in: A. D’Ottone Rambach/K. Hirschler/R. Vollandt (eds), The Damascus Fragments: Towards a History of the Qubbat al-khazna Corpus of Manuscripts and Documents, Beirut, pp. 151-178., 2020
The modern history of the Qubbat al-khazna in Damascus in the nineteenth and early twentieth cent... more The modern history of the Qubbat al-khazna in Damascus in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has first and foremost been written as the history of a European “discovery”. Prussian and English consuls and German professors are always at the centre of these narratives and are often depicted as Indiana Jones–like heroes who unearth fragments slumbering untouched in the Orient. This narrative has written local actors out of the process that, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, gradually turned the Qubba into a “historical” monument, and its holdings into cultural artefacts. Most importantly, it assumes that there was no serious local or regional interest in the fragments housed in the Qubba or even an awareness of them among contemporaries in Damascus and Istanbul.
Against this background, the aim of this contribution is simple, namely to propose one way of writing non-European actors into the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century story of the Qubba. This is not done to suggest that these non-European actors were clearly separated from or even opposed to European actors. Quite to the contrary, our intention is rather to show that their stories are deeply interwoven with those of the English consuls, the Prussian consuls, the German scholars, and the German administrators. We need to reconstruct precisely these webs of entanglement to move away from the simplistic and reductive notions of “European” and “non-European” actors that we use here merely as heuristic devices to frame this paper. Manuscript dealers, scholars, notables, and officials in Damascus, as well as administrators, scholars, and politicians in Istanbul, all had their own agency and agendas in the events surrounding the Qubba’s modern transformation into a historical building with cultural artefacts. They also all had different notions of what the Qubba meant and what was to be done with its contents. The interest in the Qubba material was not just a reaction to European actors playing a more prominent role; we propose that the non-European actors display a set of attitudes that indicate a notion of Ottoman cultural heritage preservation. This attitude was certainly not limited to the Qubba, but was part of a wider trend in the Ottoman period, as the example of the late Ottoman Museum of Islamic Endowments shows. Our aim here is thus not to write a heroic account of local and regional actors, but to write them back into history to retrieve the webs of entanglement that a purely Eurocentric narrative obliterates.
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Articles by Cüneyd Erbay
Against this background, the aim of this contribution is simple, namely to propose one way of writing non-European actors into the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century story of the Qubba. This is not done to suggest that these non-European actors were clearly separated from or even opposed to European actors. Quite to the contrary, our intention is rather to show that their stories are deeply interwoven with those of the English consuls, the Prussian consuls, the German scholars, and the German administrators. We need to reconstruct precisely these webs of entanglement to move away from the simplistic and reductive notions of “European” and “non-European” actors that we use here merely as heuristic devices to frame this paper. Manuscript dealers, scholars, notables, and officials in Damascus, as well as administrators, scholars, and politicians in Istanbul, all had their own agency and agendas in the events surrounding the Qubba’s modern transformation into a historical building with cultural artefacts. They also all had different notions of what the Qubba meant and what was to be done with its contents. The interest in the Qubba material was not just a reaction to European actors playing a more prominent role; we propose that the non-European actors display a set of attitudes that indicate a notion of Ottoman cultural heritage preservation. This attitude was certainly not limited to the Qubba, but was part of a wider trend in the Ottoman period, as the example of the late Ottoman Museum of Islamic Endowments shows. Our aim here is thus not to write a heroic account of local and regional actors, but to write them back into history to retrieve the webs of entanglement that a purely Eurocentric narrative obliterates.
Against this background, the aim of this contribution is simple, namely to propose one way of writing non-European actors into the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century story of the Qubba. This is not done to suggest that these non-European actors were clearly separated from or even opposed to European actors. Quite to the contrary, our intention is rather to show that their stories are deeply interwoven with those of the English consuls, the Prussian consuls, the German scholars, and the German administrators. We need to reconstruct precisely these webs of entanglement to move away from the simplistic and reductive notions of “European” and “non-European” actors that we use here merely as heuristic devices to frame this paper. Manuscript dealers, scholars, notables, and officials in Damascus, as well as administrators, scholars, and politicians in Istanbul, all had their own agency and agendas in the events surrounding the Qubba’s modern transformation into a historical building with cultural artefacts. They also all had different notions of what the Qubba meant and what was to be done with its contents. The interest in the Qubba material was not just a reaction to European actors playing a more prominent role; we propose that the non-European actors display a set of attitudes that indicate a notion of Ottoman cultural heritage preservation. This attitude was certainly not limited to the Qubba, but was part of a wider trend in the Ottoman period, as the example of the late Ottoman Museum of Islamic Endowments shows. Our aim here is thus not to write a heroic account of local and regional actors, but to write them back into history to retrieve the webs of entanglement that a purely Eurocentric narrative obliterates.