Adnan Husain on Reorienting History
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Welcome to the New Books Network. As-salamu alaykum listeners and welcome back to another episode of Radio Reorient. I'm Claudia and with me are my co-hosts Hizza, Saeed and Chella.

We are carrying on with our historical theme for this season in this episode, where Salman Syed and I spoke to Adnan Hussain about the limits of global history. Adnan is Associate Professor of Medieval and Middle Eastern History at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, and his work is on interreligious encounters in the medieval Mediterranean.

The idea of considering history in a global way, beyond national or traditional boundaries, has been growing in popularity for some time now. But there are also those who see the global as a prioritizing of the universal over the particular or the local in a problematic way. And even in the shift towards a global understanding, we risk seeing the Western centricism that the global was supposed to help us avoid being re-inscribed.

Adnan and I have been chatting about this for some time. We have overlapping research interests since we're both trained in the study of the Mediterranean, although he's trained in medieval studies and I'm trained in classical studies. That posed some interesting difficulties as well as gave us some common ground for the conversation. So with all those considerations in mind about the benefits and the risks of a global approach to history, let's listen in.

Hi everyone, assalamu alaikum and welcome to another episode of Radio Reorient. I'm really excited to be here today with Salman Syed.

and Adnan Hussain, and we're going to be having a conversation about the idea of the global and what sorts of work it can do in terms of telling the story of history. Listeners will be aware that this is a season in which we've had a lot to say about history. We've looked at questions of history and its narratives, hegemonic or otherwise, from various different points of view. And we're now going to come to think about this question of the global, global history, and whether it's related to

or not to the question of the decolonial. So Adnan, Assalamu alaikum, welcome. Thanks for joining us. Wa alaikum salam. It's a pleasure to be here with you both. And I wonder whether we could just get started by you maybe introducing your work a little bit to the listeners. And I wonder whether you could tell us how you became interested in this question of the global and other kinds of methods for conceptualizing medieval studies. Could you tell us a little bit about how that interacts with your research? Sure.

Well, I started being interested in medieval history, maybe like a lot of people. I read Arthurian narratives. It seemed like a kind of fantasy. I was interested in fantasy literature, and there's an odd temporality to fantasy literature that almost all of it is situated in a kind of medieval European setting.

Of course, I was also growing up Muslim in the United States, and so I was interested in learning something about Islam.

Muslim history, maybe not Islam, but Muslim history, because that seemed to be a forgotten dimension. And most of the ways in which any narrative I came across about Muslim history was one just of classical efflorescence or even more just the time of the prophet that people focused on and studied. And that suddenly we found ourselves in some kind of decline where we were subject to colonialism,

and so on. So I was interested in trying to learn more about that period, what happened between the colonial subjection and the emergence and birth of this religious transformation. So

I got interested in thinking about the medieval Middle East or Islamic world in relation to the kind of contemporary time in Europe, the medieval sort of era and the medieval period, and why these were so isolated from one another historiographically in the kind of narrative. They weren't really talked about together as sharing any kind of history.

And so gradually in trying to wrestle with the geographic kind of limits of the interests that I had, I thought about something called the Mediterranean, the medieval Mediterranean as a space in which Muslims, Christians, Jews, their culture, societies were in some kind of contact. And how could one conceptualize that space?

And so I came across somebody like Perrin early on and his famous Mahomet de Charlemagne.

and was astonished by how he managed to overturn the narrative of the end of the classical era, not with the fall of Rome to the Germanic invasions, the so-called Germanic invasions and so on, but to the Arab invasions. And he posited that Islam was the temporal breakpoint

that shattered a geographical world and a political unity and a cultural and a social and an economic unity. And what I found very interesting about his work is not just that it was so incredibly Orientalist, but, um, you know, how colonial it was, um, you know, when he was writing and the fact, uh, you know, in the, you know, teens and twenties is when he really developed this thesis. Um, and he was, uh,

you know, somebody who gave his thesis, I mean, remarkably, you know, in a series of lectures that included stops in Algeria and Cairo. And, you know, the French colonial colonists in Algeria, one Fernand Braudel, who happened to be teaching in, you know, a high school in, you know, Algeria, in the French colonial, you know, administered Algeria,

writes in his diary, something that I went and looked up because I was very interested in the Annales school as well, and the global sort of forms of global history. Braudel is well known for writing a massive global history, as well as, of course, his major work on the Mediterranean, you know, in the age of Philip II, landmark works. And he looked back to Perrin as a great source of inspiration,

and heard his talk there and was really inspired by it. And so there was this kind of connection with Mediterranean studies, with, you know, kind of wrestling with pre-modernity and geographies and global history.

And in some ways, Perrin, you know, he inspired somebody like Peter Brown. I mean, Peter Brown, the great late antique scholar of religion and history, you know, he has some very, you know, positive things to say about Perrin attempting at least to do a more global kind of analysis.

So how did one put together the medieval European kind of world and its historiography and the Islamicate world? These were things that I was looking to, but I found a lot of the attempts to do so were reproducing

you know, a colonial approach, a colonial and Eurocentric orientation, even when it was attempting to say, well, we have to get beyond Europe. It was this expansion of Europe kind of discourse. It was this, you know,

kind of way, I felt also, you know, that even in world systems work that tried to kind of have a global sort of approach and to look at the world system, you know, from people like Emanuel Wallerstein and so on, who pioneered this kind of world historical orientation, world history, is that very often I objected to it because it just seemed like it was, you know, you barely had, for example,

In departments of history, people teaching Middle Eastern and Islamic world history, hardly a common – you've got 10 Europeanists in a large department, and you've got one person to teach 1,500 years of history. And the same for East Asia, same for South Asia.

But now all of a sudden there were these world historians who claimed to be doing history of the other world regions and departing from Eurocentrism. But they weren't necessarily retooling the entire curriculum to populate it with people who were serious specialists, who learned the languages, who knew those societies and cultures in an intimate and serious way. And what I imagined I was trying to do was always populate.

in taking a larger or a Mediterranean perspective or possibly a global perspective is fundamentally try and integrate a rich, deep, textured kind of understanding of each society through its own sources in relationship to others and to wrestle with, well, do you do comparison? Do you do contact? What are the implications of how you frame some narrative? And world systems just seem to flatten everything.

within this kind of expansion of a Eurocentric, because the endpoint was always how do we get to the European takeoff and do we have different ways to explain that? So anyway, those were the kinds of things that led me to get into it. Being not an economic historian or really even a social historian, but more cultural, religious, and to some extent political,

I felt that actually is a real minefield because doing – but maybe helpful because materialist history is necessary to establish these conditions. But it also gave people the confidence to just overwhelm, you know, kind of culture and religion and subordinate it to very instrumental kinds of effects that were –

superstructures rather than significant on their own. And all the people who were doing like cultural and political things ended up framing the world in incredibly, you know, awful colonial Eurocentric sorts of ways. So I think that there's a real problem to work with there. I think that's been a, uh, there's a lot to impact. We can spend the rest of the program just to going through all of that, because I think it's been really fantastic that the, um,

the story that you've told so far, from beginnings of, I mean, there are, one of the things that always fascinates me that there's so many scholars of colour or those who identify as that,

who have this fascination early on for speculative fiction of one kind or another, science fiction or fantasy fiction. It's like there's, if I was going to be psychoanalytic about this, you could say, is there a desire to find alternative histories in a way because that's what speculative fiction is there. And this always struck me. So it's great, you know, it's interesting that you bring that up as well. But I think,

the two things that I wanted to focus on. One, we'll talk about the materialist part a little bit later on down the line, because I think that's quite interesting. But before that, you made this really, really important point about your desire to do a global history and a desire to do a global history as a way of trying to escape Eurocentricism. But that kind of seems to me one of the real problems we have in all of these endeavours is that we take

a notion of Eurocentrism as a spatial fixation. And therefore the global is an attempt to move spatially outside the boundaries of what may be Europe. Now that does two things. One, we have the idea that Europe is already constituted, essentially, so it doesn't have a history. So you can escape its borders rather than its borders being a temporal effect as well.

But secondly, how do you escape Eurocentrism where the very idea of the Middle Ages inscribes the European temporality? And I just wondered whether there is an argument here, and I would really love to hear what you and Cella would want to say about these things, that we're stuck with more or less a tripartite division of time, that there is the ancient time,

There is a middle and there's a modern. I mean, more or less, and those schemes can become more or less complicated and fuzzy around the edges. What is this ancient and modern and middle about? And you can see this most problematically when people talk about the Dark Ages, for example, and the Dark Ages of Europe are supposed to be the Dark Ages for the Tang and the Dark Ages for the Muslims. It doesn't make any sense.

So, and people say, you know, so I just wondered whether this structure, this tripartite, this vision is something that perhaps re-inscribes the Eurocentrism, even when we try to escape its spatial contours. And I'll finish with this comment that even someone like Hodgson, who is, I think, incredibly astute and incredibly aware, talks about the middle.

in the same way he preserves that tripartite division of time and i just wanted to whether you and chela want to say anything about why do you you know one of you working right at the beginning and one in the middle um how do you feel about working in this these uh this what is a trilogy of history i think um

Just something I want to point out before I try and answer that question is that what's interesting, the reason I thought it would be interesting to have this conversation with you, Adnan, is that you and I essentially work on the same place or a very similar place. Right. We work on this thing that that gets called the Mediterranean and in the field in which I'm trained, classical studies is.

To call it the Mediterranean is kind of already a sort of sign of good behavior on the part of the classicist, you know, because we're not calling it Greco-Roman or something like that. Right. We're that's already a kind of re-situating of the area that we're interested in away from Greece and Rome. You know, that's to say Athens and Rome often and towards this broader Mediterranean world is the phrase that you will find in very many places.

early kind of geographically expansive projects. And what's kind of interesting about this Mediterranean in actually both of the periods of time that we're interested in is that we are both actually trained in area studies that masquerade already. And this is before we even get onto the rise of the global or the global turn or whatever you want to call it. We are already trained in area studies that masquerade as universals.

Right. When we talk about the ancient Mediterranean, there is this tendency that has existed for a very long time to talk about that as if it were the universal beginnings of the world or at the very least of the West. And that, you know, as you say, Salman, is the kind of manufactured prehistory that Eurocentrism tells about the world. And I think the mistake has been people who.

wanted to unseat that Eurocentrism to understand Eurocentrism as only the privileging of Greece and Rome within the history of the ancient world. That's to say, I think they've they've we've sort of made the mistake of understanding Eurocentrism to be an error that's made in

in the sources that we're studying, rather than something that actually kind of produces, or at the very least co-produces, the idea that there is this thing called Greece and Rome, you know, to begin with. And I've said it so many times on episodes of this podcast, but I have this huge problem with terms like Greco-Roman, because they fabricate a fiction, right? And the problem with that fiction is it becomes a world narrative. It becomes this

that later gets extrapolated onto the rest of the history of the world. But as you rightly pointed out, Salman, this isn't just a geographical problem. It's also a temporal problem. And actually, Adnan, you said this when you brought up Pirenne. And whenever I hear Pirenne, I almost want to kind of put a pan on my head and bang it really hard so that I don't have to hear it might

brain goes, whenever I hear the name Henri Perrin, my brain kind of goes, Perrin and again and again and again, because that, he seems to be kind of a constant feature whether we want him to be or not. And I think you're right, Adnan, to point out that

This is a kind of globalizing, but it's actually a kind of globalizing that shows the precise problem or the precise limit, in my view, of this global history, because Pirenne is sort of happy to extend geographically as long as the distinction between the Mediterranean in which I'm trained, that's to say the so-called classical world, and the Mediterranean in which you're trained, Adnan, that's to say the so-called medieval world, as long as the boundary between those two things is still the coming of Islam.

That's to say, if Islam continues to function as what Edward Said calls an absolute and systemic difference, right, it continues to be inscribed within this absolute and systemic difference with the West. And in a way that then creates this kind of temporal structuring of the world. So in a sense,

I'm not sure whether I would say that we always operate with a tripartite structure. I'm sure that that is true to an extent. The other temporal structure, though, that I think is really very damaging is the idea that there is the ancient and there is the kind of, um,

modern, I suppose I would say, or what gets us towards the modern and the medieval and the early modern function as almost like a kind of runway kind of leading us up to the modern that's differentiated from the ancient. And I think those things are the production of Eurocentrism too. So I guess, you know, to bring this back to the conversation about whether there are limits to global history, what global history can do, what it can't do,

I think I would ask the question, in order for this notion of the global to do any work that we might call decolonial, what would it need to do? And I totally agree with you that one answer is that we would need to do something else about temporality. I think to simply inscribe the global within the existing forms of periodization that we have simply kind of perpetuates the problem. But I don't know what you think, Adnan.

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Well, I mean, I think it's a big question of how to arrange historical periods as units of study, just as geographies of, you know, study.

are big problems. The real issue is, I think, that most of what is patterned, the units that people take, whether it's the nation state or whether it's these temporal kind of boundaries or whether it's you're doing European history and so on, is

you know, are already assumed and they're not really, you know, they're not really developed entirely on the base, uh, basis of the phenomenon and the historical documents and evidence and a sense of let's first take into account what are the kind of genuine units that seem to exist at the time they're, you know, projected back, um, for convenience. And because, uh,

The whole purpose for people studying history is to make it relevant, even if they say that it's objective and that they don't have any interest in, you know, anachronism and so on, is because it means something for us today in how we portray and represent ourselves meaningfully, what kind of units, our political categories, and so on. So because there is an investment in the past for part of how we understand and explain ourselves in the present world,

Um, there is always going to be some kind of, um, and I don't think that's a problem itself. I think it's a problem that has to be dealt with, but I don't think it's wrong that we care about using history for the present. I mean, if it is just an objective study of the past, who cares? You know, I mean, okay, you might have an, an acronym, you know, you might have your antiquarian, as they say, you know, interests in that, but the whole purpose is you want to explain things about the present. Um,

You want to have it be meaningful. Uh, but so much of, um, you know, the, the unit of analysis is taken for granted. So this tripartite, you know, uh, ancient medieval modern is of course a function of European narratives. Um,

it's one that is really more developed perhaps in the 19th century when history becomes a more professional academic study. And with the rise of two things, nation states, um, so, so much of medieval history in like the late 19th and through much of the 20th century was, you know, attempts to explain and understand how does France become France? How does England become England? You know, these, uh, you know, uh,

looks at state formation. And, you know, the other kind of aspect of it was, of course, to justify colonial, you know, empires and European hegemony in the world.

I think a more interesting one was, you know, how to explain the emergence of capitalism or how to conceptualize capitalism, you know, and that's a lot of contested ground. I still think it has some productive things to do. But the other two, you know, really just ruin and undermine, you know, our sense of the past. And this idea of a middle is a projection here.

of European ideas of temporality and narrative. And the medieval is one that is very useful for globalizing

you know, to the non-Western world in modernity, in European modernity. Just like in anthropology, you know, Johannes Fabian and others have done some very interesting work a long time ago now, really about time and coloniality, time and the other, you know, and the way in which anthropology as a discipline required this colonial sense of time.

Other people were outside of history and frozen. They didn't change and so on for all of these kind of colonial era ethnographies. And it's all part of a justification of European hegemony and colonialism. So the global itself doesn't do that much, you know, perhaps to change. It has some consequences and effects to expand the narrative. But if it's just European expansion and Eurocentrism, it's not really a change. So what could we do? I don't really...

have a great solution for how to name the periods. But perhaps we could start thinking about important phenomenon that, like, for example, two plagues. Is the medieval bounded by the Justinian plague and the world that has to recover from its devastations and then the Black

death in the early middle of the 14th century. And that's at least taking these two big cataclysms and saying, well, let's look at events within that after plague, before plague, so on. Another one is climate and looking at these warming trends. Of course, a lot of the data is still not appropriate for

truly globalizing, you know, these, these senses of what's happening in the climate and environmental conditions. But that's a process towards which one could say, well, okay, you know, there are certain kinds of cultural possibilities and state formation and things like that that are happening in

In response to changing weather and famines and material factors like that. And that at least is something then that you can build from that is outside of some of the other ideological narratives. But I'm not, you know, completely satisfied with those. I would love to... Yeah, I'm less...

upset with Hodgson's kind of sense of the middle, because on some level, he's trying to do a comparative framework. I don't think he has any ideological investment in it being the middle. You know, the Islamicate, you know, approach, I think has a lot of potential and benefits. And

And fundamentally, every period is in the middle. It's between what came before and what came after, and even if we're talking about the contemporary, from what is about to come. So the medieval itself is not the problem. What it is is how it's defined and what the ideological investment in characterizing it as between. What is it between? That's really the problem. Well, let me quote Adnan Achyut, just for making it known.

Because the second part of your first remark was about the material and putting a materialist account. So there are two kinds of ways of proceeding on this. One may be, and this is a response to what Sheila and you both said about the uncertainty of this trinity. And, you know, so let's become slightly dualist on this matter, say.

What would we lose and what would we gain if we took a materialist position which was consistent? And what I mean by that is that surely that the only difference is the one between materialism

And let's define modern as simply being the time when you replace one form of energy production like the steam or the replacement of muscle power by energy.

fossil power, let's put it like that, right? And we can say that. And we can make the argument that really there should only be two periods, because if you take someone as a thought experiment, you took a merchant from Samarra or Baghdad in the 9th century, and you make them travel to Londinium in the 3rd century, and Adom and I,

how would they be able to adjust? What would be the things that they would see? Of course, there'd be differences and things like that, but would they be able at a glance to recognize that world? And how would that be different from putting them in outside the Emirates today? And what the differences and the way they would actually feel in relation to all of these things. So if that is the case, if what we're saying is this is the major rupture,

And you could argue that, you know, there is a kind of even the kind of Marxist stages of history that kind of mess up this point because they introduce an Asiatic mode of production. And when was the Asiatic mode of production? When it was forever in some places. Right. But if that is a rupture, what would we lose by, say, putting the three into two? Yeah, what would we lose? Well, we would, you know, kind of lose a lot of politics, I think, because.

and political structures because the variability and variety of political forms would be fundamentally probably not, you know, matter very much. You know, I think religion is another kind of field in which, and this is one of the reasons why I've always been so interested in studying, you know, religion and religious history. And in some ways, that's what the medieval is if you want to do cultural, you know,

kind of cultural terms is, well, partly as, as Cello was saying, you know, it's when Islam arrives for people like Peren and others. And for others, it's when Christendom, you know, actually really emerges, you know, I mean, it's basically, okay. Um,

You've now got Christian empire and you have Muslim empire. And it's not just kind of the theological dimension of these religions. You know, Garth Fowden, you know, has an interesting point.

book, now 20, 30 years ago, years old, Empire to Commonwealth, the consequences of monotheism. And he makes a sort of anti-Pyrennian, but it's sort of along the same lines of looking at, you know, kind of big sort of history of the Mediterranean world on some level. And he says, okay, well, it's

It's it's really the Western Mediterranean doesn't matter very much. So forget about a Mediterranean world. What it is, is really Iranian highlands, you know, an Iranian plateau to, you know, the Eastern Mediterranean. You know, that's that's the world that matters for these people.

And you have kind of different forms of political governance, different kinds of empire, but something changes when you have monotheism and this form of religion changes.

And, you know, what I would say is that it's really about confessional empire. It's not just about monotheism, but it's about the relationship between these two things. It's not really so much a theological question of monotheism, but it's actually what happens when you yoke universalist sorts of political ideologies and structures to universalist kind of religion. And that that's something that's sort of transformative, right?

in some ways. And so maybe that's the integrity of a medieval period, which we don't have to call medieval, would be something like the age of

confessional empires and their aftermath because they don't actually last that long. And then there's some consequences for how they kind of break apart. Um, so that's kind of, you know, one other way of integrating, you know, politics and culture in a different way. Um, and I think that sort of thing is lost when you only look at the materialist conditions of either climate and, uh, technology, um,

So that's one thing I think that could be lost, is meaningful structures of culture and politics that have a kind of integrity and coherence if you look at the phenomena themselves. So that's just a quick reaction to a good question.

Some people also point out that world demography is another way. There's like basically before the period you're talking about is world demography stays fairly stable. It doesn't change that much in relative terms and that suddenly with industrialization, there are conditions that allow explosion of population and that even now the –

That era seems to be over, and we're having more of a stabilization again, and we may be entering – a lot of people say we're outside of – the industrial age is over, and now we're in some other techno-feudalism or whatever, as Yanis Varoufakis has it. So one could say that that is an important –

But I think then you lose some of the texture of these other intervening quasi super, super structural, as people want to say. But I think they're very important to history. You kind of meta observations on history.

Kind of both the question and the answer, actually, that we've just been dealing with. The first is to do with the nature or the structure of the conversation that we're having here, which is kind of about it's a series of historiographic wages. Right. If we conceptualize history this way, what happens? Right. It's a kind of.

It's almost like, I don't know, a version of Mornington Crescent or something. It's a kind of speculative fiction game where we have to put the blocks in a row. And the way that you organize the blocks kind of depends on what story you're going to tell, who's going to come to power, what the world is going to be like that you're going to justify with that story. We're then responding to that question.

is what I would call historical rather than historiographic, right? So I'm saying it's a historiographic question insofar as it's about how the writing of history, right? Graphene is the Greek word for to write, historiography,

being about how we write history. So we're asking a historiographic question and we're answering it in a kind of historical way. We're sort of saying, well, what would the techniques of the historian need to be that would come to the fore? Would they be materialist? Would they be social? Would they be religious? Would they be demographic, you know, population focused? And thinking about the way that

And I guess maybe just because I'm coming at this as probably more of a literary historian than a material historian or a social historian, although I don't think for a moment that those things are disconnected. And I'm thinking about the way that

In something like world literature, which is, after all, the place that has been through all of this before, right, has tried the global turn and has now kind of realized that it doesn't really work. The conversation has often revolved around the question, will we be able to deal with a universal model?

or is there something at stake in the particular? I'm thinking of something like Emily Apter's Against World Literature, which is a book that's about 10 years old now, right? I think it's 2013, that book. You know, the subtitle is something like On the Politics of Untranslatability. And the point that she's making, I think, is that there are things that don't translate, right? There are particulars that aren't universal. To answer the question that way,

as in to say, well, if we frame history this way, then we would understand the following material social historical process in a different way. That seems to me to be about a focus on the history more than the historiography. And that brings me to the second kind of meta observation I want to make, which is something that has always

interested me, troubled me, bothered me, maybe all of those things at the same time, which is that people are on the whole. And when I say people, I mean not necessarily professional historians, right? People who have an investment in history. People are on the whole,

much more interested or much more capable of taking on the critique of the coloniality of space than they are of taking on the critique of the coloniality of time. If you look at the explosion in global history, and I don't just mean, I'm thinking specifically of the ancient world, although it's not limited to the ancient world, I don't just mean, you know, the works of specialists, things like Jack Bromberg's Global Classics or, you know, books like A Global History of the Ancient World, Globalizations in the Ancient World. There are these specialist books.

But there also are, you know, increasingly books that are public history books about the ancient world. I'm thinking of Joe Quinn's How the World Made the West. I'm thinking of Michael Scott's Ancient Worlds, for instance. It seems that the public will very readily buy books where the wager is, what if history wasn't national but global? But what the public won't buy, or at least perhaps the public haven't had the opportunity to buy, is that same shift of

that has been made with regard to space in regard to time, right? I don't think, even though we know, you know, there's similar academic literature. We could look at something like, you know, Giordano Nanni's book about the coloniality of clock time, where he says, my favorite quote from that book is where he says, clocks do not keep the time, but a time, specifically the time culture for building empires.

And so we sort of know that the same thing is true of time. We can have those conversations where we historicize the conferences at which the time zones were drawn up. And we can look at the fact that, you know, the Global South, what we would later call the Global South, was not represented at those conferences. So they ended up kind of shunted to the bottom of the time warp, as it were.

We can have that same conversation, but we struggle to convince people of that same conversation in the same way that we can relatively easily, it seems, now convince them about space. If you were to say, well, history isn't a story of progress or history doesn't go from the past to the present to the future or history doesn't go from ancient to medieval to modern or even from ancient to modern, I think people would struggle with that much, much more. And I wonder whether part of that is...

obviously everything to do with the way that your centrism has structured the world that we've talked about. But I wonder whether part of that is because it would mean saying something different about Islam and Islamic history. It would mean not it would mean dispensing with this idea that Muslims are somehow outside of history or at least outside of the formative history of the modern world. It would mean, I think.

taking Muslimness seriously as a category of historiographical inquiry and not simply as this kind of

unfortunate add-on that comes to the world later in modernity. So for me, historiographically speaking, I know you said, Salman, what would we lose if we re-periodized the world in that way? I'm thinking also about what we would gain. And I think what we would gain is the need to take Muslimness historiographically much more seriously.

Just to proclaim my innocence again, the question I asked was not necessarily a question that I believed in. It was a provocative question rather than one that was announcing that we should do this. So I just want to make that clear. But I think the substantive point that you've made, Sheila, I think is perhaps it goes back to what Adnan started off by saying.

Maybe the appetite for a history and history books sell really, really, the only academic discipline that sells across the board in a way. But it's a certain type of history that sells a large over representation of military history, for example, compared to what the discipline does and what it does.

But I wonder whether it should be seen as a branch of speculative fiction again, because what history sells is the history that you also find either through science fiction or through fantasy fiction in a way. It gives you a vision of a different world. And I think the point that you made about a vision of a different world flattens our time in a sense that I think you're quite right, that it is very difficult to think outside those temporal framings.

And I think there may be a very kind of interesting reason to explore that. But when you get these nuggets and say, well, this is the history of the Hawaiian islands, for example, this simply could be this is the history of the planet Hawaii in faraway space. And they do these things. That would be it. It would be a show. It would be that. So I think there is a sense in which history both.

historically has worked as a public discourse around how people understand the world and how princes understood the world and how the pretenders to princes understood the world and now how the public understands the world. And I think that's really, really important in a way. And I think you're quite right. There is an expansion or contraction around the spatial contours of this

but less so around the temporal contours of that, because they were deeply, deeply problematic in the way that we construct not just the now, but the now is so imbricated, the Eurocentric now is so imbricated in a temporal sequence that cannot really be interrupted by, for example, the notion of Muslimness as a historiographical concept.

inquiry or intervention rather than a historical intervention. And even when we try to interrupt it geographically, we often find it's almost like a kind of species of shadow boxing in a way. We often find that what you see or what you're enabled to see

because you're still looking through that mirror of Eurocentrism, sometimes because you have no choice, other times because you simply don't have, you haven't yet theorized the methods to have a choice. What we sometimes see is more like the projection of Eurocentrism onto something else, you know, onto something that's positioned outside of Europe than it is anything that we could describe as kind of anti-Eurocentric or decolonial or critical, right?

And I'm thinking about, you know, all of those projects that try and respond to the overprivileging of Greece and Rome by saying, OK, well, we're going to start with Persia instead, or we're going to start with Byblos instead, or we're going to start with, you know, wherever it is, we're going to start in ancient Afghanistan or ancient India or any of those things instead. But then it's partly a problem of training, right? Who does that work? And often we end up

with an imaginary, so it's not just the historians, but also the imaginary that's trained on the classical, such that we sort of end up seeing either the opposite of the Greek and Roman reflected in the other, right, that's positioned as the other, or we end up seeing what we expect to find from Greek and Roman texts reflected in these cultures that we're trying to study. So it's like a kind of shadowboxing with Greek and Roman texts, you sort of end up

What it makes you good at is better defining the contours of the classical, but it doesn't actually show you all of that much about the rest of the ancient world. So I think, you know, that there is this this kind of problem of ending up kind of doubling down on the Eurocentrism by by wanting to displace it. I think that that's a serious risk here.

Well, this is really interesting. It's going to cause me to think a lot about the relationship between the period or the societies and cultures and so on that I study in the contemporary. And I'll just say that, you know, one of the things that's been so destabilizing of those sorts of narratives in a way over the last couple of decades has been how much the

The contemporary world's, you know, Islamophobia, global war on terrorism, all of this just struck me as medieval discourse. And there was no way to sort of think how these are linked. And even as I'm now in the midst of trying to write something about the emergence of

anti-Muslim kind of ideas and bigotry, its connection with anti-Jewish, you know, proto-antisemitism and so on as fundamental to an order that's developed in Latin Christendom. As much as I'm working on that,

I want to kind of say, well, clearly it's, you know, what we see happening now and the recovery and the neo-medievalism, there's clearly some kind of connection. But as a historian, you're trained and prevented from putting those two in direct conversation because, well, there's all that time that happened before, you know, between those two. And can you link and say that, you know, you have to be specific in your situating it within a temporality, right?

that tends to push these things apart because that was medieval. And of course, society was so different then. And now we're dealing, you know, we're in the modern contemporary world and there's so many different other kinds of factors and consequences and so on. And yet there is a certain kind of atemporal way in which

one's thinking is really assisted by looking at these things together. So the question is, is what kinds of narratives, what kinds of causality, because that's the real problem for history and the temporality is that you're making causal claims by situating things before or after in an argument, you know? So how does one do it responsibly that doesn't overcome like all the many, many factors and differences and unique situations in which, you know,

you know, politics happens and so forth, but still recognize something important happening that tells us about the world we're living in without it being, you know, just a kind of unfolding over time of this narrative. So that's one kind of genuine thing to wrestle with for me in, you know, how can one go about integrating this? What kind of temporality, what kind of narrative

what kind of claims or not about causality while still wanting to say, hey, you've got to pay attention to this because we're still living with the consequences of these sorts of ideas and processes from a previous time that have become very foundational and fundamental. We can ask, what is it doing today? What did it do then? And why can it seem to be doing a lot of the same sorts of things? So that's...

an interesting area that this conversation has caused me to think about. The other thing I want to say about temporality is that there are lots of other different narratives. I mean, they are still kind of progress in time, but they're rather different. And I think we're dealing with that actually

in our age of climate crisis, in our age of the breakdown of, you know, any sense of liberal order and values that made sense of the post, you know, kind of World War II geopolitical condition and so on, is apocalyptic time, messianic time. Look at what's happening. You know, like there are clearly a lot of people who are invested not in a secular time of, you

you know, progress or historical change along these different eras. They're living in a time of before the rapture, before the apocalypse, before the messianic era, before the Mahdi, before, you know, there's clearly also an alternative kind of way of arranging history that is a kind of salvation history that operates along slightly, well, not slightly, rather different kinds of, um,

markers and factors that I think is also interesting. I don't know if, you know, well, even Marxism was a kind of messianic, I mean, sort of

kind of sense. It was built on a more progressivist, materialist historical causation, but, you know, the mind of God is less subject to that, so it could just be now we've disgusted God, you know, so much that he's going to bring about the apocalypse and the end or whatever transformation. So there's a totally different potential logic, but this structure is similar, that that's also another way of organizing history and time, and

that, you know, as I say, I don't know how productive it is, but it's clearly operating. It's out there. And that gives us a sense that there are different ways to arrange our sense of the flow of history and the flow of time. And, you know, even

Islamic history, if we're talking about Eurocentric kinds of ideas, there are chronicles and chronicle time. And people have looked at the very interesting phenomena of world histories, or at least things that claim to be world histories. And Islamicate societies in the 8th, 9th, 10th centuries produced quite a lot of them. And then another sort of era producing them in the kind of

you know, Mongol era and so on, you have the, which is interesting, and I'd love to talk more about that. Maybe I will at an upcoming Caliphate conference. But they constructed, these writers, historians, they constructed a kind of idea of situating the Muslim polities in

in some kind of broader scheme, some of which borrowed on these translatio studi ideas that, you know, there were dispensations and now is the dispensation of

the Muslim sort of era, and we've gained the knowledge of the Greeks. You know, Jahez talks about, well, you know, we're the real inheritors of the Greeks, not you Byzantines. You guys have, you know, gone into this, you know, religious fundamentalism with your, you know, iconoclasm and suppression of dissidents. We're, you know, we're the ones who really know and understand that we're carrying culture forward. You know, you have these different narratives, but the fundamental one

That's so important and it patterns a lot of Muslim thinking and contemporary thought, you know, since that time is about the era of Islam and the Jahiliyyah. You know, there's the age of ignorance and then there's an age of, you know, newer enlightenment, right?

And so many, I've become interested. I never wanted to work on this sort of early history because everybody was just interested in the time of the prophet, era of the prophet as part of religious discourse. And I thought we're missing kind of what the reality of Muslim experience was and what we could learn from it. And I always loved that about Marshall Hodgson, that there was continuity, you know, Islam. And this is what I always do in my own, you know, intro history, you know, of the Islamic world course is,

pose this to two narratives. One is a radical change, and actually the Islamic sources kind of go along with this, of saying there was a radical religious revolution that led to

political transformation and the rise of these Muslim empires, the caliphate and so on. And what was passed was rejected and changed. And you have Arabic, Quran, and a displacement of the previous. There was conversion and the, you know, people changed their religion. They changed everything about themselves and they became Muslims by adopting this fully formed, you know,

you know, integrated religion that emerged, you know, in Arabia. And then Hodgson's perspective is,

Well, people became Muslims, but that didn't mean that everything changed. I mean, in fact, the kind of Islam that develops in the classical age is very much in continuity with the cultural and political and religious matrix of the Near East and that a lot of the horizons of what it meant to be part of a religious community do emerge from Islam.

you know, kind of this sort of synthesis. You know, it's not that some people came from the Arabian Peninsula and then conquered and imposed this

this big, huge radical change, but that, you know, there's some kind of formation of Islam. And this is, of course, very counter to the Jahiliyyah kind of story itself. I never was interested because I always thought, well, Hodgson is right. What we really need to study is what Islam becomes and see it as continuing to evolve and

But that's still already presumed that there weren't a lot of very important changes and developments taking place in the Arabian Peninsula before the moment that we identify historically as the coming of Islam.

There's been some new work in this period that says, you know, the Jahiliyyah was not so dark. I mean, it wasn't so ignorant. There was, you know, kind of monotheistic religious culture there. And, you know, it's a more complex than story. So what we're dealing with as Muslims is we also have to find a way in which Muslimness can be grounded in

in all of these periods of history as authentic, as developing, and not be so, it seems to me,

defensive about the framing of our own historical narratives. Of course, there's Orientalism. Of course, they've done so much damage. So this is not to blunt the critique there and the rethinking. But we also have to understand that a critical Muslim studies approach, I think, to Islamicate history would be one that could integrate some sense that

Islam and Muslimness, you know, it has meant different things in an authentic way. It's always construction, creation of worlds by using tools and materials that you have from the past, and that's the only, it seems to me, hope for rewriting Muslim history in such a way that we give ourselves a genuine contemporary kind of

a history and an identity that isn't just subject to the polemics of Eurocentrism and also, of course, you know, some sense of a genuine Muslim future. I think it was really interesting, Adnan, that you started there by, before you kind of let John of Patmos and the apocalyptic kind of come into the room, you started with, you know,

the idea of global Islamophobia and the way that that becomes a pattern for history. And I want to, we do need to wrap up in a moment, but I want to just very quickly make the connection between where you started and where you finished, right? Because I think where you're kind of getting to or where you've got to in your work is similar to where I've got to in my work, except the difference for me is that in my work, historically speaking, there aren't Muslims yet.

right? Whereas in your world, you can talk about Muslimness if you want to as a social category, as a category of experience, as a religious category. Some people would talk about it in that way. You've got all of these options. For me, you know, in my Mediterranean, as opposed to your Mediterranean, all of those options don't exist. But there is an option that I do think exists. I think if we think about this Eurocentric patterning of history,

the tripartite temporality, the Pirenne split, you know, between my Mediterranean characterized by being a glorified world without Muslims, your Mediterranean characterized by being the world into which Muslims enter and change everything. If we think about the temporality that way, then I think we could

call it a kind of historiographical Islamophobia because it's about trying to pattern a world history where Muslims are an interruption where they're in opposition where they cause problems for what is otherwise a kind of happy ethno-nationalist history of the world where we are Europeans because the Greeks and Romans were Greeks and Romans and the problem with that

Well, I guess what you're saying at the end there, when you come to Islamicate histories, is the way that Islamicate histories, because they're positioned outside of that normative narrative of history, contain within them some of the tools that we can use to unpick that Eurocentric history. And for me, I think the difference is that for me, in my kind of pre-Muslim world,

For me, that Muslimness is not so much a religious or social material, a lived category as an epistemological category. It's not possible for me to talk about Muslims in ancient history, but it is possible for me to talk about Muslim ancient history. That's to say, ancient history that is patterned using some of those methods that we might find in that Islamicate history that is outside the boundaries of this Eurocentric historical narrative that we're talking about.

And I want to just say quickly what I think the stakes are here, because I think they're enormously, enormously high in the present. Because that history that Europe told itself, i.e. that Europeans were European and better than everyone else because they were closer to Greece and Rome than everyone else. They were literally, you know, the descendants of the Greeks and the Romans. That's the story on which Europe took its foundation here.

that same story that we might call ethno-nationalism, right? The idea that you are a nation because you're connected by blood, by lineage, by descent with these glorified ancestors.

That same story seems to me to be the historiographical narrative that underlines so many genocides and violences against Muslims in the present. You know, we could talk about Tel Aviv's genocide against the Palestinians. We could talk about the Chinese government's genocide of the Uyghurs. We could talk about India's violence against Muslim minorities. And a lot of those narratives are.

are in fact historiographical. They tell a story that Muslims come late to history and because they come late, they have no ancient claim to the idea of nation, so they can be excluded, right? And where that ends is genocide. When you're talking about trying to exclude a group, a racialized group,

from a nation the only end for that is is you know to get rid of that group and so when we're talking about these historiographical narratives this is not kind of mere abstraction this is not uh mere philosophy i almost want to say it's not just academic i'm always surprised at the way people we are all three of us academics but we use the word academic to mean kind of esoteric and useless at the same time right but this is not mere abstraction these are

real problems, this historiographical narrative that we're talking about continues to cause real problems in the present. I think that's where we have to stop. I wish we had more time. There's so much more to unpack. These sorts of questions

particularly as they pertain to global Islamophobia, historiographical Islamophobia, questions of Muslim history, Muslim time, Muslim geographies are things that, inshallah, we'll continue to unpack on Radio Reorient across the rest of this series and no doubt, inshallah, many series to come. But let me say to both of you, Adnan and Salman, thank you so much for what for me has been a really, really interesting conversation.

And thank you as well to all of our listeners for listening. We hope we'll see you again on another episode of Radio Reorient. As-salamu alaykum from Salman. As-salamu alaykum from Adnan. It was a pleasure. Thanks so much. As-salamu alaykum, listeners. This is Radio Reorient, the decolonial podcast in partnership with the New Books Network. How should we study the things that we study after the critique of Orientalism? You're listening to Radio Reorient, exploring the Islamosphere and navigating the post-Western.

Now, let's discuss what we've heard with... Hizamir. Jella Ward. Saeed Khan. And Claudia Radovan. I really enjoyed the discussion that was occurring between you, Jella, and Salman and Adnan, because I grapple with this question about Muslim history a lot as a historian. I always wonder that do Muslims do themselves a disservice by focusing on a very limited period of Muslim history and

and making it a theological history, which then somehow the other inadvertently becomes a mythological history. And we then divorce ourselves from the reality and the practical lessons that history is supposed to teach us. You mentioned Tabari in your discussion, and many people are unfamiliar that Tabari laid nothing to be considered ambiguous. There are stories of

the companions of the Prophet, peace be upon him, pulling beards and having arguments, being very real human beings. And we tend to sort of shy away from that. I also wonder, ironically, that as we look at Western history, there is the whole notion of the Hegelian end of history.

And did the end of history come to Muslims fairly early? For some, it would be the end of the califal period in 661. For others, it would be after the trauma of Karbala. And perhaps

Also important to ask the question, do we live outside history? And this, of course, doesn't even get into the issue about the absences, women in Muslim history. I always like to tell my students that somehow or the other, there's a gap of the women's presence from Umm al-Qulsum, the daughter of the Prophet, peace be upon him, to Umm al-Qulsum, the great Egyptian singer. So what then are the challenges do we face then as Muslims to become more authentic about the authenticity of our history?

So I think this actually links back quite nicely to an episode that I think yourself did, Saeed, with Salman, with Laurie Silvers.

and we had a post chat about this as well we spoke about social history and how we can bring that into our understanding of the islamic and i think you know what you were saying just now about you know the realities of the situation and that debris doesn't shy away from showing the debates between the companions and stuff like this i think that would be something which we could maybe bring in from that kind of side that you know actually focusing more on the social histories as was done in the past rather than simply

giving more of an intellectual history. So for example, Ghazali said this and then Ibn Rushd replied to him and then it was taken up by the Renaissance friars in Italy. That doesn't really tell us about the reality of it's just an intellectual history. The second thing I wanted to pick up on actually, and I wasn't going to do this, but you've mentioned it, so I think is where you spoke about this idea of decline in history. Now in my own work, I've written about this quite a bit and

It's fascinating to see that whenever with decline comes rupture, and obviously the most famous one and the one that most people in the Islamicate would subscribe to would be the one between what we call modernism and traditionalism. So up until colonialism came about, we had traditionalism and then we had modernism. And obviously this has now been read back into Islamicate history. So, for example, there's various works which will describe the Muttazili as modernist.

which makes no sense whatsoever if you think about it. So I think there's a few challenges and issues there that need to be worked out. I think you're right, Hiza, to ask the question, what kind of history do we do when we talk about these kind of big narratives of history? I think we also have to ask the question, and I think this is where in the conversation with Salman and Adnan, this is kind of where we got to. We also have to ask the question, how do we do history, right? What does it actually mean to do history historically?

because for a long time I think people thought that what it meant to do history was just kind of putting putting facts in a row right is it the history boys that has the quote history is just one thing after another I won't say the other word that comes in that quotation because it's a bit rude but history is just one thing after another you know was for a long time the way that we understood history as this kind of positivistic method of knowing what has happened um and and

that it's for that reason that the question how do we do history has to be important to the project of reorienting right to the reorient project because we're not just talking about you know how do we do better positivistic history as in you know we need to know the social history of the islamicate as well as we know its religious history or its um

intellectual history or whatever else we might want to call that history. We're also talking about the fact that how we do history needs to be really drastically different. And that's why we ended up kind of talking about

Tabari and those sorts of Muslim historiographers using there the word historiographer rather than historian to indicate that these are people who were very much aware that they were doing a writing of history. They were telling a narrative just as Eurocentric historiographers were also always telling a narrative, but claimed to be having some kind of access to to extra discursive truth, which, of course, we know doesn't exist anymore.

So I think within something like Tabari is a whole series of methodological questions about how we do history that are actually really interesting. The interesting thing that everybody who's who's even opened the first volume of Tabari will know instantly is that Tabari's history is not human history. Right. It begins before humans begin.

And so that then asks a really interesting question. If you start your history before creation, then what are your historical periods going to be? What are the objects of your study going to be? How are you going to organize knowledge? And those questions about organizing knowledge

matter not just for thinking about Muslim history, although they do matter for thinking about Muslim history. They also matter for making that connection between reorienting and the decolonial, or that's to say between the Muslim and the decolonial, because they ask questions about how we unsettle

that colonial narrative of history and how doing Muslim history can unsettle that narrative, not just because it's a kind of particular history in a kind of provincialising Europe type sense. It's not really that at all. It's not about, you know, doing the particular rather than doing the universal. It's actually about being...

being able to go back to the methods and ask, well, how do we do history? Do we need to talk only about human history? Or if we don't talk about human history, how else do we frame the world? And doing that, having different beginning points, you know, rather than believing in these kinds of universal origins. And as you said, these kind of notions of rupture that we sort of accept as if they were natural to the history of the world, where in fact they're discursively produced. I think that's the point you were trying to make. And the big one for me in my book

discipline, or at least in the discipline in which I'm trained, which is classical studies, is the idea that, you know, the fall of Rome comes with the rise of Islam. That's the big rupture on which is then patterned all kinds of Islamophobic world narratives of which, you know, Huntington's clash of civilisations, Bernard Lewis's clash of civilisations is probably the most famous one.

So Muslim history, Muslim historiography of this kind gives us the opportunity to ask those how questions that allow us to question the discursive production of historical narratives, I think, in a decolonial way.

I think that sort of draws on another really important point, and it's something we've discussed in some of the other episodes when we're talking about decoloniality and what it means. When we're talking about global histories and how this can contribute to decolonising and reorienting and being mindful, as you say, not to fall into that trap of repeating those discursive

practices that replicate the kind of Eurocentric practices of investigating histories that we've seen and also to the discussions around what decoloniality actually means and making sure that we're not just adding to a reading list that, you know, now that we've added a couple of books that constitutes decolonising the curriculum and so on. So I think that draws on a number of other important points that we've been investigating throughout these series as well.

Well, one of the things, I mean, Cella, that you were mentioning about the way that Western historians deployed their Eurocentrism, which creates a very distinct contrast from Muslim historians, is that Muslim historians did not, to the best of my knowledge, exoticize, eroticize, fantasize or fictionalize the rest of the world.

And so here we find then that one of the projects of decolonialization then can occur perhaps more easily if we stay away from those kinds of distorted lenses as a model. I think that's a really interesting point, and I think it kind of draws on some of the bigger theoretical underpinnings of the Reorient project as well. I mean, we talk often about the question of Edward Said's Orientalism and

I think one of the questions that you could usefully ask as you're doing that project of reorienting, you know, is the question, how do we do the things that we do after the critique of Orientalism? And here we're sort of asking, how do you do world history after the critique of Orientalism? And one of the ways that one of the very famous ways that that

Edward Said's Orientalism, his critique of Orientalism was debunked or sort of attempted to be debunked by those who were quite enamored of Eurocentrism and didn't like his critique of Orientalism, was by people who tried to say that there was also this thing called Occidentalism, right? Or in other words, they tried to say, well, it's not just that the West misrepresents the East, it's actually that the East also misrepresents the West, right? There's an equal and opposite reaction between

people misrepresent their others and that's just the way that it is in the world. But that, of course, what that didn't do was read power in any kind of sensible way, right? That's a reading that is fundamentally naive about power and also doesn't understand the way that Orientalism comes about through a process of imperialism, too. It's not kind of

just a critique that anybody could make of anybody else kind of thing. So I think that's another important thing that thinking about world history can do is it can ask those questions about what do we do with this critique of Orientalism and how do we not simply bat it away in the way that those who argued for Oriental, for Occidentalism tried to do, but make it a kind of meaningful methodological part of how we do that historiography and how we tell the history of the world. But that seems to me like something that we're going to be returning to

hundreds and hundreds of times over the course of this series where we're thinking in particular about the question of reorienting history and how history, histories, historiography relates to the Reorient project. So maybe inshallah we'll come back to that another time and maybe we'll just say before we finish then thank you listeners ever so much for being with us for this episode and inshallah we hope to see you soon for another episode of Radio Reorient.