Publics, Politics and Participation

(Wang) #1

54 Philosophical Frames


over Algeria, Tunisia, Palestine, Northern Syria and Mount Lebanon. The
rebels had in common a resistance to exorbitant taxation and the demand
for land and for political and judicial equality. The period 1820–1860 in
Mount Lebanon witnessed three major commoners’ revolts in 1820, 1840
and 1858 which established the tradition of elected village representa-
tives, the wakils, commissioned to lead their fellow villagers as long as they
remain “faithful to their own conscience and to the interests of the villagers
and to those of the general good.”^8 In the Kisrawan revolt of 1858–1861,
which combined an anti-tax resistance and a peasant jacquerie, the region
was ruled for some three years by a council of one hundred elected wakils
in the name of “the power of the republican government” [bi-quwwāt
al-h.ukūma al-jumhūriyya]. Their leader Tanius Shahin often referred to
the Ottoman reform edicts of 1839 and 1856 to demand “full equality and
complete freedom” [taswiyya ‘āmma wa-h.urriyya kāmila].^9
e renaissance of Arab culture, the nahd.ah in its two main centers Th
Cairo and Beirut, relied on a rapidly developing cultural infrastructure of
expanded education networks, private and public schools, increased liter-
acy and mixed education, progress in the printing press, and the develop-
ment of “print capitalism,” represented by an impressive number of news-
papers and magazines. Ahmad Faris al-Chiyaq’s al-Jawa’ib, published in
Istanbul, was both semiofficial yet zealously independent of the Ottoman
authorities (and had its publication suspended by official order more than
once) and was read all over the empire from Algeria to Yemen. Common
to all those developments was the increased emergence of the “individual”
as opposed to the “subject” and the member of the community. Both the
Islamic reform of Afghani and ‘Abdu and the secular Lebanese intellectu-
als were proposing rationalism, education and individual freedom in both
religious and secular affairs. In 1861, for example, Butrus al-Bustani freely
translates Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe as if to imagine the birth of the
individual in the Ottoman Empire. His colleague Ahmad Faris al-Chiyaq
would emphasize the ideal of equality, including social equality, the work
ethic, the liberation of women and the respect for time.
owever, as the Ottoman Tanzimat declared political and judicial H
equality between the Empire’s subjects and imposed measures to carry it
out, launching a growing process of secularization of the state, European
powers reverted to the policy of “protecting the religious and ethnic

Free download pdf