Reading Europe with Muslim Eyes (REME): Historiographical Forays

The starting-point of critical elaboration is the consciousness of what one really is, and is “knowing thyself” as a product of the historical process to date which has deposited in you an infinity of traces, without leaving an inventory…[therefore it is imperative at the outset to compile such an inventory].”

-Antonio Gramsci, Prison notebooks

For some, the historiography of anti-Islamic sentiment is shaped by the perennial Huntingtonian ‘clash of civilizations’ paradigm whereby tracing polemical discourse amongst religious communities is intertwined in the politics of today-namely deference to claims of multiculturalism and liberal plurality. It is a narrative which needs little explanation for it persists in academic and popular settings. To politely historicize the seemingly primordial feud between the ‘Muslim world’ and Christendom for some is a laudable (and benign) project. In a way, it pacifies and rationalizes contemporary feelings of discontent and disdain between Muslims and others rather than address systems of power and hegemony that amplify and deploy divisive rhetoric. Other scholars have taken a more nuanced orientation and deconstructed the motivations for anti-Islamic sentiment and its lengthy history. John Tolan, a critical voice in the field of anti-Islamic discourse and one whose research has been instrumental in my own formation, explores Christian portrayals of Islam from the 7^th-13^th in much of his work. He details the ways in which innumerable Christians throughout the Middle Ages were ‘confronted’ by the expanding reach of the Islamic civilization and compelled to make sense of it. The former Christian Roman empire, which encompassed territory from Syria to Spain, was rapidly conquered by the Islamic empire in the first century. Though the medieval period and the early modern era would be characterized by Christian states ‘reclaiming’ lost territories through the form of reconquistas, crusades, and other imperial efforts, Islam continued to expand across Asia and Africa and with the growth of the Ottomans in the 14^th century, into Europe itself. Early Christian communities across Latin Christendom witnessed these territorial conquests and were consequently riven by existential and theological angst, consumed by the prevailing conundrum of WHY and HOW. How could the Divine ordain such a catastrophe and “[h]ow could God’s apparent abandonment of his Christian empire be explained?”

In the final instance, Tolan highlights an important function of anti-Islamic rhetoric: “if the Muslim other could not be eliminated through war or conversion, at least he could be intellectually and socially circumscribed.” The power of discursive representation cannot be understated for it seeks to both contain the other while simultaneously effacing them. Tolan describes the multitude of ways in which anti-Islamic rhetoric reacted to this collective bewilderment most notably in the proliferation of chronicles, theological tracts and legislative texts. These constructions characterized Islam and the ‘Muslim’ other as the eternal embodiment of alterity, an image that would endure regardless of whether such portrayals bore any historical or factual truth. In a sense, “objects are what they are because they are what they are, for once, for all time, for ontological reasons that no empirical material can either dislodge or alter.” Many of the earliest Christian texts sought to dissuade Christians from converting to Islam by portraying the new religion as a heresy, an ideology committed to the corporeal realm. In the 7^th and 8^th centuries, anti-Islamic rhetoric depicted Islam as a ‘divinely sent’ punishment, Muslims as pagan idolaters, heretics, the devil’s disciples, or followers of the Antichrist. During the first crusade, chroniclers represented Muslims as idolaters who had contaminated the holy city of Jerusalem with their profane rituals. Countless writers produced ‘hostile’ biographies of the prophet Muhammad, portraying Muhammad as heresiarch, false prophet and precursor of Anti-Christ in order to galvanize support for Reconquistas, crusades and militant conversion efforts (for example, Franciscans in the 13^th century engaged in proselytization efforts and deployed such images for their own ideological purposes). Tolan’s analysis of Christian polemical texts is expansive and significant. While other medievalists have romanticized the premodern period as a pristine landscape “free of the representational violence inventoried by Said,” Tolan acknowledges the significance of Orientalism yet clarifies that to examine such Christian writings about Islam is not meant to demonstrate “the inexorable rise of orientalism or of ideologies justifying colonial expansion.”

Perhaps it is this reticence to name things as they are which has led others to highlight medievalists’ and the discipline’s trepidation concerning accusations of anachronism and presentism. In this vein, some scholars have elected to expand their conceptual and analytical framework when examining premodern texts and their theological, social and polemical orientation. In this regard, integrating the critical category of race as an emergent feature of human differentiation and organization in the early modern period, particularly in relation to European imperial colonial expansion and dispossession, has proven instrumental and productive. Ambereen Dadabhoy affirms that race and religion were never disconnected discourses for they “often work[ed] in tandem to manufacture an alterity that [stood] outside the bounds of an emerging nation and its preferred normative identity.” In the case of Iberia, religious identity was being constructed through the body, blood and genealogical constitution of the individual with the limpieza de sangre (or purity of blood) laws. According to blood laws, the blood of ‘New Christians’ was tainted by their Jewish and Muslim lineage and as such, sincere conversion deemed an impossibility. Dadabhoy emphasizes examining the longue durée of race and racism for doing so reveals the ways in which the “ontological and epistemological conceptions of race have changed over the ensuing centuries, moving from the religious, to the biological, to the social. This shifting or fluid characteristic of race exhibits its malleability, which has allowed it to signify differing relations of power across time and space.”

These are vital contributions, and I do not minimize their significance. At the same time, I invite the reader to ponder the following query. None of the above scholars have professed their intimate positionality as embedded in the texts they scrutinize. To put it crudely, for the one who identifies as a Muslim-how does it feel to read such texts? To reckon with the knowledge that your religious identity, the locus of your salvation and the compass with which you move through the world has been distilled, caricatured, interrogated and misrepresented throughout the ages? To locate one’s subjectivity does not entail the demise of one’s vaunted impartiality (that sacred characteristic in the toolkit of the intellectual)—it simply shifts one’s perspective and perhaps the motives for the project itself. Throughout his own process of historical, humanistic and cultural research on the ‘Islamic Orient’ and its representation, Edward Said reflected on the ways in which he was intimately and personally attuned to the inescapable reality that he himself had been ‘constituted as an Oriental.’[1] . The study of Orientalism was in many ways “an attempt to inventory the traces upon me, the Oriental subject, of the culture whose domination has been so powerful a factor in the life of all Orientals.”[2] It is an impactful statement for the intellectual and professional trajectory of many of us is often deeply informed by childhood aspirations, mid-life failures, and/or the ways we view ourselves in the refracted reflection others hold up. Does such an admission hinder the intellectual project or simply imbricate it with an indignant purpose or “a collective commitment to assign them a more than personal validity”? Admittedly, I possess similar sentiments and am cognizant of the lifespan of anti-Islamic caricatures, and the material violence they have provoked in different environments and epochs. In this vein, I do not seek redemption or recognition, this is not a call for contemporary convivencia or an ambivalent shrug of the shoulders, resigned to neoliberal platitudes. In this textual compilation of sources, REME seeks to affirm our ability to contain historical misrepresentations of Islam that seek to define who Muslims are, interrogating the underlying objective of such literary, theological and clerical portrayals and dismantling the fragile foundation upon which they are constructed.

[1] Edward Said, Orientalism, 26.

[2] Edward Said, Orientalism, 25.