Reading Outsiders:
A Note on Islamic Historiography

May 25, 2006

This last year one of the other Mellon fellows was from the history department at Emory. His topic was the history of race theory in 19th century America. To write on this subject he had to engage with all the popular and influential books and tracts on race that were published at that time. Now, I take one look at the material he has to read and think to myself: I would rather do bodily harm to myself than have to read through all this boring stuff. Give me Thoreau.. give me Twain.. or give me death. But that illustrates the difference between the academic approaches that for shorthand we might call "historical" and "literary." Historians have a hard time looking outside their own methodology.. but nothing is more annoying and limiting than when a historian incorporates a major thinker such as Thoreau into a survey of general thinking on a subject. The inevitable result is to make a unique and complicated voice small. Literary scholars tend to be more interested in bringing out the complications that are present in a an essay by Thoreau, ignoring the flatter dialogues that are taking place elsewhere.

Islamic Historiography by Chase F. Robinson is a wonderful overview of the growth of the Islamic (Arabic) tradition of historical writing. But its tendency is to see things as a historian and not as a literary scholar. I thought this was most telling in his treatment of al-Mas'udi, the 10th century historian who wrote a universal history that blends geography, history, and curiosities. Robinson has the following to say about him:

Now it is true that there were alternatives to this traditionist historiography. Al-Mas'udi (d. 956), who was deeply antipathetic towards traditionists in general, did not use isnads, and it may not be coincidental that he, virtually alone amongst practising historians in this period, seems to have regarded historiography as a 'well ordered and firm science'... But however much we may value al-Mas'udi's approach, especially his catholic and urbane tastes, the later tradition expressed its own preferences by steering clear of his work... [36]

For many, historical knowledge, as before, would be produced through the transmission of discrete accounts, and no attempt would be made to rebuild the tradition atop the rationalism proposed by al-Mas'udi. Like it or not, his was a dead end... [98]

I could have entitled this blog "In Praise of Dead Ends." If the goal of a work is to tell the mainline history of Islamic historical writing, then an outsider such as al-Mas'udi cannot be given too much importance. It is far more valuable to dive into the endless prosopographies and popular siras of the prophet than to stop and examine someone whose text did not go anywhere. But on the other hand it is hard for me to think of a text from any tradition that is more theoretically curious than the work by al-Mas'udi. His work is worth settling upon and examining.. a scale of effort which would not be rewarding when it comes to the histories that Robinson would label "traditionist." I would be the last to say that we do not need practitioners of the historical approach.. but I also think something is lost if the multiple dead ends of cultural traditions do not win dedicated scholars.. after all, it will often be the dead ends who have the most to offer us now.. just as our contemporary dead ends may have the most to offer to the future.