Racio-national Imaginary and Discursive Formation of Arabo-Islamic Identity in al-Manār and al-Risālah: A Topic Modeling Study

Abstract

This article focuses on the dynamics of culture, language, and race as integral to the discourse on Pan-Islamist/Pan-Arabist national identification in Egypt during an era of drastic change in the Egyptian political and social spheres that set the stage for the current century that followed. Our approach draws on computational tool of topic modeling to probe relevant thematic discussions on the” conceptualization of race, language, culture, and identity by leading Arab-Muslim intelligentsia at a foundational moment that paved the way for Arab Nahḍah (modernity). Specifically, this analysis is meant to trace the intellectual development in the writings of Muḥammad Rashid Riḍā’s (1865-1935), which appeared in the magazine he edited, al-Manār (‘The Lighthouse’, 1898-1935), and those of Aḥmad Ḥasan al-Zayyāt’s (1885-1968), editor of al-Risālah (`The Messageʼ, 1933-1953), also a weekly magazine, both published in Cairo, Egypt. The study concludes that both figures sought to galvanize a largely hybridized Islamist/Arabist discourse as manifested in the clusteral paradigms of modelled topics.