Associate Professor in the History Department at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada, and Director of the Centre for Comparative Muslim Studies
Janvier à juin 2020
Amal Ghazal is an Associate Professor in the History Department and the director of the Centre for Comparative Muslim Studies of the Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada. She earned her BA from the American University of Beirut and her MA and PhD from the University of Alberta in Canada. She specializes in modern Arab intellectual history. She has published a book on the politics of identity of the Omani intelligentsia in colonial Zanzibar and numerous articles covering a variety of topics. She is a co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of the Contemporary History of the Middle East and North Africa (forthcoming). She is currently working on two projects. One analyses the politics of identity of the Mzabis in colonial Algeria. The other analyses the anti-Nahda thought in the late Ottoman period.
"contesting nationalism: regionalism and sectarianism in colonial Algeria"
This research project will focus on the role of a Saharan community in Algeria, the Mzabis, in anticolonial and national movements between 1911 and 1948. Through an analysis of Mzabis’ activism in both Tunsia and Algeria, this project will explore the spectrum of political possibilities and alternatives to the nation-state that Mzabis envisioned while situating themselves within regional networks of religious reform, anti-colonialism and nationalism.
This spectrum undermines teleological readings of national identity formation and points to a more gradated internally and regionally diverse history of Algerian nationalism than the historiography has hitherto accounted for. Thus, rather than the usual perception of World War I (WWI) as being the catalyst for nationalist stirrings in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), the case of the Mzabis provides a counter-narrative to nationalist historiographies.
GHAZAL, Amal & HANSSEN, Jens. The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Middle Eastern and North African History, Oxford, Oxford University Press, forthcoming.
GHAZAL, Amal. "Islamic Reform and Arab Nationalism: Expanding the Crescent from the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean, 1880s-1930s", in Culture and Civilization in the Middle East Series, London, Routledge, 2010.
GHAZAL, Amal. “Conservative Thought in the Liberal Age: Yusuf al-Nabhani, Dream-Stories and the Polemics against the Modern Era,” in Arabic Thought Beyond the Liberal Age: Towards an Intellectual History of the Nahda (HANSSEN, Jens & WEISS, Max), Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2016, pp. 214-233.
GHAZAL, Amal. “Tensions of Nationalism: Mzabi Student Missions in Tunis and the Politics of Anti-Colonialism”, in International Journal of Middle East Studies, Vol. 47.1, 2015, pp. 47-63.
GHAZAL, Amal. “Counter-Currents: Mzabi Independence, pan-Ottomanism and WWI in the Maghrib", in Journal of First World War Studies, vol. 7:1, 2016, 81-96.