Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth, forth coming in Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth, 15/2 (2022), pp. 131-148, 2022
The economic and cultural encounter in the nineteenth century between the Ottoman Empire and the ... more The economic and cultural encounter in the nineteenth century between the Ottoman Empire and the West influenced both Ottoman and Arab societies. The place of women, and hence children, was reinvented in the sense that children were considered to determine not only their families’ future but also that of society and the Syrian/Arab or Ottoman nations more broadly. This family-centered attitude was partly influenced by the discourse on domesticity in Europe and America which brought with it an intensive wave of consumerism. Drawing on Aspers and Godart, I discuss the expansion of child consumerism by analyzing newspaper advertisements, articles, home economics columns (tadbir al-manzil) that included copious advice and fashion illustrations as well as child rearing manuals and memoirs. This thematic overview shows the extent to which children’s fashion not only reflected the social and cultural attitudes of the time but also made them more visible in society and within the family, and may have prompted both boys and girls to become more aware of themselves as actors and agents.
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מאמר על אוטיוביגרפיות ורגשות של מתבגרים בסוריה הגדולה בסוף המאה ה19, עיתון הארץ (אונליין) בסדנה להיסטוריה חברתית
An interview regarding my article which focuses on children from Schneller's orphanage after the civil war of Mt. Lebanon and Damascus (1860).
Muḥīṭ al-Muḥīṭ constituted an important pedagogical step in transforming classical Arabic into “a living” language adapted to the needs of the Arab nation. However, although Muḥīṭ al-Muḥīṭ took the first crucial steps toward creating a modern Arabic lexical source, this dictionary mainly extends the age-old Arabic tradition of lexicography. It nevertheless paved the way to al-Bustānī’s final work, the encyclopedia Dāʾirat al-maʿārif, his most monumental effort and the cornerstone of al-Bustānī’s modern lexical vision.
[link to article - click on Cambridge.Org]
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/review-of-middle-east-studies/article/butrus-abumanneh-19322018/3E7F9275E493A4B406184E8BCF01A4B3/share/46bd2a84e26e5f9877f30c53c12db12cc798c528
Abstract:
Among the greatest challenges in writing the history of childhood, especially in non-Western societies, is the paucity of primary sources, especially the scarcity of documents that reveal children’s perceptions. This chapter explores how Arabic lullabies and nursery rhymes can serve as window into the emotional world of mothers and children and make it possible not only to analyze shifting attitudes toward children and childhood in 19th-century Greater Syria but to lay bare aspects of life, including the texture of maternal-child relationships and emotional sensibilities, otherwise difficult to recover. The chapter identifies certain recurrent themes—including paternal absence, maternal suffering, mothers’ fraught relationship with their husbands’ families, and the challenges mothers faced in protecting their children from various threats to their well-being—that illuminate cultural attitudes toward the goals of parenting, contrasting attitudes toward children among urban middle-class and lower-class villagers and evolving standards of emotional expression.
https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9780429261633
The article is based on fieldwork in the Upper-Galilean Moslem village of Naḥf with three generations of women from one family. The structure, rhythm, content and language of five Palestinian Galilean lullabies and nursery rhymes, which are still preserved in some villages in the region, are analyzed. We term these "Quintuple-Chained lullabies" because they constitute a sequence of five lullabies drawn from the same resevoir although each has its own raison d’être and its own title.
It is argued that Galilean Arabic lullabies and nursery rhymes are cultural reflections that can shed light on key emotions elicited by children and childhood that can also provide a better understanding of mother-child relationships. Since men avoid singing lullabies, this genre is connected directly to women’s lives (mothers, grandmothers, sisters). Recent studies have highlighted the importance of feelings and sensibilities underlying the sphere of ideas and ideologies, which are reflected in lullabies that create an emotional engagement and a loving tone. In this article emotions are not perceived as anthropological constants but rather as emotions that can change as a function of geographical regions and passage of time. It is shown that these endangered lullabies and nursery rhymes are socio-cultural and emotional repositories that reveal not only mothers' and children's private world, and thus the world that children live in, but also the way women sustain their language discourse and attitudes toward children.
מאמר על אוטיוביגרפיות ורגשות של מתבגרים בסוריה הגדולה בסוף המאה ה19, עיתון הארץ (אונליין) בסדנה להיסטוריה חברתית
An interview regarding my article which focuses on children from Schneller's orphanage after the civil war of Mt. Lebanon and Damascus (1860).
Muḥīṭ al-Muḥīṭ constituted an important pedagogical step in transforming classical Arabic into “a living” language adapted to the needs of the Arab nation. However, although Muḥīṭ al-Muḥīṭ took the first crucial steps toward creating a modern Arabic lexical source, this dictionary mainly extends the age-old Arabic tradition of lexicography. It nevertheless paved the way to al-Bustānī’s final work, the encyclopedia Dāʾirat al-maʿārif, his most monumental effort and the cornerstone of al-Bustānī’s modern lexical vision.
[link to article - click on Cambridge.Org]
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/review-of-middle-east-studies/article/butrus-abumanneh-19322018/3E7F9275E493A4B406184E8BCF01A4B3/share/46bd2a84e26e5f9877f30c53c12db12cc798c528
Abstract:
Among the greatest challenges in writing the history of childhood, especially in non-Western societies, is the paucity of primary sources, especially the scarcity of documents that reveal children’s perceptions. This chapter explores how Arabic lullabies and nursery rhymes can serve as window into the emotional world of mothers and children and make it possible not only to analyze shifting attitudes toward children and childhood in 19th-century Greater Syria but to lay bare aspects of life, including the texture of maternal-child relationships and emotional sensibilities, otherwise difficult to recover. The chapter identifies certain recurrent themes—including paternal absence, maternal suffering, mothers’ fraught relationship with their husbands’ families, and the challenges mothers faced in protecting their children from various threats to their well-being—that illuminate cultural attitudes toward the goals of parenting, contrasting attitudes toward children among urban middle-class and lower-class villagers and evolving standards of emotional expression.
https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9780429261633
The article is based on fieldwork in the Upper-Galilean Moslem village of Naḥf with three generations of women from one family. The structure, rhythm, content and language of five Palestinian Galilean lullabies and nursery rhymes, which are still preserved in some villages in the region, are analyzed. We term these "Quintuple-Chained lullabies" because they constitute a sequence of five lullabies drawn from the same resevoir although each has its own raison d’être and its own title.
It is argued that Galilean Arabic lullabies and nursery rhymes are cultural reflections that can shed light on key emotions elicited by children and childhood that can also provide a better understanding of mother-child relationships. Since men avoid singing lullabies, this genre is connected directly to women’s lives (mothers, grandmothers, sisters). Recent studies have highlighted the importance of feelings and sensibilities underlying the sphere of ideas and ideologies, which are reflected in lullabies that create an emotional engagement and a loving tone. In this article emotions are not perceived as anthropological constants but rather as emotions that can change as a function of geographical regions and passage of time. It is shown that these endangered lullabies and nursery rhymes are socio-cultural and emotional repositories that reveal not only mothers' and children's private world, and thus the world that children live in, but also the way women sustain their language discourse and attitudes toward children.
For access to the encyclopedia: https://referenceworks.brillonline.com/browse/encyclopaedia-of-islam-3
Full entry: https://ottomanhistorians.uchicago.edu/en/historian/mihail-mishaqa
project editors: Cemal Kafadar, Hakan Karteke and Cornell Fleischer
2500 words
http://referenceworks.brillonline.com/entries/encyclopaedia-of-islam-3/ahmed-pasa-COM_23741?s.num=0&s.f.s2_parent=s.f.book.encyclopaedia-of-islam-3&s.q=zachs
Tanwīr is derived from the word nūr/anwār (light/lights) and means illumination or spreading light. Tanwīr later became a synonym for Enlightenment. It is a multifaceted concept that embeds temporality of meanings, which transforms depending on changes in contexts and times.