Description:

Speaker: Thadeus Dowad, Crown Junior Chair in Middle East Studies and Assistant Professor, Department of Art History, Northwestern University

In June 1800, the Syrian-born Muslim scribe Suleiman al-Halabi was tried and executed in Cairo for assassinating the leader of the French occupation of Egypt (1798–1801). Not only was al-Halabi's execution documented by French draftsmen in Egypt, but the criminal investigation was also published in both Arabic and Ottoman Turkish in a deliberate attempt to “indigenize” and “Islamicize” the colonial state’s exercise of judicial punishment. Reading across these visual and textual sources, this talk analyzes al-Halabi’s execution as a singular performance of Orientalist knowledge-power that crystallized the French Republic's emerging techniques of colonial governance. It argues that al-Halabi’s execution illuminates how Egyptian words and French images, as well as Islamic and post-Revolutionary juridical epistemes, converged and collided in the colony.

Presented by The Language of Islam, an Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities research workshop.