History Writing and History Making in Twentieth Century Beirut
The project examines the rise of modern history in the work of Constantine Zurayq (1909-2000) and his milieu. It firstly investigates this milieu’s understanding of historical truth as a category of knowledge. It traces the changing scientific and philosophical methods employed in understanding, interpreting and judging the past. In doing so it traces the rise of the professional academic historian as the guardian of historical truth and explicates the ‘intellectual virtues’ historians ought to cultivate in their character. Secondly, the project elucidates the link Zurayq forged between knowing history and making history, and how knowledge of the past became foundational to building consciousness in the present and planning for the future. It thus unpacks Zurayq’s conception of history as a progressive sequence of human civilisations and explores this conception’s connections to the historiography of science burgeoning in the inter-war period. Lastly the project explores the modern university as the site in which these ideas were initially developed and then operationalised. It reveals that higher education curricula in general, and the fields of History and Arab Studies in particular, were a site crucial to the development of thought. They were also the place in which this thought was distilled into the collective consciousness of the educated elites.