2020 Winning Titles
WINNING TITLE
ELECTRIC NEWS IN COLONIAL ALGERIA
BY ARTHUR ASSERAF
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Examining a range of sources in multiple languages across colonial society, Electric News in Colonial Algeria offers a new understanding of the spread of news. News was a whole ecosystem in which new technologies such as the printing press, telegraph, cinema and radio interacted with older media like songs, rumours, letters and manuscripts. The French government watched anxiously over these developments, monitoring Algerians’ reactions to news through an extensive network of surveillance that often ended up spreading news rather than controlling its flow. By tracking what different people thought of as news, this history helps us reconsider the relationship between time, media and historical change.
“the book represents scholarship of genuinely world-class quality”
“By putting individuals and localities at the centre of his argument Asseraf sets himself against the prevalent trend in global history, which tends to privilege knowledge transmission, transnational connection, and network formation as the principal cultural drivers in the history of empire. It takes real scholarly assurance to do so.”
Our anonymous reviewer
Arthur Asseraf is based in the Faculty of History, University of Cambridge. He is a historian of modern France, North Africa, and the Mediterranean, with particular interests in the history of colonialism and information.
Runner up Titles
MODERN THINGS ON TRIAL: ISLAM’S GLOBAL AND MATERIAL REFORMATION IN THE AGE OF RIDA, 1865-1935
BY LEOR HALEVI
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS
Leor Halevi tells the story of the Islamic trials of technological and commercial innovations of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He focuses on the communications of an entrepreneurial Syrian interpreter of the Shari’a named Rashid Rida, who became a renowned reformer by responding to the demand for authoritative and authentic religious advice. Upon migrating to Egypt, Rida founded an Islamic magazine, The Lighthouse, which cultivated an educated, prosperous readership within and beyond the British Empire. To an audience eager to know if their scriptures sanctioned particular interactions with particular objects, he preached the message that by rediscovering Ialsm’s foundational spirit, the global community of Muslims would thrive and realize modernity’s religious and secular promises.
Through analysis of Rida’s international correspondence, Halevi argues that religious entanglements with new commodities and technologies were the driving force behind local and global projects to reform the Islamic legal tradition. Shedding light on culture, commerce and consumption in Cairo and other colonial cities, Modern Things on Trial is a groundbreaking account of Islam’s material transformation in a globalising era.
“The study also presents new material and it is founded on a thorough study of a vast number of empirical sources in a number of different languages. The references are many and the notes can almost be read as a “book” of its own.”
“This book is simply excellent, and it will be a valuable source for anyone interested in the development of Islam and the legal aspect of the religion.”
Our anonymous reviewer
Leor Halevi is a Professor of History and Professor of Law at Vanderbilt College of Arts and Science. As a historian of Islam, Professor Halevi explores the interrelationship between religious laws and social practices in various contexts medieval and modern.
FRIENDS OF THE EMIR: NON-MUSLIM STATE OFFICIALS IN PREMODERN ISLAMIC THOUGHT
luke b. yarbrough
cambridge university press
The caliphs and sultans who once ruled the Muslim world were often assisted by powerful Jewish, Christian, Zoroastrian and other non-Muslim state officials, whose employment occasioned energetic discussions among Muslim scholars and rulers. This book reveals those discussions for the first time in all their divrsity, drawing on unexplored medieval sources in the realms of law, history, poetry, entertaining literature, administration, and polemic. it follows the discourse on on-Muslim officials from its beginnings in the Umayyad empire (661-750) through medieval Iraq, Egypt, Syria and Spain to its apex in the Mamluk period (1250-1517). Far from being a fixed, changeless part of Islam, views about non-Muslim state officials were devised, transmitted and elaborated at moments of intense competition between Muslim and non-Muslim learned elites. At other times, Muslim rulers employed non-Muslims without eliciting opposition. The particular shape of the Islamic discourse on an this issue is comparable to analogous discourses in medieval Europe and China.
“The work deserves to become the sine qua non for all scholars interested in the discourse surrounding non-Muslim state officials. Yarbrough moves beyond dichotomies of “historical realities” and “legal norms” and instead views the discourse within its proper historical contexts: this integrative approach is both refreshing and thought-provoking.”
“This work is truly outstanding and ground-breaking. It presents a sophisticated and thorough discussion of pre-modern opposition to the employment of non-Muslims as state officials.”
Our anonymous reviewer
Luke Yarbrough is a scholar of early and medieval Islamic history and thought at UCLA. His research interests include inter-religious relations, hadith studies, Arabic historiography, premodern state administration, and manuscript studies.
SHORTLISTED TITLES:
Dionysius A Agius
The Life of the Red Sea Dhow: A Cultural History of Seaborne Exploration in the Islamic World
(IB Tauris)
Konrad Hirschler
A Monument to Medieval Syrian Book Culture: The Library of Ibn ʿAbd al-Hādī
(Edinburgh University Press)
Ussama Makdisi
Age of Coexistence: The Ecumenical Frame and the Making of the Modern Arab World
(University of California Press)