Suchergebnisse

It was Europeans who started in Egypt a historic preservationist movement for Arab (or Islamic) art.1 It was they who persuaded Khedive Tawfiq to decree, in December 1881, the founding of the Committee for the Conservation of Monuments of Arab Art (hereafter "the Comité," the usual French designation). It was the European-dominated Comité that opened the Museum of Arab Art three years later, and it was an Englishman, K. A. C. Creswell, who established the Institute of Islamic Archaeology at the Egyptian (later Cairo) University. Why did the Europeans care? In 19th-century Europe, romanticism gave a strong impetus to writers and painters, scholars, and collectors to search for a lost past, the unusual, the exotic, the "Oriental." This inquiry into the past, at home and abroad, was intimately bound up with Westerners' search for their own identities and with the triumph of the idea of the nation-state. Historic preservationists and museums selected, conserved, and displayed buildings and objects defined as valuable to their national heritages. Romanticism, in part a revolt against classical styles, also spurred a "Gothic revival movement and a fascination with various Oriental styles.

Among the best books I read at this time… wasTarikh al-falak 'inda al-'Arab[The History of Astronomy among the Arabs] by Professor Nallino. I scrutinized it thoroughly, and I learned from it how the leading orientalists did their research, and how they persisted in their investigations, how they actually lived in the subject of their specialization, and how they proceeded carefully and deliberately from the simple to the complex in their research. It would scarcely be an exaggeration to say that I learned the methodology of research from this book.

This article examines the role of European orientalists at Cairo University. After examining the different national traditions from which these European professors came, the study analyzes Egyptian reactions to the orientalists and Egyptians who adopted their methodology and some of their results. The era covered was a crucial one in Egypt's struggle to achieve a workable modern national identity - and reactions to orientalism were part of this struggle. (DÜI-Hns)