The ‘Muslim World’ in British Historical Imaginations

Inaugural Lecture, Royal Holloway University of London
8th February 2010

(Prof Humayun Ansari OBE, is currently Professor of the History of Islam and Cultural Diversity, and Director, Centre for Minority Studies at Royal Holloway, University of London)

When I came to Royal Holloway thirty years ago to begin my doctoral research, I could not possibly have predicted that the then well-established and widely-accepted concepts of the ‘Muslim world’ and the ‘West’ would become such highly contested notions. The ‘Muslim world’ was generally taken for granted, albeit as something that was geographically bounded, inferior and essentially different from the West. Arguably, British historical writing – or at least the majority of it, particularly during Britain’s imperial phase – reflected the power relations with Muslim societies. Now, three decades later, it is ‘Islamophobia’ (reflecting the existing climate of widespread fear and hostility towards Islam and Muslims) and ‘a clash of civilisations’ (in which the current war against terror – and by extension Islam – has come to occupy such prominence lately) that both interrogate the dynamics between knowledge and power in today’s rapidly globalising context.

Norman Daniel, the widely-respected historian of Islam and Muslims, who published his Western Images of Islam as long ago as 1960, highlighted the political and religious considerations behind distorted western views of Islam, examining Christian-Muslim interaction from medieval times to the modern world. According to him, hostile attitudes and hatreds had become deeply embedded, surfacing from time to time given the right context or conditions. We may or may not go along with all that Daniel proposed, but Edward Said – while agreeing with Daniel – gave his thesis a timely post-modern twist in what became his controversial study, Orientalism, published in 1978 not long before I reinvented myself as a PhD student. And since its publication, Said’s many protagonists have argued that a new more sophisticated kind of ‘Orientalism’ has emerged and continues to shape attitudes in the so-called West.

But, despite the impact of Said’s ideas, much of the debate generated by his work has been conducted by non-historians; few of the latter have engaged with Said’s argument. Indeed, many of them have dismissed him as being not only confused but also plainly ahistorical. It is this lack of engagement that has prompted me in my lecture this evening to explore how – over time – British historical imaginations have processed or handled Islam and the so-called Muslim world.

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As I have just mentioned, since Orientalism’s publication in 1978 there has been a great deal of debate about Said’s thesis and propositions. His study has provoked much controversy but it has also generated an immense amount of positive intellectual development across many humanities and social sciences disciplines. Said, as is well-known, sought to explore the relationship between power and knowledge; between imperialism and scholarship. He saw ‘Orientalism’ as a Western discourse that essentialises the Muslim world in pejorative ways, one that was intimately entwined with imposition of imperial power, offering ideological justifications for it While a wide range of academics have developed or refined Said’s framework, others have challenged and, indeed, denounced it, as Robert Irwin puts it, as a perverted muddle of ‘malignant charlatanry’. In terms of the production of historical knowledge about the peoples, politics and cultures of the so-called Orient, disagreements have been to do with approaches, sources, and interpretive paradigms. An increasing number of scholars have come to accept that knowledge is socially-constructed and that complex developments contribute towards shaping our understandings of the world. Hence, social and political interests play a significant role in the adoption of one way of construing reality rather than another. Others claim that they tell it like it is; they allow facts to speak for themselves, and have no interest in the social utility of the historical knowledge that they produce. Intellectual curiosity, ‘lust for knowing’, is apparently their only drive. Bernard Lewis, thus, defended Orientalism as ‘pure scholarship’, a discipline that strove towards objectivity. On the other hand, A.J. Arberry (who was a government censor during the Second World War) in his compilation, Oriental Essays (1960), while denying that he himself had any political agendas, accepted that politics nonetheless intruded academic scholarship. Indeed, it could be argued that politics is always present, but not necessarily where people claim to locate it since politics has less to do with interactions than actions and results, which are always unpredictable. It is, thus, difficult to put intentions on trial.

Absolute claims such as these demand closer inspection, and so what I want to explore this evening is how far there were scholars who were genuinely ‘purely’ interested in Islam and Muslim societies and so studied them for their own sake. I want to do this by looking at the places that Islam and Muslims have occupied in British historical imaginations from the outset of the early modern period to the present.

One of the key reasons for examining the past is to uncover the shape of human experience: can we discern any patterns in it, and how can we make sense of it through time? For many centuries, in the context of Britain, ‘the march of history’ was understood in sacred terms. For Christian writers historical knowledge bore witness to the grand theme of Creation and the Last Judgement. But as Islam spread through the Mediterranean, posing a theological and political threat as it conquered the bastions of Eastern Christendom, the mysterious rise of this ‘falsehood’ against the truth of Christianity compelled an explanation. How to stem its rising tide and protect Christians and Christendom (and convert Muslims) from this scourge?

The response of medieval and early modern Christian scholars was to create ‘a body of literature concerning the faith, its Prophet, and his book, polemic in purpose and scurrilous in tone, designed to protect and discourage rather than to inform’. Attacks on Islam were in part a way of propping up ideological conformity among various Christian denominations, in Britain as elsewhere. With military power unable to withstand Islamic expansion, refutation through argument and missionary work was considered the best option for overcoming the challenge, for which knowledge of the Muslim adversaries, their beliefs and practices, was considered crucial. In much of this scholarship, a repertoire of Christian legends rather than hard historical evidence about Islam and Muslims, nourished by imaginative fantasies, served the purpose. While the explanations provided were never fully satisfying, writers such as William Bedwell – the so-called father of Islamic studies in England – succeeded in creating a portrait of an exotic, and deluded, ‘other’ – and hence a negative perception became deeply embedded in the ‘British’ social imaginary, something that possesses considerable emotional resonance even to this day.

That said, when we look at the early modern period, we find that, in the British Isles at large, there was little awareness of, let alone curiosity about, Muslims – even less so in serious literature. Most of those who had sufficient resources and interest to sponsor Arabic studies were either churchmen (as was the case with most forms of learning, not just this field) or closely aligned with their causes who aimed primarily at producing materials to achieve their own salvation as well as that of wayward Middle Eastern Christians and Muslims. Thomas Adams, a wealthy draper and sometime Lord Mayor of London, created the Chair of Arabic at Cambridge in 1632 in the hope that he might, through his patronage, contribute to converting Muslims. Four years later, William Laud Archbishop of Canterbury and Chancellor of the University of Oxford, established its Professorship in Arabic, primarily as part of the struggle against Catholicism.

It is important to note, however, that in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, those in Europe who studied Islam tended to do so not out of interest in that faith per se, but primarily to pursue intra-confessional polemic. During the Reformation, Islam was frequently used by one group of Christians to criticise another. Protestants were likened to Muslims for deviating from and perverting the true faith. Such developments, of course, need to be located in the context of Ottoman expansion in competition with other European states. It is noticeable though that, while there was considerable conflict between the states, it did not take the form of ‘Islamdom’ versus ‘Christendom’.

The 1600s are credited with having marked the beginning of ‘modern’ British historical writing. The confident authority of the Christian world view began to crumble as secularised interpretations of history, centred on human rather than divine activity, gained ground. Reason combined with empirical evidence was coming to be accepted as the final authority for deciding what was historically credible. Scholars now increasingly possessed the resources and linguistic potential to investigate more rigorously than before the nature of Muslim beliefs, history, traditions and practices. Hence, writings on Islam became contradictory, reflecting the fragmented views held by Europeans on the subject, influenced by political thinkers such as Descartes and Spinoza. The old stereotypes were repeated by most writers, but now alongside newer observations that found favourable things in Islam. For example, there was The General Historie of the Turkes (1603) by Richard Knolles. A fear-inducing chronicle, it was filled with accounts of Ottoman atrocities, cruelties and torture. Knolles, like earlier English writers, called the Ottoman Empire the “great terror of the world”, Islam the work of Satan and Muhammad a false prophet. But – here is the difference – Knolle also acknowledged Turkish determination, courage, and frugality and the massive 1,200 page account contained much positive information about Muslims, until then considered mortal enemies. Likewise, Edward Pococke’s 1649 Specimen Historae Arabum while casting Islam as the religion of the false prophet, managed by deploying Arabic sources and historians to avoid many of the distortions of medieval polemic and presented what was, for its time, a more balanced view of Muslim society. A little later Paul Rycaut, in his The Present State of the Ottoman Empire, drew a picture of Ottoman despotism, unequivocally corrupt and backward, straight out of the old stock of ignorance and fear. But it also recounted accurate, knowledgeable and insightful details of Turkish life and history, of Ottoman political, military, and religious organisation, of the diversity of Islamic beliefs and traditions. In it there was also acknowledgement of mutuality of commercial interests and benefits and admiration of many aspects of Islamic culture. But importantly, having been written by British men, these histories lacked the breadth of understanding of Muslim societies that eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century women observers, such as Lady Mary Wortley Montague and Sophie Lane-Poole, would contribute thanks to what they wrote about spheres of life to which they, as females, had exclusive access.

By the end of the seventeenth century, while the intellectual climate had changed significantly in favour of ‘freethinking’, both orthodox Christians and so-called ‘deviants’ continued to critique each other. Humphery Prideaux’s 1697 Life of Mahomet aimed to uncover ‘[t]he true nature of imposture fully displa’d in the life of Mahomet, with a discourse annex’d for the vindication of Christianity from this charge’, while Henry Stubbe’s anti-Trinitarian tract, Account of the rise and progress of Mahometenism (written in 1671 but not actually published until 1911), trenchantly challenged ‘the fabulous inventions of the Christians’ in the light of reason, contrasting this with his positive assessment of the life of Muhammad and Islam’s rationality. What is particularly interesting is that both these authors used Pococke’s work and sources extensively but interpreted them in radically different ways to arrive at opposite poles in their conclusions – one hostile (thanks, it should be added, largely in response to the challenge of Deism rather than Islam), the other sympathetic, to Islam and Muslims. What we see emerging out of these controversies by the eighteenth century are rather more balanced understandings of Islam, for instance Simon Ockley’s The History of the Saracens in 1718. Nevertheless, given the religious context in which they were operating, their authors could hardly be expected to write wholly positively of a religion that had proved ‘the first ruin of the eastern church’. Ultimately, even Ockley condemned Muhammad as the ‘great imposter’.

The late eighteenth century was also a period of transition in British imperial history, and, not surprisingly, this too had an impact on how Islam and Muslims were viewed by contemporaries. The East India Company from the mid-eighteenth century had been steadily establishing dominance in India, often taking power from Muslim rulers in the process, but it was still navigating its way towards finding the right strategies in order to establish firm control. Many who ran the early Company in India admired and appreciated indigenous cultures, saw merit in their history and assimilated. William Robertson was one Enlightenment historian who expressed an early willingness to value Indian culture and society as the development of an equivalent and equally valid civilisation to that of Europe. However, whereas Europe was seen to have ‘progressed’, India during the Mughal period was perceived to have ‘stagnated’ in relative terms. Hence, Robertson believed that India should be facilitated but not coerced in its socio-economic and cultural development by a form of imperial rule and commerce that demonstrated respect for India’s cultural heritage. This ‘development approach’ to history associated particularly with the Scottish Enlightenment from the 1750s to the 1790s, concluded that the human record was one of material and moral improvement, of cultural development from ‘savagery’ and ‘barbarism’ to ‘civilisation’, and that their own society stood at the pinnacle of achievement. Since Muslim societies were judged as, at best, semi-barbaric, colonialism – Empire in other words – was justified.

As British imperial expansion progressed, there was a further shift in attitudes to Islam. There was perhaps less prejudice alongside a greater sense of curiosity; so while history continued to be written as a moral tale, critical enquiry gave birth to new historical values. Yet stereotyping persisted. Edward Gibbon while exploring how Christianity ended European classical civilisation in his 1788 History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, imbued Islam with several positive attributes, but his final moral judgement on Muhammad was that the Prophet ended up an ambitious impostor. And whatever its virtues, Gibbon did not want Europe to be over-run by Islam nor the Quran ‘taught in the schools of Oxford, her pulpits [demonstrating] to a circumcised people the sanctity and truth of the revelation of Mahomet.’ While Gibbon along with another of Britain’s most eminent Enlightenment scholars, William Jones were both admirers of Muslim civilisations, they both firmly believed in the superiority of the European, because, for them, Europe had forged ahead in gathering useful knowledge, in its command of ‘Reason’ and its application of the scientific method – in all these fields, they believed, other peoples lagged far behind. Those who judge Jones’s scholarly work as entirely motivated by aesthetic and academic interest really need to look at his life and career more closely, as this reveals him to be not only complex, inconsistent and contradictory but also someone who possessed undoubted utilitarian propensities. Far from being a disinterested Orientalist, in Mukherjee’s assessment, Jones was a late eighteenth-century ‘liberal imperialist’, who had no doubt in his mind about ‘the excellence of our constitution, and the character of a perfect king of England’ – after all, he served for many years as a judge in British-controlled Calcutta.

Thus, the ways in which British historians of this period analysed, imagined and depicted the so-called ‘Orient’ were often intertwined in complex ways with growing British power, often over Muslim peoples. In time, these realities began to shape historical accounts. The Romanticist influence on historical writing was also felt. The ‘Orient’ attracted interest as it became less threatening while remaining exotic. One key (though not uncontested) element of nineteenth-century thought on the ‘Orient’ was a particular concentration on the difference between East and West. Islam constituted a distinct type in terms of civilisation, cultural essence and core values – these, many Orientalists of the time believed, shaped a different Muslim consciousness, mind-set and behaviour.

Scottish Enlightenment thinking continued to be the leading intellectual influence. John Malcolm and Mountstuart Elphinstone, both highly instrumental in the extension of British power in India and West Asia, would have seen themselves as no more than subscribing to the forces that drove societies from one stage to another. Both belonged to a broad band of historians comprising conservatives as well as many liberals and radicals, among whom imperial expansion, born out of human enlightenment and effort, and underpinned by utilitarian ideas, became a dominant vision. They were supported by a growing evangelical public sentiment, which viewed Empire as the work of Providence. Notwithstanding their kinship with different schools of thought, all British historians during this period assumed the intellectual and moral superiority of contemporary Great Britain over the Muslim world.

Let us take probably the single most influential work in the early nineteenth century – James Mill’s 1817 The History of British India. For Mill, knowledge was nothing if it was not a source of power – a tool of change. Understanding the past was good ‘only for the improvement of the future’. Since Indo-Muslim society, a product of despotism, superstition and poverty, given to insecurity and lacking in progress, measured ‘lower’ in his scale of civilisation, British rule was justified. Similarly, Macaulay, a great admirer of Mill’s History, also believed in the benevolent impact of British rule in India and elsewhere. Macaulay’s dismissal of, and contempt for, the natives epitomised Saidian ‘Orientalism’.

But, while it might be argued that this kind of ‘Orientalist’ history writing had become hegemonic by the nineteenth century, Said’s argument leaves little room for the kind of contestation and contrasting approaches to Islam that were evidently emerging in this period. Take, for instance, the works of Edward Lane, a scholar who was to have an enormous influence on Middle Eastern studies. From Lane’s life, it is immediately clear that, in the context of the early nineteenth-century excitement about Egypt, while he remained committed to his own cultural heritage, he became genuinely interested in Egyptian society – its traditions, customs and people – to the point where he adopted an Egyptian lifestyle, dress and language.

While many scholars have levelled charges of ‘Orientalism’ against Lane – his awareness of his difference from an essentially alien culture, the coded sense of superiority in his major works, his views regarding the unchanging character of Middle Eastern societies – his biographer, Leila Ahmad, has shown that Lane possessed a relatively accurate and sympathetic understanding of Islam. It is true that he comes across, occasionally, as condescending, patronising, even admonishing, in his best-known An Account of the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians (first published in 1836), but, when read in the context of his personal interaction, it could be argued that for the most part he strove for and largely succeeded in presenting an account of Egyptian society and its people that was respectful, and one that someone belonging to that culture could broadly accept as authentic and accurate. More usefully, it created a space for British scholars within which emotively-charged and hostile traditions could be more effectively challenged.

Towards the middle of the nineteenth century, new perceptions of Muhammad, accompanied by new attitudes to his religion were also emerging. This period was particularly crucial in British historical understanding of Islam, for it was a time when the enduring images of Muhammad as a heretic were juxtaposed with new images of Muhammad a noble figure. In contrast to Said’s methodological emphasis on the unity of the Orientalist discourse, what we witness is a considerable plurality of approaches to Islam. Thus, discourse about Islam, at times contradictory, became richer, more diverse and more complex than Said’s arguments suggested.

The reasons for this shift were many. Burgeoning knowledge about Islam and increased information made earlier stereotypes less tenable. The demise of Christian apocalypticism and the rise of secular historical method created the Muhammad of history, relegating to the shadows the Muhammad of Christian legend. The Victorian proclivity for great men coupled with their fascination for an exotic East engendered a sympathetic environment for a partial rehabilitation of Muhammad and Islam. And the rise of British power over Muslim lands made for a context in which the Prophet and his religion could be treated more benevolently, even while it continued to encourage and support criticism of its modern expressions.

This juxtaposition is clearly visible in Carlyle’s famous lecture on Muhammad, ‘Hero as Prophet’. In 1840, after centuries during which Muhammad had been called an imposter, a seducer or worse, he made the ‘first strong affirmation in the whole of European literature, medieval or modern of a belief in the sincerity of Muhammad’. And yet, he too, it might be argued, was prone uncritically to deploy ‘Orientalist’ tropes and attitudes in his rhetoric. Islam for Carlyle remained ‘a confused form of Christianity’, fit for semi-barbaric Arabs.

So the main assumptions of historical writing at this time remained paternalism and utilitarianism. Both contributed to the British assumption of superiority over the East and to the justification of colonial rule. Hence, William Muir, scholar and colonial administrator around the time of the so-called Indian Mutiny of 1857-58, in his historical works, consistently denigrated Muhammad and the Qur’an, misrepresented Muslims and undervalued Islam, often through a conscious manipulation of, at times, questionable sources, in order to demonstrate the superiority of Christianity and British culture in justification of colonial dominance. In his Life of Mahomet he concluded, ‘the sword of Mahomet, and the Coran are the most fatal enemies of Civilization, Liberty and the Truth which the world has yet known’. In line with Whig interpretations of history, Victorians believed that they were positioned at the pinnacle of human development. Historians did not dispense knowledge of the past for its own sake, or simply to inculcate practical lessons – that is, to sustain British rule. Above all they strove to preach a moral sermon, to hold up the virtues that they believed had won empire in the East and which alone could preserve it.

By the later decades of the nineteenth century, biology, anthropology and other sciences had combined with Maine’s demonstration of the historicity of ideas and Darwin’s law of natural selection to produce a relative ranking of world civilisations along racial lines. According to these criteria, Muslim societies did not fare well. Britain had developed the highest ideal of social happiness and devised the scientific instrument of law to enforce it. Writing at the zenith of the Imperialist phase in England, William Hunter stressed the importance of national character of the British race – ‘adventurous, masterful, patient in defeat and persistent in executing its designs’ – as the key to its imperial success. J.R. Seeley’s Expansion of England, published in 1883, stated that the study of history could offer lessons for those serving the Empire. Lord Acton, Seeley’s successor at Cambridge at the beginning of the twentieth century, likewise considered the making of moral judgements to be the mark of true historical writing. For him, the British Empire possessed an essentially noble purpose – it was a benevolent and progressive force in human history. While Seeley believed in the necessity and moral justification of the continuance of British rule, a question that troubled him was how the British could reconcile the despotism of the Indian Empire with the democracy enjoyed by the colonies of white settlers (and indeed, the British themselves): how Britain could ‘be in the East at once the greatest Mussulman Power in the world … and at the same time in the West be the foremost champion of free thought and spiritual religions?’. Well, for such historians, Indian society being un-progressive and perhaps decadent, the important thing was to do Indians good in spite of themselves; to lead India (and the rest of the Empire) with a paternal authoritarian hand. The histories of the period up to 1914 broadly reflected these assumptions.

It is true that this was not invariably the attitude in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – drawing inspiration from Cobbett, Bright and Cobden, scholars such as J.A. Hobson challenged the justifications for imperial rule. Nevertheless, it undoubtedly remained the hegemonic view. The majority of British historians agreed with Seeley’s analysis. Re-evaluative trends in British Islamic scholarship were still at an embryonic stage, and thinly veiled disparagement of Islam and Muhammad such as that of David Margoliouth, Professor of Arabic at Oxford, continued to inform influential historical analysis.

However, while Islamic history offered scope to Orientalist scholars to draw favourable comparisons regarding the virtues and truth of Christianity, there had also emerged considerable questioning of the Christian faith and this led to the re-evaluation of both academic and popular attitudes towards other belief-systems. T.W. Arnold, who spent much time in scholarly pursuits in northern India, was part of a small group of historians who presented interpretations of Christian and Muslim cultural history and interaction that challenged the arguments of the orthodox Orientalist paradigm. Both in conception and construction, his 1896 The Preaching of Islam represented a radical departure in British Islamic scholarship. In contrast to reductionist constructions of Islam as monolithic, having only one authentic expression, Arnold affirmed the validity of all the varying and sometimes contradictory currents within it, and concluded in his The Islamic Faith that, since religion was defined by individual understanding and practice of faith, ‘no single formula—beyond the brief simple words of the creed—can sum up [Islam’s] many diversities’. E.G. Browne too exuded enthusiasm for and empathy with Arab, Persian and Turkish cultures and peoples. A scholar of enormous erudition, he travelled in Persia and his A Year Among the Persians, published in 1893, represented a sympathetic portrayal of Persian society. His monumental Literary History of Persia, which came out in 1902, further valorised its refinements. An adherent of the liberal view of progress in historical development, he became passionately interested in the politics of contemporary Persia, supported the Constitutional Movement and resistance to European imperialist encroachments. Browne’s positive analysis in his The Persian Revolution of 1905-1909, published in 1910, not only countered the imperialist notions of Persian capriciousness and corruption as essential contributors of lack of progress; of their incapacity for democratic self-government, but also, by means of a ‘nationalist [counter] Orientalism’, announced the revival of an eastern people whose national character had empowered past historical achievements and might well do so again.

The climate of opinion in early twentieth-century Britain was, thus, simultaneously sympathetic towards and highly suspicious of Muslims. Muslim political activism imposed new demands on British authority, and pan-Islamism became a cause of increasing political concern as conflict with the Ottoman Empire intensified. Muslim aspirations seemed in sharp conflict with British imperial ambitions and political strategic security. These priorities were reflected in literature of the period. Cromer’s Modern Egypt (1908), for instance, effectively ignored Egypt’s achievements, highlighted its deficiencies through selective use of empirical materials, and offered an unbalanced rationalisation of British imperial rule. What was needed, he suggested, was a system that would ‘enable the mass of the population to be governed according to the code of Christian morality’.

The aftermath of the First World War witnessed the revival of the idea of British colonial mission and imperial obligation. The Empire’s history as the unfolding of the story of liberty re-emerged as the dominant mode of interpretation. With the break up of the Ottoman Empire, Britain became much more strategically dominant in the Middle East, responsible for lands that were perceived to be inhabited by people not yet able to stand by themselves under the strenuous conditions of the modern world. Representing a main trend in British historical writing, historians such as Reginald Coupland still believed in the moral qualities of the British to shape a better world and saw the history and purpose of the Empire as the gradual unfolding of liberty. While not an officer of the Empire he spent much time in its service and he made influential historically rigorous contributions to the debates on the direction of the Empire and imperial policy making.

The post-Second World War years witnessed rapid change and much instability as the pace of decolonisation quickened and the Cold War began. In this context, Asia and Africa increasingly became the battlegrounds. Western governments felt the urgent need for reliable knowledge about critical areas to inform policy-making. But, in the late 1950s and 1960s, scholars such as Richard Southern and the afore-mentioned Norman Daniel showed that it was not so much new positive knowledge that was being produced by disinterested scholars, but rather the diffusion in more refined and complex forms of greatly distorted existing elaborations, creating inaccurate images of Islam and Muhammad, based on dubious sources and distorted readings of texts and scriptures, leading to crude and derogatory assertions.

Take Hamilton Gibb and Bernard Lewis, two towering figures in the field in this period. Their interest in Islam and Muslim peoples’ current affairs undoubtedly emanated from their desire to influence policy-makers. Gibb, for instance, was concerned that Western governments were acting largely out of ignorance and it was his belief that understanding of Muslim peoples’ beliefs and cultures by careful study of their specific past was essential for effective policy-making. However, the categories he used to organise the knowledge and to interpret Islam and the history of the Muslim peoples are illustrative of what many critics would eventually argue were the grave shortcomings of the Orientalist tradition. For instance, in Modern Trends in Islam (1945), Gibb started from the assumption that there was an unchanging and distinctive Arab or Muslim ‘mind’ whose nature he could infer from his knowledge of the traditional texts of Islam and which could be implicitly or explicitly contrasted with an equally singular and essentialised ‘Western mind’. On this basis Gibb was able to offer sweeping generalisations about the innate deficiencies of Muslims’ thought-processes, imagination and ethics that had caused them to stagnate and fail to modernise. According to Irwin, ‘As a Christian moralist, [Gibb] was inclined to blame Islam’s decline on carnality, greed and mysticism’. Gibb explained Ottoman decline by locating it in its specifically Islamic despotic character. Yet, as Roger Owen has pointed out, Gibb’s analysis was largely flawed as his data in fact suggested that in the groups and activities of the Ottoman Empire there was little that could be considered as specifically Islamic – indeed, developments under the Ottomans had close parallels in non-Muslim Europe and Asia. More recently Caroline Finkel has challenged even more convincingly such ‘myths’ of Ottoman decay.

Bernard Lewis was the other ‘big gun’ in the field of British scholarship on Islam, and like Gibb, he believed that the Orientalists’ deep understanding of Islamic civilisation rendered them uniquely capable of shedding light on policy matters. In 1953, Lewis, in a lecture on “Communism and Islam” at Chatham House, ignoring local contexts and histories, elaborated his conception of Islam, similar to that of Gibb, as a civilisation with a distinct, unique and basically unchanging essence. For Lewis, Islam’s core features included an essentially autocratic and totalitarian political tradition that made Communism appealing to Muslims. Lewis accepted that, while Muslims were obliged to resist impious government, their subservience to authority took precedence. This contrasted sharply with ‘the spirit of resistance to tyranny and misrule … inherent in the core values of Western civilisation’. This line of argument ignored what Muslims had actually done over the centuries when confronted with impious or tyrannical rule. But such overarching, monolithic, delineations of the ‘Islamic civilisation’, underpinned by apparently timeless and uniform ‘Islamic concepts’, became very attractive towards the end of the twentieth century, with Lewis, for instance, pointing to ‘a clash of civilisations’, in his words, ‘the perhaps irrational but surely historic reaction of an ancient rival against our Judeo-Christian heritage, our secular present, and the worldwide expansion of both’. In such writing, one can indeed see many of the key features of Said’s ‘Orientalism’.

Gibb and Lewis’s ideas, like ‘Orientalism’ in the Saidian sense more generally, dovetailed modernisation theory, the dominant paradigm from the 1950s to the 1970s. A common set of assumptions about the character and trajectory of historical change, it denoted the process of transition from traditional to modern society as universal, linear and initiated by the West. Why Muslim societies had not modernised according to the Western model, it was argued, had little to do with social, political and economic forces – their legacies of colonialism, continuing foreign domination or economic under development – rather, they had become disoriented because of their essentially static nature, psychological deficiencies and cultural pathologies. Unlike the early modern Europe’s insatiable thirst for discovering the ‘secrets’ of Muslim advances, Muslims seemed uninterested in learning about the sources of Europe’s growing strength. Their societies were, therefore, unable to develop the institutions and internal dynamics that might lead to fundamental social transformation from within. Lewis, in his From Babel to Dragomans and The Muslim Discovery of Europe, linked the failure of Muslim societies to modernise with their lack of the spirit of enquiry, their misplaced sense of superiority, and their insularity and hostility towards the West. According to Lewis ‘Few Muslims travelled voluntarily to the land of the infidels …The question of travel for study did not arise, since clearly there was nothing to be learned from the benighted infidels of the outer wilderness’. And so, Lewis argued, change had to come from outside. New historical findings, however, challenge such analyses, and show that Muslims were, actually, intensely curious about and fascinated by European societies and peoples in the early modern period. Nabil Matar’s work, among others, has demonstrated that Arabic-speaking Muslims were deeply inquisitive about scientific, literary and political developments in ‘bilad al-nasara’ (the lands of the Christians) and, like their European counterparts, wrote ‘detailed and empirically based’ accounts of Europe in the seventeenth century.

Already beginning to emerge in the 1960s and 1970s, this challenging of the framework of interpretation, which had hitherto both shaped historical analyses and conclusions and their perceived complicity with Western power in the Muslim world, brings me to reflect on the current state of play! I would argue that there is still an influential strand in historical writing, buttressed by those who hold reins of power, which links in with ‘Orientalist’ paradigms and rationalises Western superiority, tutelage and domination. It insists that the modern West remains at the pinnacle of a new hierarchy of human evolution; and that Muslim lands need to follow suit through the enfeeblement of Islam.

Niall Ferguson, for one, offering refurbished Whiggish wisdom, has furnished an historical basis for the current Anglophone liberal imperial project. His writings argue that the British Empire was a powerful force of order, justice and development for much of its existence and built much of the modern world; its paternalistic authoritarian practice of government, through a properly trained and knowledgeable administrative corps competent to dispense fairness and justice, ushered in ‘civilisation’/modernisation setting the natives on the path to progress. Alternatives to empire would have involved despotism, endemic disorder and economic decay, and resulted in dangerous instability.

In Ferguson’s writing, it would seem, we have come full circle – he offers canards once championed by old imperialists such as Mill and Macaulay. While he agrees with Marx’s deterministic approach to the evolution of human history, he, unlike Marx, is much more positively disposed to British rule and argues that the Empire was forced to make painful decisions in pursuit of ‘liberal’ objectives. Systematically ignoring sources that analyse or present the perspectives of the colonised, there emerges, in Gopal’s words, a ‘poisonous fairytale’ of ‘a benign developmental mission’ – a pattern that tends to reinforce the prejudices of those whom he seeks to influence. Highly provocative, Ferguson’s histories of the British Empire construct the ‘lessons’ that we are to learn from the ‘rise and demise of the British world order’. What are they? As part of the building of a similar empire, the war on Iraq was the right thing to do. For him, ruthlessness in its prosecution was justified: he says, ‘what happened at Abu Ghraib prison was no worse than the initiatory “hazing” routine in many army camps and even student fraternities’.

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So what conclusions can we draw from all of these developments? It is very clear that dichotomous notions of the ‘clash of civilisations’, ‘the end of history’ and ‘liberal international interventionism’, while still popular and influential in policy-making circles, are now being challenged from both the contemporary and historical perspectives. On the theoretical level, the category of ‘civilisation’, while tangible in geopolitical, cultural and material terms, seems diffuse. In terms of cultures, values or systems of belief, they can be shown to be ever changing and adaptable to new conditions. Hence, unlike conflicts between states, it is difficult to know in what ways civilisations could be construed to ‘clash’. Moreover, it is being increasingly argued that ‘Islamic civilisation’, with distinctly recognisable features, like its Roman and Greek counterparts, has disappeared. Equally, with the globalisation of modernity, ‘Western civilisation’ also appears to have lost its specifically European character. This line of argument makes the ‘clash of civilisations’ thesis seem untenable.

Historically too, many scholars today reject the portrayal of the relations and interaction between the so-called Muslim world and the West (both contentious terms because of their homogenising, reductionist and essentialist undertones) as a simple story of perpetual opposition and conflict. They seek to demonstrate historically that civilisations have never been hermetically-sealed separate entities – the shared story of Asia, Africa and Europe, for one, is replete with uninterrupted mutual exchange.

More specifically, Christian and Islamic ‘civilisations’ are being shown to have interacted fruitfully and to have borrowed from one other with mutually formative effects. The idea of ‘multiple modernities’ challenges the classical theory of modernisation as a uniquely and specifically European project. ‘Oriental globalisation’ literature, with its longer time frame, contests this thesis, demonstrating historically that many of the characteristics that are associated with the eighteenth-century British industrial revolution had emerged earlier in China, and that Middle East was ahead of Europe in this period. Thanks to Jardine and Brotton, we are now much more aware of the highly symbiotic relationship between Muslim and other European cultures and the profound influence of developments in Muslim societies on the emergence of European Renaissance and Enlightenment thinking – especially the role of the Ottoman Empire in generating mechanisms that lay behind ‘modernisation’. There was, in reality, no monolithic and unitary Europe confronting the Ottoman enemy. Nor was ‘Islam’ unremittingly ranged against the ‘West’. Yes, there were conflicts but there was also trade and the exchange and mingling of ideas, technologies and institutions.

This brings us to the question of how this challenging of the ‘Western-centric’ paradigm has emerged? Surely much of the answer lies in the changed context and the changing relations and balance of power in today’s world and the impact of this on the character of the historical knowledge being produced. Shifts in history writing reflect shifts in world politics, as the West itself is gradually de-centred by multi-centric global processes. Analysis of history writing about the Muslim world in Britain, as I have suggested this evening, reveals that it has always been produced in complex, diverse and non-monolithic ways. Nor, as Said contended more generally in his Orientalism, has it been entirely systematically constructed; there has not been one totalising vision of the West’s Islamic ‘Other’. British historians could write about the Muslim world ‘as often consumed by admiration and reverence as by denigration and depreciation’. But as British power expanded, some came to think of Islam and the Muslim world as ontologically different from, and inferior to, the ‘West’; and many such scholars placed their knowledge at the disposal of the Empire. Others, albeit more commonly at the margins, opposed imperialism or wrote more sympathetically about Islamic cultures and societies, though not necessarily deploying a different interpretive frame from mainstream Orientalists. Yet, individual historians are always products of their pasts as well as their presents. They cannot escape, to quote Bernard Lewis (rather ironically since he seems to exclude himself from this comment), ‘the prejudices of their culture and age…Even when writing of the past historians are captive of their own times – in their materials and their methods, their concepts and their concerns.’

Having acknowledged the limitations of British historical writing about the Muslim world, what alternatives are there? Said’s critique has undoubtedly helped us to become more acutely and self-critically conscious of the existence of multiple perspectives and the need to consider them in any historical analysis. The empowered, and much more articulate and confidently vocal, Muslim subaltern has contributed to the shifts in historical thinking and approaches. Moving away from global generalities, due attention is now being given to local and regional social and political dynamics, hierarchies of power and historical contexts. Likewise, factoring in the history of women living in Muslim societies into the wider story is being pursued with much more vigour, undermining stereotypes about their past lives (and present realities too).

But, all the same, it appears impossible to escape completely the essentialism that continues to inhere even in current historical epistemologies – a cultural essentialism that, for Said, was the hallmark of ‘Orientalism’. For someone in my position, there remains the nagging question as to whether or not I might have become, or at least be regarded as, a native informant? Have I become one of ‘us’, a product of British academia, part of the crop of new ‘Orientalists’ who, many argue, has emerged since the publication of Said’s Orientalism – someone who (whether they mean to do so or not) ends up applying a Eurocentric gaze that results in the sustaining of old hegemonies and dominances; one who uncovers the supposed mysteries of the ‘Muslim world’ for the benefit and in the interest of the ‘West’ – what Spivak calls the ‘European discursive production’ that continues to influence and shape our knowledge, culture and histories. Or is it possible, I wonder, to be a free-floating, cross-pollinated, historian. In other words, do we remain complicit in the ‘Western’ project or is it possible to develop instead a transnationally oscillating subjectivity. Taking such questions into account, perhaps all one can do is recognise the existence of discoursive tension within oneself, realise that all one is doing is fashioning one of many stories from one’s own relatively narrow perspective and seek to minimise the limits of the essentialism that inheres therein. I leave you with this thought!