Imperial Connections: The Nahda and Translation Movements between Ottoman Turkish and Arabic, 1860-1914

What kinds of ties connected intellectuals in Istanbul, Cairo and Beirut in the last decades of the Empire? To what extent did these intellectuals follow each other’s debates and engage with (or simply read) each other’s works? Is it possible to think of a common Ottoman intellectual realm that is not confined by linguistic barriers? Ilham Khuri-Makdisi will broach these questions by looking at translations between Arabic and Ottoman Turkish published in the three aforementioned cities, a topic that has elicited virtually no attention within the historiography of the late Ottoman Empire.