Prospects for a New Idiom for Islamic History

Abstract

This chapter reflects on the positivistic treatment of medieval ‘histories’ written in Muslim contexts, which often ignore their significance as pieces of rhetoric. This is a product both of an emphasis on philology in training and a wish to make essentialised generalisations about Islam to communicate to policy makers. A corrective is offered here in recognising the Sunni bias of many of the sources for canonical understandings of Islamic history and recognising that Islam is a discursive field and a product of the choices of historians, rather than having an essence that precedes our texts.

State of the Field: Histories of the Future

“…Exploring the long stretch of time between Muhammad and today, using historical texts, literature, art and architecture, music videos and almanacs, to name but a few of his sources, and taking examples from the global Muslim world, Bashir's A New Vision for Islamic Pasts and Futures provides a pluritemporal image of Islamic history in the form of a web and goes against western attempts to 'timeline' this history. 126 Studies such as Bashir's show how we can overcome the still Eurocentric frame of histories of the future. A more gendered approach in histories of the future is a worthwhile pursuit too.…”

Languages of din: Place, history, and paths

“…This tension – between ‘internal’ and ‘external’ perspectives – is not unique to our discipline; nor is it something that can be adequately discussed here. But reading Sidaway's contribution, I was reminded of Shahzad Bashir's recent project, A New Vision for Islamic Pasts and Futures (2022). There, Bashir refuses to privilege between ‘Muslim’ and ‘non-Muslim’ ways of knowing Islam, arguing instead ‘that Islam is made by Muslims and non-Muslims alike’.…”

“…There, Bashir refuses to privilege between ‘Muslim’ and ‘non-Muslim’ ways of knowing Islam, arguing instead ‘that Islam is made by Muslims and non-Muslims alike’. The digital project – a constellation of different essays open to many possible figurations – thus seeks to make visible an argument that Islam ‘is represented best by positing links that come into being and dissolve rather than as a system amenable to mapping’ (Bashir, 2022: Introduction). Perhaps a critical Muslim geographies might be imagined in a similar spirit: neither only critical geographies produced by self-identified Muslim scholars nor just reflexive geographies about Muslims produced by scholars who don’t necessarily identify as Muslim but as a case of both/and, formed through links and partnerships that are woven into a tradition of Islam without insisting on a single form.…”