Following recent pioneering work on conceptual history in non-European contexts, our panel explores the historical development of key concepts in Ottoman Turkish, Persian, and Arabic from the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries. The first paper treats the semantic development of the concept of tarih-i umumi, or universal history, in nineteenth-century Ottoman historiography, connecting this development to changes in conceptions of temporality and spatiality. The second paper analyzes the Persian discourse on shura, or consultation, demonstrating that since the mid-nineteenth century Qajar period, shura emerged as a concept entangled in religious and secular visions of political power. Moving to the early twentieth century, the third paper explores the concept of Asia in the writings of Muslim intellectuals, asking how Asia as a conceptual space with Afghanistan at its center became a galvanizing framework for the formation of modern political identities. The last paper examines the key concept of manhaj al-Azhar, or Azhar methodology, in the writings of Muslim religious scholars in twenty-first century Egypt. By situating the development of manhaj al-Azhar in relation to late-twentieth century leftist and Islamist engagements with the concept of manhaj, the paper demonstrates how Muslim scholars strive to make themselves relevant to multiple discourses.

Taken together, these papers contribute to recent scholarship that extends the methods and theories of conceptual history outside of European geographies and languages and beyond the nation-state. In analyzing the history of the Middle East through the lens of conceptual history, the panel explores the challenges, opportunities, and pitfalls that emerge from applying this approach in a transnational, multilingual context. Collectively, our papers ask how conceptual history methods can be rethought to capture the complexity and entanglements of the diverse linguistic, political, and social fields that constitute the transnational Middle East in the modern period.