The Eastern Mediterranean and the Making of Global Radicalism, 1860-1914 (review)

In the past decade a number of important studies on intellectual life in the late Ottoman Empire have appeared.¹ This work by Ilham Khuri-Makdisi adds to that ongoing review of the parameters of modernity as understood by people living in the Ottoman Empire, or the former Ottoman Empire in the case of Egypt which provides the focus of much of this work. Until now, scholars have concentrated on two dominant intellectual paradigms that were circulating in the empire: nationalism and the Salafiyya, or Muslim reform movement. Khuri-Makdisi wants to add a third intellectual trend into the mix: radicalism. By radicalism, the author means a mixture of socialist/Marxist/anarchist/ syndicalist/anti-clericalist ideas that were prevalent in Mediterranean Europe and South America in the decades that marked the transition from the 19^th to the 20^th century. The location of the origins of the intellectual currents outside the Ottoman Empire is crucial to the author's argument as she wishes to identify radicalism in the eastern Mediterranean as a global and cosmopolitan enterprise.

To establish her case, Khuri-Makdisi concentrates on three cities: Beirut, Alexandria, and Cairo which were also centers for both the emerging discourse on Arab nationalism and, to a lesser extent in the case of the first two cities, the Salafiyya. Extensively reviewing the press of those three cities and the presentation of radical ideas through the new medium of the theater, the author establishes that various currents of radical ideology were Altering into the ongoing discussions among the intellectuals of those cities. These affected their framing of a response to a number of pressing social and political problems ranging from women's rights to European imperialism. That discussion alone makes this work a valuable contribution to the ongoing conversation on modernity in the Middle East.

The second major contribution of this work is to highlight the role of diaspora communities in the spread of radical ideas. The two groups that the author singles out for discussion are the Italians and Syrians, a designation that in this period included people who would later be considered Lebanese. Both ethnic groups had extensive connections with diaspora communities in Latin America and New York. The author adeptly establishes the network of intellectual currents reaching the eastern Mediterranean from abroad through the use of letters to the editor in various locally-produced newspapers. Important as this contribution is, it is somewhat flawed by the absence of any meaningful discussion of the Greeks.

The Greeks were an important linch-pin community that was present in all the cities of the eastern Mediterranean. Their absence from this otherwise comprehensive discussion, therefore, is troubling. The author has demonstrated her linguistic skills in tackling large amounts of periodicals and documents in Arabic, Italian, and French, and one can understand that it is difficult to do more when dealing with an empire in which so many languages were employed. There is, however, a growing body of secondary work on Greek intellectual life in the late Ottoman Empire that is relevant to this topic.² The inclusion of the Greeks would have widened the reach of the discussion of radical networks in the Ottoman Empire to include Izmir, Istanbul, and Thessaloniki. The creation of radical nodes of intellectuals and labor activists was an empire-wide phenomenon and not just confined to the predominantly Arabic-speaking cities that the author discusses.

Ilham Khuri-Makdisi has produced a book that everyone interested in the intellectual life of the late Ottoman Empire, or more broadly the spread of radicalism in the modern age, should read. It is the first major contribution to the discussion of radical ideas in the Arabic-speaking lands in English and points the way to how such a discussion might be extended to otherdiaspora communities in the...