Notes on a Century: Reflections of A Middle East Historian

by Bernard Lewis

  Goitein’s background was very much in the classical-philological-Orientalist tradition. As he progressed with his work, he realized that what he was doing was no longer classical Orientalism, but social history and economic history. So he made himself into a social historian and an economic historian. He familiarized himself with the methods, the concepts, and the approaches of disciplines which were entirely new to him, and mastered them sufficiently to do a superb job. Being able to change to that extent at that age is really quite unusual. He was a man of great modesty, completely without claims or pretensions: a true scholar. One of his favorite sayings was that among scholars there were princes and peasants, and he always insisted that he was a peasant. I do not agree.

  Propaganda and History

  The responsibility, the obligation, of a historian is to tell the truth as he sees it, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. He should not allow himself to be a propagandist or to be used by propagandists. This is the great temptation and the great danger of history as a profession because history is, after all, the case that one makes for almost any political cause. The same sequence of events can be interpreted and presented in very different ways. It’s a great mistake to assume that historical truths are like mathematical truths where there is one right answer and all others are wrong. If your history is a simple narrative of events, there are right and wrong answers; but they are of no great interest or value to anyone. History is open to interpretation but even with interpretation there is the need for accuracy. Inaccurate history is worse that no history at all. People can be brought up on illusions and myths.

  The modern historian needs access to archives, to public and where possible private papers, and of course good libraries. These are still lacking in many parts of the world. Another necessity, also sometimes missing or restricted, is freedom—the ability to express any opinion, put forward any argument, criticize any point of view. In a free society, scholars can take ideas and bat them back and forth over a seminar table. This constant exchange of ideas is part of the excitement of teaching and of studying. A group of people sit around a table, usually a mixed group of faculty and students, and one tries out an idea and sees how the others respond. Students working on a dissertation will draft a chapter and read the draft to a seminar and their fellow students will tear it to pieces, knowing, of course, that the same thing will be done to them in the following weeks. This freedom of research and debate is another reason why we not only may but should study the history of other peoples, some of whom cannot effectively study their own history, because of constraints—practical, political, ideological, religious or other. And there, perhaps, we have a moral duty to help.

  I believe profoundly in the value of history. I am well aware of the defects of historical knowledge and it is precisely those defects which give it value. History is not an exact science. It is based on evidence which is incomplete, fragmentary, inconsistent, often contradictory, full of gaps, and in this way precisely reflects the human predicament. It provides some insight into the side of life and knowledge that is not precise, and not even always clear. Many of the troubles in the modern world have arisen from the fact that some people believe that human affairs can be dissected and directed with the sort of planning that engineers use. But humanity is not capable of such precision; human societies are not susceptible to such direction.

  In the twentieth century enormous suffering was caused to countless millions of people by misguided attempts to apply that kind of direction to human society, by what is sometimes call social engineering, the planned and purposeful direction of the course of human events. Obviously, some sort of guidance is possible, and may even be useful. However, the idea that one can direct the course of history seems to me a pernicious and destructive delusion. By the study of history we can arrive at some better understanding of the nature of the human predicament in this universe; of what we can do and what we can’t do; of where we are and, with luck, where we are going. History may serve us as a guide or as a teacher. We cannot use it as a tool. Those who condemn history as “irrelevant” and want to make it relevant may be even more dangerous than those who dismiss it as useless.

  According to a common view that has evolved in the Western world, the primary objective of all study and of all research is to know, to understand. The desire to know the past is almost universal among human beings; almost but not quite. There are societies that have not attached much importance to history. But most societies have. Islamic societies in particular have always attached great importance to history, but only to their own. For them, history means the history of Islam, and is valuable insofar as it reveals the working out of God’s purposes for humanity. Non-Islamic history, including their own pre-Islamic history, was in their perception worthless and therefore received no attention until early modern times.

  The aim in teaching history is to get people to ask questions, quite basic questions, and to go through a constant process of self-examination. When I make a note, why do I make that note? What is the hypothesis on the basis of which I copy these three lines into a notebook and not the previous ones and not the following ones? One must be self-questioning and alert for unconscious and unstated assumptions. A good teacher must try to induce in the budding historian some idea of the infinite complexities of the historical process and the endless uncertainties. There’s a wonderful remark by Anatole France in one of his books when he says of a certain scholar, “He’s a truly great historian; he has enriched his subject with a new uncertainty.”

  A point which I always tried to impress on young historians is the importance of fairness. It is perfectly legitimate to reject and refute someone else’s arguments, but you must not distort his arguments in order to make your task easier. This, alas, is very often done, not merely by some disreputable scribblers who dishonor our profession at the present time, but even, on occasion, by serious historians who cede to this temptation. If you wish to refute an argument, you must take as your target a fair statement of the best case possible for the point of view that you are trying to refute.

  Another matter, often necessary to raise in reading draft chapters submitted by graduate students, is that they not convey indirectly what they lacked the evidence, or courage, to say directly. If you have the evidence and are convinced that a certain interpretation of that evidence is true—say so, and give both the evidence and the reasoning. There may be more evidence and less reasoning; there may be less evidence and more reasoning—that doesn’t matter. But if you are not satisfied that the evidence and reasoning combined suffice to establish your version, don’t try to convey it without actually saying so, by the use of carefully selected verbs and adjectives, of emotionally charged language, or of deliberate ambiguities. There are many uncertainties in historical research and often a major achievement of research may be to raise doubt where there was certainty before. Uncertainty may be beneficial in that it invites further research and further thought. But uncertainty disguised as certainty is dangerous.

  Teaching Versus Research

  Some people, it is argued, are good at teaching but not at research; others are good at research but not at teaching. This often leads to difficult discussions about allocating academic preferment. It is a familiar dilemma. Over the years I have heard many complaints, particularly from those who believe that university preferment is based almost entirely on research, so that good researchers who may be bad or negligent teachers are promoted, while good and devoted teachers with limited or no research are scorned.

  I cannot speak of subjects other than history, nor of levels of the educational process below the university, but as far as the teaching of history at university level is concerned, this strikes me as an artificial dichotomy. In teaching history to university students, what precisely are we trying to teach? What is the purpose of the whole business of holding classes and seminars and guiding university students in their study of history?

  At this level, history teaching does not simply me
an transferring pieces of factual information about the past. If it were only that, it wouldn’t be worth the bother. Factual information is of course necessary, but the students should either have this when they arrive at university or know where to find it. What a university teacher should be doing is conveying to his students an understanding of the processes by which historical knowledge is achieved. Unless the teacher has direct personal experience of that process through past research, or better still through current research of his own, he can’t do that.

  There are of course good teachers who don’t do research, and they have an important function, at lower levels or perhaps in other subjects, but it seems to me that the prime value of history as a university discipline lies precisely in the fact that it is more than a mere accumulation of pieces of information to be acquired, stored and passed on. That kind of history is of very little value. It is mere anti-quarianism.

  We are all aware of the common phenomenon of the university teacher, whether in history or in any other field, who does one major book, and that’s all; one major research project, usually a revised and amplified version of his doctoral dissertation, accompanied and followed by a scattering of articles consisting either of leftovers from the book or further developments of points touched on in the book, and no more. I am not saying that this is bad, or that people who do this are unworthy to be teachers. What I do believe is that the teacher who just reads history books, and teaches history from the books he reads, cannot really be a decent university teacher of history.

  Years ago I argued that the historian should not set out to prove a thesis and select material to establish it, but rather follow the evidence where it leads. Some of my colleagues challenged this. “Doesn’t one,” they asked, “necessarily have in mind a thesis that one wishes to prove by citing evidence? This after all is the way one works in the exact and in the social sciences, by formulating a thesis and then marshaling evidence to prove it. Should one not, does one not, work the same way in history?”

  To clarify my point, I would make a distinction between thesis and hypothesis. By a thesis, in this context, I mean a proposition or a series of propositions that the historian has in mind before he starts work. These guide him in choosing the evidence that supports his thesis and enables him to present a case. This is where the honest historian must be very careful. On the other hand it is clearly right that in historical research, as in any scholarly or scientific activity, the researcher has to formulate a hypothesis or hypotheses. After all, every time the scholar takes a note he is formulating a hypothesis; that one item in his source is worth noting, whereas the items before and after are not.

  Two conditions are normal in honest historical research. The first is that the hypothesis should be conscious and not unconscious. The second is that the scholar should be ready to modify or even abandon his hypothesis at any stage, i.e., follow the evidence. In most of my books, my ideas underwent several modifications in the course of both my reading and my writing. I did not by any means finish with the same ideas on the subject as when I began; I would have been wasting my time if I had. Any scientific or scholarly research, in history as in the social, exact, and life sciences, involves making hypotheses, but this should be a process of constant modification. The scholar tests his hypothesis against the evidence; he doesn’t test the evidence against his hypothesis, and then accept or reject it, according to whether it fits or does not fit that hypothesis.

  I have found it important to impress on students a very mundane matter, the techniques of scholarship. What should go into a footnote? What shouldn’t go into a footnote? How should a footnote be constructed? What constitutes a chapter? There are all kinds of practical things which can make the difference between a good thesis and a mediocre thesis. Little attention is given to these practical questions nowadays. It’s somehow assumed that all this comes to students through the light of nature or that they pick it up.

  I believe it was Adolf von Harnack who had a very striking passage in which he talks about the great danger, when one gets to the final phase of writing, of somehow trying to stuff everything in, all these great masses of notes and vast quantities of information that you have accumulated. Some people feel it would be a terrible tragedy to waste all the days spent in the archives or reading a book and making notes on it, and from which one gets either nothing or very little. The point he makes with great insistence is: “Do not try to shove in everything.” His rather hard advice is: resign yourself to the process of cremation.

  I’ve generally told my students that I thought that was too severe, and I suggested they keep those excess notes for articles in the future, which I think is kinder advice, and what many articles seem to be.

  Muslim History and the Danger of Cultural Arrogance

  A historian, like human beings in general, is not free from human failings. Loyalties and prejudices may color his perception and presentation of history, but the critical historian is aware of this and tries to correct it. In the past, a Westerner looking at a non-Western civilization tended to assume that everything Western was good, but at the present time it is more fashionable to assume that everything Western is bad, which is really the same prejudice but turned inside out. People nowadays who find it impossible to say anything good about the West are really being extremely ethnocentric and arrogant. When they claim that everything that goes wrong is the fault of the West they are still maintaining the old claim that the West is the fountain of everything and that everything that happens in the world is determined by the West. They say it is bad, in the past they said it was for good, but it is the same kind of arrogance.

  One must guard against the danger of cultural arrogance, the arrogance into which I think we fall all too easily by asking what is profoundly the wrong question: asking why something didn’t happen. Why didn’t Islam do this? Or, why didn’t the Middle East develop that? Meaning, why didn’t they do what we did? That is an error. One must ask why things happened, not why things didn’t happen. If you want to know, why did the West discover America, that’s a reasonable question. But to ask, why didn’t the Muslims discover America from their seaports in Spain and Morocco, is not a reasonable one.

  In trying, self-critically, to preserve my scholarly impartiality, I knew I had to watch out for three sources of prejudice, the Western, the British, and the Jewish. If I’m writing on Semites and anti-Semites, then obviously it is the Jewish angle I have to look out for. If I’m writing of the Middle East and the West, it’s the Western angle I have to look out for. By this I don’t mean that I’m just going to turn against my own cultural background; that would be just as silly, in fact, far sillier. There is a question of empathy rather than sympathy. And here I will make what may appear to be a blatantly chauvinistic statement and say that this capacity for empathy, vicariously experiencing the feelings of others, is a peculiarly Western feature. It produces the desire to know other civilizations and the ability to understand them. The cause of suspicion is often incomprehension.

  When the first Western archaeologists went digging in the Middle East many Muslims were mystified. They had never paid the slightest attention to the remains of their glorious ancestors lying around, because that was not usable history, not significant history. It was pre-Islamic, and therefore unimportant. They could not comprehend that people would go into danger and discomfort and spend vast sums of money in order to dig up the remains of someone long dead, and therefore they suspected there had to be some other motive. They looked for reasons—espionage, treasure hunting—heaven knows what. There were in fact some Orientalists who were in the service of empire, though most of them were very critical of empire. The true explanation, the quest for knowledge, sounded preposterous.

  From a Muslim point of view history has a profound, even a religious, significance. The advent of Islam is an event in history, known through historical evidence. The development of mainstream Islamic law is based on Sunna, the precepts and practice of the Prophet and his compa
nions. Sunna is thus a kind of history, a record of past actions and past sayings. For a Muslim history is therefore religiously important, and it is crucially important that the history be accurate. A hadith, a tradition of the Prophet, is a historical statement, that on this or that occasion the Prophet did this or the Prophet said that. The recording, collection and critique of hadiths are therefore a kind of historiography. From the beginning of Muslim history and civilization there was a profound concern, not only to know the past, but to make sure that what was known was true. Already in early Islamic times, Muslim scholars, greatly concerned about the validity of extant traditions, were at great pains to distinguish between true and false hadiths. They had a more sophisticated classification; not just true and false, but certain, probable, weak, false. They also devised a complex methodology for studying and classifying hadith by content, chain of transmission and reliability.

  To ask whether history is true obviously implies that history is sometimes false. Why should it be false? Why, and how, would anyone falsify it? This is one of the great problems of the historians of any society. A thousand years ago Muslim specialists in hadith had a problem of false hadith; they also had a problem of weak hadith. What this distinction meant was that sometimes a hadith was totally fabricated, invented by someone; or, sometimes it might have been based on a true narrative which in the course of transmission was somehow changed. I tell you a story, you tell him that story, he tells it to someone else, and after about the fifth retelling the story has become something quite different, without anybody wanting or trying to falsify it. We might call this a natural erosion of truth. There is also a deliberate perversion of truth. Why does one falsify history? Some erosion of historical knowledge is self-explanatory, but why does anybody deliberately distort or invent history?