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Towards a history of Aleppo and Damascus in the early Middle Ages (635-1260 CE)

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Towards a history of Aleppo and Damascus in the early Middle Ages (635-1260 CE) TRADITION AND INNOVATION IN THE STUDY OF ISLAMIC HISTORY: THE EVOLUTION OF NORTH AMERICAN SCHOLARSHIP SINCE 1960 Dr. R. Stephen Humphreys University of California at Santa Barbara I will be speaking primarily about the history of the Islamic Middle East, both medieval and modern, since that is the field I know best. I will include other approaches and disciplines insofar as they throw light on the study of history. I begin with a few general thoughts. History is not really a discipline. It certainly is not a body of data which has been organized within the framework of a unified theory. In this way it differs from the hard sciences like physics or microbiology, even from economics. Nor is it driven by the concern to build models or test theories like sociology and political science. Rather, history is a frame of mind, a way of thinking about human affairs. Historical thought is ad hoc, holistic, inclusive, and pluralistic. That is, the study of history allows historians to do just about whatever they want. They need only show that their statements are based on valid evidence. Historians focus on particular sets of events for their own sakes, not as cases which exemplify some overarching theory. At the same time, they try to connect these particular events to the whole universe of human thought and action. Most important, historians aim to describe and explain change; they want to show how one situation gave way to or was transformed into another. In doing these three things — describing particular events, connecting one set of events to many others, analyzing the process of change — historians consciously and unconsciously draw on many theories. But they rarely use theory in a rigorous way. Taken as a whole, the study of history is not governed by any single body of theory; there is no one theory accepted by all historians that says which facts are relevant or irrelevant, or how facts must be connected to one another. In this way, history is inclusive and pluralistic. In principle all facts are relevant. Any given set of facts may be explained and interpreted in many different ways. When we try to describe and explain the actions and thoughts of some group of people in the past, we may do so in two basic ways. First, we can try to enter into their world. We can focus on trying to reconstruct, as accurately as possible, their actions, words, and institutions in and for themselves. We can write a history which says: "So far as we can determine, this what they said and did." We can also try to understand how they thought about what they were doing. What words did they use to describe themselves to one another? What values did they apply to thoughts and actions; what was good and bad, desirable and undesirable, etc.? This kind of history aims to describe and explain events in terms that would make sense to the actors in those events. It means that we try to leave our world and enter into theirs. As a historians in this mode, we are acting as honest and skilled translators; we translate with as little distortion as possible the words and actions of the past into terms that make sense to our own contemporaries. A second approach to the past is quite different. It tries to connect the events and persons of the past with the ideas and concerns of our time, or it tried to link several disparate periods into some larger structure. Here we are not acting as simple translators. the people whose history we are describing might not understand a single word we say about them. This kind of history is a search for broad patterns and processes, for a unifying logic in things. Here theory plays a much greater role, because only theory allows us to discover (or create) broad patterns and a unifying logic. With this introduction, I come to the study of the Middle East and Islam in North America. When I began my graduate studies thirty-three years ago, the first type of historical study was paramount, or so we thought. The main issue was finding and learning to use new sources effectively. In particular, the treasures of Istanbul promised a revolution in our knowledge and understanding of the medieval Islamic world. In fact, studies on medieval Islamic history operated on two planes. One was that of trying to discover what medieval Muslims had actually said and done, what social structures and systems of governance they had devised, how they made sense of their world. For this task, good traditional philology, as devised by great German and French scholars of the 19th century, was the main tool–"the painstaking analysis of difficult texts" (L.Binder). The vast amount of new sources made this seem an unusually rewarding task; every time you opened a manuscript, you were likely to find something genuinely new. The second plane was very different. This was the plane of the broad interpretive framework within which we applied our philological tools. That framework was, of course, "Orientalism." Said’s analysis of Orientalism is overdrawn and misleading in many ways, and purely as piece of intellectual history, Orientalism is a very bad book. But it is also and important one, and it did underline how much we were entrapped within a vision that portrayed Islam and the Middle East as in some way essentially different from "the West." That vision was already being challenged by my teachers in many ways. They insisted that it was possible to write the history of Islam and the Middle East just as we would for any other culture and society. Yet the old vision of an "essential Orient" (in this case the Middle East) still shaped many of the questions we asked. "Late Orientalism" can be trace through three overlapping generations. H.A.R. Gibb–Gustave von Grunebaum–Jean Sauvaget Bernard Lewis–Claude Cahen Marshall G.S. Hodgson The members of this influential group were all born between 1895 (Gibb) and 1921 (Hodgson). The first generation developed a kind of final synthesis of classical Orientalism, while trying to connect it with new trends if historical and social thought. Von Grunebaum, who reached his intellectual maturity at the University of Chicago during its glory years (1940s-50s) explored the possibilities for comparative analysis provided by contemporary sociology and anthropology. Sauvaget, an urban survey archaeologist, found greater value material culture that in religious and literary texts. Gibb, the most traditional in his formation and approach, had an uncommon grasp of values, and a deep sense of Islam’s integrity and validity as a spiritual tradition. Lewis and Cahen represent scholars who were trained as historians of Europe, and turned their attention to the Middle East only a bit later on. Both were (and of course Lewis still is) hard-core political and social historians, for whom religion and culture were rather secondary and accidental concerns. When you read Cahen’s work, in fact, you could just as well be reading about Russian or Italian history; religious beliefs and cultural expression play no substantial part in his analysis. Lewis is a great believer in a well-defined, durable, though always changing entity called "Islamic civilization." But for him the beliefs and customs of Muslims are just ideology –their way of articulating the things that mark the boundary between them and the outside world. Hodgson — another University of Chicago product — was very slightly the youngest of this group. His critique of Orientalist construction of islamic society was far more searching that Said’s, but he understood the value as well as the shortcomings of that tradition. His Venture of Islam (written by 1968, published 1974) was both the last work of Orientalism and and effort to frame a new, more adequate paradigm. The history of the modern middle East (19th-20th centuries) was equally in ferment during the 1960s. At that time, the scholarship on the Middle East since 1800 was markedly inferior by any criterion to that available on medieval Islam. Few modernists read Arabic, Persian, or Turkish; those who did were not professional historians but ex-foreign service officers or missionaries. Nor could they compensate for this lack through the use of European archives. Even the British PRO, with a fifty-year rule, allowed scholars access to official papers only up to the beginning of World War I. The French had a 75-year rule. Finally, the field was crippled by the most intense partisanship and nationalism. In this contest, the work of Bernard Lewis ( a master of all periods) and Albert Hourani came as a revelation. Both scholars were of course masters of the relevant languages, and both knew Middle Eastern society very well. Lewis’ Emergence of Modern Turkey (1958) demonstrated that late Ottoman and Turkish history was simply a part of modern history generally — there was nothing exotic or "Eastern" about it. It presented the same problems and could be analyzed in exactly the same terms as (for example) the emergence of modern Italy. Hourani’s Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age (1962) was the first real intellectual history of the 19th and early 20th century Middle East. With immense erudition and perceptiveness, it showed that there was a genuine secularist intellectual tradition in the modern Middle East. Moreover, Hourani writes without apologetics or polemics. I have said that the 1960s marked the end of a tradition. But these years also opened a new era. By the end of that decade, the study of Middle Eastern history — both medieval and modern — had begun to go in a new direction. By the mid-1970s this shift was confirmed by three major changes: 1)the rise of the book-length monograph — basically the PhD dissertation — which vastly increased the body of detailed knowledge at our disposal; 2) the growing interest in disciplines, methodologies, and approaches from outside the field of traditional middle Eastern … read more »

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