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A Life on the Path of Knowledge:
Rifa'at Ali Abou-El-Haj
ilim yolunda bir hayat: rifa'at 'ali abou-el-haj
ISA BLUMI*
Rifa'at 'Ali Abou-El-Haj, a scholar of the Early Modern Ottoman Empire, passed away in Brooklyn, New York on March 14, 2022. Beloved huband to Barbara Abou-El-Haj (d. 2015), brother of Asia, Hidayet, Samira, and Amal; uncle to Thea Abou-El-Haj, Nadia Abou-El-Haj, and Tabatha Abou-El-Haj; mentor to many. He was 89.
Completing a Ph.D. in Princeton University's Departments of Oriental Studies and History in 1963, Dr. Abou-El-Haj represented a key member of a generation of scholars that included Peter Gran, Talal Asad, and Engin Akarli who sought to challenge the largely Euro-American dominated academy and its study of the Middle East. While well-respected by his peers, Dr. Abou-El-Haj spent the majority of his teaching career at California State University, Long Beach and thus unable to train graduate students. Beginning in 1964, for the next 31 years, Dr. Abou-El-Haj sought through his publications, including the books The 1703 Rebellion and the Structure of Ottoman Politics (Leiden: Brill, 1984; translated into Turkish in 2011) and Formation of the Modern State: The Ottoman Empire, Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries (Albany: SUNY University Press, 1991; translated into Turkish in 2018) to critically engage scholars working on the early modern Ottoman state and society. Consistently challenging the "teleological" and often Euro-centric approaches entrenched in the established universities training students in Ottoman history, Dr. Abou-El-Haj remained loyal to a scholarly ethos that combined
ATIF | CITATION
Blumi, Isa. "A Life on the Path of Knowledge: Rifa'at 'Ali Abou-El-Haj". Kadim 3 (April 2022), 267-268. doi.org/10.54462/kadim.1096714
* Assoc. Prof., Stockholm University, Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, isa.blumi@su.se, ORCID: 0000-0003-3591-741X.
Vefeyat | Obituary
ISA BLUMI
deep textual analysis with the integration of methods of research embraced in more critically engaged fields of studies. Often criticized for his challenges to the conventions of Ottoman scholarship at the time, as many sought to ignore his work, he has been notoriously referred to as both an "iconoclast" and "gadfly" by others in the field when engaged.
Perhaps as a result of his polemics, Dr. Abou-El-Haj's significant works remained obscure to younger scholars until much later in his career. While able to occasionally supervise graduate students during the years he dedicated to teaching from within the California State system, it was only after receiving an invitation to return to Princeton as Ahmet Ertegun Visiting Professor (1996-1997) that his work gained new interest. By the time he joined his wife Barbara, a prominent Art Historian relocating to Binghamton University in 1997, his work became more an accepted part of the mainstream curriculum. Reflective of this growing appreciation of his work, under an initiative led by his colleague Peter Gran (Temple University), his out-of-print Formation of the Modern State (1991) would be republished in a second edition by Syracuse University Press in 2005. A further sign of appreciation took place in 2010 when colleagues Donald Quataert and Baki Tezcan (a former attendant to his 1996-1997 Princeton seminar) co-edited a special issue of the Journal of Ottoman Studies celebrating his lifetime work.
Perhaps the primary generative force behind this new interest in Dr. Abou-El-Haj's work was the impact he had made on a new generation of Ottoman historians who attended his seminar on critically reading Ottoman sources at Princeton over the academic year 19961997. Able to teach advanced graduate courses upon settling in Binghamton, Dr. Abou-El-Haj became a mainstay for numerous Ph.D. and M.A. students passing through the Ottoman Studies program. During these years, Dr. Abou-El-Haj taught courses on Ottoman history, Comparative History, History from Below, The Formation of the Modern State, and a seminar in translation and interpretation of Arabic and Ottoman Turkish primary sources. By the time of his retirement in 2014, he had advised forty-four Ph.D. dissertations including 25 in History, 7 in Art History, 4 in Near Eastern Studies, and 4 in Sociology.
In many ways, Dr. Rifa'at Abou-El-Haj's pioneering excavations of the early modern Ottoman Empire taught our current generation of Ottoman historians to think critically about their sources. Pushing us to put the authors of these sources into their varied socio-economic, and thus class, political, and ideological contexts, upset the teleological assumptions Ottoman historians carried about the empire in early works. As such, by pushing young historians to think beyond the predictability of an institutional "decline" long assumed of the Ottoman Empire in the late 18th century, Rifa'at Abou-El-Haj leaves behind an enduring legacy. For this former interlocutor and student, muse, and source of debate, his passing is a source of reflection as much as sadness. May he rest in peace.
