Life, Sovereignty, and the Political: Towards a Middle Eastern Global History

AbstractWith one of the latest turns in historiography, it seems that documents as quintessentially national as the American Declaration of Independence can have a global history. This is indeed an exciting prospect, and the distinguished historian David Armitage encourages us all to become global historians if we are to remain relevant. In my first book, Working Out Egypt, I tried to do something to that effect before having
read Armitage, situating what I called effendi masculinity within a set of emerging global practices and discourses around gender, sexuality, the body, desire, and national identity. It seems to me that scholars of gender and sexuality were at the forefront of claiming a global canvas for their work. Of course one could also make a good case for scholars of Islam such as Marshall Hodgson and Richard Eaton. What animates my current project, of which I give an overview in this talk, is a certain anxiety about the kinds of themes deemed globally significant in the recent scholarship. Thus, I consider how some of the basic building blocks of our modern world—life, sovereignty, and the political—appeared through the lens of a nineteenth-century Sufi, Sayyid Fadl b. Alawi, as a step towards imagining a Middle Eastern global history.