Quête des ansāb et quête des ašrāf dans le monde arabe (XVe-XXe siècle)

Abstract

One hundred years after Lévi-Provençal’s Les Historiens des Chorfa and almost twenty-five years after Oriente Moderno’s founding issue on sādāt and ašrāf, a new special issue of Oriente Moderno is devoted to the “quest for ansāb”, along with the quest for ašrāf. Our project focuses mainly on Morocco, and on modern and contemporary sources. Firstly, we will take stock of twentieth- and twenty-first-century historiography, with works devoted to Arab genealogy (Zoltàn Szombathy) and “sayyido-sharifology” (Kazuo Morimoto), and to the intersection of the two (Sara Bowen Savant and Helena de Felipe). Modern and contemporary history is still relatively neglected in a field of research favored by medievalists and ethnologists. Our project aims to reflect on the links between genealogical science, the writing of history and the question of ašrāf, at a time of religious politics. imperial politics and the construction of modern states. Focusing on Morocco, this issue adopts a comparative spirit with three studies on Iraq, genealogical literature in Ottoman Egypt and contemporary Mauritania.