the decades from an unspecific to a more ethnicized terminology, the article finds that perceptions of the Arabs and Arabness in late Ottoman encyclopaedic literature reflect the merging of different knowledge traditions current in the late Ottoman era. Consequently, a more multifaceted picture emerges, as portrayals vary between venerating references to the Arabs as a noble and ancient people who should be credited as the bringers of Islam, the Arabs as negatively racialized blacks, and approaches informed by the findings of Western scientific racism.
Author: Benedikt Römer
Institution: Universität der Bundeswehr München
Language: English
Topic: Historical Turkish Studies
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W4409558559