The frequency and variety of attempts by writers ancient and modern to define adab as a singular concept testify to its centuries-long resistance to a consensus for a concise formulation. It is perceived as an aesthetically pleasing rhetoric of behavior and a code for laudable social conduct in different spheres and disciplines, but its inextricable duality of description and prescription evades tidy definitions.

It boasts a long history in different times and in different languages of the Islamic world, with numerous practitioners from a diverse array of disciplines. Morals, manners, and literature are conventionally included in its purview. In more recent times, the ideological freight of adab has expanded even further, conflated as it has become in modern scholarship with the struggle to find ways and resources to challenge fundamentalism and its attendant parochialism, and perhaps even the thornier problem of political Islamism. Its most recent incarnation is as a stand-in for secularity, a concern for the here and now that accommodates political life and procures the common good, drawing on a wide range of anecdotal precedence from the past. In its literary context, it opts for an all-embracing approach for its supporting exempla, removing barriers and crossing frontiers: Qur’anic verses, vignettes from pagan but just rulers and their councilors, aphorisms by philosophers Greek or otherwise, and animal fables from India appear side by side. They buttress the same rational argument in unison. In short, this leads to the current aspiration that adab may come to define, maybe even unwittingly, the secular Islamic canon—what Larry Scanlon has explained as a “quasi-secular authority that belongs to precisely that set of textual traditions modernity will come to call literary.”Footnote ¹ How does tradition configure in the modern?

It is in this vein that the contributions to Adab and Modernity: A “Civilising Process”? (Sixteenth–Twenty-First Century), viewed as a joint venture, can be contextualized and understood. Catherine Mayeur-Jaouen’s insightful Introduction is an important addition to current debates on theorizing adab. Footnote ² Cognizant of the intractability of the subject matter, she proposes a definition of adab, then of modernity and civilization, so as to attempt a stab at her subtitle: “civilizing process?” The author carefully segregates the question of periodization from her definitions, to emphasize continuities and ruptures in adab as the Islamic world, and particularly the Middle East and North Africa, transitions to the modern period. For although the history of adab may be traced back to the ninth and tenth centuries, it is best investigated not genealogically, but as a living organism, the product of endless exchange and cross-pollination. According to Mayeur-Jaouen, adab as a corpus is not an “orderly stratigraphy of cultural notions,” accrued over time to collectively define its purview, but rather “a multitude of encounters and exchanges coupled with a conscious, voluntary effort to create a pluralistic unity” (p. 6).

Mayeur-Jaouen begins with the advent of modernity in the Middle East. The introduction of European-inspired norms elicited a search for kernels of genuine Arabic and Islamic civilization compatible with them to facilitate the indigenization of the new coveted mores—hence the renewed interest in adab. She correctly emphasizes that participants in this debate were all modern, advocates and adversaries alike. While adab—“the concept that best combined these values” (p. 2)—prevailed from the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth century, it was gradually eclipsed in the interwar period by a moral turn, the gradual rise of akhlāq as the fount for cultural markers and social norms, with profound effect on the history of the Muslim majority societies in the modern period (p. 2). Thereafter, adab was largely confined to literature, although its earlier valences of manner and etiquette persisted to some degree.

Following a rich history of the manifold ways in which a focus on adab allows for a nuanced reading of social norms, cultural values, and political stakes, the collection turns to twenty-one chapters organized into four parts: “New formulations of Adab in Modern Islam (Sixteenth-Nineteenth Century),” “Translations and Meditations in the Time of European Encounters (Nineteenth Century),” “Education and Emotions in the ‘Civilising Process’ in the Middle East,” and finally, “Reformulating Adab and Civilization in Contemporary Islam (Nineteenth–Twentieth Century).” Most focus on the period between the late nineteenth century and the 1950s, and a good number of the discussions are based on Egyptian case studies.

Katharina Ivanyi surveys the interaction of adab and akhlāq in the writings of Birgivī Meḥmed Efendī (d. 1573), an influential participant in the articulation of orthodoxy in the early modern Ottoman world. His Aḷ-Tarīqa al-muḥammadiyya focuses on tahdhīb al-akhlāq rather than adab, concerned “with providing a blueprint for believers to shape an ideal, pious self, through a variety of intellectual, spiritual, and bodily exercises” which Ivanyi nevertheless categorizes as “a project of adab as paideia par excellence” (p. 54). Ivanyi takes issue with Peter Brown’s celebrated thesis that paideia as opposed to adab was concerned basically with a secular system of grooming, suggesting that “the neat dichotomy between “secular” and “religious” may be out of place in both cases—a product of our Enlightenment heritage more than anything else (p. 55). Birgivī’s concept of adab was not a nineteenth-century one of “being civilized,” but, like its later avatar, it translated prevailing cultural social and religious norms into an individual ideal and practice (p. 60).

Royal adab at the early modern Mughal court is the subject of Corinne Lefèvre’s chapter, focusing on Sufi advice literature. In Lefèvre’s genealogy, the ruler’s code of conduct (ādāb) shifted from a juristic bent discernible in advice presented to the Delhi sultans, to a more expansive cultural register in the Mughal period, including “ethico-political texts like the Akhlāq-i Naṣīrī by Naṣīr al-Dīn Ṭūsī (d. 672/1274) which were not framed by Islamic norms but took inspiration from Greek philosophy” (p. 63). Rather than piety or conformity to the sharī‘a, the more philosophically inclined Nasirean tradition located the adab of good rule in the “systematic use of critical reason” (p. 68). From the mirror for princes by the Qādirī master ‘Abd al-Ḥaqq Muḥaddith Dihlawī (d. 1642), written for the newly enthroned Jahāngīr (r. 1609–27), whose conciliatory attitude to conventional Islamic piety was welcomed by the ‘ulamā’ and sharī‘a-minded Sufis, Lefèvre surmises that the latter harbored only a superficial commitment to the inclusive political ethos espoused by the Mughal court. What Lefèvre reads as a veneer, an expedient camouflage, is in truth a hallmark of advice literature, from classical Greece to medieval Europe, the medieval and early modern Islamic world and beyond. Hence, rather than creating “a fair amount of confusion in the mind of the readers” (p. 87), the so-called “contradictions” point to narrative strategies that invite the reader to interpret, reinterpret, and then some more. Far from revealing a “‘neoconservative’ pattern which from the late tenth/sixteenth and early eleventh/seventeenth centuries onward became yet another hallmark of early modernity in the Muslim world” (p. 88), hidden meanings, alien origins, historical transpositions, and the pairing of contraries, are salient features of premodern advice literature from around the globe.

The Damascene Ibn ‘Ābidīn’s (d. 1836) treatise on testaments (waṣiyya) is the subject of Astrid Meier’s contribution. The immediate question confronting the jurist was the legal standing of purchasing thawāb (acts of redemption intended to influence God’s mercy). However, Ibn Ābidīn’s main preoccupation was the social and ethical dimensions of scholarship and knowledge production, which, according to Meier, points to the concept of adab not as a secular code of morals and manners exemplified in artistic and literary productions, but the moral blueprint for cultivating personal growth and edification, and, as such, “a part of knowledge (‘ilm)” (p. 95). Ibn ‘Ābidīn’s treatise, Meier claims, reflects the shifting articulations of the public life of scholars and their self-image, found to be more akin to modern conceptions of the public intellectual than hitherto acknowledged. Rather than a society best understood as transitioning to modernity, it portrays a society that is looking to its past to navigate its future. Ibn ‘Ābidīn writes to safeguard religion, for which ‘ilm combined with ‘amal (action) is required, but above all else, rests on the moral probity of the community of believers. The propagation of this notion of adab is at the heart of his undertaking.

Francesca Bellini’s chapter investigates the intersections of adab and modernity in Arabic encyclopedic culture of the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. Encyclopedism spawned an Islamic humanism which flourished until the Mamlūk period. Thereafter, changes in practices of knowledge production led to the disappearance of a separate class of literati and secretaries and the gradual absorption of adab and the class of udabā’ into religious ‘ilm and the ‘ulamā, and the institutionalization of ‘ilm al-adab as a distinct academic discipline in the madrasas (pp. 131–3). Nevertheless, continuities between the Mamlūk and Ottoman periods may be discerned, such as a concern for the classification of the sciences as the prime organizing principle of encyclopedias (p. 140). The author selects three Ottoman encyclopedias written between 1850 and 1950 to conduct a close reading of the way in which the respective authors use the classification of sciences “as a device for collecting, organising, hierarchizing, studying, and even criticizing knowledge” (p. 141). The rich reading shows the salient presence of tradition alongside western adoptions in late nineteenth-century Arabic encyclopedism, offering a particularly insightful discussion on how the Arabic language and secular knowledge swayed the production of modern encyclopedism, evident in Buṭrūs al-Bustānī’s (d. 1883) coining of the term dā’irat al-ma‘ārif as Arabic for encyclopedia. A calque from the Greek enkýklios paideia (circular instruction or circle of learning), which itself was first used to refer to encyclopedias in the sixteenth century, al-Bustānī chose to evoke “Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie, even if he programmatically changed his concern to the Arabic language and the Arab perspective on his project” (p. 154). His encyclopedia was governed by three main principles: a global purview, accommodation of Darwin’s theory of evolution, and the equation of knowledge with progress (p. 157). Through the prism of adab, Bellini shows how modern Arabic encyclopedias mirror the gradual ascendancy of two divergent if concurrent trends in Arab societies, one that looks to the West and a second that turns to the Islamic tradition for a blueprint of a genuine Arab awakening that secures the public good.

The influence on the notion of adab of Don Rāfā’il Zakhūr’s unfinished and unpublished Arabic translation of Machiavelli’s The Prince in early nineteenth-century Egypt is the subject of Elisabetta Benigni’s contribution. Appearing in the context of an emerging political awakening, The Prince was read both against the rich tradition of Islamic mirrors for princes and as an introduction to European political thought. The new adab of the nineteenth century reflected reformist projects pursued at the level of government and reflected the political changes that engulfed Egyptian society. Along the way, the author provides a fascinating discussion of the challenges confronting the early translators. The complexities of translating “stato” (state) into Arabic is a telling example. To capture the polysemy of “state” as used in Machiavelli’s text, the translator chose not a uniform equivalent, but rather oscillated between waṭan, dawla, and ḥukm. For patria (homeland) and repubbliche (republics), he resorted to “waṭan and umma for the former and mashyakhāt for the latter” (pp. 178–9). Benigni’s scrutiny is particularly instructive for contemporary academics pursuing conceptual histories of the non-western world, who often lament the lack of a reliable, universal lexicon in the host languages.

Several contributions engage with the new adab that took shape in the context of colonial modernity, beginning in the eighteenth century. Felix Konrad focuses on the new adab that came to characterize eating habits at the khedival court and by extension elite Egyptians in the eighteenth century as European table manners were gradually adopted. New European modes of sociability that accompanied dining etiquettes left their mark as well on gender interaction among the elite population. The new adab of colonial modernity is also the subject of Mark Boivin’s study, which attends to the birth of a new intelligentsia in the Indian cultural oikumene engaged with acquiring a new set of practices. Along with other important participants such as Shi‘i merchants, they promoted an ethical code that valorized harmony and wisdom as universal values that went beyond communal discourses. The new adab that accompanied diplomatic engagements with European powers at the Ottoman court is studied by Olivier Bouquet. He finds that it rested less on a rejection of the past than a reconfiguration of an existing moral universe to meet the demands of changing times. As such, the new adab was in line with the longstanding tradition of cosmopolitanism that characterized the Ottoman polity since its inception.

Jurjī Zaydān’s (d. 1914) prescription for a new adīb as laid out in his novels and other prose writings is investigated in Anne-Laure Dupont’s contribution. How did adab’s two dimensions, moral and literary, configure in the reformist ethos that dominated the encounter with the West and, crucially, addressed a nascent middle class tasked with mediating between the elite and the lower classes? For Zaydān and other members of the intelligentsia, the new individual, key to the formation of modern society, was an adīb—cultivated and edified through education. Apart from a classical education, the adīb was encouraged to adopt a vast array of rules governing personal hygiene, diet, exercise, marital relations, sexual activity, social habits, as well as moral virtues such as public mindedness and tempered religiosity. Importantly, and in contrast to the wholly westernized elite, the adīb is also devoted to Arab identity, although well-acquainted with western literature and social mores. Finally in this section, Stephan Guth focuses on the adab that emerged as native culture came into contact with the West in the works of the Lebanese writer Khalīl al-Khurī (d. 1907) and the Ottoman Turkish novelist Aḥmed Midhat (d. 1913). Guth’s close reading of his material reveals equal disdain for uncritical Europeanization, viewed as emblematic of “a lack of education and knowledge” (p. 319), and for the wholesale rejection of all that is new. The new adab idealized moderation, and by implication a literate and socially conscious middle class that could champion its cause.

Part 3 comprises five articles on education and emotion, two important and popular constituents of adab considered as a civilizing process. Samuela Pagani writes on Muṣṭafā Luṭfī Manfalūṭī’s (d. 1924) eclectic use of adab, both as an edifying project that encourages rationality and tempers emotion, as well as a remedy for the alienation and malaise that characterize modern society. Still linked to the classical heritage, Manfalūṭī’s romantic adab pertains more to the cultivation of an inner self, the wherewithal to safeguard humanity against the relentless march of progress. Anne-Sophie Vivier-Muresan turns to Iran, where she claims two terms are used to designate politeness, “adab et ta‘āruf” (p. 463). It is on the latter that she writes, based on fieldwork conducted in the Kuhbanān area in Kirmān in the early 2000s. She finds that the requisites of adab and ta‘āruf diverge in important ways, and that although regard for ta‘āruf is on the wane as western and Islamic mores have come to dominate Iranian society, especially in urban metropolises, adab has retained its status as a venerated ideal. In contemporary Iran, Vivier-Muresan concludes, adab is of more anthropological than sociological value.

The broad theme of the role of educational institutions and practices in the propagation of a new adab is taken up in the remaining three chapters. Chantal Verdeil shifts the lens to the adab of Catholic missionaries in the Ottoman Empire, specifically the Jesuit community in Syria at the turn of the twentieth century, to reveal a diverse landscape comprising several Protestant and Greek Orthodox missionary communities. The reactionary pedagogical and ideological stance practiced and taught by the Jesuit missionaries included strictly observed rules of conduct, the glorification of religion, morality, obeisance and hard work, and gender segregation. That Jesuit ethos—adab was confined to literature in their writings—propagated through educational institutions, complemented the nuclear family as the site for “the civilizing process.”

Catherine Mayeur-Jaouen’s contribution traces the changing relationship between education, etiquette, and ethics in Egypt from the late nineteenth century to the post-World War II period by probing the vexed question of women’s education. In a fascinating close reading of an array of texts that weaves the dilemmas of education for women in the context of Egypt’s rapidly changing political climate, Mayeur-Jaouen shows how the rather liberal (even secular) tendencies that dominated cultural currents in the late nineteenth century, when even conservatives and clerics encouraged women to modernize in response to a new era, were gradually supplanted by a call for fealty to “native” mores, religious traditions, and proper Arab/Muslim conduct as colonial design, injustice, and political oppression rallied the population against the West and the modern world it had birthed. Among the victims of this tortuous trajectory was adab, Mayeur-Jaouen concludes, as it lost out to akhlāq as the proper vehicle for preserving Arab identity and became increasingly confined to literature and discourses on polite and decorous manners.

Iris Seri-Hersch studies the cultivation of character in colonial education in post-World War II Sudan, where adab was limited to and coterminous with akhlāq. With the colonial order on the decline, the country’s overlords Egypt and Britain harbored divergent post-independence ambitions. The Egyptians vied for a union between the two countries, which the British discouraged. Against that backdrop, and with the cooperation of northern Sudanese civil servants, Sudan’s colonial administration embarked on an extensive social modernization program designed to propagate a modern ethos. Educational reform to train the Sudanese character and mold Sudanese society (p. 436) was central to that political project. Directed mainly at primary school teachers, the Seri-Hersch finds that the colonial project of “character building” may not have been effective at modernizing Sudanese society—whatever that may imply—but it did alter the outlook of a good number of primary school teachers who went on to fill the cadres of the country’s post-independence intelligentsia.

In the final section, Luca Patrizi’s chapter analyzes the Damascene cleric Jamāl al-Dīn al-Qāsimī’s (d. 1914) Jawāmi’ al-ādāb fī akhlāq al-anjāb. Like the texts studied in Mayeur-Jaouen’s chapter, al-Qāsimī’s attempt to synthesize Islamic with modern ethics while safeguarding Islamic mores and social regulations belongs to a bygone era when prominent thinkers from different walks of life were receptive to engagement with the West. Al-Qāsimī’s integrationist approach includes even a soft spot for Sufi spirituality, considered a branch of Islamic philosophy, a rarity among modernist Salafīs (pp. 485–8). A comprehensive manual of proper conduct, it advises on the adab of commerce, hygiene, friendship, social conduct, public institutions, education, foreign language acquisition and cultural exchange, mourning (which condones gravesite visitation for men), jihad, physical education, and domestic economy among others. Al-Qāsimī’s vision of modernity integrates that which can be established rationally and scientifically within a still traditional ecosystem, offering an “Islamic positivism” of sorts (p. 499). Recent interest in the works of al-Qāsimī may be understood as a gradual demise in the puritan Salafism that has dominated the Sunni world in the twentieth century, Patrizi concludes.

The textual strategies and the considerable afterlife of another turn-of-the-twentieth-century Egyptian adīb, the Sufi Yūsuf b. Ismā’il al-Nabahānī (d. 1932) is taken up by Francesco Chiabotti. In his numerous critical editions of classical texts, al-Nabahānī’s marginal notes, acknowledgments and ijāzāt (certificates of transmission) reveal countless innovations and a significant degree of interpretation. Often he resorted to dreams to buttress his outlier positions. Al-Nabahānī’s notion of adab entailed a revival of Islamic norms and classical texts as a buffer against secularism, but at the same time amplified and legitimated an anti-Islamist stance. His lingering influence among a good number of Muslims, Sufis or not, is attested by the many reprintings of his works and his significant digital presence.

Adab produced among the Yoruba speakers of mid-twentieth-century Nigeria is the subject of Stefan Reichmut’s investigation. The Yoruba context was uniquely pluralist: Arabic, English and Yoruba literary traditions coexisted, as did Islam, Christianity, and Yoruba Oriṣa cults. One prominent example is the case of the itinerant Sufi preacher Muhammad Jum‘a Alabi (d. 1923), known as Tāj al-Adab, founder of the Adabiyya movement, whose “Arabic writings convey a concept of adab which encompassed at once ethical, literary, and spiritual connotations,” and resonated strongly with ìwà, the Yoruba notion of character (pp. 564–5). Through literary activities and educational reform, the Yoruba Muslims not only strengthened their local identity, but also secured a standing for the community among the larger ‘umma.

Nabile Mouline’s chapter discusses the Qur’anic injunction al-amr bi al-ma‘arūf wa al-nahy ‘an al-munkar (commanding right and forbidding wrong) as an opposition ideology in Saudi Arabia in the 1960s. The Jamā‘a al-salafiyya al-muḥtasiba (The Salafī Community for the Maintenance of Public Decorum) was established in 1966 by Juhaymān al-‘Utaybī (d. 1980), the famed Saudi dissident who overtook the Grand Mosque of Mecca in 1979. Juhaymān’s use of a classical Islamic concept not only allowed for the propagation of his political views, but also prompted the Saudi state to claim a monopoly on invoking the duty by launching its own centralized and professionalized ḥisba infrastructure in 1976, the General Presidency for Committees of Commanding Right and Forbidding Wrong, with an ever-expanding remit and budget. There are several opaque references to the rigid (read reactionary) ethical and behavioral norms governing public space in Saudi Arabia as a result of the increasing influence of religious hardliners in Mouline’s chapter, but its connection to the other chapters and to the subject matter are at best tenuous.

Albrecht Hofheinz’s highly original approach to norms governing contemporary expressions of akhlāq in diverse media is focused on moral campaigns such as “rāqī bi-akhlāqī” (I am rising on my morality) campaigns run by the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in the past twenty years. Briefly, the campaigns encourage young people to take pride in their own heritage, shun the West, abide by the rules of their religion, repent past errors, exercise, and other commonplace ingredients found in most self-improvement regimens, all in an effort to improve themselves, and take charge of their own life. The focus of the campaigns is on the individual, and as such “show clear parallels to what Islamic reform movements since the eighteenth century were concerned with: an attempt to expand Islam’s internal boundaries socially and psychologically. Every single believer should internalise Islamic norms and discipline his or her behavior accordingly” (p. 631). By simplifying religious teachings, focusing on actions, carving an individual path to salvation, and by drawing on scripture rather than on ḥadīth and other accounts of the Prophet’s life—that is, creating a process of edification that is accessible to every true believer—Hofheinz suggests that the new moral turn is modern in important ways. However, and even though the new ethos is propagated through a wholly new, twenty-first-century medium of the internet, it mirrors currents and trends evident in eighteenth-century Sufi movements.

The strength of this collection lies in its emphasis, not on what adab is, but on what it does, and on the performativity at the heart of adab that stems from its dialogical give and take between old and new. At times though, adab is stretched to include such an array of socio-political currents that it disappears as a focus of investigation. Such diffusion is commonplace in most published conference proceedings, and should not detract from a core of significant contributions in this volume by Mayeur-Jaouen, Hofheinz, Bellini, Benigni, Patrizi, and others, which challenge several current scholarly assumptions regarding this chameleon-like concept, and even more broadly, trajectories for conceptual history in the non-western world.