“One might argue that, for us as historians, the principal challenge is to imagine the region outside of the commonplace assumptions about modern Middle Eastern societies, namely that they are best defined by a series of absences or negations—the lack of “authentic” nation-states, capitalism, democracy, secularism, human rights, and so forth. Against the hegemony of these Orientalist narratives, we can encourage students to understand history as a far more complex process of contingency and contradiction, for example, by grasping the contemporaneity of modernity and tradition. This style of thinking encourages students to move away from conceiving of history in terms of simple oppositions, such as capitalism or socialism, democracy or despotism, religion or secularism, and instead grasp historical processes in the elegance of their complexity. History emerges, then, as the unstable play of forces, rather than the unfolding of teleological logics. More concretely, this means viewing the Middle East as shaped by dynamic internal and external power relations—between elite and subaltern classes; between religious and secular groups; and between Middle Easterners, Europeans, and Americans.
Situating the Middle East within world history provides a way to break free from Orientalist thinking by emphasizing historical comparability. That is to say, when we study the Middle East we can study it in ways comparable to that of other regions. This means instead of emphasizing exceptionalism—the notion that the Middle East is different from other parts of the world—we may emphasize comparability. For example, we can focus on many of the themes that thread through world history more broadly by looking at histories of capitalism; colonialism; racial formations; the contours of cultural modernism, anticolonial nationalism, and postcolonial revolutionary movements; struggles around class and gender; and political contests over state power.”
Comments