Conference paper at the conference
Un mirabile arabista.
Giornate di studio in ricordo di Angelo Arioli
Dipartimento Istituto Italiano di Studi Orientali
Sapienza University of Rome
19 September, ROOM T01
Abstract
The Arab reception of texts, characters and myths of Greek-Hellenistic antiquity since the 19th century is often traced back to the broader phenomenon of openness to Europe and its cultural production. This contact has certainly represented a strong stimulus to take an interest in ‘Greekness’, but it does not take sufficient account of the fact that this interest has deep connections with the movement of Greek-Arabic translations and reworkings, especially from the Abbasid period. Through the case of the reception of the figure of Alexander the Great in the Arab cultural press at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century – which represents a privileged channel for accessing the cultural dynamics of the period -, this contribution thus aims to bring out the role of the Arab-Islamic tradition in the modes of reception of the classical Greek world in the context of the first decades of the modern Arab renaissance. At the same time, it aims at framing more precisely the elements that can actually be traced back to the modern contact with Europe, including the new contents and texts disseminated with regard to Alexander, the reasons for the contemporary interest in this figure, and the assimilation of the concept of ‘classics’. The latter label soon adapted to include the cultural production of the Abbasid era, which was not by chance a period of enormous interaction with Greek sources, as well as a model of rebirth to which the modern cultural movement explicitly refers.
