Global Middle Eastern and North African Studies (MENA)

In 1830, following the conquest of Algiers, French statesmen began to systematically deny Ottoman sovereignty claims over Tunis, Algeria’s eastern neighbor. Tunis was an autonomous province of the Ottoman Empire since 1574, placed under the hereditary rule of the Husaynid Beys since the early eighteenth century. However, in an attempt to undermine Ottoman influence in North Africa, France began to treat the Beys as independent ruler and Tunis as a sovereign state. In support of their government’s position, French diplomats crafted several legal arguments designed to “prove" that Tunis was independent from Istanbul. One recurring French argument conceded that the Ottoman sultan held some kind of authority over Tunis, but argued that this authority was religious, and therefore merely symbolic. Implicit in this view is a conception of sovereignty predicated on a strict separation between temporal (real) and spiritual (symbolic) authority. This separation, the Sublime Porte argued, was foreign to the Ottoman understanding of sovereignty. According to the latter, the sultan’s authority as a caliph was indissociable from his sovereign authority as a ruler. This lecture examines the French argument about the spiritual nature of caliphal authority as well as Ottoman and Tunisian responses to it. From there, it offers rereading of the relationship between secular and religious power in late Ottoman political thought, revealing how contrasting ideas about "real" sovereignty circulated across legal traditions in the nineteenth-century Maghrib.

Bio:

Professor Youssef Ben-Ismail holds a Ph.D. in the study of Muslim societies and cultures from Harvard University. Before joining the Amherst faculty, he was a postdoctoral fellow in the Society of Fellows in the humanities at Columbia University. His research interests focus on the intellectual history of empire, legal and political thought in the Middle East and North Africa, the history of international law, and colonial and post-colonial studies. His current book project, "Between Legal Worlds: The Tunisian Question and the Making of Modern Sovereignty," traces the history of the French-Ottoman imperial dispute over the sovereignty status of the Regency of Tunis in the nineteenth century. Drawing on archival research in Arabic, Ottoman Turkish, French, and Italian, the book takes the imperial rivalry over the status of Tunis as a case-study to explore how different genealogies of sovereignty and statehood circulated, competed, and influenced one another across legal-epistemological traditions.