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Michele Amari

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Michele Amari
Michele Amari
Michele Amari
Born(1806-07-07)7 July 1806
Palermo
Died16 July 1889(1889-07-16) (aged 83)
Florence
Occupation(s)Sicilian historian and orientalist
Notable workHistory of the War of the Sicilian Vespers (1842)

Michele Amari (Michele Benedetto Gaetano Amari[1], 7 July 1806 in Palermo – 16 July 1889 in Florence) was a Sicilian patriot, historian and orientalist.

Biography

Amari was the son of Ferdinando (d. 1850) and Giulia Venturelli. His paternal grandfather was a well-to-do attorney, while his father was an accountant in the Bank of Palermo and a gambling man, whose marriage was opposed by the family. Due to his father's financial troubles, Amari lived with his grandfather from 1814. He studied at Palermo in church institutes permeated by the intellectual influence of English empiricism, which in combination with the Voltairianism of his father prompted Amari to abandon the church by the age of 12 and embrace materialist philosophy by the age of 13, according to his own recollections. It was also his father who introduced him to the democratic and Francophile circles of Sicily. In February 1820 he was admitted as an intern into the Ministry of the Interior, but his fortunes took a downward turn after the death of his grandfather. Shortly afterwards, he took part alongside his father in the Palermo uprising of July 1820 which demanded Sicilian independence and a liberal constitution. His father was initially sentenced to death in 1822 and eventually released from prison in 1834. Amari spent the subsequent years working as a clerk to support his family and reading widely with political intent.[2]

By 1837 he had prepared the outline of his principal work, a detailed investigation of the war of the Sicilian Vespers (1282–1302), which was conceived as a call to overthrowing the Bourbon rule in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. The work, published in 1842 with a title that understated its message to bypass censorship, rapidly won a mass audience in Sicily and on the Italian mainland, and caused concern in the Neapolitan government. Amari went into exile in Paris from 1842 to 1848, where he studied Arabic with Joseph Toussaint Reinaud[2].

During the Sicilian revolution of 1848, he travelled back to Sicily to take up the chair in public law at the University of Palermo. Elected a deputy to the Sicilian Parliament, he was subsequently nominated the Minister of Finance in the revolutionary government. From August 1848 to April 1849, he lobbied for the recognition of the Sicilian state in Paris and London. After an abortive return to Sicily in April 1849, he pursued scholarly work in Paris until May 1859, when he accepted a position at the University of Pisa, from where he moved in January 1860 to the Istituto di studi superiori di Firenze. At Florence, he soon joined a committee of support for the Sicilian revolution and reached the island with the Expedition of the Thousand of Giuseppe Garibaldi (1860)[2]. At the height of the Risorgimento, he is credited with having acted as a link between the Prime Minister Camillo Benso di Cavour and influential Sicilians, helping convince them to support Italian unification. Amari did so in expectation of Cavour granting Sicily a measure of regional autonomy after unification. He served as the Minister of Education and Public Works and then briefly Minister of External Affairs in Garibaldi's wartime government, but resigned shortly due to the dictator's refusal to pursue immediate unification with Italy. He was appointed a senator of the Kingdom of Sardinia in January 1861, two months before its proclamation of the Kingdom of Italy.[1]

He died at Florence in 1889 and was buried in Palermo.

Scholarship

Amari's historical works focus on medieval Sicilian history and cover the period of Muslim control. He viewed the arrival of the Muslims as a positive development in that it freed Sicily from Byzantine civilization that over nearly three centuries had reduced the island through excessive taxation to an impoverished and underdeveloped place. He attributed much of modern Sicily's cultural and social legacy to the Islamic rule.[3]

Having mastered Arabic at Paris, Amari was a forerunner of Oriental studies in Italy. His efforts earned him the recognition as one of 19th-century Europe's finest translators of medieval Arabic writings. His Storia dei musulmani di Sicilia (History of the Muslims of Sicily, 1854) has been translated into many languages, including into Arabic by a group of Egyptian scholars as recently as 2004.

In 1851, Amari published a translation into Italian of an Arabic work of the mirror for princes genre, which includes a biography of its author, the 12th-century medieval Sicilian Arab philosopher Ibn Zafar al Siqilli, considered a precursor of Machiavelli. Amari's version was translated into English by Bentley under the title Solwan, or Waters of Comfort in the following year.

His work proved influential with later historians of Islam: among them, in Italy, Leone Caetani, Francesco Gabrieli, Umberto Rizzitano and Paolo Minganti.

Heinrich Leberecht Fleischer of the University of Leipzig, in publishing two supplements to Amari's Siculo-Arabic Library, credited him with reviving Oriental studies in Italy[citation needed].

Views

A rationalist and a positivist, Amari exhibited a strong ethical sensibility, commitment to secularism and a notion of civic virtues, and indifference to religious partisanship. He cited the works of Antoine Destutt de Tracy and Adam Smith as decisive in his intellectual formation.[2]

Principal works

References

  1. ^ a b "Amari, Michele", senato.it, Senato della Repubblica, retrieved 10 March 2023
  2. ^ a b c d Gabrieli & Romeo 1960.
  3. ^ Amari, Michele; Nallino, Carlo Alfonso (1933). Storia dei Musulmani di Sicilia. Oxford University. Catania, R. Prampolini.

Sources

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