MAKING SENSE OF HISTORY WESTERN HISTORICAL THINKING

Stwlics Íll Hist,nical Ctdlllr<' .md IntcrCttlt11ml Conttttt llticllfÍott

Gcner:1 l Editor:j i) rn Rüsc n, in Association with C hristiJn Gc ulen
An IntercultJHal Debate

Hh ta 11 Historicül711inkill.l!: A 11 flltcrwltllml Dcb.uc

Edited by Jorn Rüsen

ldcttfities: Ti111c, Diffamrc, .uuf Botmdaries

Edited by Heidrun Fríese
Edit.od by
1\i,ll'l'<lfi,m, /d('lltity <llld Historiral Consâo 11sncss Jorn Rüsen
Edited by Jürgen Straub

Tlte .Hcmtinx o{ History

Edited by Jo rn Rüse n and Klaus E. Müller

~
Berghahn Books
New York • Oxford

The Coherence of the West
AZIZ AL-AZ MEH
Peter Burke's text is structured by two elements, uneasily juxtaposed, in . the
manner o f the 1990s: these are the two tropes o f modem historical concepnon,
the vitalist and the positivist. The former supplies the notions o f distinctive ness
and continuity in combination, and is underwritten by the culturahst and rela-
tivíst temptations and desíres o f the 1990s. The latter prompts. self-re_flectton,
reserve about the strong ídeological and mythologtcal tmphcattons ot dtstmc-
tiveness and continuity, and is sustained by scholarshíp. I will follow sult m rad-
ically questioníng some assumptíons upon which the vitalist trope stands.
1.
lt is difficult to ground the "distinctiveness of the West" meaningfully without
resort to the vitalist trope and to metaphors of the organísm and of genenc con-
tinuity. Professor Burke is clearly not in the business o f constructing yet another
version of"the uniqueness of the West" romance, recently m renewed ascen-
dance in the shadow o f impoverished readings ofWeber; and 1t may mdeed be
fair to see Western distinctiveness as "a unique combination o f elements each o f
which is to be found elsewhere, a pattern of emphases, which themselves vary
by period, region, social group and individual historiao." But do we thereby~ in
this combination of elements, have a structured pattern, th at is, a combmatwn
of elements internally connected :md consistent (without this necessarily imply-
ing consistency)? . .
I believe we do not.What we have, rather, is a register of van o us v1ews and
divergences without necessary connections, sequences, or taxonomic implica-
tions; views and diverge nces whose uni ty is seen to be a d1rect conseq~ence of
their putative Western genealogy, this being their ímplicít principie ot ge nenc
continuity and organismic unity. T he West ís here understood both as a place
which ís assocíated with a fairly homogencous (hence Western) concep tlon of
Notes fo r th1s sectio n can be fo und on page 54 .
59
history, and JS a continuous sequence o f time. I should like empirically to con-
test both these elements, and, fur ther, to suggest that endowing them with a
substantive presence, an o ntological weight, requires extrahistorical assumptions
of durability and consistcncy. Thcse assumptions can only derive from
metaphors of the organism.
I take the liberty o f making this last assertion beca use I believe the mod-
ern :tge-like previous agcs-makes available a limited repertoire of concep-
tualmeans by which people might formally state positions on the past, on the
social order, on political organizations, and on much else besides . Sentiments of
identity, inclusion, and exclusion, like other sentiments, are not concepts, and
need a conceptual articulation in order to be enunciated.The two conceptions
of history available are the vitalist (premised, 11olet1s voletiS, on an organisrnic
conception o f significant historical objects, sue h as the natio n, the people, the
West, or Islam), and the positivist (which does not necessarily have to bear a
teleological evoluti01úsm).
The former 1 is of course of great m oment in European and indeed uni-
versal political and social thought in the last two centuries, animating most par-
ticularly the universal ideologies of nationalism and populism, and other forms
of romanticism. Though its moment appears somewhat indistinct in recent
textbooks and to the contemporary consciousness, this is rather a wishful exci-
sion and abridgement of historical reality by the liberal order that followed
Wodd War II. Organismic romanticism in the conception o f history derives its
conceptual profile ultimately from medieval natural-philosophical and medicai
notions, sue h as temper and nature as states o f balance and rest and as an ent-
elec hy: this connection is explicit in Herder, who even deploys the conception
of the " great chain of being," in its medieval and explicitly nonevolutionist
understanding. As often happens when thinking in metaphorical terms, the
derivative term is made fully to be the metaphor incarnate; a complete con-
substantiarion is assumed to relate the metap hor and the metaphorized in which
the rhetorical distance is lost and the last becomes the first. Thus are historical
subj ects conceived in terms ofliving organisms, and thus is history narrated as
the romance o f this Western, Islamic, o r otherwise deno minated subject.
That the discourse on cultures today, with its emphasis on individuality
(rather than particularity), on correlative no tion of" meaning," of''incommen-
surability," of " hermeneutics," declares itself postmo dern, does not convince me
that it is not in direct conceptual continuity with m edieval vitalism. The senti-
ments and política! and social wills to distinctiveness can only be co nsistently
articulated in terms o f the vitalist trope.
Clcarly, this is not a trope o f whic h Peter Burke partakes. What I wish to
emphasizc by bringing up the matter of vitalism is that it is needed to sustain
the impu tation o f unity to the West-and the Western historical tradítion- as a
historícal object homogeneous in time (continuity) and in space (essencial
coherence). It subtends the integri ty o f tim e Jnd o f place attr ibuted to the West.
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2.
Peter Burke does declare that the West is a historic:tl construct, :tnd casts doubts
on w hether H erodotus would have reg:trded himself a European o r a Westerner.
I should like to take rhis further th:m comforting recognition, Jlld use it to
qucstion onc element in the presumption ofWestern continuity and to subvcrt
the mythogenic proclivity of genealogy.
Th:H the Roman republicanist model and certain Grcek traditions we re
traditionalized and adopted as a European heritage in the Renaissance is very
well known. It is also well-known that, in the eighteenth century, the Egyptian
and other "orientalizing" genealogies adopted by the G reeks themselves, were
displaced in f.wor of one or another version of the rale of the Greek miracle,
which constituted the inicial terminus in the normative and progressive course
o f civility :md rationality.The notion o f the somehow n1iraculous nature o f the
Greek pheno menon is not unnatural, give n the requirement of ali genealogies
that beginnings be absolute.
The recognition o f rhese matters should in itself have a salutary influence,
and stem, by a historical deconstruction, the temptation to translate the typo-
logical construction o f history underlying ali ge nealogies (this is a matter I shall
come back to below) into an evolutionist register, to seek praiseworthy ances-
try, to see the present prefigured in the remote past.
Yet this G reek, or a more generaiiy antique past, is not in a serio us histo ri-
cal way the past of the West despire the use of Roman typologies by Machi-
avelli, Ingres, o r Napoleon, oro f the Greek alphabet in mathematical formubs,
o r indeed o f Atheni:m democracy as the putative fount of just poli ti cal order.
This isso similar that the notion ofJudeo-Chnstian continuity and affinity-a
doctrine that had some fundamentalist Protestant incidence before World War
11 but which acquired particular political salience thereafter-is n ot historically
meaningful despire the wide use of Old Testament typologies by C hristians
(and, very extensively and perhaps more consequentiaiiy, by Muslims), and
despire claims to intertestamental unity.
I would submit instead the thesis that antiquity had a geogr:tphical context
srretching fiom the M editerranean littorals to Persia, and that the millennial ebb
and flow of conquest and counterconquest across the Euras ian ecumene
reflected a lo ng- term trend towards ecumenical uni ty. lnitíally, this thrust had
bcen sustained by rhe Achaemenians, w ho served as a salutary model of sound
polity to a great many contemporary Greeks, including the court of Philip of
Macedon. The Alexandrian conquests and the first uniftcation o f the oecumene
by Alexander, in his capacity as the last o f the Achaemenians, was the fulfillment
of a long-term tendency that was fa r more consumm ately :md durably accom-
plished by the Caliphate nearly a millennium !ater. The Caliphate had com-
posed together the military and economic trends towards unity, with the
cultural monotheistic unive rsalísm of Uyzan tiurn, whi ch was itseli thc product
61
of Augustan imperialism anJ Eusebian C hristíanism . Late antiquity thus had
two termini: Constantinople, and Baghdad, which haJ more in common with
each o ther than either had (except nom.inally, or typologically) with Aachen,
Magdeburg, Paris, or Gregorian Rome.The latter places wcre the tail that, in the
fulln ess of time, came to wag the dog, as a result of a very distinctive line of
development, incubated in isolation and discontinuity, in the northern and
Western margins and wastes o f the ecumene.
This conception oflater antiquity may not be popular, but neither is it new
or idiosyncratic; ir is ofien stated, but its consequences-not least for periodiza-
twn-are rarely drawn consequentially. Arnold Toynbee saw it quite clearly,
althou gh th1s vJsion was somcwhat clouded by concern with the response ofthe
Syriac civilization. O f orientalists, C. H . Becker discerned it. One historian clearly
sketched Its w1de econormc and cultural bearing. 2 Recently, it has been system-
atJcally sustamed by one study o f cultural universalism ', and by :mother on con-
ceptions and metaphors of order and power in rebtion to sacrality. 4
3.
The historical traditions-and by these I mean, as I presume Peter Burke to
mean, formal traditions rather than folk conceptions--of the antique ec umene,
m th1s perspective, are historically coherent in terrns o f their vast geography as
well as o f their cumulative, cross-linguistic traditions, and cannot be character-
ized as Western (or Eastern) in the sense of an exclusively continuous tradition.
Were Origen, Tertullian, Phílo, Eusebius, Plotinus, Proclus, Arius, or Z eno
"Westerners"? I would submit, moreover, that in searching for distinctivenes~
one cannot reduce non- Western historical traditions to cyclism, not least
because linear Heilsgeschichte is , despite Bossuet, a Zoroastrian, Jewish,
Mamchaean and late antique notion of history, which predominated in
medieval Muslim conceptions o f universal history no less than in that of Oro-
sius . Cycles in religious (and nationalist) readings of history constitute eddies
within :t grander linear flow o f time to a meeting with destiny, this being the
Eschaton or national sovereignty. Time in Hcilsxesrhichte is spiral and three-
dJmeusional; in mainstream Muslim traditions, cycles repeat one another wíth
the b st, inaugurated by Muhammad, performing this repetitíon at a higher and
more consummate levei o f accomplishment. That history is habitually recidivist
does not necessarily give time a cyclical stmcture with no end, as in Brahmini-
caiYugas, although it does produce cycles, normally at irreguhr intervals, within
a large linear structure. Augu stine of Hippo (a " Wcsterner" ?), for one, signaled
the differentia o f paganism to consist o f believing rh e downward trends in his-
tory to be fim! ; in secular historiography and political ideo logy, the nocio n of
transl,ztio i111perii catered to the sustenance o f linea ri ty. In any case, cyclism itself
IS rather more complcx than we are usually led to believe, and tàr more inter-

62
esting, not least for the display within it of an urbanity at once sentimentalist
and knowing, that characterized cultivated elements o f the ancique ecumene.
What is crucial in late antique notions o f the past, and indeed in all pre-
modern notions, is typology: certain events o f the past are identified as types,
and these are read as prefigurations o f subsequent figures and events. History is
conceived in the mode of repetition, of reenactment, where the Beginning
(Garden of Eden) is recapitulated in the End (Paradise), where crusaders con-
ccive of themselves as Israelites, where Constantinople becomes the Second
Jerusalem, where Moscow becomes the Third Rome, where the Iulii descend
from Romulus and Venus, Muhammad fi:om Abraham, where medieval Euro-
pean kings are characterized as typtts Christi, and where Noah's Ark prefigures
the Church. Muslim histories o f prophecy are conceived entirely in this mo de,
as are the Muslim histories o f the future, those narratives about the. apocalypse
are composed according to the formal canons of historical writing. Ibn Khal-
dun's cycles are not of history, but o f kingship, the rhythms o f the two do not
correspond necessarily. 5
In conceiving history as typology, time becomes a space of ta.'Conomy, of
genealogical differentiation. Historical discourse here concentrares on identify-
ing what it regards as continuities, and thereby conceives as distinctiveness. lt
sketches the narrative of a continuous subject, and subsumes "causality" in this
narrative, conceiving it as "origin" and "influence."This is of course a causality
implicitly conceived in typology and repetition. It is this notion of time as a
continuous register subsuming causality in linearity, which makes possible the
imputation o f integrity to large-scale historical masses, such as "cultures," " civ-
ilizations," indeed, histories: the West and Islam.
The distinctive feature of modern historical conceptions is the elision o f
Providence (but this does not do away with cycles), and the crucial role given to
historical criticism (which was never absent, albeit selectively: medieval Muslim
biblical criticism, for instance, anticipated and quite possibly precipitated Spin-
oza'sTractatus).'' Karl Lowith's view might well bejustified yet the crucial point
remains that linearity is neither in contradiction with cyclism , nor with a devo-
tional reading o f the pastas a register of antecedents, pre-figurations, beginnings.
What is secularized is the identity of the types sought out to construct a geneal-
ogy: the Athenian agora, for instance, rather than Roman catacombs or the Tem-
pie Mount, though a secular, political salience has been attached to the latter.
Genealogies are typological, against the spirit of modern times, always constitut-
7
ing, necessarily, what I have elsewhere termed "chronophagous discourse."
4.
The distincciveness of"Western" notions o f the past is further vitiated by other
matters, sue h as the concern with anachronism, o f the awareness o f change, on
63
which there is much in medieval Arabic historical writing and wisdom litera-
ture (Ibn Khaldun, Biruni, Mas'udi, Ya'qubi, to m ention but a few). The same
could be said of source criticism. Medieval Arabic astrological histories and
prophetic histories o f the immediate future were, moreover, highly quantitative.
The relation between medieval Arabic historical writing ;md other genres was
strong: as in the narrative types identified by Northrop Frye, they go back to a
prior generll stock o f structural types out o f which chey develop. Local histo-
ries and the histories of specific categories of people (philosophers, judges,
granU11arians, Shafi'is) are ubiquitous in medieval Arabic historical writing.H
Fmally, the notwn of causal explanation in history is a matter requiring more
than a celebratory statement.
Ali these belong to a repertoire o f Late Antique ecumenical notions, canons,
and gemes o f the historical craft and o f political wisdom, in the highly distinc-
tive form acquired under the Caliphate o r in its shadow. That they are of inci-
dencein "Western" writing derives fi:om a point in time when they were not yet
conceiVed as Western.The differentia of modern conceptions ofhistory, signaled
above, ts mdeed ofWestern origin, but is not an exclusively Western tradition.
5.
That all the characteristics are combined, is undeniable if we specify a time:
beginning with the Renaissance, but far more consistently from the Enlight-
enment, most particularly when steeled with the notion o f objectivity, formally
consututed m the nineteenth century as a corollary to scientism. This combi-
nation was achieved in Europe at the same time as history became an acade-
rnic discipline in its own right, at roughly the same time that saw the rise of
correlative cultural phenomena: literary naturalism, the photographic (and !ater
the cinematic) notion of realism, no less than taxidermy and Mary Shelley's
Fra11kenstein. As Peter Burke indicates, this combination has beco me a univer-
sal patrimony: this was accomplished by the universal modules of modernity,
enracmated globally in institutions o f cultural, anel in tropes o f political, social,
and historical thought. [t is produced and re-produced everywhere, indeed in
many instances more successfully outside Europe, for modernity is a global
development going back to the early nineteenth century, a combined global
development, which was (and still is) uneven in the rhythms and incidence, and
in which the "West" has not always been the pioneering location for these
convergent movements, despite the Eurocentric narrative that predorninates
globaUy. The most profound consideration on histo ry, its philosophies, crafts,
and histories, that I have read in two decades was written in Arabic,'' and [
doubt whether it would be translated, as publishers are likcly to think it much
too exotic on :~ccount of its language, and not sufficiently exotic on account
o f its content.
64

Yet it must not be assumed that we h ave here a homogeneous cternity o f a

rational hístorical culture, objective, wary o f anachronism.The robust and reflec-
tive positivísm espoused by Peter Burke, albeit protessionally originating in thc
epistemological utopia encapsulated in von Ranke's celebrated but not vcry
profound phrase "wíe es e(r;e11tlich gervesc11," is socially conhned to the formal and
profcssional writing o f history. There are layers o f h1stoncal culture m ali soc!-
eties, and Westcrners are as irrational in the conception ofh1story as any others:
Romantic notions o f the past, vitalist conceptions of time and o f otherness, the Toward an Archaeology of
cyclism o f national greatness and decadence, the very notion of decline, are ali
part o f a concept o f history that, for half a century, had been relegated to the Historical Thinking
demotic but is now resurfacing, under the guise of culturahsm and of post-
modern:sm, to subvert historical reason as it had when it predominated until FRANÇO!S HARTOG
the end o f the Second World War. I think it important that the histofy o f h!s-
tory be set out clearly, that history reaffirm the parting ofways with rhetoric
and religion that inaugurated Ranke's utopia in the nineteenth century ;md led
to the rise of professional history; after ali, for what better task is there for the
composer of historical narratives, but to be the remembrancer celebrated by
Peter Burke, as the "guardian of awkward f:lcts, the skeletons in the cupboard of
the social memory"? 10 How to begin?With a conunentary anda brief discussion of each point brought
up by Peter Burke? This approach possesses a certain disadvantage in that the
proposed framework must be taken as a given, and then conveniently, the ensu-
ing analysis will bring out the nuances and put the finishing touches on this or
that point for which Burke has already provided the basic outline. After an ini-
tial remark about these issues, about the way to pose such questions today, I shall
invite the reader to focus her gaze on the beginnings ofthis "historical thought."
Notes Given the difficulty of practicing comparative analysis in a meaningful
way, we can at least use it as a framework for our present ref!ections. A poten-
1. One might rnost usefully refer to JE. SchLmger, ús mhrphores de l'or~anisme, Paris, 1971.
2. M. Lombard, Tite Goldett Age of /s[,mr, Amsterdam, 1975.
tial if not actual comparativism! A history ofhistoriography, inspired, opened up
3. G. Fowden, From Empire to Commonwealtlt, Princeton, 1993. and even thrown into question by this demand to compare would be able to
4. A. Al-Azrneh, Muslim Kingship, London, 1996. . . escape constant repetition or might also avoid so much revisionism done always
5. A. Al-Azmeh, Al-Kitaba at-tarikhiyya wa'l ma'rif;r at-tarikhiyya {Historical ~VnfÍI\~ mui Histom.rl
from the inside. By inscribing "historical thought" within this comparative
Knowledge}, Beirut, 1995. .
framework, we would be able to take a certain distance from these Western his-
6. H. Lazarus-Yafeh, [tJtertrvined H\n/ds. MeJi€1~<11 M<tslim Bible Critíástn, Pnnceton, 1992.
7. Thus the ti de o f rny contribution to Relígion ,md Pnrctical Re<lsofl, ed. D. Tracy and f: Reynolds, toriographical paradigms and would perhaps be able write a renewed history or
Albany 199 3, 163 ff. . even better an archeology. An archeology that would appreciate the successive
Medieval Arabíc hístorical wríting h.lS been poorly servcd by scholarsh1p. But see now T.
8. and retrospective teleologies that have organized and made "history" meaning-
Klulidi, Arabic Historical Tho<t,~ht in the Ci<lssical Period, Cambndge, 1994.
9. A. a!-' Arwi, Majlwm al-tarikh [The Co11cept o{ History}, 2 vols., Beirut and Casablanca, 1992.
fuL To this we can add a further elaboration: historiography can be understood
10. Peter Burke, 'History as Social Mernory', in Memory. History, Cttlfl<re, mui rhc Mind, ed.T. But- as a kind of, or part of, intellectual history.To understand the books ofhistori-
ler, Oxtord, 1989, !lO. ans, you must read books other than those by historians-otherwise you sound
the death knell of a professionl Burke is thus corrcct to speak more largely of
"historical thought."
This text which wants to be and is an opening onto a wider world, is with-
out any doubt written frorn the heart of old Europe. Imagine that the same
question was asked from a Calitornian university, for instance: the answer would

Notes for this section can be found on page 71.