12.
Writing and Rewriting History
Style merits a very high place in the writing of history. I don’t mean a sort of makeup which is added afterward. It’s not something which is applied. I’ve heard people suggest that one man writes and then another applies the style, and some see this as the function of the editor appointed by a publisher. I don’t accept that at all. I think that style is part of the actual thought and writing process—thought especially. Clarity of thought will normally produce clarity of style; obscurity of thought will produce obscurity of style. Writing history is not the same as writing a novel or a poem, but one should have some thought for elegance. Historical writing should have certain essential qualities—clarity, precision and elegance.
Clarity means that you say what you mean to say and your meaning is unambiguous. Precision is saying just what you mean to say and not something else. Time and time again things are so clumsily and carelessly written that what the person intends to say and what he actually says are significantly different. If a book is poorly presented and poorly written it’s not good history. It may be good scholarship but it is not good history. Elegance speaks for itself.
The study and the writing of history are constantly being enriched by new insights and new experience. Every generation brings something fresh to the study of the same topics and periods. Two things are always added. One is new methods, new documents, and new sources. The other is that every generation brings some fresh experience and the experience of one’s own time can be useful, if only by suggesting new lines of inquiry, new questions which can be put to the evidence of the past.
History at one time was military and political and nothing else. It was the story of kings and wars, sometimes described as drums and trumpets. Kings and wars are important, and at times we have tended to go overboard in rejecting them, but a history which is purely political and military is no longer acceptable. Over the last fifty years we have added a psychological dimension and an economic dimension; we now have cultural history, social history, intellectual history, economic history and so on. The addition of the psychological method may prove as fruitful as the addition of the sociological method to the study of history. However much one may believe in impersonal, historical forces which determine the course of events, people are important, and individual decisions and actions are in part at least psychologically determined. Psychology is of value to the biographer, and what is of value to the biographer is ipso facto valuable to the historian.
But one needs to be careful because there are certain questions which one can never ask, or rather, to which one cannot hope to find answers. The psychologist, like the social scientist, asks questions and pursues his questions because he has living subjects to whom he talks. A historian can’t do that. If we want to write a social history of the past, we have to make do with the evidence available. This is the great difference between the historical method and the social science method. In the historical method you have evidence left behind from an era which is gone; the activities of people who are no longer around. This limits the use of the sociological method, and to an even greater extent it limits the use of the psychological method. It is no use building theories based on evidence which we don’t possess and can never hope to acquire. The psychological method should be used with caution, bearing in mind that you can’t put Julius Caesar or Martin Luther or Kemal Atatürk on the psychoanalyst’s couch.
Since most modern psychology is the work of Westerners working on Western patients, asking Western questions and getting Western answers, it is extremely dangerous to assume that one can simply take the whole caboodle and apply it to another society without making the necessary adjustments. That way you get the same sort of nonsense as if you try to explain the Ottoman Empire in terms of medieval Europe or of industrial Germany, which is what some people have done.
Take, for example, the Oedipus complex. This is something which relates to the European family, the theoretically monogamous nuclear family in Christian Europe and other Christian countries. How does this work in an Islamic royal family of the past where the mother is a nameless bought concubine and the father an absentee polygamist? One can’t just take one set of psychological determinants and apply it to another time or place.
The psycho-biographer has one advantage that the psychoanalyst does not have, in that he confronts a total career. A psychoanalyst who might have met Abraham Lincoln would have met him at a certain point in his career, whereas the psycho-biographer sees the entire life and times. He has a further advantage in that he doesn’t have to cure him.
Sensitive Subjects
A few years ago, one of the questions I was asked in the course of an interview was, “Why do you always deal with sensitive subjects?” I responded by explaining that the answer to his question was contained in the metaphor he used. The sensitive place in the body, physical or social, is where something is wrong. Sensitivity is a signal the body sends that something needs attention, which is what I try to give. I don’t agree with the implicit meaning of the question that there should be taboo subjects. In any society there are, in fact, taboo subjects. In ours, it usually takes the form of political correctness maintained by social, cultural and professional pressure, but it is not completely enforced.
I have in particular given some attention to two major points of sensitivity—the treatment of non-Muslims in general and Jews in particular in Muslim countries, and the related questions of race and slavery. My first essay on Islam and the non-Muslims was published in the French review Annales in the summer of 1980. This formed the introductory chapter of a book, The Jews of Islam (1984), dealing with the classical, Ottoman and, more briefly, the modern periods. I dealt with this last at greater length in a succeeding volume, Semites and Anti-Semites (1986). Both of these books were translated into a number of European languages. Unlike most of my other books, with one exception they were not translated into Arabic. Nor was my book on race and slavery. The exception, Semites and Anti-Semites, is available in Arabic thanks to the effort of an Egyptian lawyer, the late Muhammad Mahmud ‘Umar, who felt that this book should be accessible to the Arab reader. After trying in vain to find a publisher he finally decided to do it himself. He translated it into Arabic and had it printed and distributed at his own expense. I greatly appreciate his effort and feel free to draw attention to it as he is safely dead.
My interest in race and slavery began with an invitation I received in the late 1960s from a political scientist in England who was running a project on tolerance. He formed a group of scholars to examine the problems of tolerance and intolerance, and asked me whether I would contribute a paper to a conference on tolerance and intolerance in Islam. At first, I took these words in the conventional sense, meaning willingness or unwillingness to coexist with people of another religion. As I was preparing the paper it suddenly struck me that the true test of tolerance is willingness to accept diversity in matters that really concern us. The fact that we are nowadays tolerant in religion doesn’t indicate much since for many people religion has become unimportant. To test tolerance one must look at how people react in matters about which they are passionately concerned, and in much of the modern world that often means race and color. This led me to look at racial attitudes in Middle Eastern history and literature, to consider how far they indicate tolerance or intolerance, and to ask how much truth there was in the commonly accepted stereotypes, both positive and negative.
I presented my paper at the conference and thought that would be the end of the matter. It was not. One of those attending the conference came from the Institute of Race Relations in London. He expressed interest in what I had to say and asked whether I would be willing to give a paper on the same subject at his Institute. I agreed and we set a date for December 2, 1969. When he wrote to confirm the date he informed me that in view of the importance of the subject he had arranged for it to be a joint meeting of the Institute of Race Relations, the Royal Institute of Inter
national Affairs, and the Royal Anthropological Institute.
This, to be frank, caused me some anxiety. It is one thing to do a paper and present it to a colloquium or a small group of colleagues. It is quite another to make a formal presentation at a meeting of three august learned societies. I therefore felt obliged to drop everything else and set to work to produce a paper which would be adequate for the occasion.
In due course the paper was completed and delivered, and once again I thought this was the end of the matter. Again it was not. The editor of Encounter, a London monthly, was present, and said that he wanted to publish my paper. I agreed, on condition that he include all my footnotes, which he accepted. Monthly literary and political magazines do not normally publish heavily footnoted articles, but with a subject as sensitive as this I did not wish to make statements without providing the documentation.
The article appeared in Encounter, with all its footnotes, in August 1970. It brought me a letter from a publishing firm in New York, saying that they had read the article, and would like to have a longer version for book publication, as one of a series of short paperbacks that they had in hand. This was not difficult, since the Encounter article had been abridged from a much longer draft. The resulting booklet, Race and Color in Islam, was published in 1971.
The publication of a French translation in 1982, more than ten years later, gave me the opportunity to make a number of substantial changes. In addition to correcting some errors I added new documentation and discussed some topics not touched upon in the earlier versions. I also appended a selection of relevant original sources, most of them translated from Arabic.
The study of race led inevitably, in the Islamic world as in other societies, to the problem of slavery, by which both race relations and racial attitudes were profoundly affected. This raised serious difficulties. One of them is the remarkable dearth of scholarly work on the subject. The bibliography of studies on slavery in the Greek and Roman worlds, or in the Americas, runs to thousands of items. Even for medieval Western Europe, where slavery was of relatively minor importance, European scholars have produced a significant literature of research and exposition. For the central Islamic lands, despite the subject’s importance in virtually every area and period, a list of serious scholarly monographs on slavery—in law, in doctrine, or in practice—could be printed on a page or two. The documentation for a study of Islamic slavery is almost endless; its exploration has barely begun.
Perhaps the main reason for the lack of scholarly research on Islamic slavery is the extreme sensitivity of the subject. This makes it difficult, and sometimes professionally hazardous, for a young scholar to turn his attention in this direction. In time, we may hope, it will be possible for Muslim scholars to examine and discuss Islamic slavery as freely and as openly as European and American scholars have been willing to discuss this unhappy chapter in their own past.
But that time is not yet. Meanwhile, Islamic slavery remains both an obscure and a highly sensitive topic, the mere mention of which is often seen as a sign of hostile intentions. Sometimes indeed it is, but it need not and should not be so. The imposition of taboos on topics of historical research can only impede and delay a better and more accurate understanding.
My book on the subject was published by the Oxford University Press under the title Race and Slavery in the Middle East in 1990. As with The Muslim Discovery of Europe, I was able to draw on extensive pictorial evidence of how slaves and people of other races were perceived in the Middle East. This time I was very happy to have twenty-four illustrations in full color. In this book, I tried to deal fairly and objectively with a subject of great historical and comparative importance and to do so without recourse to either polemics or apologetics.
It is an interesting reflection on the subject that Race and Slavery, of all my books, is the poorest seller and the least translated.
Once when I was attending a conference in Spain I was sitting and chatting with Patrick Harvey, the distinguished historian of Spanish Islam, when an African American acquaintance joined us. At some point in the conversation I asked him a question that had been puzzling me. “Why is it that so many African Americans who are not converts to Islam are giving their children Muslim names like Ahmad and Ali and Fatima? I can understand that converts to Islam would do that. That would be very natural, but why do people who are not converted to Islam give their children Muslim names?” He replied with some passion, “We don’t want to go on carrying the names of the people who bought us.” To which Patrick Harvey responded, “But what do you gain by adopting the names of the people who sold you?” It was an interesting point. The European and later American slave dealers who went to West Africa to get slaves did not go and capture them themselves. They bought them from local slave merchants. The identity of those slave merchants is well known but rarely mentioned.
The Middle East and the West
I have always been interested in the relations between the Middle East and what we now call the West, the impact of both Western action and Western civilization on the Islamic peoples and societies of the Middle East and the successive phases of Middle Eastern response. My book The Middle East and the West consisted originally of a series of six public lectures delivered at Indiana University in Bloomington in March and April 1963, and published in the following year. I attempted to look at the Middle East as a historical, geographical, and cultural entity; to show what the West has meant and means to Middle Easterners; to trace the processes of Western intrusion, influence, domination, and partial withdrawal; and to deal with political and intellectual movements in the Middle East in recent and modern times in three main groups—liberal and socialist, patriotic and nationalist, and Islamic. Finally, I felt it was important to examine the place and role of the countries of the Middle East in international affairs and so consider some of the factors affecting Western policy toward them.
This book, published in 1964, was reprinted a number of times in both Britain and the United States and was translated into several languages, including Norwegian, Greek, Arabic and Hebrew. It was translated into Hebrew by the publishing house of the Israel Defense Ministry, and was translated into Arabic by the Muslim Brothers. I felt that a book which could appeal to such diverse clients must have some merit, at least from the point of view of objectivity. I particularly liked the preface to the Arabic translation in which the translator says, “I don’t know who this person is but one thing is clear. He is, from our point of view, either a candid friend or an honest enemy and in any case one who disdains to distort the truth.”
In 1993, thirty years after the delivery of the original lectures, I prepared a revised edition which appeared in 1994 with a new title, The Shaping of the Modern Middle East. It was promptly translated into German and French. During those intervening years, vast changes had taken place in both the world and the region. The Arab states and Israel fought several more wars and Palestinians formed their own organization. Egyptian and Israeli statesmen negotiated and accomplished the first peace treaty between Israel and an Arab state. A revolution in Iran evoked responses all over the Middle East and indeed all over the Islamic world and transformed the region through the emergence of a new regional power and a new Islamic ideology, radical in both its objectives and its methods. Saddam Hussein in Iraq invaded and annexed Kuwait, thus flouting the rules of both inter-Arab and international coexistence, and provoking a massive intervention and involvement of the United States.
A second and more sizable work, The Muslim Discovery of Europe, was first published in 1982. It had however a long prehistory. I had for many years been preoccupied with the idea of looking at relations between Europe and the Middle East from the other side—the same curiosity that brought me to the Middle East in the first place. I set to work to explore what Muslims in the Middle East knew about Europe, where they got their information, how good that information was, and what they thought about Europe—if indeed they thought about Europe at all. I presented my first s
tatement on this topic to the International Congress of Historians in Rome in 1955 and discussed it at greater length in some broadcasts on the BBC, and in a series of public lectures at the Collège de France in 1980. In the book I tried to draw these different threads together and, using Arabic, Persian and Turkish materials, to look at ourselves and at our culture from the outside.
In many of my books I use illustrations to make the subject matter more accessible and more intelligible to the general reader. In two cases, the illustrations were an essential part of my narrative, in Race and Slavery and, still more so, in The Muslim Discovery of Europe. For these, the way in which slaves in the one case and Europeans in the other were portrayed by Muslim artists was of central and obvious importance.
For The Muslim Discovery of Europe I collected thirty pictures, most of them from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, portrayals of European men and women as seen by Middle Eastern, mostly Turkish and Persian, artists. I was eager to have them in color but my American publisher told me that this was quite impossible as it would drive the price per copy to an unacceptable height. He agreed reluctantly to let me have my thirty illustrations, but only in black and white. As the usual sequence of translations began, the situation got worse. The German publisher accepted only eight illustrations, the French publisher none. Then came a moment of utter delight. I received a letter from the Italian publisher saying that he would prefer to have the illustrations in color, did I have prints available? I had some, but not all, and the Italian translation of The Muslim Discovery of Europe had sixteen pictures in color and twelve in black and white. Among other translations, the Persian included twenty-eight pictures in black and white, the Japanese and Indonesian translations included none.
The question arose again with my book Race and Slavery, where I thought it would be interesting and relevant to show how Muslim artists perceived and portrayed their slaves. Here the response filled me with delight. The original English edition, published by the Oxford University Press, contained twenty-four pictures, all in color. All twenty-four reappeared, again in color, in the French translation.
Notes on a Century: Reflections of A Middle East Historian Page 31