Orientations to the Past

Overview

This chapter exemplifies how different Islamic history looks depending on spatiotemporal positions from which it is imagined. I treat three historical periods during which understandings of the Islamic past underwent radical change: 1) the nineteenth century, when modern ideas about history created the version of the Islamic past most familiar to us now; 2) the approximate period 1250–1350, when Mongols invaded Central Asia and the Middle East and caused the creation of a distinctive tradition of telling the story of the Islamic past in Persian; and 3) the tenth century, when the first extensive narratives of the birth and growth of Islam were produced in Arabic. My choices for examples are not exceptional and could be replaced by other possibilities. They reflect what I have found most evocative to demonstrate the theoretical point regarding positionality.

In “A Roaming Orientalist” I take up a nineteenth-century work on Islamic history written in Urdu by the flamboyant European orientalist G. W. Leitner. This case exemplifies how European scholars working with Islamic sources transformed Islamic history to fit a modern mold. The understanding of Islamic history instantiated in Leitner’s work has proven authoritative for Muslims as well as non-Muslims due to the transformative influence of modern European intellectual constructs.

“The Modern (Historical) Condition” takes up a massive Persian universal chronicle written at about the same time as Leitner’s work. Penned by a small-town schoolteacher in Bengal named Ilahi Bakhsh Angrezabadi, this work’s contents come from premodern and modern (including English) sources. Its form, however, hearkens to a pattern in use before the arrival of European influence. The work’s liminality helps us to think through the relationship between form and content within the writing of the past. The sections on works by Leitner and Angrezabadi together reveal the specifics of Islamic history in its modern form.

“The Mongol Catalysis” moves us to seven centuries earlier, when majority Muslim societies were invaded by non-Muslim Mongol armies. Within a few decades of their arrival, the Mongol rulers began converting to Islam and became patrons of grand-scale works on local as well as global pasts. The tradition of history writing begun in this period retained great prestige all the way into the nineteenth century. My treatment of this context concentrates on three major authors—’Ata-Malik Juvayni, Rashid ad-Din Tabib, and Sharaf ad-Din Vassaf—for whom it was critical to account for both Islam’s supremacy and the Mongol conquest that had subjugated Muslim rulers and dynasties. The double imperative led to understandings that divided up the world’s time and space in a distinctive way with respect to Islam.

“Varieties of ‘Islamic’ Time” concentrates on the Arabic work of al-Mas’udi, a celebrated chronicler and geographer of the tenth century. Mas’udi’s understanding of the relationship between history and dating makes the past a cornerstone of the identity of any community. Works like his were among the first to contextualize the life of the Prophet Muhammad as part of universal history. He is keen to assert that, even for a foundational period such as the Prophet’s life, Muslims differed widely on the details and significance of events. Mas’udi’s work demonstrates that disputation regarding the past has been a part of religious debates among Muslims in all periods.

“Orientations to the Past” contains cumulative assessments of positionality and notions about breaks in time that are significant for considering the Islamic past. I compare aspects of the three cases described in the other sections and point to other possibilities that could be used to make the same point. The stark variation between the three cases serves as an invitation to think creatively about narratives we produce today based on Islamic evidence. Most significantly, the variety reviewed in the chapter argues in favor of freeing ourselves from the orientalist timeline of Islamic history dominant in academic work since the nineteenth century.

This chapter’s sections focus on materials produced in the nineteenth century, the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and the ninth century. If one reads them in the order designated in the table of contents, the progression is in reversed chronology. But the discussions make it clear that pasts are always creations. The order for presenting events is in the hands of writers and others contending to become a part of the conversation.

1453museum

Mehmet II “Fatih” (Conqueror) at the gates of Constantinople. These paintings are a part of the “1453 Panorama History Museum” opened in Istanbul in 2009. Nothing in this museum is old. The event is presented through modern paintings and recordings meant to recreate the scene at the city’s walls.

Walls of Constantinople under siege.

The Ottoman army poised for victory.

More than the basic observation about chronology, the designated progression moves from the most to the least familiar way to understand the Islamic past. Perspectives that came to the fore under the primacy of European ideas are still very much with us. Authors such as G. W. Leitner and Sayyid Ilahi Bakhsh Angrezabadi are the easiest for us to understand because the information and interpretation found in their work conditions how the world looks to us intuitively at present. While easiest to absorb, the most proximate authors are also the most difficult to scrutinize critically because doing this requires deconstructing our own presumptions.

Inflections pertaining to the past embedded in works produced many centuries ago are easier to notice due to their sheer otherness. But these works require much more work to decipher adequately because we do not have an intuitive understanding of their contexts. The world Juvayni, Tabib, and Vassaf inhabited is difficult to imagine because the sources are, for us, simultaneously information and interpretation, both text and context.

The representations found in Mas’udi contain no inkling of what the state of the lands he describes would end up being a couple of centuries after his time, in the Mongol period. In the normative understanding, time moves forward from past to present. But narration of time works in reverse. Interpreters placed in present circumstances create pasts in the face of evidence and exigencies contemporary to them.

The contexts discussed in this chapter are “moments” from which to reconstitute how the Islamic past appeared to a select group of authors. These moments are my creations, stemming from my decisions regarding what I understand as critical junctures in Islamic time. Discussions similar to what I have provided could be created based on alternative moments. Two further obvious examples in this regard are noted on the sidebar in this section. The conquest of Constantinople in 1453, when Ottoman Muslims triumphed over Byzantine Christians, was a signature moment for the transformation of a huge geography in the Middle East and Europe. Similarly, the fall of Granada in 1492, when Spanish Catholic monarchs routed the last remaining Muslim polity in Iberia, shaped the destinies of large communities. Islam’s pasts and futures look very different when seen from these two moments when Muslims and Christians were beset with opposing fortunes.

Painting depicting the last Nasrid king of Granada capitulating to the Catholic monarchs Isabella and Ferdinand in 1492. Source

In the web model of the past I advocate in this book, moments function as clusters of interconnected nodes within which traffic flows between ideas and objects in multiple directions. To tell the past, I manipulate the evidence to produce images that I find compelling and “true” based on my epistemological, aesthetic, and ethical commitments. I should say, emphatically, that my projections are not definitive or categorical. To suggest that would be to undermine the core message I am trying to convey in this book. But to state this is not to imply that creating the past is a free-form exercise. My projections are subject to criteria pertaining to evidence and plausibility to which I am committed and that I presume to be operative for my presumed audience.

We must find patterns of flow and connection, the making and unmaking of the lives of individuals and societies over time. We should not reify Islam as having a lifecycle or some kind of internal momentum of its own that has propelled a single history.

To the greatest extent possible, we should accord authors and others whose expressions we consider to be the past as being free or constrained to the same level as we are ourselves. For them as for us, evidence mattered, although what is admissible or inadmissible as such varies greatly between different contexts. And the same goes for other elements, such as procedures for argument, attraction of mode of presentation, limits imposed by the medium in which the expression is occurring, intellectual conditioning and commitments, social and political positioning, and financial freedom or constraint.

For Islamic pasts, we must attend to situational issues pertaining to orientation without presuming predetermined vectors of development. As historians of many stripes, we must find patterns of flow and connection, the making and unmaking of the lives of individuals and societies over time. In doing this, we should not reify Islam as having a life cycle or some kind of internal momentum of its own that has propelled a single history. Rather, Islam is, and has always been, made and remade through the creation of pasts from diversified presents. Attending to material circumstances that condition these presents is a key element when assessing the logic of narrating time.

Exploring moments of transformation is an invitation to create new clusters in the web of history. When we concentrate on one or another set of data, the web transforms since it must be seen from a particular vantage point. This process brings some connections into view while causing other connections to disappear. The creation of clusters is our choice and not a matter tied to a pregiven, unilinear history. The web of history is beholden to material evidence, although the pictures and interpretations it gives rise to change continuously based on choices made by commentators ancient and present.

Related Sections in Other Chapters

Overview

Resources

Works Cited

Further Reading