[The following is an excerpt from a recently published article in Medieval Encounters 13(3):385-412, 2007.]
In many disciplines, scholars would not dream of taking their terminology from the street. Even if they do not fully succeed in agreeing upon a given set of terms, they recognize that it is essential for each writer to use his terms with precision, and that an attempt to accommodate oneself to popular usage as reflected in a dictionary must be disastrous. Too often, historians (especially in the field of Islamics) still try to avoid recognizing such a necessity and are satisfied to be guided by whatever is ‘common practice.’ (Marshall Hodgson)
Marshall Hodgson, perhaps more than any other historian of the Middle East, knew that the venture of Islam was all the more difficult to describe due to the adventure in trying to escape the strictures of loaded terms. His neologistics, advocating the use of “Islamicate†to distinguish the cultural from the religious dimensions of a regional history, failed to gain a consensus, although his seminal three-volume study of Islamic history remains a valuable resource three decades later. In the current postmodern climate a number of outdated and outsized terms have fallen into disuse among historians. “Muhammadanism,” by the 1960s, and “Orientalism,” since the 1970s, cease to carry weight after being dressed down for their ethnocentric cultural baggage. “Middle East,” moreso than its linguistic sibling rival “Near East,” continues to float across disciplines and the media, in part because Southwest Asia inspires little interest outside geography. But there is still at least one more label that we could all do without.
To be blunt, I suggest that continued use of the term “medieval†in reference to Middle Eastern and Islamic history between the 7th and the 15 centuries, anno dominated, is anachronistic, misleading and disorienting. Continue reading Making “Medieval” Islam Meaningful
