HISTORIOGRAPHY

Trends in historical writing about the Middle East.

Academic history-writing about the Middle East took shape during the first half of the twentieth century. European-style universities were founded in the early 1900s in Istanbul and Cairo, and state education, museums, historical associations, and journals expanded between the wars, alongside state-building. History-writing became a profession. Long-established forms—dynastic chronicles, political biographies, and historical topographies—were slowly displaced. History (taʾrikh) took on its ambivalent, modern meaning, referring not just to a form of knowledge, but also to the actual course of past events. In Europe, scholars working in Oriental Studies and trained in language, philology, and the study of Islam increasingly produced work recognizable as modern historiography. The amateur histories of colonial officials and travelers became much-trawled primary source material to complement chronicles and literary texts.

Civilization and Nationalism

Before 1945, historians from Europe and the Middle East formulated the past in terms of the flowering of an Islamic civilization that achieved its zenith at some point during the Middle Ages and subsequently entered a lengthy decline. The last centuries of Ottoman rule in particular were depicted as years of decay and oppression. Exemplary historians in this period were the prolific and popular Ottoman-Syrian Christian Jurji Zaydan (1861–1914), who wrote Taʾrikh al-Tamaddun al-Islami (1902–1906; History of Islamic civilization), and the British Orientalists Hamilton Gibb and Harold Bowen, who did more than anyone else in English to set afoot the historical study of the modern Middle East, particularly in Islamic Society and the West (1950). Such work measured civilization by great men and their battles, politics, and high cultural production. Nationalist historians such as the Egyptian Abd al-Rahman al-Rafiʾi (1889–1966) and Palestinian George Antonius, author of The Arab Awakening (1938), chronicled the recent past in terms of the triumphant rise of the new nation, led by a new elite, who disseminated enlightened ideas in a backward land, and thus drew their fellow citizens toward freedom.

Modernization

With the beginning of the Cold War, national independence in the region, and the emergence of Area Studies, academics trained as historians started to multiply in and outside the region. They added to the older sources colonial reports, state correspondence and statistics, and the tracts of modernizing elites. Borrowing from conventional currents in Europe, the field divided into political, intellectual, economic, and social history. Bernard Lewis, Stanford Shaw, and others wrote political histories of the Ottoman Empire, European colonial rule, and the high politics of nationalism. Albert Hourani wrote a seminal work of intellectual history, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age, 1798–1939 (1962). Charles Issawi did most to chart what he saw as the decline and rise of Middle Eastern economies. Influenced by the Annales School, Ömer Lutfi Barkan and Halil Inalcik pioneered Ottoman socioeconomic history, which was taken up also at Cairo University by students of Muhammad Anis. Gabriel Baer studied guilds, town and country, and André Raymond transformed historians' understanding of socioeconomic change in eighteenth-century Egypt.

The achievements of these decades were very real, but assumptions left over from Oriental Studies, entrenched by bourgeois-nationalism and introduced by modernization theory, were pervasive. The object of study was often Islamic society, which was still often assumed to be in long-term decay. Many judged the region according to a linear and idealized notion of European modernization, seeing the Middle East as laggard mainly as a result of local failings that were often linked to psychology. Europe's impact, typically marked off as commencing with Napoléon Bonaparte's brief occupation of Egypt (1798–1801), still signified the beginnings of progress in the region.

The drastically limited success of state-led projects of modernization and development, underlined by the Arab defeat in the Arab–Israel War of 1967 and the rise of more radical currents in Third World socialism and nationalism, gave increasing currency—inside and outside the region—to more critical scholarship. Rigid boundaries dividing politics, economics, and society started to blur, and history drew increasingly on other disciplines.

Marxism

Particularly influential during the 1970s was the broad current of Marxism: dependencia, world systems theory, and analysis based on social class. These ideas gave rise to numerous groundbreaking studies. Samir Amin, Resat Kasaba, and Roger Owen situated the Ottoman Empire and the Middle East within the world economy. Hanna Batatu's monumental study, The Old Social Classes and the Revolutionary Movements of Iraq, remains without peer. Ervand Abrahamian's seminal history of twentieth-century Iran, Iran Between Two Revolutions, owed much to notions of uneven development and social class. Anwar Abd al-Malik, Mahmud Hussein, and Eric Davis understood Egyptian history in terms of different fractions within the bourgeoisie in interaction with the state. Amin Izz al-Din, Raʾuf Abbas, Joel Beinin, and Zachary Lockman chronicled the rise of the working class in Egypt from the late nineteenth century until the 1960s.

Instead of depicting an Islamic society in decline, these scholars detailed the incorporation of a part of the periphery into a world economy with its core in Europe. Instead of seeing backwardness as the result of local cultural and political failings, backwardness was seen as the systemic result of a process of world capitalist development. Instead of viewing transformation as a process of elite-driven, ideas-based modernization that remained laggard, society and change were freshly understood as internally structured by state and class.

Social History

Critiques of Marxist determinism, not least from Edward Said, who depicted Karl Marx as an Orientalist in Orientalism (1978), formed the background to increased interest in more grounded social history, which took a critical distance from grand meta-narratives of modernity. Social history particularly benefited from increasingly accessible national archives, especially the use of Islamic court records. Kenneth Cuno, Beshara Doumani, Suraiya Faroqhi, André Raymond, and others transformed understandings of the period 1600 to 1800, showing dynamism, market forms, urban change, social stratification, and changing patterns of social reproduction instead of backwardness and decline. Their work, along with that of Juan Cole, Zachary Lock-man, Donald Quataert, and others has greatly diversified understandings of socioeconomic change and popular protest in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: The deindustrialization thesis has been challenged; the end of the guilds appears to be far more complicated than it did; and the rise of the working class is no longer seen econometrically, and workers outside the factory, from artisans to migrants, are also seen as playing active roles in popular politics and world economic incorporation. F. Robert Hunter, Eugene Rogan, and others have given a far more embedded sense of state formation in Egypt and Jordan, respectively. Edmund Burke's Struggle and Survival in the Middle East (1993) made groundbreaking use of popular social biography.

Such work has opened the door to new forms of cultural history, in which culture is no longer an elite preserve, and constitutes (rather than simply reflects) the social process. Exemplary here are Abbas Amanat on the beginnings of the Bahaʾi movement in Iran, Ussama Makdisi on the modernity of sectarianism in Lebanon, and Ella Shohat on Israeli cinema. Work by historically minded anthropologists such as Michael Gilsenan, who studies violence and narrative in rural Lebanon, is highly suggestive for new directions.

Nationalism

Another important body of work has challenged the verities of idealist, elite-centered, and teleological nationalism. Rashid Khalidi, C. Ernest Dawn, James Gelvin, and others have given more heterogeneous and less emancipatory histories of the rise of Arab and regional nationalism, and have pointed to the agency of previously ignored social groups. Avi Shlaim, Ilan Pappé, Benny Morris, and others, working with newly released archival material, have presented a dramatic and far-reaching challenge to the conventional Zionist account of the events of 1948.

Women and Gender

Feminist historiographical influence, and growing criticism of male-centered history, gave impetus from the 1970s onward to research on women and gender. Leila Ahmed, Lila Abu-Lughod, Judith Tucker, and others have paid systematic attention to the place of women in society and to constructions of gender, and they write the social, cultural, and political histories of women. Patriarchy, seclusion, and veiling are no longer understood as simply vestigial backwardness or as the expression of some essential Islamic essence, but as cultural practices grounded in processes of political and cultural contestation. The hypocrisy of colonial feminism has been exposed, as well as the pitfalls of simple nationalist assertion as an unwitting defense of patriarchy. After 1990 scholars successfully made the social construction of gender—masculinity as well as femininity—an integral part of larger accounts of social change. Elizabeth Thompson's work on Mandate Syria, for example, has argued that forms of colonial citizenship were forged in part from an interwar crisis of paternity, which had much to do with changing gender practices and norms.

Foucault

A number of historians have been inspired by the work of the French philosopher Michel Foucault, whose oeuvre suggests a radically critical genealogy of modernity. Timothy Mitchell's groundbreaking work sees Egypt's nineteenth-century history in terms of the inscription of modern disciplinary practices, which gave rise to and were ordered by a new metaphysics of modern representation—the "world-as-exhibition." Khaled Fahmy on nineteenth-century Egyptian state-building and Joseph Massad on Jordanian national identity have undertaken rich archival research to pursue such insights in productive ways.

Overall, the historiography of the region has become less vulnerable to the charge of being outmoded. It presents a diversity of approaches, a more developed theoretical awareness than before, and an increasingly rich resource for those trying to understand the past, present, and future of the region.

See also antonius, george; barkan, Ömer lutfi; bonaparte, napolÉon; hourani, albert; zaydan, jurji.

Bibliography

Ahmed, Leila. Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of a Modern Debate. New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1992.

Antonius, George. The Arab Awakening. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1938.

Batatu, Hanna. The Old Social Classes and the Revolutionary Movements of Iraq. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978.

Beinin, Joel. Workers and Peasants in the Modern Middle East. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

Burke, Edmund III, ed. Struggle and Survival in the Modern Middle East. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.

Gibb, Hamilton A. R., and Bowen, Harold. Islamic Society and the West. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1950.

Hodgson, Marshall G. S. The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in a World Civilization, Vols. 1–3. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974.

Mitchell, Timothy. Colonising Egypt. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.

Said, Edward. Orientalism. London: Penguin Books, 1978.

john t. chalcraft