901 – 001 – The Globalization of Islam

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The Globalization Of Islam

Since the early 1970s, western Europeans and North Americans have become increasingly concerned about an apparent change in the nature and patterns of human migration. For some this change threatens to alter the ethnic and religious composition of their nation-states, their democratic and capitalist traditions, and their liberal social values. The emigration and settlement of Muslims from more than seventy nations to the West has been of some concern. For those in the West who believe in the purity of race, civilization, and culture, or in a super-sessionist “Judeo-Christian” worldview, this movement of Muslims is a menacing threat to what they believe to be a homogeneous Western society. For others it increasingly represents a significant demographic shift that posits a major cultural challenge, the precise consequences of which are unpredictable and unforeseen, because they require a variety of adjustments by both the host countries and the new immigrants.

Until recently many Europeans and North Americans tended to identify Islam with the Arabs. More knowledgeable scholars added parts of Asia and Africa to the abode of Islam. Other scholars were reluctant to admit that not only is Islam a universal religion with adherents throughout the globe, but that it has increasingly become part and parcel of the West. Ignoring “the facts on the ground,” they persist in thinking of Muslims as displaced persons temporarily residing in the West, who will one day pack up and return to where they came from or to “where they belong.” Still others, who for religious or political reasons wish away these Muslim immigrants, have become more shrill in declaring their presence a threat.

The Encounter Of Islam With The West

The Muslim encounter with “the West” dates back to the beginning of Islam’s expansion. As Arab armies spread their hegemony over major parts of the Byzantine Empire in Southwest Asia and North Africa, large segments of the Eastern Christian churches (Byzantines, Jacobites, Copts, Gregorians, and Nestorians) came under their control. This close encounter generated a variety of experiences, ranging from peaceful coexistence and cooperation to mutual vilification and armed conflict. It also helped craft a corpus of polemical literature written by both Muslims and Christians, each seeking to demonstrate and proclaim the truth and superiority of their own religion. Each group faulted the other for basing their faith on falsified scriptures as well as proclaiming errant doctrines. The Muslim depiction of the Christian “other” and the Christian depiction of Islam have inevitably been forged by the historical context in which they were conceived.

Muslim expansion from North Africa into western Europe was stopped at Poitiers in 732, but the Ottomans in the East kept probing Europe’s defenses for several centuries until they were halted after the failure of the siege of Vienna in 1683. European areas that came under Muslim jurisdictions in Spain, Portugal, Sicily, and southern France between the eighth and the fifteenth centuries experienced a thriving cultural revival that became a major influence in the transmission of civilization that sparked the European Renaissance. The fall of Grenada in 1492 brought Muslim rule in western Europe to an end. A significant number of the Ottomans continued to live in eastern Europe, where some of the indigenous population converted to Islam in Bulgaria, Romania, Albania, and Serbia. The recent dramatic transplantation of Muslims into western Europe and North America has thus been called “the new Islamic presence.” Other scholars, noting the fact that Islam has modified the religious composition of western Europe and become its second largest religion, have begun to talk about “the new Europe.”

The second major Muslim encounter with “the West” was with Catholic Christianity during the crusades and the Reconquista. Although the crusades took place at the periphery of the Islamic empire and seem to have been concerned with containing and weakening Eastern Orthodoxy as much as Islam, the bloody story of the crusaders sacking Antioch and Jerusalem and slaughtering all the inhabitants is increasingly depicted in today’s Islamic literature as one of Western warriors consumed with Christian hatred, bent on eradicating Muslims and usurping their land. Similarly, the leaders of the Inquisition, armed with the assurance of Christian truth and virtue and in an effort to “de-Islamize” Spain, offered Muslims the options of conversion to Christianity, expulsion, or execution. In the process they all but eliminated the Muslim presence in western Europe, as the last Muslims were expelled in 1609. This phase provides an image of a West not so much interested in guiding Muslims away from their errant ways or debating the efficacy or truth of their beliefs as much as eradicating them. Polemics shifted from issues of errancy of doctrines and supersession to mutual declarations of kufr (unbelief) and apostasy, hence sanctioning violence as a means of restoring truth.

The third encounter is marked by Western colonial expansion into Muslim territory following the fall of Grenada in 1492. In this phase Muslims have encountered the West as a triumphant, conquering, and imperial presence. The colonial experience that initially pitted various European powers against one another in their quest to subjugate Muslims and monopolize their economic resources lasted until after the end of the second world war. By its end Europeans were able to create imaginary lines in the sand, parceling out Muslim territories in a variety of schemes, carving up the three Islamic empires (the Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal) into what is today some fifty nation-states (members of the Organization of Islamic Conference). Meanwhile, more than one-fourth of the Muslims in the world continue to live under non-Islamic rule.

The colonial experience appears to have left a mark on the consciousness of those who were colonized. Islamist literature increasingly depicts the West as obsessed with combating Islam on all fronts. The West is often portrayed as marshaling its forces to launch a more pernicious attack under the guise of “civilizing” the Muslims and liberating them from “backwardness” and economic dependency, as seeking to subvert the influence of Islam on society by promoting the implementation of certain secular values as the foundation of political, economic, ideological, cultural, and social institutions. Dubbed as a “cultural attack” (al-ghazu al-thaqafi), it is seen as a multifaceted attack launched by colonial bureaucrats and their willing cadre of orientalists and Christian missionaries (both Catholic and Protestant). These bureaucrats and missionaries struggled to cast doubt about Islam by propagating the superiority of Western culture through such colonial institutions as schools, hospitals, and publishing firms, whose goal was to separate the Muslims from Islam.

The current encounter, still in progress, is a by-product of World War II. While this encounter has been conditioned and shaped during the third quarter of the twentieth century by the heritage of the postwar relationships between communism and capitalism, it is also marked by two distinct features. The first is the assumption of world leadership by the United States with the consequent creation and empowerment of the state of Israel and the invention of the “Judeo-Christian” worldview. The second is the emigration and settlement of Muslims and their acquisition of citizenship in the West, in western Europe, as well as in such established regions of European migration as Australia and New Zealand, Canada, Latin America, South Africa, and the United States.

Many types of mosques and community centers have been built in America to serve the large and varied Muslim community there. One of the most elegant is the Islamic Center of New York. Designed by the architectural firm Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill, and located on 96th Street on Manhattan’s tony Upper East Side, it attests to the presence of an international community of Muslims in the metropolis.

The Cultural Divide

The scramble to identify the next threat to Western democracies that ensued after the fall of communism has not yet abated. Islam and Muslim culture have been depicted by certain interests in the United States as the next challenge, if not the enemy challenging the West. It is accused of being a religion that is devoid of integrity and progressive values, a religion that promotes violent passions in its adherents, a menace to civil society, and a threat to the peace-loving people of the world. Muslims are often cast as bloodthirsty terrorists, whose loyalty as citizens must be questioned because they are perceived to be obsessed with the destruction of the West.

Samuel Huntington’s publication of “The Clash of Civilizations” in Foreign Affairs, promoting a thesis that the next conflict will not be between nation-states or ideologies but civilizations, appears to have gained support among some policy pundits. His thesis has reconfirmed to Muslims that colonialism is not over, because it has echoes of themes heard since the nineteenth century. On the surface it appears as a rehash of a century-old myth that undergirded European hegemonic policies justifying wars of colonial expansion and missionary crusades during the nineteenth century under the rubric of “civilizational mission,” “white man’s burden,” or Manifest Destiny. It posited the superiority of European man, the acme of human civilization, who willingly assumes the burden of sharing his values and achievements with the rest of the backward world. In the process, this myth justified the ransacking of the cultures of the conquered people and confining Muslim achievements to ethnological museums or the dustbin of history.

Meanwhile, the immigrants bring with them a different understanding of their culture. Many believe that they have been victims of Western cultural hegemony. For them the preservation of distinctive culture is the last line of defense against total obliteration. Battered by Western weapons of destruction, overcome by Western scientific achievements, and reduced to vassal states, Muslims have been attempting to resist by hanging on to Islamic civilization as the last bastion of human dignity and worth, a means of galvanizing people and keeping them from total disintegration. Consequently, conformity to Islamic culture, traditions, and norms is not only a source of pride in Muslim contributions to human civilization, it has become a divine imperative, a cure for what ails Muslim society and the world. It is promoted as possessing redemptive powers. Public performance of the rituals of Islam and maintaining a distinctive culture has thus become a vehicle of healing. Deviating from the consensus of what is publicly considered normative by the majority population in which the immigrants live is not backwardness; rather, it is a willful act of coherence and an option of a more meaningful reality. In the process, for some, ritual has become an instrument of protest against a society that continues to treat Islam as an alien religion whose adherents are fixated in the seventh century.

The Rise Of Islam And The Major World Religions To 1500 BC

The major religious tradition to arise was that of Islam. After the migration (Hejira) of Muhammad from Mecca to Medina in 622 BC, he became the overall leader of the whole city of Medina, and Islam began a dramatic expansion. By 661 AD, during the golden age of Muhammad and the four early caliphs, Islam had spread through much of North Africa and the Middle East, the Qur’an had been finalized, the Arabic language had begun to permeate what became the Arab world, and Islam was poised to expand still further.

By 1258 Islam had penetrated into Spain in the west and India in the east and was at least equal in strength to Europe, India and China.

The Great Religious Traditions

During the medieval period Europe was dominated by Christianity; India – although multi-religious – was becoming more Hindu, and China had a combined Confucian, Daoist and Mahayana Buddhist culture. Islam prevailed in the Middle East, and the four regions became roughly equal, roughly parallel and roughly separate.

Christianity spread within Europe, absorbing the various northern tribes, including the marauding Vikings; and with the rise of Russia its Orthodox branch began to venture east into the steppes. Islam ventured into Europe, reaching Spain in the west and, eventually, Turkey in the east. In early Spain creative contacts developed between the Christian, Muslim and Jewish communities. Elsewhere, on the other hand, the Crusades exacerbated the sense of hostility between Christians and Muslims.

Islam became established in India through the medium of the Mughal empire, which had also received Syrian Christians, some Jews, some Parsis (who settled in Bombay after fleeing from the Muslim invasion of Persia) and later the Sikhs. All these groups co-existed with India’s majority Hindus, Jains and Buddhists (who virtually died out in later medieval India). In China the neo-Confucian revival, centered on Chu Hsi ( 1130 – 1200 ), incorporated elements of Daoism and Buddhism, and in Southeast Asia Buddhism grew in strength. European Christendom became the most beleaguered of the four major religions, beset by Islam to the south and Tartar and Mongol hordes to the east. Within Europe, except for early Spain, the Jews were spasmodically persecuted.

Parallel Religions

Although the four major religions were radically different, some linking patterns can be discerned. Transcendence, and the means by which it was achieved, mattered; whether it was seen in terms of reaching Allah through Christ, Allah through the Qur’an, a Hindu personal deity through the mediation of a Brahmin, or the enlightened state of Nirvana through the Buddha or the Dharma (the Buddha’s transcendent teaching). The monastic or mystical communities of each tradition encouraged the development of inward spirituality. In all four religions, the future life, whether in heaven or beyond the round of rebirths, mattered as much as, if not more, than this life. In the Christian world, theological and philosophical syntheses of faith emerged in the work of Aquinas and Bonaventura in around the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. These syntheses were echoed by Maimonides in the Jewish world, al-Ghazali in the Muslim world, Chu Hsi in China, and Ramanuja in India.

Each tradition saw the development of different branches of the faith; Catholic and Orthodox Christianity, Sunni and Shi’ite Islam, Theravada, Mahayana and Tibetan Buddhism, and Hindu communities centered specifically upon Siva, Visnu and the Allahdess. All of the traditions were distinguished by elaborate rituals, festivals and sacraments, great ethical systems, and beautiful buildings, sculpture and literature.

In the wider world the American Indians, the Inca and Aztec cultures, the peoples of southern Africa, the Aborigines of Australia, the Maoris of New Zealand, and the peoples of Oceania were cut off mainly by sea from the classical traditions, as were the peoples of Siberia and the Arctic, through the exploits of Mongol invaders.

Historiography

The modern‐day historians of the Islamic world, particularly those of the Middle East and South Asia, are the heirs of a powerful and sophisticated tradition of historical writing, and they appeal to (or feel the burden of) this tradition on many levels. Historical writing was one of the earliest and most highly developed literary genres in every region and language of the Islamic world. The characteristic formal structures, subject matter, and explanatory paradigms of this literature took shape between the early eighth and eleventh centuries, and persisted — with much flexibility and elaboration but little change at a deep level — down to the early nineteenth century. By the 1840s, however, the forms and perspectives of traditional historiography, rich and varied as they were, no longer seemed adequate in face of the radical challenges posed by Europe to every aspect of life in the Islamic world. By the beginning of the twentieth century, a few historians were beginning to model their work (with mixed but not inconsiderable success) on European approaches and research methods. The 1910s and 1920s witnessed the founding of universities on the European model, and as an inevitable consequence, a growing professionalization of history. That movement has continued down to the present, so that now (as in Europe and America) the writing of history has become largely an academic enterprise, with all the gains and losses that this implies.

In a brief article we cannot follow the evolution of historiography throughout the entire Islamic world. We will therefore focus only on three areas: the central and eastern Arab lands (with an emphasis on trends in Egypt), Turkey, and Iran. Historiography in India and Pakistan on the one side, and North Africa on the other, has not developed in isolation from the Middle East; on the contrary, the parallels and mutual influences have been close and profound. But historical writing in these countries has followed a distinctive path, shaped by a far tighter (even suffocating) colonial domination, and marked by a clear preference for English and French (rather than Arabic or Urdu) among the leading modern historians.

Nineteenth Century

The challenge of Europe was of course felt most immediately in political and economic life, but that in itself might have compelled few changes in historical vision; Muslim intellectuals had faced many equally acute crises on this plane over the centuries, and the deeply rooted but still flexible conceptual tools and cultural resources of their societies had permitted them to address these quite effectively. The European cultural challenge cut deeper, however. Felt only by a tiny minority as late as the mid‐nineteenth century, it had become inescapable to almost everyone (at least in the major urban centers) by the beginning of the twentieth. Not only did it threaten the political independence and economic autonomy of Muslim societies; it assailed the very foundations of Muslim identity.

The rapid intellectual readjustments of the late nineteenth century (down to World War I) of course affected historical writing, although the works produced in this genre do not reach the level of the political and cultural essays of Rifā῾ah Rāfi῾ al‐Ṭahṭāwī (1801–1873), Namik Kemal (1840–1888), Jamāl al‐Dīn al‐Afghānī (1839–1897), or Muḥammad ῾Abduh (1849–1905). This is probably due in large part to the fact that history continued to be (as it always had been in Muslim countries) the work of amateurs, and moreover was seldom attempted by the leading intellectuals of the age. As one might expect, the shift toward new forms and approaches began in Cairo and Istanbul, the two largest cities in the region, the seats of the most ambitiously reformist regimes, and the places most directly and profoundly exposed to Western pressures.

Cairo was the first and most important center of a changing historiography. It had in fact produced the last great work in a traditional mold, the ῾Ajā’ib al‐āthār of ῾Abd al‐Raḥmān al‐Jabartī (1753–1826). Al‐Jabartī witnessed the catastrophic self‐destruction of the Mamlūk regime in the late eighteenth century, the shock of the French occupation in 1798–1801, and the tumultuous changes forced on the country by Muḥammad ῾Alī (r. 1805–1848). He was an acute observer, but he regarded none of this as progress, and he was content to work within the chronicle/biographical dictionary framework bequeathed to him by the great Egyptian historians of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

Muḥammad ῾Alī, illiterate soldier that he was, had more than a little to do with the rise of an altered historical consciousness. Quite apart from his military, administrative, and economic initiatives, so disruptive of deep‐rooted institutions and habits of thought, he took the risk of sending student missions to study in France, thereby exposing at least a few of his subjects to the thought and culture of contemporary Europe. No less important was his founding of the Translation Bureau (under the directorship of al‐Ṭahṭāwī), which rendered many works of medicine, engineering, geography, and even history into Turkish and Arabic. To be sure, the few historical works chosen for translation (e.g., Montesquieu’s Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur décadence, or Voltaire’s lives of Charles XII and Peter the Great) represented the Enlightenment, not the new scientific history of Ranke or the romantic nationalism of Michelet; even so, they suggested radically new ways of imagining and representing the past.

The first major history in Arabic to reflect new possibilities and tensions was Al‐khiṭaṭ al‐tawfīqīyah al‐jadīdah (20 vols., Cairo, 1886–1888) by ῾Alī Mubārak (1824–1893), the engineer who oversaw Khedive Ismā῾īl’s ambitious revamping of Cairo in the 1860s and early 1870s. Modeled to some degree on the classic work by Taqī al‐Dīn al‐Maqrīzī (d. 1442), it is a remarkably rich miscellany of historical‐biographical information, geographical description, and administrative data. Conceptually and structurally conservative (like al‐Maqrīzī’s work, it is organized by toponym), its contents never‐the-less reflect many aspects of the new order. A hybrid work of this kind could not generate many successors, although the Taqwīm al‐Nīl (6 vols., Cairo, 1916–1936) of Amīn Sāmī (c. 1860–1941) comes closest in spirit and content. Like al‐Ṭahṭāwī and ῾Alī Mubārak, Sāmī spent his life in loyal service to the regime, chiefly as an educator; he was director of the government teachers’ college, Dār al‐῾Ulūm, under Tawfīq and ῾Abbās II, and was appointed to the Senate by King Fu’ād.

In Egypt the political and ideological crisis of the ῾Urābī period proved in the long run to be a turning point, but for a time one sees only limited results — owing in large part to the stifling of political life under Lord Cromer until almost the turn of the century. An exception to this generalization would be Salīm al‐Naqqāsh’s passionate, richly detailed, but still little‐studied history of the ῾Urābī Revolt, Miṣr lil‐Miṣrīyīn (6 vols., Alexandria, 1884), based heavily on government documents and trial proceedings. By the end of the century we can perceive a marked shift from neo-traditional to contemporary European models of historiography. Of the new historians by far the most successful and widely read was the staggeringly prolific Syrian immigrant Jirjī Zaydān (1861–1914). He edited several journals and wrote in many genres; among his works the most significant in the present context is his Tārīkh al‐tamaddun al‐Islāmī (5 vols., Cairo, 1902–1906). This is less an original work of scholarship than a popular synthesis derived in large part from European Orientalist scholarship; even so, it is a very competent job and earned an English translation of one volume (Umayyads and Abbasids, London, 1907) by the formidable David Margoliouth. Zaydān’s was thus the first Arabic work in “modern” style to address medieval Islamic history. It was widely read but not much emulated, perhaps because as a Christian committed to a westernizing approach, Zaydān could not address adequately the deeper issues raised by his subject for modern Muslims. Nor could he really share the aspirations and frustrations of Egyptian nationalist writers. He was in fact offered the position in Islamic history at the new Egyptian University in 1910, but outrage in politically engaged circles compelled the offer to be withdrawn.

Istanbul was the home of a rather different historiographic evolution. It was still the capital of a vast empire, ruled by an autocrat who increasingly defined his role in terms of the Islamic caliphate. Moreover, its historians continued to be, as for centuries past, part of the scribal‐bureaucratic elite whose careers and personal identities were closely linked to the fortunes of the Ottoman state. A strongly conservative trend is thus no surprise in the two leading historians of the mid/late-nineteenth century — Ahmed Cevdet Pasha (1822–1895) and Ahmed Lutfî Efendi (1816–1907), both of whom were official court historians (vakanüvis), the last men to hold that post under the Ottoman sultans. Both recognized the changes going on all around them, but Lutfî resisted them, while Cevdet Pasha exhibited a more realistic mentality. Lutfî, for example, drew heavily on the official gazette for his information on the Tanzimat decades — a method that ensured a narrow, superficial, and highly laudatory account of this critical period (Tarihi Lutfî, 8 vols., Istanbul, 1873–1910; the final volumes remain unpublished). Cevdet Pasha, in contrast, had a strong grasp of law and administrative institutions and was deeply concerned with the processes governing the decline and fall of states. He was several times Minister of Justice and of Education and occasionally acted as a provincial governor (usually in Syria). He was the editor in chief of the Mecelle (the sharī῾a‐based code of civil law issued between 1870 and 1877) as well as a translator of Ibn Khaldūn. Although his chronicle of the crucial half‐century between 1774 and 1826 (Tarihi vekayii devleti âliye, 12 vols., Istanbul, 1885–1892), composed over a period of some thirty years, is traditionally constructed, it makes considerable use of European as well as Ottoman documents. Apart from Cevdet and Lutfî, we should mention the several historical works of the leading Young Ottoman intellectual Namık Kemal, a far more progressive spirit than his two older contemporaries. But his historical writings (many either never published or quickly suppressed) were hastily written inspirational and patriotic exercises and had almost no impact on the development of modern Turkish historiography.

The old mold was broken first by the Young Turk seizure of power in 1908, and then, decisively, by the Kemalist revolution. Whatever his defects as a thinker and politician, Ziya Gökalp (1875–1924) brought contemporary European sociology and history into the mainstream of Turkish intellectual life, where it found a ready reception. After World War I, Atatürk’s generation would create modern Turkish historical writing. (See Section 200 – Biographies – Ziya Gökalp; https://discerning-islam.org/405-007-a-biographies-mehmet-ziya-gokalp/).

Nineteenth‐century Iran did not witness the deep intellectual transformations of Cairo and Istanbul; the country’s poverty and isolation, not to mention the political ineptitude of the Qājār court, left its historians working in a traditional framework (albeit enormously sophisticated) until the turn of the century. The Constitutional Revolution (1905–1911) was the culmination of a long process, and it would be misleading to attribute the later explosion in Persian intellectual life solely to this cataclysmic event. Yet the Revolution did crystallize the new currents of thought in the country, still illformed and shallow‐rooted before 1905. It also created a powerful myth of promise, betrayal, and struggle for redemption — a myth that continues even now to shape many realms of Iranian life.

Interwar Period, 1919–1945

World War I was the turning point in almost every aspect of Middle Eastern life; indeed, this titanic event really laid down the agenda for the entire twentieth century within the region. It created vast new hopes and possibilities, and of course even more bitter disappointments and insoluble problems. It is no surprise that it ushered in a new era of historical writing marked by several characteristics: growing, if far from complete, professionalization (with several scholars getting doctorates in Europe, especially from Paris), institutionalized within the new universities of Cairo, Istanbul, and Tehran; a much closer approximation in form and methodology to the kinds of historical writing practiced in Europe; and a definition of persistent subject‐matter areas, somewhat different for each of the linguistic/cultural realms. One apparently odd product of the period was a marked bilingualism among the new generation of historians, who often wrote in French or English for European audiences, and in Arabic, Persian, or Turkish for their own countrymen; in the latter works the cultural agendas and conflicts of their native countries came to the fore. This phenomenon continues strongly in the present.

It would be incorrect to assume that all traces of traditional literary‐historical culture disappeared during these two decades. On the contrary, some of the most significant and useful historical compositions adhere to long‐established genres. Thus Osmanlı devrinde son sadrazamlar (Istanbul, 1940–1949) is an invaluable biographical compilation on the last thirty‐seven Ottoman grand viziers by Ibnülemin Mahmut Kemal Inal (1870–1957), himself a senior bureaucrat in the empire’s final decades and a scholar steeped in all aspects of Ottoman literary culture. Another writer, Muḥammad Kurd ῾Alī (1876–1953), the founder of the Arab Academy of Damascus and a prolific journalist and littérateur, composed a monumental history of Syria, Khiṭaṭ al‐Shām (6 vols., Damascus, 1925–1929). Although Kurd ῾Alī was well acquainted with the critical methods of Western Orientalism, this is the last great work of historical topography, a Syrian tradition going back to Ibn ῾Asākir (d. 1176) that flourished at least until the eighteenth century.

Works of more “modern” style tended to reflect in quite direct ways the central contemporary political‐cultural debates of the countries in which they were written. This was true not only of works on recent history, but of those dealing with the more remote past. Indeed, the segments of the past chosen for discussion provide an excellent index of these debates. In Egypt, attention was focused equally on the nineteenth century (especially Muḥammad ῾Alī, Ismā῾īl, and the ῾Urābī Revolt) and on the beginnings of Islamic history. On the nineteenth century, the key works were probably those written by ῾Abd al‐Raḥmān al‐Rāfi῾ī (1889–1966), Muḥammad Ṣabrī (1894–1978), and Shafīq Ghurbāl (1894–1961). Al‐Rāfi῾ī, an ardent partisan of the old National Party founded by Muṣṭafā Kāmil at the turn of the century and deeply immersed in Egypt’s political struggles, was self‐taught as a historian and wrote exclusively in Arabic. Ṣabrī and Ghurbāl were professional academics; both took doctorates from the Sorbonne, held chairs at Cairo University, and published much of their major work in French or English.

In regard to early Islamic history, Ṭāhā Ḥusayn’s Fī al‐shi῾r al‐jāhilī (Cairo, 1926), Muḥammad Ḥusayn Haykal’s Ḥayāt Muḥammad (Cairo, 1934), and Aḥmad Amīn’s three books on early Islamic history (Fajr al‐Islām, Ḍuḥā al‐Islām, and Ẓuhr al‐Islām, Cairo, 1928–1953) are landmarks in their various ways. Ṭāhā Ḥusayn had taken a Sorbonne doctorate with a thesis on Ibn Khaldūn; his attack on the authenticity of pre‐Islamic Arabic poetry was an effort (almost disastrous for him and Cairo University) to apply European textual criticism to a culturally sanctified body of literature. The works of Haykal and Amīn, in contrast, were attempts to synthesize Islamic piety and “scientific” historical method. However one judges Haykal’s use of modern critical methods, his biography of the Prophet was a literary tour de force, a superbly integrated portrait infused with a distinctively twentieth‐century sensibility. Aḥmad Amīn’s studies, though less accessible, have commanded broad respect since their first publication. Although he was a graduate of the School for Qāḋīs and was largely self‐taught as a historian, his European colleagues at Cairo University formally recommended him for a professional chair on the strength of his publications.

In Turkey scholars followed Atatürk’s lead by turning their backs on the recently‐extinguished Ottoman Empire in favor of an older, more “authentic” Turkish history, in particular Central Asia and the Seljuks. Here the leading figures were two exact contemporaries. Zeki Velidi Togan (1890–1970) was an emigré from Russian Turkestan and devoted his life to the history and literature (both medieval and modern) of the Turkic peoples of Central Asia. Mehmet Fuat Köprülü (1890–1966), a descendant of a famous seventeenth‐century vizierial family, was essentially an autodidact, but he became the most influential scholar of his generation in Turkish literature and the history of the Seljuks of Anatolia. He published mostly in Turkish, but his 1935 lectures in Paris, Les origines de l’Empire Ottoman, marked a turning point in the study of that controversial subject.

In Iran work was inevitably affected by the neo‐Achaemenidism and anti‐clericalism of the Reza Shah regime; the historiography of this era, though by no means always royalist in tendency, was deeply nationalist and often anti‐clerical. These trends are perhaps most tellingly summed up in the writings of Aḥmad Kasravī (1890–1946). Born in Tabriz, politically the most progressive and cosmopolitan city in Iran at the turn of the century, and trained as a cleric, he abandoned that path by the age of twenty. In the early years of the Reza Shah era he served as a judge and lawyer and then taught history at the University of Tehran, but in 1934 he left these official careers for one as a journalist and cultural critic. His vitriolic attacks on Shi’ism and Iranian cultural traditions earned him both a devoted following and deadly hostility; his assassination by the Fidā’īyān‐i Islām was almost predictable. He was, when he set his mind to it, a talented historian. An early work, Shahriyārān‐i gumnām (Forgotten Rulers, 3 vols., Tehran, 1928–1930), deals with the pre‐Seljuk dynasties of his native province and is still regularly cited. His most important work, however, was on the Constitutional Revolution (Tārīkh‐i mashrūṭah‐i Īrān, 3 vols., Tehran, 1940–1943), in which he had participated as a youth and in which his native city of Tabriz had played a critical part. [See Section 200 – Biographies – Aḥmad Kasravi.]

The leading historians of this period did not simply toe the official line. On the contrary, many of them were opponents of the new governments and often in trouble with them. Nor is their work merely a coded statement of their own ideological predilections, for the work of every writer mentioned above has proved of enduring value. Al‐Rāfi῾ī’s books, for example, have been regularly reprinted down to the present. But it remains the case that all these works were shaped in the context of the political struggles of their day, including the struggles for cultural identity as Egyptian, Turk, Iranian, or Muslim.

Cold War And Middle Eastern Nationalisms, 1945–1970

World War II marked another watershed as the domination of the region by Great Britain and France collapsed, to be replaced by a bipolar world of American‐Soviet rivalry. At least until the early 1970s, and in some arenas until the present, intellectuals in the Arab lands and Iran tended to interpret their past within a single broad framework, as a struggle against foreign domination — by England and France in the modern period, of course, but often by fellow (Mamlūk amirs, Arab invaders, and so on) in the medieval past. In the revolutionary age beginning in the mid‐1950s, it was inevitable that many would also begin to look seriously at Marxism as an intellectual tradition, and thus to link issues of internal class struggle with long‐established concerns about imperialism. Muslims

Turkish intellectual life moved along a somewhat different path. There the Atatürk revolution had successfully forestalled direct foreign domination. Likewise, while the Atatürk regime’s étatist and autarchist policies may well have limited Turkey’s economic growth, they also reduced concern over covert foreign influence, at least until the late 1960s, when a rise in anti‐Americanism was provoked in part by the repeated crises over Cyprus. Marxist interpretations did, however, speak to the pervasive poverty of the Turkish countryside and the frustrations of an emerging working class in the major cities.

The inevitable engagement of historians in the political struggles of the postwar years did not prevent the increasing professionalization of historical writing. The process was rooted in the rapid growth of higher education in Middle Eastern countries: a flood of new students into the universities required more professors, and professors had to have advanced research degrees. Down to the early 1970s credible Ph.D.s could only be obtained abroad, preferably in Paris or London (the old imperial capitals, ironically), but many students found themselves in newer and less prestigious institutions in the north of England or the American Middle West. The bilingual nature of historical research among Middle Eastern scholars continued and even increased; many of the major French and English monographs published during these years had begun life as doctoral theses at the Sorbonne or the University of London.

Again, it would be extremely misleading to interpret scholarly production simply as a reflection of ideology and political conflict. If a test for the “pure scholarship” of a work is its usability by scholars of disparate political‐ideological commitments, then much produced in this era must rank very high indeed. To take only the most eminent names, it is hard to imagine modern Ottoman studies without Halil Inalcık, or early Islamic history without ῾Abd al‐῾Azīz al‐Dūrī. [See the biography of Dūrī.] The study of Seljuk history became a favored preserve of Turkish scholarship, and the collective contribution of Osman Turan, Mehmet Köymen, and Ibrahim Kafesoğlu probably outranks work on this subject done anywhere else in the world. In spite of political controls placed on Egyptian scholars under the Nasser regime, the students of Muḥammad Anīs at Cairo University initiated a major body of scholarship on the social and economic history of nineteenth‐ and twentieth‐century Egypt. For an earlier but hardly less contested era, that of the Crusaders, Ayyūbids, and Mamlūks, Sa῾īd ῾Abd al‐Fattāḥ ῾Āshūr and his many students produced (and continue to do so) a major corpus of texts and studies still too little consulted among Western scholars. Even so, the free play of historical research was undeniably constrained by political pressures that far exceeded the partisanship of the previous era, notably the internal security apparatus of Nasser’s Egypt and Muhammad Reza Shah’s Iran, the unpredictable violence of political life in Syria and Iraq, the intermittent military interventions in Turkey, and the taboos inspired by the Arab‐Israeli conflict.

Since 1970

Several of the underlying trends established during the 1950s and 1960s have continued apace, in particular the burgeoning of universities and research institutes throughout the Middle East. In spite of chronic underfunding and a strong emphasis on scientific‐technical training, this trend has led to an expansion of academic history. Particularly important, especially for the Ottoman period in Turkey and the Arab lands, has been a great improvement in the organization of archives and documentation centers of all kinds. (Unfortunately, Iran seems not to have benefited from such a process under either the shah or the Islamic Republic.) Another trend, already discernible before 1970 but much stronger since, has been the growing number of historians from the Middle East who hold permanent academic appointments in Europe and the United States. Admittedly, most of these completed their graduate studies in Western universities, but even so they bring a perspective rooted in the cultures and historical experience of the Middle East.

The political climate in which historians must try to work has been variable. Egypt has witnessed an unsteady but substantial liberalization; in contrast, Syria and Iraq have moved from instability to tightly regimented dictatorships. Turkey has experienced a cycle of almost chaotic openness, severe military censorship, and, since the mid‐1980s, a gradual easing; however, it remains illegal to criticize Atatürk, which inevitably constrains work on the crucial quarter‐century from 1914 to 1938. In Iran, the Islamic Revolution has opened up certain possibilities for research while closing others; historians of a secularist orientation have obviously had to choose their topics and their words with great tact. In general, the Islamic movement everywhere has increasingly affected historical inquiry and writing, as it has intellectual life in general. For example, a trend seen in the Arab world during the early 1970s — a radical critique of the nature of early Islamic society and even of the soundness of the sources — has been silenced or at least driven underground. There has been no real progress in Arabic‐language works on the life of Muḥammad since Haykal’s famous biography was published more than sixty years ago.

In spite of such official and cultural pressures, however, many periods and topics seem to be politically and religiously neutral, in the sense that historians are relatively free to construct their accounts of them in accordance with their own purposes and outlooks rather than externally‐dictated agendas. The middle periods of Islamic history (c. 900–1500) have long fallen in this category, with the partial exception of the Crusades and the figure of Saladin, and we can now add the early ῾Abbāsids and the Ottoman era, no longer a useful target for Arab nationalist polemics. The social and economic history of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in particular has attracted a great deal of first‐rate work during the past two decades. In premodern times, the early ῾Abbāsids, the Seljuks, and the Mamlūks have continued to be the subject of valuable and sometimes ground‐breaking studies. To name individual scholars for the last two decades seems invidious, since there are now so many historians at work, and it is hardly possible as yet to identify those whose contributions will prove seminal or enduring. What can be said is that there now exists, in all the major countries of the Middle East, a substantial corps of professional academic historians writing chiefly in the languages of the area. In this respect, the history of the region is increasingly in the hands of its own scholars — the natural state of things, we might suppose, but one that was hardly the case for most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Moors

The Moors were the Muslim inhabitants of Islamic Spain, or al-Andalus. The term Moor is a late-antique and medieval Western European usage to indicate dark-skinned North Africans of Arab and/or Berber origin who were responsible for the invasion of Spain in 711 A.D. and the establishment of its flourishing Islamic culture, which lasted from the eighth through the fifteenth centuries.

Origin And Development Of The Term

The origins of the term remain elusive. Its derivation from the Semitic etymon mahourím, “people of the West,” is questionable, and the Arabic al-Mar is extremely rare and does not occur in Andalusi Arabic sources. Mauroi is late Greek and may have been derived from the Latin ethnic name Mauri, both meaning “dark ones.” Following the destruction of Carthage in 146 B.C., the term mauri was used to indicate the tribes inhabiting the Roman provinces of Mauretania, corresponding to modern-day western Algeria and northeastern Morocco.

In the Latin Middle Ages, Mauri referred to a mixture of Berbers and Arabs inhabiting the coastal regions of Northwest Africa. In Spain, Portugal, and Italy, Mauri became Moros (Maures in French). More commonly, however, it was a racial designation for dark-skinned or black peoples, as in its English usage, which is seen as early as the fourteenth century.

The term was most popular in historiography and literature from early modern times to as late as the mid-twentieth century, when it was used to describe persons and events in the history and culture of Islamic North Africa and Spain. It survives in such phrases as “Moorish history” (or “civilization”), “Moorish art,” and “Moorish architecture.” In Spain, the term is still used, inaccurately and often disparagingly, in reference to Arabs or Muslims of diverse origin. Since the mid-twentieth century, the term has fallen out of use and carries racial connotations.

Ethnic Composition

The Moors do not constitute a well-defined ethnic group, and, unlike the Mongols, they do not represent a clearly identifiable tribal confederacy. They are, rather, a large and diffuse ethnic group consisting primarily of sub-Saharan Africans (Mauritania, Northern Senegal, and Western Mali), Berbers (Morocco and Western Algeria), Arab Bedouins, and a landed Arab elite (primarily from Yemen and Syria). In most writings on the Moors, darkness of skin has been applied as a characteristic for any and every Muslim invader of Europe.

The Islamic conquest of North Africa (Ifriqiyya) throughout the eighth century, and the existing tribal and social contentions among these various groups, led to the consolidation of rival confederacies. The Arab element among the Moors was always a minority, with the majority entering from North Africa during the conquest of the area or as migrant soldiers reinforcing existing armies. The system of walaʿ, or forced conversion, led to significant racial mixing among Arabs, Berbers, and other Africans — in addition to Visigoths and numerous- Slavs (saqaliba) — thus forging a highly diverse Mus population in the Maghrib and al-Andalus.

Numerous terms provide further illustration of the ethnic and political groupings present in Islamic and, later, Christian Spain. Mulad (Arabic muwallad, “person of mixed ancestry”) designated non-Arab Muslims or descendants of converts living in al-Andalus (also generically designated musalima). Mudejar (Arabic mudajjan, “those accepting submission”) designated a Muslim living under Christian rule as well as an architectural style predominant in Castile and Aragon. Morisco (Spanish “Moor-like”) referred to Muslims living in Christian Spain in the period between the conquest of Granada in 1492 and their expulsion from Spain in 1609.

Role In Political, Social, And Religious Life Of Islamic Spain

Although the European history of the Moors begins with their conquest of Iberia in 711, this historical survey will be limited to the Berber dynasties of the Almoravids, ruling from 1069 to 1121, and the Almohads, who ruled from 1121 to 1269. These were followed by the Nasrids (Banū al-Nasr) who settled the kingdom of Granada from 1232 until its capitulation in 1492, and finally the Moriscos, who remained mainly in Granada under Christian rule until their expulsion in 1609.

The tribal coalition of the Almoravids (al-Murābiṭūn), led by Berbers belonging to the Lamtuna tribes of the Moroccan Atlas, marks the emergence of a properly Moorish social and political legacy. The Almoravids were a formidable Muslim dynasty, conquering in Northwest Africa throughout the eleventh century. Following the capitulation of Toledo to Alfonso VI in 1065, Muslim forces called on the Almoravids for aid, which resulted in the rapid conquest of southern Spain by 1079, the year in which their most renowned leader, Yūsuf Ibn Tāshfīn (d. 1106), declared himself commander of the faithful. The Almoravids brought with them a militarist ideology centered on rigid application of Mālikī Islamic law, issuing fatwas against the perceived moral laxity of Islam under the Taifa states (muluk al-tawaif, independent Muslim-ruled principalities).

The Almoravids were usurped by another Berber dynasty, the Almohads (al-Muwaḥḥidūn, “the unitarians”), who followed the doctrine of Muḥammad Ibn Tūmart, a self-proclaimed mahdī, and took over al-Andalus, establishing Seville as their capital in 1170. Under the military guidance of ʿAbd al-Muʿmin (d. 1163), the Almohads became a powerful force, imposing Islamic law and persecuting minorities. Their mark on Islamic North Africa and Spain is visible in the great Kutubiyya mosque in Marrakech, begun under ʿAbd al-Muʿmin. This monument was followed by the mosque of Hassan, begun in 1191 with the foundation of Rabat, and later the “Giralda” of Seville — a minaret now adjacent to the cathedral — which was begun in 1198. As their name suggests, the Almohads brought the religious ideology of tawḥīd to the Iberian peninsula, a reaction against a perceived heterodox Islam. They were patrons to the great philosopher Ibn Rushd (Averroës) and several important poets. Despite their routing of the armies of Alfonso VII at Alarcos (al-Arak), the Almohads were unable to retain political power and their dynasty began its downturn with their defeat at Las Navas de Tolosa in 1212.

Following the downfall of the Almohads in the mid-thirteenth century, Islamic Spain was reduced to the kingdom of Granada. The Nasrid dynasty was founded in 1232 and would rule there as the last Muslim dynasty in Islamic Spain until their capitulation to the Catholic monarchs, Ferdinand and Isabel, in 1492. Their most renowned ruler, Mohammad V, was responsible for completion of the Alhambra palace. A renowned poet working under his patronage was Ibn Zamrak, whose poems are inscribed on the Alhambra ’s walls. An insight into Islamic law during this period is attested in the numerous religious writings, in both Arabic and Spanish, of Içe de Gebir.

Finally, Moriscos (“descendants of the Moors”) is the label given to Muslims who continued to settle Granada and its surrounding areas after 1492. The Moriscos composed numerous literary works in a Romance language written in the Arabic alphabet, a language known as aljamiado (Arabic al-jamīyah). Several crypto-Muslim writings in defense of Islam (and attacking Christianity) have survived in this language. Among their numerous uprisings against a harsh Christian rule, the most famous occurred in the Alpujarras mountains in 1568, signaling the decline of their culture in Spain.

Meaning In Western Culture

Under their many European labels — Arabs, Mohammedans, Ishmaelites, and so forth — the “Moors” were viewed as the enemies of Christian Europe. They become central topoi in European historiography beginning with chronicles of Spain ’s conquest in 711 and continuing in Crusader accounts and beyond: as characters in epic and ballad; as romanticized (and reviled) others in early modern poetry and novel; and as a centerpiece of European orientalist fictions and histories throughout the Enlightenment and into the modern period.

The earliest European account of the Moorish invasion of Spain, the Chronicle of 754, refers to the Visigothic capitulation, the so-called “loss of Spain” (perdida de España) at the hands of the “Arabs and Moors sent by Musa,” or Musa Ibn Nusayr, the Muslim governor of North Africa. In the Estoria de Espanna (History of Spain), the first vernacular chronicle composed in Spain, we find a characteristic portrayal: “All the Moorish soldiers were dressed with silk and black wool that had been forcibly acquired; their black faces were like pitch and the most handsome of them was as black as a cooking pan.” ‘The extensive European historiography on the Crusades is replete with similarly derogatory portrayals. French, Italian, and English histories of the medieval Moors — and later the Turks — repeat these stereotypes and reinforce this negative image.

Early-modern through modern European historiography — which began to view the Moor as subject rather than enemy — began to move away from such portrayals without quite relinquishing the romantic and epic mode in assessing Moorish history. Unfavorable portrayals can certainly be found in the works of Ernest Renan, Richard Burton (Personal Narrative), Washington Irving (The Alhambra), Menéndez y Pelayo (Origenes de la novela), and William Montgomery Watt (A History of Islamic qe in Renaissance Spanish literature — Cervantes ’ Don Quixote and Novelas ejemplares (Exemplary Tales), for instance —which offer s frequency tereotypes concerning their lax or mendacious nature on the one hand, and, on the other, their knowledge of Arabic and their own medieval literary heritage.

In the opening of Shakespeare ’s Othello, Ophelia is imagined in the “lascivious grasp of the Moor” (I.1), in reference to the play ’s eponymous character. In Ariosto ’s Orlando furioso, the Moorish leader is a fierce enemy, but other Moors fight alongside Christians in the parodic adventures depicted in this Renaissance epic. African kings, referred to as mouros, also appear in Camões ’ Lucida’s, sometimes as wise men, at other times as barbarous infidels. European translations of the Thousand and One Nights served to reinforce this image of the lascivious Moor. The image of the Moor has occupied a place of some importance in more recent European and even American writing, in texts such as Heinrich Heine ’s verse play Almansor (1821), and more recently in Amin Maalouf    ’s Leo Africanus (1988) and Salman Rushdie ’s The Moor ’s Last Sigh (1995). This term continues to inform modern conceptions, fictional and otherwise, of the Muslim inhabitants of medieval Iberia and western Europe.

As for visual art, depictions of Moors abound in medieval manuscript illumination, iconography, and sculpture. The images of the Cantigas de Santa María (Songs of Holy Mary) of Alfonso X were intended to portray tolerance and courtly eclecticism: the Moors are depicted playing lutes, engaged in a chess match, or fighting Christian armies. Bellicose imagery appears in the frescoes in the palace of Berenguer de Aguilar, which feature a white knight stabbing and throwing a Moor from the battlements during the Aragonese capture of Majorca in 1229. Some well-known statues include, for example, I due mori, dark bronze representations of two robust Moors wielding hammers for striking the bells of the Piazza San Marco in Venice. Illustrations of turbaned Moors in early modern Moorish novels and their British counterparts have been engraved in the European imagination. These represent a small sample of the myriad representations of the Moors in Western culture.

Historiography

Historiography is not mere historical writing, but a study of how history is articulated. Such a reflexive attitude toward history is the trademark of contemporary historiographical writing and is visible also in ythe historical writings of classical, medieval, and modern Muslim historians.

Arguably the foremost Western scholar of Islamic historiography is Franz Rosenthal, who laid the foundations of a critical study of this subject in his seminal History of Muslim Historiography. Rosenthal’s approach sheds light on the historical implications of this crucial term, but more specifically on tracing the genealogy of contemporary Islamic historiography back to classical Islamic sources. He notes, for instance, [how the following words of] the famous historian Ibn Khaldūn (d. 1406), continue to influence Muslim historiography: “The inner meaning of history, on the other hand, involves speculation and an attempt to get at the truth, subtle explanation of the causes and origins of existing things, and deep knowledge of the how and why of events. History, therefore, is firmly rooted in philosophy (Muqaddimah)” Modern and contemporary Islamic historiography continuously wrestles with such dialectics as change vs. continuity, representation vs. reality, and epistemic freedom vs. dogmatic tautology.

The characteristic formal structures, subject matter, and explanatory paradigms of Islamic historiographical literature took shape between the early eighth and eleventh centuries, and persisted — with much flexibility and elaboration — down to the early nineteenth century. By the 1840s, however, the forms and perspectives of traditional historiography, rich and varied as they were, no longer seemed adequate in the face of the radical challenges posed by Europe to every aspect of life in the Islamic contexts. This article presents a synopsis of modern and contemporary Islamic historiography in four contexts: Egypt, Turkey, Iran, and India.

Nineteenth Century

The challenge of Europe was felt most immediately in political and economic life. Felt only by a tiny minority as late as the mid-nineteenth century, it had become inescapable to almost everyone (at least in the major urban centers) by the beginning of the twentieth. Not only did it threaten the political independence and economic autonomy of Muslim societies; it assailed the very foundations of Muslim identity.

The rapid intellectual readjustments of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries affected historical writing. The shift toward new forms and approaches began in Cairo and Istanbul, the two largest cities in the first region examined in this article. These two cities were the seats of the most ambitiously reformist regimes and the places most directly and profoundly exposed to Western pressures in the region.

Cairo was the first and most important center of an evolving and innovative historiography in the modern Muslim world. It had in fact produced the last great work in a traditional mold, the ʿAjāʿib al-āthār (Marvels of the Past) of ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Jabartī (d. 1826). Al-Jabartī witnessed the catastrophic self-destruction of the Mamlūk regime in the late eighteenth century, the shock of the French occupation in 1798–1801, and the tumultuous changes forced on the country by Muḥammad ʿAlī (r. 1805–1848). He was an acute observer, but he regarded none of this as progress and was content to work within the chronicle–biographical-dictionary framework bequeathed to him by the great Egyptian historians of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

Muḥammad ʿAlī had a great deal to do with the rise of an altered historical consciousness. Quite apart from his military, administrative, and economic initiatives, so disruptive of deep-rooted institutions and habits of thought, he took the risk of sending student missions to study in France, thereby exposing at least a few of his subjects to the thought and culture of contemporary Europe. No less important was his founding of the Translation Bureau (under the directorship of Rifāʿah Rāfiʿ al-Tahṭāwī, d. 1873), which rendered many works of medicine, engineering, geography, and history into Turkish and Arabic+. To be sure, the few historical works chosen for translation — such as Montesquieu’s Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains, et de leur décadence, and Voltaire’s biographies of Charles XII and Peter the Great — represented the Enlightenment, not the new scientific history of Leopold von Ranke or the romantic nationalism of Jules Michelet; even so, they suggested radically new ways of imagining and representing the past.

The first major history in Arabic to reflect new possibilities and tensions was Al-khiṭaṭ al-tawfīqīyah al-jadīdah ([A Guide to the New Districts Ruled under Tawfiq Pasha in Egypt and Its Ancient and Contemporary Cities] 20 vols., Cairo, 1886–1888) by ʿAlī Mubārak Basha (d. 1893), the engineer who oversaw Khedive Ismāʿīl’s ambitious revamping of Cairo in the 1860s and early 1870s. Modeled to some degree on the classic work by Taqī al-Dīn al-Maqrīzī (d. 1442), it is a remarkably rich miscellany of historical-biographical information, geographical description, and administrative data. Conceptually and structurally conservative — like al-Maqrīzī’s work, it is organized by toponym — its contents nevertheless reflect many aspects of the new order. A hybrid work of this kind could not generate many successors, although the Taqwīm al-Nīl (Chronology of the Nile, 6 vols., Cairo, 1916–1936) of Amīn Sāmī (d. 1941) comes closest in spirit and content. Like al-Tahṭāwī and ʿAlī Mubārak, Sāmī spent his life in loyal service to the regime, chiefly as an educator; he was director of the government teachers’ college, Dār al-ʿUlūm, under Tawfīq and ʿAbbās II Ḥilmī, and was appointed to the Senate by King Fuʿād.

In Egypt, the political and ideological crisis of the late nineteenth century proved in the long run to be a turning point, but for a time one sees only limited results — owing in large part to the stifling of political life under the British viceroy Lord Cromer until almost the turn of the century. An exception to this generalization is Salīm al-Naqqāsh’s passionate and richly detailed but still little-studied history of the ʿUrābī Revolt, Miṣr lil-Miṣrīyīn (Egypt for the Egyptians, 6 vols., Alexandria, 1884), based heavily on government documents and trial proceedings.

By the end of the century there is a marked shift from neo-traditional to contemporary European models of historiography. The most successful and widely read of the new historians was the prolific Syrian immigrant Jirjī Zaydān (d. 1914). He edited several journals and wrote in many genres; among his works the most significant in the present context is hiss Tārīkh al-tamaddun al-Islāmī (History of Islamic Civilization 5 vols., Cairo, 1902–1906). This is less an original work of scholarship than a popular synthesis derived in large part from European Orientalist scholarship, but it was well done, and one volume was translated into English (Umayyads and Abbasids, London, 1907) by the David Margoliouth. Zaydān’s was the first Arabic work in “modern” style to address medieval Islamic history. It was widely read but not much emulated, perhaps because as a Christian committed to a westernizing approach, Zaydān could not address adequately the deeper issues raised by his subject for modern Muslims. Nor could he really share the aspirations and frustrations of Egyptian nationalist writers. He was in fact offered the position in Islamic history at the new Egyptian University in 1910, but outrage in political circles compelled the offer to be withdrawn.

Istanbul was the home of a rather different historiographical evolution. It was still the capital of a vast empire, ruled by an autocrat who increasingly defined his role in terms of the Islamic caliphate. Moreover, its historians continued to be, as for centuries past, part of the scribal-bureaucratic elite whose careers and personal identities were closely linked to the fortunes of the Ottoman state. A strongly conservative trend is thus no surprise in the two leading historians of the mid- to late nineteenth century — Ahmed Cevdet Pasha (d. 1895) and Ahmed Lutfî Efendi (d. 1907), both of whom were official court historians (vakʿanüvis), the last men to hold that post under the Ottoman sultans. Both recognized the changes going on all around them, but Lutfî resisted them, while Cevdet Pasha exhibited a more realistic mentality. Lutfî, for example, drew heavily on the official gazette for his information on the Tanzimat decades, a method that ensured a narrow, superficial, and highly laudatory account of this critical period (Tarihi Lutfî [Lutfî’s History], 8 vols., Istanbul, 1873–1910; the final volumes remain unpublished). Cevdet Pasha, in contrast, had a strong grasp of law and administrative institutions and was deeply concerned with the processes governing the decline and fall of states. He was several times Minister of Justice and of Education and occasionally acted as a provincial governor (usually in Syria). He was the editor in chief of the Mecelle (the sharīʿa-based code of civil law issued between 1870 and 1877) as well as a translator of Ibn Khaldūn. Although his chronicle of the crucial half-century between 1774 and 1826 (Tarihi vekayii devleti âliye [History ol,lf the Ottoman Empire], 12 vols., Istanbul, 1885–1892), recomposed over three decades, is traditionally constructed, it makes considerable use of European as well as Ottoman documents. Apart from Cevdet and Lutfî, there are the several historical works of the leading Young Ottoman intellectual Namık Kemal, a far more progressive spirit than his two older contemporaries. But his historical writings were hastily written inspirational and patriotic exercises and had almost no impact on the development of modern Turkish historiography. (Many were never published or were quickly suppressed.)

The old mold was broken first by the Young Turks’ seizure of power in 1908, and then, decisively, by the Kemalist revolution. Whatever his defects as a thinker and politician, Ziya Gökalp (d. 1924) brought contemporary European sociology and history into the mainstream of Turkish intellectual life, where it found a ready reception. After World War I, Atatürk’s generation would create modern Turkish historical writing. [See: https://discerning-islam.org/405-007-a-biographies-mehmet-ziya-gokalp/)

Nineteenth-century Iran did not witness the deep intellectual transformations of Cairo and Istanbul; the country’s poverty and isolation and the political ineptitude of the Qājār court, left its historians working in a traditional (albeit highly sophisticated) framework until the turn of the century. The Constitutional Revolution (1905–1911) was the culmination of a long process, and it would be misleading to attribute the later explosion in Persian intellectual life solely to this cataclysmic event. Yet the Revolution did crystallize the new currents of thought in the country, still ill-formed and shallow-rooted before 1905. It also created a powerful myth of promise, betrayal, and struggle for redemption, a myth that continues even now to shape many realms of Iranian life.

The Indian Mutiny of 1857 against the British marked the end of centuries-old Muslim rule in India. Indian Muslims responded to British imperial rule and cultural influence in various ways, including educational reform and religious polemics. Though these reactions extended across the spectrum — from traditionalists, such as the Deobandīs, to modernists, such as Sayyid Aḥmad Khān (d. 1898) — the modernists’ historical consciousness is most noticeable. Islamic modernism in India may be traced back to Shāh Walī Allāh of Delhi (d. 1763). As an intellectual movement, however, it was inaugurated by the efforts of Karāmat ʿAlī, who retold the narrative of the Protestant Reformation from his Islamic point of view in his book Maʿkhaẕ-i ʿulūm (translated into English as Makhaz-i-Uloom, or, A Treatise on the Origin of the Sciences, Calcutta, 1867). Like Karamat ʿAli, Sayyid Aḥmad Khān embraced modern ideals, specifically the European emphasis on scientific objectivity. In the writings of Muslim modernists in British India, history was employed to assert the rationalism of the Qurʿān and Muhammad’s teachings, and to counter the accusations of European and Hindu critics of Islam. Sayyid Aḥmad Khān’s A Series of Essays on the Life of Muhammad (London, 1870) is a case in point. On the other hand, the traditional ʿulamāʿ used history to assert the superiority of their intellectual tradition over that of their opponents. An exception to this was the work of the ʿulamāʿ associated with Muhammad Ali Mongiri’s Darul Uloom Nadwatul Ulama (Arabic Dār al-ʿUlūm Nadwat al-ʿUlamāʿ) in Lucknow, an Islamic seminary that combined the modernist rationalism of Sayyid Aḥmad Khān’s Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College at Aligarh (now Aligarh Muslim University) and the revivalist traditionalism of Muhammad Qasim Nanotwi’s Darul Uloom (Arabic Dār al-ʿUlūm) Deoband. The historical bent of the Nadwa school is explicit in the writings of Shiblī Nuʿmānī (author of Sīrat al-nabī [Life of the Prophet], an Urdu biography of Muḥammad) and Sayyid ʿAbd al-Ḥayy of Lucknow (author of Nuzhat al-khawāṭir [The Pleasure of Thoughts], an eight-volume biographical dictionary of Indian ʿulamāʿ).

Interwar Period, 1919–1945

World War I was the turning point in almost every aspect of life in much of the Muslim World, perhaps most importantly in the Middle East. It created vast new hopes and possibilities, and consequently even more bitter disappointments and insoluble problems. It ushered in a new era of historical writing marked by several characteristics: growing professionalization (with several scholars getting doctorates in Europe, especially from Paris), institutionalized within the new universities of Cairo, Istanbul, Tehran, and Aligarh; a much closer approximation in form and methodology to the kinds of historical writing practiced in Europe; and a definition of persistent subject-matter areas, somewhat different for each of the linguistic/cultural realms. One apparently odd product of the period was a marked bilingualism among the new generation of historians, who often wrote in French or English for European audiences, and in Arabic, Persian, Turkish, or Urdu for their countrymen; in the latter works the cultural agendas and conflicts of their native countries came to the fore. This phenomenon continues in the present.

It would be incorrect to assume that all traces of traditional literary-historical culture disappeared during these two decades. On the contrary, some of the most significant and useful historical compositions adhere to long-established genres. Thus Osmanlı devrinde son sadrazamlar (The Last Grand Viziers of the Ottoman Era, Istanbul, 1940–1949) is an invaluable biographical compilation by İbnülemin Mahmut Kemal İnal (d. 1957), a senior bureaucrat in the empire’s final decades and a scholar steeped in all aspects of Ottoman literary culture. Another writer, Muḥammad Kurd ʿAlī (d. 1953), the founder of the Arab Academy of Damascus and a prolific journalist and litterateur, composed a monumental history of Syria, Khiṭaṭ al-Shām (Description of Syria, 6 vols., Damascus, 1925–1929). Although Kurd ʿAlī was well acquainted with the critical methods of Western Orientalism, this is the last great work of historical topography, a Syrian tradition going back to Ibn ʿAsākir (d. 1176) that flourished at least until the eighteenth century.

Works of more “modern” style tended to reflect in direct ways the central contemporary political-cultural debates of the countries in which they were written. This was true not only of works on recent history, but of those dealing with the more remote past. Indeed, the historical periods chosen for discussion provide an excellent index of these debates. In Egypt, attention was focused equally on the nineteenth century (especially Muḥammad ʿAlī, Khedive Ismāʿīl, and the ʿUrābī Revolt) and on the beginnings of Islamic history. On the nineteenth century, the key works were probably those written by ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Rāfiʿī (d. 1966), Muḥammad Sabrī (d. 1978), and Shafīq Ghurbāl (d. 1961). Al-Rāfiʿī, an ardent partisan of the old National Party founded by Musṭafā Kāmil at the turn of the century and deeply immersed in Egypt’s political struggles, was self-taught as a historian and wrote exclusively in Arabic. Sabrī and Ghurbāl were professional academics; both received doctorates from the Sorbonne, held chairs at Cairo University, and published much of their major work in French or English.

In early Islamic history, Tāhā Ḥusayn’s Fī al-shiʿr al-jāhilī (On Pre-Islamic Poetry, Cairo, 1926), Muḥammad Ḥusayn Haykal’s Ḥayāt Muḥammad (Life of Muḥammad, Cairo, 1934), and Aḥmad Amīn’s three books on early Islamic history (Fajr al-Islām [The Dawn of Islam], Ḍuḥā al-Islām [The Forenoon of Islam], and Ẓuhr al-Islām [The Midday of Islam], Cairo, 1928–1953) are landmarks in their various ways. Ṭāhā Ḥusayn had received a Sorbonne doctorate with a thesis on Ibn Khaldūn; his attack on the authenticity of pre-Islamic Arabic poetry was an effort — almost disastrous for him and Cairo University — to apply European textual criticism to a culturally sanctified body of literature. The works of Haykal and Amīn, in contrast, were attempts to synthesize Islamic piety and “scientific” historical method. However one judges Haykal’s use of modern critical methods, his biography of the Prophet was a literary tour de force, a superbly integrated portrait infused with a distinctively twentieth-century sensibility. Aḥmad Amīn’s studies, though less accessible, have commanded broad respect since their first publication. Although he was a graduate of the School for Qādīs and was largely self-taught as a historian, his European colleagues at Cairo University formally recommended him for a professional chair on the strength of his publications.

In Turkey, scholars followed Atatürk’s lead by turning their backs on the recently-extinguished Ottoman Empire in favor of an older, more “authentic” Turkish history, in particular Central Asia and the Seljuks. Here the leading figures were two contemporaries. ,Zeki Velidi Togan (d. 1970) was an emigré from Russian Turkestan and devoted his life to the history and literature (both medieval and modern) of the Turkic peoples of Central Asia. Mehmet Fuat Köprülü (d. 1966), a descendant of a famous seventeenth-century vizierial family, was an autodidact who became the most influential scholar of his generation in Turkish literature and the history of the Seljuks of Anatolia. He published mostly in Turkish, but his 1935 lectures in Paris, Les origines de l’Empire Ottoman, marked a turning point in the study of that controversial subject.

In Iran, work was inevitably affected by the neo-Achaemenidism and anti-clericalism of the Reza Shah regime; the historiography of this era, though by no means always royalistAhmedabad, Gujarat in tendency, was deeply nationalist and often anti-clerical. These trends are perhaps most tellingly summed up in the writings of Aḥmad Kasravī (d. 1946). Born in Tabrīz, politically the most progressive and cosmopolitan city in Iran at the turn of the century, and trained as a cleric, he abandoned that path by the age of twenty. In the early years of the Reza Shah era he served as a lawyer and judge and then taught history at the University of Tehran, but in 1934 he left these official careers to become a journalist and cultural critic. His vitriolic attacks on Shi’ism and Iranian cultural traditions earned him both a devoted following and deadly hostility; his assassination by the Fidāʿīyān‑i Islām (Islamic freedom fighters) was almost predictable. He was, when he set his mind to it, a talented historian. An early work, Shahriyārān-i gumnām (Forgotten Rulers, 3 vols., Tehran, 1928–1930), deals with the pre-Seljuk dynasties of his native province and is still regularly cited. His most important work, however, was on the Constitutional Revolution (Tārīkh-i mashrūṭah-i Īrān [History of the Constitutional Government of Iran], 3 vols., Tehran, 1940–1943), in which he had participated as a youth and in which his native city of Tabrīz had played a critical part. [See: https://discerning-islam.org/405-011-a-biographies-ahmad-kasravi/]

The leading Indian Muslim historian of this period was undoubtedly Sayyid Sulaymān Nadvī (d. 1953), a student of Shiblī Nuʿmānī and a Ṣūfī disciple of Ashraf ʿAlī Thānvī (d. 1943). Nadvī’s mastery of Islamic history and classical Arabic qualified him to complete Shiblī Nuʿmānī’sSīrat al-nabī. In his surveys of Islamic thought, Nadvī often offered profound philosophical insights that attested to his semi-critical, yet acute historical awareness. His renowned set of lectures, Khutbāt-i Madrās (The Madras Lectures, translated into English as Muhammad: The Ideal Prophet), is one such example. His other writings include historical works on the geography of the Arabian Peninsula and Arab navigation. Such historical work was not only of great importance to scholars but was also instrumental in moving Indian Muslim identity closer to its imagined origins in Arabia. In 1915, Nadvī established the Darul Musannefin (Arabic, Dār al-Musannifīn; House of Writers) in the northern Indian city of Azamgarh, a research institution that fostered historical writing and became a sought-after academy of letters devoted to publishing well-researched monographs in Urdu. Nadvī’s work not only appealed to like-minded Muslim thinkers and theologians but was also influential in introducing traditional and conservative ʿulamāʿ to a historical method. After the partition of India, Nadvī served an important role in drafting the original constitution of Pakistan, invoking his knowledge of Islamic political history in this enterprise.

Before 1947, however, a heated political appropriation of history had occurred from which most followers of Thānvī, including Nadvī, had excused themselves. From World War I to the mid 1920s, many Indian Muslims, employing quixotic notions of an ideal Islamic past as an authenticating apparatus, rallied for the Ottoman caliphate under the leadership of the Deobandī theologian Mahmud Hasan (d. 1920). From the 1930s until 1947, history was constantly (mis)quoted in order to advocate or dismiss the two competing notions of Muslim social existence in the Indian subcontinent: a two-nation theory (championed by the poet-philosopher Muhammad Iqbal [d. 1938]) versus a united India (championed by Abū al-Kalām Āzād [d. 1958] and Ḥusayn Aḥmad Madanī [d. 1957]). Though these internal differences existed, in fact amounting to considerable internal strife, the overwhelming majority of Indian Muslims were unanimous in opposing the British government’s presence in India.

Cold War and Middle Eastern Nationalisms, 1945–1970

World War II marked another watershed as the domination of the region by Great Britain and France collapsed, to be replaced by a bipolar world of American-Soviet rivalry. Everywhere until the early 1970s, and in some arenas until the present, intellectuals in the Arab lands and Iran tended to interpret their past within a single broad framework, as a struggle against foreign domination — by England and France in the modern period, of course, but often by fellow Muslims (such as Mamlūk amirs and Arab invaders) in the medieval past. In the revolutionary age beginning in the mid-1950s, it was inevitable that many would also begin to look seriously at Marxism as an intellectual tradition, and thus to link issues of internal class struggle with long-established concerns about imperialism. Turkish intellectual life moved along a different path. There the Atatürk revolution had successfully forestalled direct foreign domination. Likewise, while the Atatürk regime’s elitist and autarchist policies may well have limited Turkey’s economic growth,, they also reduced concern over covert foreign influence, at least until the late 1960s, when a rise in anti-Americanism was provoked in part by the repeated crises over Cyprus. Marxist interpretations did, however, speak to the pervasive poverty of the Turkish countryside and the frustrations of an emerging working class in the major cities.

The inevitable engagement of historians in the political struggles of the postwar years did not prevent the increasing professionalization of historical writing. The process was rooted in the rapid growth of higher education in Middle Eastern countries: a flood of new students into the universities required more professors, and professors had to have advanced research degrees. Until the early 1970s, credible Ph.D.s could only be obtained abroad, preferably in Paris or London — the old imperial capitals, ironically — but many students found themselves in newer and less prestigious institutions in the North of England or the American Middle West. The bilingual nature of historical research among Middle Eastern scholars continued and even increased; many of the major French and English monographs published during these years had begun life as doctoral theses at the Sorbonne or the University of London.

Again, it would be extremely misleading to interpret scholarly production simply as a reflection of ideology and political conflict. If a test for the “pure scholarship” of a work is its usability by scholars of disparate political-ideological commitments, then much produced in this era ranks very high indeed. To take only the most eminent names, it is hard to imagine modern Ottoman studies without Halil İnalcık, or early Islamic history without ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz al-Dūrī. The study of Seljuk history became a favored field of Turkish scholarship, and the collective contribution of Osman Turan, Mehmet Köymen, and Ibrahim Kafesoğlu probably outranks work on this subject done anywhere else in the world. In spite of political controls placed on Egyptian scholars under the Nasser regime, the students of Muḥammad Anīs at Cairo University began a major body of scholarship on the social and economic history of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Egypt. For an earlier but hardly less contested era, that of the Crusaders, Ayyūbids, and Mamlūks, Saʿīd ʿAbd al-Fattāḥ ʿĀshūr and his many students continue to produce a major corpus of texts and studies still too little consulted among Western scholars. Even so, the free play of historical research was undeniably constrained by political pressures that far exceeded the partisanship of the previous era, notably the internal security apparatus of Nasser’s Egypt and Muhammad Reza Shah’s Iran, the unpredictable violence of political life in Syria and Iraq, the intermittent military interventions in Turkey, and the taboos inspired by the Arab-Israeli conflict.

During this time, Muslims in India not only sought a historical grounding of their own existence among their country’s Hindu majority but also remained sympathetic to the Arab cause. An example of a text that dovetails history and politics is Qāriʿ Muḥammad Ṭayyib Qāsimī’s Asbāb-i ʿurūj o zawāl-i aqwām (Causes of the Rise and Fall of Nations). Although Qāsimī was the chancellor of the Darul Uloom Deoband for nearly fifty years (from the early 1930s to the early 1980s) and also served as the president of the All-India Muslim Personal Law Board, he did not use this opportunity to institute critical historical methodology for the study of classical and medieval Islamicate texts in the madrasah system. This is not to suggest that no Deobandī theologian contributed to Islamic historiography in post-colonial India. Manāẓir Aḥsan Gīlānī, for instance, used his skills in Urdu rhetoric and composition to write not only historical surveys of the institutionalization of Muslim education in the Indian subcontinent, but also put the prophet Muhammad’s milieu in conversation with contemporary conditions of human existence in his Urdu book, Al-nabī al-khātim (The Prophet of the Seal). Also, Sayyid Abulḥasan ʿAlī Nadvī (d. 1999) established himself as a theologian who used history as the primary medium of exposition. His biography of Sayyid Aḥmad Shahīd of Bareilly, and his Arabic works, Mādhā khaṣira al-ʿālam bi-inḥitāt al-Muslimīn (What the World Lost through the Decline of the Muslims, translated as Islam and the World) and Rijāl al-fikr wa-al-daʿwah fī al-Islām (Thinking Men and Missionary Work in Islam, translated as Saviors of Islamic Spirit), in which he attempts to account for the co-existence of change and continuity in Islamic intellectual history, achieved great acclaim. Like his teacher, Sayyid Sulayman Nadvī, Abulḥasan ʿAlī Nadvī also espoused a semi-critical attitude toward history. In the face of post-modernity, he was able only to offer apologias for Islam and remained nostalgic for a Muslim utopia.

Since 1970

Several of the underlying trends established during the 1950s and 1960s have continued, in particular the burgeoning of universities and research institutes throughout the Middle East. In spite of chronic underfunding and a strong emphasis on scientific-technical training, this trend has led to an expansion of academic history. Particularly important, especially for the Ottoman period in Turkey and the Arab lands, has been a great improvement in the organization of archives and documentation centers of all kinds. (Unfortunately, Iran seems not to have benefited from such a process under either the shah or the Islamic Republic.) Another trend, already discernible before 1970 but much stronger since, has been the growing number of historians from the Middle East who hold permanent academic appointments in Europe and the United States. Two examples from the Indian-Pakistani context are Aziz Ahmad, a historian of South Asian Islam who taught at the University of Toronto and Fazlur Rahman, a historian of Islamic thought who taught at the University of Chicago.

The political climate in which historians must work has been variable. Egypt has witnessed an unsteady but substantial liberalization; in contrast, Syria and Iraq moved from instability to tightly regimented dictatorships. Turkey has experienced a cycle of almost chaotic openness, severe military censorship, and, since the mid-1980s, a gradual easing; however, it remains illegal to criticize Atatürk, which inevitably constrains work on the crucial quarter-century from 1914 to 1938. In Iran, the Islamic Revolution has opened up certain possibilities for research while closing others; historians of a secularist orientation have obviously had to choose their topics and their words carefully. In India, though greater historical consciousness was espoused by the modernists, it is the ʿulamāʿ who became the proponents of re-instituting traditional Islamic historiography. In general, the Islamic movement everywhere has increasingly affected historical inquiry and writing, as it has intellectual life in general. For example, a trend seen in the Arab world during the early 1970s — a radical critique of the nature of early Islamic society and even of the soundness of the sources — has been silenced or at least driven underground. There has been no real progress in Arabic-language works on the life of Muḥammad since Haykal’s famous biography was published more than sixty years ago.

In spite of such official and cultural pressures, however, many periods and topics seem to be politically and religiously neutral, in the sense that historians are relatively free to construct their accounts of them in accordance with their own purposes and outlooks rather than externally-dictated agendas. The middle periods of Islamic history (ca. 900–1500) have long fallen in this category, with the partial exception of the Crusades and the figure of Saladin, and we can now add the early ʿAbbāsids and the Ottoman era, no longer a useful target for Arab nationalist polemics. The social and economic history of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in particular, has attracted a great deal of first-rate work during the past two decades. In premodern times, the early ʿAbbāsids, the Seljuks, and the Mamlūks have continued to be the subject of valuable and sometimes ground-breaking studies. To name individual scholars for the last two decades seems invidious, because there are now so many historians at work, and it is hardly possible as yet to identify those whose contributions will prove seminal or enduring. What can be said is that there now exists, in all the major countries of the Muslim world, a substantial corps of traditional and professional academic historians writing chiefly in the languages of the area. In this respect, the history of the region and its local Islam is increasingly in the hands of its own scholars — the natural state of things, we might suppose, but one that was hardly the case for most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn

Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn al-Ayyūbī (1138–1193), known in the western world as Saladin, founded the Ayyūbid dynasty and was a highly esteemed Muslim hero of the Crusades. He was born to a family of Kurdish military commanders in the service of the Zangid rulers of Muslim Syria. Although little is known about his formative years, an important turning point in his career came in 1164. The Zangid sultan Nūr al-Dīn had decided to enter the contest for power in Egypt, where the Fāṭimid caliphate was in crisis. Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn accompanied an army destined for Egypt under the command of his uncle, Asad al-Dīn Shīrkūh. Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn was soon able to prove his own valor as a defender of Alexandria against the Frankish Crusaders. In 1169, Shīrkūh became the vizier of the last Fāṭimid caliph, al-ʿĀḍiḍ, but died shortly thereafter, whereupon the vizierate passed to his nephew. Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn then began strengthening his own position, calling several of his family members to Egypt and discreetly undermining the sovereignty of the Fāṭimids.

After the death of al-ʿĀḍiḍ in 1171 and the official end of the Shīʿī Fāṭimid caliphate, Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn ruled over Egypt and its considerable resources, emerging as more than a vassal of the Zangids. Upon the death of Nūr al-Dīn in 1174, he was able to extend his influence beyond Egypt, entering Damascus in 1174 and consolidating his power over the rest of Syria after the death of Nūr al-Dīn’s heir, Ismāʿīl al-Ṣāliḥ, in 1181. This period is the most controversial of his career and some have accused Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn of being a usurper of the Zangids. However, it can also be argued that by uniting Syria under his rule by 1186, he was laying the necessary groundwork for the jihād (holy war) against the Crusaders. To this end, he made appeal to the ʿAbbāsid caliph in Baghdad, thereby strengthening his own legitimacy. Like his former overlord Nūr al-Dīn, Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn’s primary objective was the liberation of Jerusalem, a goal that became realizable after his complete triumph over the Crusader armies at the Battle of Ḥaṭṭīn in 1187. On October 2, 1187, Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn was able to enter Jerusalem, where he peaceably restored Muslim power. His successes, however, stimulated the Third Crusade, and thereafter he was forced to fight a series of campaigns for the cities of Palestine, which drained his military and financial resources and compromised his own health. Upon Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn’s death in 1193, many of his family members were in positions of power in Egypt and Syria, and leadership of the dynasty eventually passed to his brother al-ʿĀdil.

In addition to his military achievements, Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn founded several pious endowments to further the cause of Sunnī orthodoxy. He endowed several madrasahs (legal colleges) in Cairo, as well as a Ṣūfī retreat. He likewise founded several legal colleges in Syria and a madrasah, Ṣūfī retreat, and hospital in Jerusalem; he also restored the Dome of the Rock. It is Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn’s reputation for piety, generosity, and chivalry that has ensured his international and enduring fame.

Reconquista

First coined in the nineteenth century, the term reconquista (reconquest) denotes the gradual and complex process of territorial expansion by which, between c.720 and 1492, the Christian states of the Iberian Peninsula wrested control of the region from Islamic authority. For those who espouse the idea of the “historical unity” of Spain, the reconquista represents a patriotic and religious movement, aimed at restoring the unity of Christian Hispania that had been destroyed by the Islamic conquest of the Visigothic kingdom in 711, and whose outcome was the creation of the modern Spanish state. During the past quarter century, however, scholars have shied away from this overtly nationalistic discourse to emphasize instead the importance of pragmatic politics and socioeconomic forces in driving Christian expansionism.

The reconquista is traditionally considered to have begun in the northern region of Asturias, where in 718 (or 722) a group of Christian rebels led by a refugee Visigothic noble, Pelayo, defeated and killed the local Muslim governor in battle at Covadonga. This Christian enclave survived, and was even able to expand into Cantabria to the east and Galicia to the west, largely because during the 720s and 730s Muslim military energies were focused on southern Gaul. Furthermore, an Arab-Berber civil war in al-Andalus (Muslim Iberia) and North Africa during the 740s, and the severe effects of drought and famine during the 750s, prompted the Berber tribes to evacuate the northern strongholds they had occupied following the Islamic conquest. A century later, renewed turmoil in al-Andalus allowed the Asturian kingdom, under kings Ordoño I (850–866) and Alfonso III (866–910), to advance southward onto the lightly populated plains of the Duero basin, which by then acted as a buffer between the Christian and Muslim territories, and in 910 the chief royal center of the kingdom moved from Oviedo to the old Roman city of León.

Chroniclers viewed the nascent Asturian-Leonese kingdom as the legitimate successor to the Visigothic monarchy and the battle at Covadonga as a divinely guided step towards the Christian reunification of the Peninsula. Political realities were far more complex, however. During the eighth and ninth centuries other centers of Christian power began to emerge in the north. In the Basque territories of the western Pyrenees a realm based in the city of Pamplona — later known as the Kingdom of Navarre — had come into being by the second quarter of the ninth century, despite attempts by Franks and Muslims to bring the region under their respective authority. In neighboring Aragon, another Christian territory came into the orbit of the kings of Pamplona, until it was established as a separate kingdom in 1035. In that same year, the county of Castile, based around Burgos and the Upper Ebro, which had broken away from Leonese overlordship during the late tenth century, also achieved regnal status. At the eastern end of the Pyrenees, meanwhile, in what is now Catalonia, Frankish armies had captured Gerona (785) and Barcelona (802), and established a protectorate, known as the Marca Hispanica (Spanish March), which was ruled by crown appointees. When Frankish power waned during the second half of the ninth century, the counts of the March drifted into independence. However, for the first three centuries after the Islamic conquest, none of the Christian states was powerful enough to challenge al-Andalus for peninsular hegemony. During the tenth century, when the Umayyad caliphate reached the peak of its power, the Christian states were reduced by diplomacy and force to little more than client kingdoms, but there was no attempt to recover the northern territories for Islam.

The eleventh century saw a profound shift in the balance of power in Iberia. Between 1009 and 1031 the caliphate disintegrated, to be replaced by a multiplicity of Islamic city-states (taifas) of varying size and resources. The Christians exploited the endemic political instability and military weakness of the taifas by forcing them to pay sizeable sums in tribute in return for military “protection.” The Christians were also able to make important territorial gains. Most spectacular of all, in 1085 Alfonso VI of León-Castile (r. 1065–1109) conquered the Muslim taifa of Toledo and with it a vast swath of central Spain. Another to profit from the kaleidoscopic political scene was the Castilian noble Rodrigo Díaz, better known as El Cid, who conquered the taifa of Valencia in 1094. The fall of Toledo sent shock waves throughout al-Andalus, prompting the Almoravids, a Berber Muslim sect, to intervene and defeat Alfonso VI in battle near Badajoz in 1086; they subsequently brought the remaining taifas under their authority.

The wars of the late eleventh century rekindled the ideology of reconquista, itself further sharpened by the introduction of the ideas and institutions of crusade. Encouraged by papal pronouncements, which began to equate the Iberian campaigns against Islam with the crusading expeditions to the Holy Land, the idea that military activity against Muslims had a penitential value took root in the Peninsula. It was thus with contingents of foreign crusaders that Alfonso I of Aragon (r. 1104–1134) conquered Saragossa in 1118; Alfonso VII of León-Castile (r. 1126–1157) seized Almería and Afonso I, the first king of Portugal (r. 1128–1185), captured Lisbon, both in 1147; and Ramón Berenguer IV (r. 131–1162) of Aragon-Catalonia captured Tortosa and Lérida in 1148 and 1149, respectively. The crumbling of Almoravid authority in al-Andalus and North Africa facilitated the Christian advances of the 1140s, but further expansion into the area south of the Tagus and Ebro rivers was hindered by infighting among the Christian states and the arrival of a new Berber power in al-Andalus, the Almohads. During the second half of the twelfth century, the Almohads launched numerous attacks against Christian positions and inflicted a major defeat on Alfonso VIII of Castile (r. 1158–1214) at Alarcos in 1195. However, the southern Christian frontier was bolstered by the foundation of a number of indigenous military orders — particularly those of Calatrava (1158), Santiago (1170), and Alcántara (1176) — and by the expertise of the local town militias, whose raiding expeditions devastated the economy of the exposed Muslim communities to the south. In July 1212, Alfonso VIII, with papal backing and Navarrese and Aragonese support, crushed the Almohads at Las Navas de Tolosa and opened the road to southern Spain.

Christian fortunes were further assisted by the death of the Almohad caliph Yūsuf II (1213–1224), which prompted an intense struggle for power within the ruling dynasty. As Almohad authority crumbled during the 1220s, a new generation of taifas emerged to fill the power vacuum and the Christian states, furnished with fresh crusading indulgences, went on the offensive. To the east, James I of Aragon (r. 1213–1276) conquered the Balearic Islands (1229–1235) and overran the taifa of Valencia (1232–1245). To the west, Alfonso IX of León (r. 1188–1230) annexed what is now Spanish Extremadura, conquering Cáceres (1227) and Mérida and Badajoz (1230). His son Fernando III (r. 1217–1252), who reunited León and Castile in 1230, advanced down the Guadalquivir valley, capturing Córdoba (1236), Jaén (1246), and Seville (1248), and receiving the submission of the kingdom of Murcia in 1243–1244. In the far west, the Portuguese fulfilled their own territorial ambitions by occupying the Algarve in 1249. By the mid-thirteenth century, Muslim authority in Iberia had been extinguished with the exception of the Nasrid emirate of Granada and a handful of puny enclaves on the Atlantic seaboard. That Granada was able to maintain its independence thereafter owed much to its readiness to buy peace from Castile in return for tribute, to the political turmoil which regularly convulsed the Christian states, and the Nasrid rulers’ skill in shifting allegiance between Castile, Aragon, and the Berber Marinids, the dominant power in North Africa. Castilian military operations thereafter focused on controlling the ports that dominated the Straits of Gibraltar. Thus, Sancho IV (r. 1284–1295) captured Tarifa in 1291 and Alfonso XI (r. 1312–1350) reinforced that control by defeating the Marinids at the River Salado in 1340 and by conquering Algeciras in 1344.

Thereafter, the conquest of Muslim Granada ceased to become a pressing objective for Castile, as dynastic wars, as well as famine and epidemics, took their toll. It was not until the reigns of Isabella I of Castile (r. 1474–1504) and her consort Ferdinand II of Aragon (r. 1479–1516), who both saw a campaign against Granada as an opportunity to instill loyalty to the monarchy, that the final act of the reconquista was played out. Encouraged by dynastic infighting within the Nasrid royal house and supported by new crusading indulgences, massive subsidies from the Church, and the arrival of foreign volunteers, the Christian forces engaged in a ten-year war of attrition leading to the fall of Granada in January 1492. Even with Islam defeated, the ideology of the reconquista continued to be felt. It contributed to the increasingly sectarian attitude toward Muslims, Jews, and Moriscos (Muslim converts) that characterized sixteenth-century Castilian society, just as it also fueled Spanish imperial ideology, which saw the creation of an overseas empire — in the Americas and elsewhere —as the fulfillment of the manifest destiny of Christian Spain foreshadowed centuries before. (For more on the Reconquista, see: https://discerning-islam.org/802-042-reconquista/).

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