Theme Issue 57

Islamic Pasts: Histories, Concepts, Interventions

Edited by Shahzad Bashir

Cover image: A city under Mongol siege, from the illuminated manuscript of Rashid ad-Din's Jami al-Tawarikh (ca. 1307)

+ SHAHZAD BASHIR, Introduction, History and Theory, Theme Issue 57 (December 2019), 3-6.

No abstract.

+ RIAN THUM, What is Islamic History? History and Theory, Theme Issue 57 (December 2019), 7-19.

Efforts to define the concepts “Islam” and “history” have separately engendered rich debates with long intellectual genealogies. Both debates serve as a foundation for this essay's attempt to delimit the subject of “Islamic history.” However, the essay also argues that a close examination of the interaction between the two categories offers its own insights. Chief among these is the argument that a reliance on subjects’ self‐ascription as “Muslims” for definitions of “Muslim” and “Islamic” is far more than the empty or “nominal” approach that some critics have described. Rather, Islamic self‐ascription is historically entangled, both an artifact of historical processes and an evocation of them, even an integral element of the phenomenon it seeks to define. The essay begins with an evaluation of the “islams not Islam” approach to defining the Islamic, rooting the argument not only in self‐ascription—a common social‐science tool for category definition and boundary making—but also in Islamic historical traditions themselves. It then demonstrates this historical rootedness through an unusually difficult test case: Chinese‐language Islams that eschewed the words “Islam” and “Muslim.” After proposing a definition of “Islamic history,” one that is particularly open and expansive, the article outlines some common characteristics of Islamic history across its many forms, asking what makes it distinct and where it can contribute to a global comparative historiography. Finally, it argues that when we generalize about these traditions, describing the features most widely shared among them, we find an Islamic history that reflects and substantiates the centrality of self‐ascription in delineating the scope of Islam.

+ JUDITH PFEIFFER, In the Folds of Time: Rashīd Al‐Dīn on Theories of Historicity, History and Theory, Theme Issue 57 (December 2019), 20-42.

By focusing on Rashīd al‐Dīn's (d. 718/1318) historiographical oeuvre and here in particular his “History of the World,” this article challenges the usual approach to his Jāmiʿ al‐tawārīkh (Compendium of Chronicles) and argues that his was a deeply pluralistic enterprise in a world with many centers, tremendous demographic change, high social mobility, and constantly shifting truth‐claims in an ever expanding cosmos, to which Rashīd al‐Dīn's method, language, and the shape of his history were perfectly adaptable. This article introduces the notion of “parallel pasts” to account for Rashīd al‐Dīn's method. By placing the Jāmiʿ al‐tawārīkh and its author in their historical and intellectual context, this article also argues that this method is not restricted to Rashīd al‐Dīn's historiography: His historiographical work ought to be seen as part of his larger theological and philosophical oeuvre into which the author placed it consciously and explicitly, an oeuvre that is, like Rashīd al‐Dīn's historiography, pluralist at heart, and that could be as easily classified as “theology” or “philosophy” as “historiography.”

+ KAYA ŞAHİN, To Observe, to Record, to Depict: Memorializing the Circumcision of an Ottoman Prince, c. 1582–c. 1600, History and Theory, Theme Issue 57 (December 2019), 43-67.

A circumcision celebration in the summer of 1582, organized by the Ottoman ruler Murād III (r. 1574–1595) for his son Meḥmed, is one of the most extensively recorded events in early modern Ottoman history. Contemporary and near‐contemporary testimonies include archival sources, odes, event‐based narratives, illustrated accounts, passages in regnal and universal histories, and several descriptions by European observers. The celebration occurred amid tensions fueled by ongoing warfare, rising prices, elite factionalism, and apocalyptic anxieties. It also coincided with a time of exceptional cultural productivity at the Ottoman palace and among the Ottoman literati. This article discusses the celebration's treatment in event‐based narratives, illustrated accounts, and regnal and universal histories from the period, to emphasize the multiplicity of approaches to the writing and recording of history. Ottoman works of a historical nature defy easy categorizations such as official history or court history; they also blur compartmentalized notions of history, art history, and literature that emerged in the nineteenth century. Ottoman historical writing, like any other historical tradition, was closer to a meeting ground, where authors and patrons gathered and competed, than a common ground where consent and hegemony were supposedly produced. Authorial agency was crucial in creating demand, fostering competition, and building reputation; moreover, authors and patrons had to negotiate a multiplicity of languages, linguistic registers, styles, and techniques, some of which had been bequeathed by past generations, whereas others had been invented or reinvented recently.

+ DANA SAJDI, Reclaiming Damascus: Rescripting Islamic Time and Space in the Sixteenth Century, History and Theory, Theme Issue 57 (December 2019), 68-85.

Disconnected from the original place and time of Islam and its own glorious early‐Islamic history, medieval Damascus felt like a temporally and spatially distant city. Through participating in newer hadith practices that facilitated the compression of time, Damascene scholars were able to diminish temporal distance to be closer to the Prophet. They also devised new spatial descriptions that enabled them to redefine space so that it could be easily occupied and revalued. Having inherited traditions of both the later hadith practices and the newer spatial discourses, the sixteenth‐century Damascene scholar, Shams al‐Din Ibn Tulun (d. 1546) combines them to provide chronotopic solutions to address personal and collective voids precipitated by Damascene distance, which were further intensified by the new Ottoman condition. Ibn Tulun locates the Prophet in the crevices of Damascus and allows himself and the Damascenes to be the exclusive cultivators and preservers of a local “iconographical” effort to conjure up the Prophet.

+ NANCY FLORIDA, Living in a Time of Madness: Last Days of Java's Last Prophetic Poet, History and Theory, Theme Issue 57 (December 2019), 86-106.

Shortly before his death in December 1873, the renowned Javanese court poet R. Ng. Ronggawarsita composed a short work of social criticism and Islamic ethics that is among the most celebrated of Javanese literary texts. Serat Kalatidha (The Time of Darkness) reflects upon the avenues that remain open to the ethical subject in what Ronggawarsita calls the “time of madness,” the time of darkness and error that marked his dismal present in high colonial Java. Most celebrated as a prophecy, the poem is, in part, a critical reworking of an early nineteenth‐century prophetic reflection on the Javanese past. My article explores the troubled context in which the author wrote this twelve‐stanza (108‐line) poem and how its text forms both a critical commentary on the state of the poet's current‐day society and a pensive reflection on the ethical imperatives of Islam. In the course of this exploration, I reveal how Ronggawarsita's poem forms a prophecy, not as a foretelling of an already determined future, but rather as a work that moves along prophetic time to provoke in his readers a productive intimacy with both pasts and futures.

+ MARGRIT PERNAU, Fluid Temporalities: Saiyid Ahmad Khan and the Concept of Modernity, History and Theory, Theme Issue 57 (December 2019), 107-131.

This article investigates the language the great Indian Muslim reformer of the nineteenth century, Saiyid Ahmad Khan, uses to conceive of temporalities. The attention is directed toward the way he imagined the relationship between the present and the past, on the one hand, and the future, on the other hand, and toward the changes these configurations underwent in the course of his lifetime. The article will follow up these questions in three sections, focusing on three phases of Saiyid Ahmad Khan's life: first, his early years as a colonial officer and scholar (1840s–1860s); second, the period when the comparative gaze became crucial, leading to the establishment of a scientific society and to a voyage to London (1860–1871); and finally, the time when the Aligarh College occupied the center stage of his life (1871–1898). On one level this can be read as a straightforward history of concepts and temporalities. At another level, the article contributes to the ongoing debate about the past, which is simultaneously absent and hauntingly present. It follows Reinhart Koselleck to India where he never went and listens to the conversations between him and Saiyid Ahmad Khan, who died before Koselleck was born, thus blurring the lines not only between the past and the present, but also between the emic and the etic, and between historians and those they study. Like any meaningful encounter, it transforms its participants and the concepts with which they entered the dialogue.

+ NILS RIECKEN, Heterotemporality, the Islamic Tradition, and the Political: Laroui's Concept of the Antinomy of History, History and Theory, Theme Issue 57 (December 2019), 132-153.

If tradition has often figured as modernity's other, the Islamic tradition has long played the role of the modern constitutive other par excellence. Modern secularizing practices of timing and spacing feed this grounding of the political beyond the conceptual grip of tradition. The works by the Moroccan historian and philosopher Abdallah Laroui (b. 1933) put forward a concept of heterotemporality that distances itself from secularizing practices of timing and spacing, and, importantly, also from theological ones. His critique enables us to understand each of these practices as viewing heterotemporality through one master temporality, a view that represents temporality as, in Laroui's words, “absolute” time. First, this privileged temporality is the homogeneous time of secular progress, and second, it is the homogeneous time of theological truth. Laroui unsettles both practices of timing and spacing by discussing heterotemporality as governed by what he calls the antinomy of the concept of history. For Laroui, this antinomy refers to a specific temporal dynamic that results from the tension between the fundamental discontinuity and incoherence of history, on the one hand, and the production of continuity and coherence through human observers, on the other. Laroui thus reveals that the claims about continuity and coherence that sustain groundings of the political within homogeneous time—either secular or theological—must always be understood in relation to their position within the temporal dynamic of the antinomy of the concept of history. In revealing the temporal dynamic of this antinomy within the Islamic tradition, Laroui reworks the architecture of difference that keeps the secular modern and the Islamic theological conceptually separated from each other.