Islamic History: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions) by Adam J. Silverstein

Author:Adam J. Silverstein
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2010-01-20T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 4

The sources

How do we know what we know about Islamic history? In theory, as ‘Islamic’ history is a branch of history more generally, the methods and tools used by historians of other societies are also available – to a greater or lesser extent – to historians of Islam. Naturally, the sources for each branch of history are particular to it, and our sources for some periods and regions are better than those for others: in some cases, we possess a small number of sources that tell us a lot; in other cases, an extraordinary glut of sources proves to punch well below its weight.

In 1977 and 1978, four books were published in which historians of Islam were told that they were doing their job poorly. Edward Said’s Orientalism chastised Islamicists for – amongst other things – creating a field of study that is condescending towards and critical of the Muslim societies that they study. John Wansborough’s Quranic Studies and The Sectarian Milieu, along with Patricia Crone’s and Michael Cook’s Hagarism, told Islamicists that they are not being critical enough (in the scholarly rather than judgemental sense of the word). Over the past three decades, scholars have been forced to engage with the ideas presented in these books, even if only to refute them. Broadly speaking, historians work with two types of written materials: primary sources (written by the people under History’s microscope) and secondary sources (written by the people looking through the microscope). Said’s work concerns secondary sources and will be discussed in the following chapter; Wansborough’s and Crone/Cook’s work concerns primary sources and will be discussed here.

Our sources for Islamic history after 1100 (following the chronology adopted in Chapter 1) are, for the most part, of the sort that will be familiar to historians of other societies. People in these centuries wrote many books about many topics and – once we read them – we can attempt to reconstruct and analyse the world they describe. Obviously, the careful historian will be on guard for misleading or biased accounts (or for what some might consider to be the inevitable biases that each author brings to his/her writing), but otherwise the study of Islamic history will be broadly comparable to the study of European history, for instance. In fact, by this period, due to events described in Chapter 1, some of our sources for Muslim societies are European documents and accounts. Jean Chardin (d. 1713), for instance, left us the record of his travels from France to the Near East and Iran, a record that fills ten volumes. Similarly, Ottoman–European relations are known to us from European accounts as well as Ottoman ones. The same can be said for the Mediterranean societies of the immediately preceding periods, when Christians from southern Europe and Muslims from North Africa and the Near East interacted regularly, leaving plenty of literary and documentary traces of this interaction from which historians can now benefit. From this context comes of one of our most important resources for Islamic history, the Cairo Geniza.

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