This year’s Arab History Days at the Arab World Institute in Paris saw mainly French academics, researchers, journalists, and others with a lively interest in the past or present of the Arab world gather at the Institute’s landmark premises on the left bank of the Seine in the French capital for three days of lectures, debates, and discussions on the theme of celebrations and popular emotions in the Arab world.
The event, the 12th in a series that started in 2015 with the theme of the Arab city, has featured both traditional topics such as revolutions, religion, and diplomatic and other relations between Europe and particularly France and the Arab world as well as more unusual ones such as bodies and frontiers. Over the past three years, it has examined landscapes, climates, and societies, different forms of love, and heroes and heroines in the Arab world.
It has established itself as a major annual event on the Paris calendar, offering one of the few venues anywhere in the world for researchers to come together with the wider public on a regular basis to discuss their ideas. The large and appreciative audiences that came to this year’s History Days, taking place between 27 and 29 March, will certainly have appreciated this year’s mix of historical, anthropological, film, and media studies that made up the range of talks and discussions.
In addition to the three days of discussions, the History Days also host the award of the Grand Prix for the best work of history on the Arab world to have appeared in French in the previous year. Chosen by a panel of specialists from France as well as Lebanon and Morocco, the Prize is sponsored by the Académie du Royaume du Maroc. This year’s shortlist saw several heavyweight scholarly works on mediaeval and modern history vying for the Prize, along with others aimed at a wider public and one on ancient history.
One of the more scholarly works shortlisted for this year’s Prize was Missionnaires italiens et enseignement en Egypte (1890-1970) by researcher Annalaura Turiano and published by the Institut français d’archéologie orientale (IFAO) in 2025. Many people will be aware of the important contributions made by Italian schools to Egyptian education since at least the second half the 19th century, when Italian diaspora institutions were founded particularly in Alexandria before later being replaced by the bilateral cultural and technical cooperation that is more familiar today. Turiano’s book reconstructs the history of this contribution from the late 19th century to the 1960s in an exemplary scholarly account.
Also shortlisted was Eugénie Rébillard’s Imposer l’ordre, la police dans les villes et les campagnes de l’Iraq abbasside, also published by the IFAO, a scholarly treatment of how the mediaeval Abbasid Caliphate in Baghdad kept order during a particularly important period in its history. Founded in 750 and beginning to lose effective political authority from the 10th century CE, the Caliphate’s golden age is associated with the rule of caliphs such as Haroun al-Rashid and Al-Mamoun in the late 8th and early 9th centuries before the period of civil war that severely weakened it later.
Stéphanie Guédon’s Juba II, l’Afrique au défi de Rome, was the only work of ancient history to be considered for the Prize this year, being a biography of the North African king Juba II. Born in Hippo (Annaba) in what is now Algeria in around 48 BCE, and later husband of Cleopatra Selene, daughter of the famous Egyptian queen Cleopatra VII, Juba II ruled Mauretania, an area taking in much of what is now Algeria and Morocco, from the late first century BCE to the early 1st century CE with his capital at Caesaria (Cherchell) in today’s Algeria.
Other books on this year’s shortlist included Question juive, problème arabe by Henry Laurens, professor of contemporary Arab history at the Collège de France in Paris, a history of two centuries of modern Palestine; Gaza devant l’histoire, a history of modern Gaza by Enzo Traverso; D’une révolution à l’autre, le camp palestinien de Yarmouk en Syrie by Valentina Napolitano, a history of the largest Palestinian refugee camp in Syria; and Un seul trône, souveraineté et divisions colonials au nord du Maroc 1860-1938 by Antoine Perrier, a scholarly work on modern Moroccan history.
However, the winning title and therefore the recipient of this year’s Prize, awarded on the first day of the History Days in Paris, was La Croisade, une histoire partagée by Abbès Zouache, director of the Centre français d’archéologie et de sciences sociales in Sanaa (Yemen) and Kuwait, published by IFAO in 2025.
Making use of Latin, Arab, Armenian, and Greek source material, and drawing on European and Arab historiography, this large-scale history of the mediaeval European Crusades in the Arab world is described as an “unparalleled new history of the phenomenon.”
Shared emotion: With panels and discussions taking place across the Institute over the course of the three days of the History Days, it was unfortunately only possible to attend a sample of what was on offer, though this was uniformly enjoyable.
Speaking on a panel on “shared devotion” in the Arab world, anthropologists Emma Aubin-Boltanski and Manoel Pénicaud and historian Anne Troadec examined examples of religious emotion shared between different religious communities. While Aube-Boltanski and Pénicaud gave their anthropological accounts of particular events in Lebanon and Tunisia, Troadec provided a larger perspective by suggesting various historical parallels.
Aube-Boltanski described events beginning in Christian communities in Bechouate in Lebanon in 2004 during which the Virgin Mary is reported to have appeared to believers. Setting out the background to the appearances, she said that it had been significant that the Virgin had at first appeared to a Sunni Muslim boy of Jordanian nationality – meaning that she had not exclusively appeared to Christians or even just to Lebanese nationals – and this had helped turn what could have been an exclusively Christian event into one that had touched all the country’s religious communities.
The Virgin of Bechouate had played an important role in encouraging shared religious experience, with the pilgrimage to where she had appeared in the Bekaa Valley being identified as something that could attract all Lebanese people whatever their religious belonging and being underlined as such by her appearance in popular iconography bearing a national flag, Aube-Boltanski said.
Pénicaud’s example of shared devotion, also generating significant popular emotion, was taken from Tunisia and the Jewish pilgrimage site at Djerba. This can attract people from different religious communities, he said, commenting that as well as being a place to search for baraka (blessings), the site is a popular venue for celebrating significant life-transitions, including the birth of children and marriages.
While historical accounts place a strong emphasis on events signalling religious devotion, Troadec said, it can be difficult to glean information from them about what kinds of emotion were in play and who was expressing them. Nevertheless, the fact that some of the chroniclers report that some of these events were condemned by the religious authorities of the time as being either unorthodox or likely to lead to an overflow of popular emotion indicates that there was some suspicion of them from above.
The widespread emotion that religious events can give rise to was also examined in another session later the same day on the history of one of the best-known examples in the Muslim calendar – the moulid, or birthday, of the Prophet Mohamed. This is celebrated by millions across the world every year, with the moulid being particularly important and widely celebrated in Egypt.
Historian Yassir Benhima, a professor of the mediaeval history of the Muslim world at the Université de Lyon II in France, explained in his presentation that the origins of the moulid of the Prophet seem to go back to the 12th century, or at least this is the date of its first mention in the written sources, and the official sponsoring of the occasion by the Fatimid Caliphate in Cairo. Processions were held and sweets handed out to celebrate the occasion, with popular involvement soon becoming more and more evident along with music and a carnival atmosphere despite the disapproval of some of the religious authorities.
On the same panel, Sabrina Mervin, a researcher with the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS) in France and a well-known authority on Shia Islam, took the audience through Shia religious practices in which the public expression of emotion is encouraged, particularly in commemorations associated with the Shia Imams.
Not all the sessions attended by Al-Ahram Weekly focused on religious emotion, however, since a final panel late in the day looked at the popular emotions associated with nationalist ideas in the shape of a discussion of “popular joy and the legitimation of new regimes” in the context of the independence of Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia from France in the 1950s and 1960s.
French researchers Benjamin Badier, Rihem Faher, and Malika Rahal explained that this year is the 70th anniversary of the independence of Tunisia and Morocco from France in 1956, making it a good time to look again at the popular emotion generated by the withdrawal of the former colonial power and the advent of the new post-colonial regimes. How were and are these events celebrated at the popular level by the populations concerned, they asked, and what kinds of emotion does the nationalist narrative encourage or discourage at that level today.
Among the other sessions included this year was one giving young researchers, in most cases still working on their doctoral theses, the chance to talk about their work to a wider audience. Titled “my thesis in five minutes,” but thankfully allowing each of the seven speakers to go beyond the allotted five-minute time slot, this saw promising work by researchers Stéphane Vincent, Salomé Mega, and Yesmine Karry, among others, reduced to suitably bite-sized pieces.
Stéphane Vincent spoke interestingly about what he called “historical writings on the margins of the vulgate” – the accepted version – in this case the Kitab Al-Futuh (Book of Conquests) by the 9th-century Abbasid writer Ibn Atam Al-Kufi. Little is known about Al-Kufi, Vincent explained, aside from his book in which he presents the early history of Islam from a Shiite perspective.
The very different subject of the archaeological site of Igliz in Morocco, which flourished between the 11th and 13th centuries, was the subject of Salomé Mega’s presentation, in which she described the importance of this site for the Almohad conquest of the region in the 12th century.
Yesmine Karry spoke about her research on the 11th-century religious writer Abu Hamid Al-Ghazali, arguing that while he is often seen as a critic of philosophy when applied to religious and metaphysical questions (his most famous work is the Tahafut Al-Falasifa – The Incoherence of the Philosophers), this idea needs to be nuanced. Other topics included aspects of Iraqi Kurdistan by Paul Caville, Roman North Africa by Joseph El Khoury, the crisis in Libya by Aldo Liga, and the Mameluke jurisprudence on slavery by Jamela Ouahhou.
This year’s History Days were competing with the spring sunshine in Paris – a time of year when the French capital looks at its most inviting – and yet the audiences for the presentations were more than happy to stay inside to hear the discussions and of course also ask questions.
Appreciative and attentive, it was encouraging to see so many young people present for the sessions – perhaps particularly marked in the session by the young researchers who appear to have brought their friends – with this constituting a striking vote of confidence in the event among younger audiences and a good sign for its future.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 30 April, 2026 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
Short link: