For a History-Oriented Approach to Islamic Studies

The question of how to study Islam from a social science perspective has haunted research on Muslim societies for close to half a century. It reflects the uncertainties of several generations of researchers, marked as much by the deconstruction of Orientalist philology in the wake of Edward Said¹ as by the exponential growth of references to Islam in wider social debate involving—more or less closely—actors and groups identified as “Muslim.” How, then, in this context, can one arrive at what Shahab Ahmed recently called “a coherent conceptualization”² of Islam, both as a theoretical object and as a historical phenomenon? There is a real risk of sliding into either a form of essentializing culturalism that amalgamates Islam from Morocco to Indonesia, or a form of textual fetishism resembling what Pierre Bourdieu called “philologism,” that is, “the theory of language which foists itself on people who have nothing to do with language except study it.”³

The contribution of the Annales to these debates has been considerable. From early on, the journal has promoted an approach that considers Islam as a social fact whose historicity can be recovered through the practice of islamologie—the study of Islam as both a religion and a civilization—as a social science. While pioneering figures such as Jacques Berque left their mark, it was above all in the 1980s and 1990s that the Annales, on the initiative of Lucette Valensi, provided space for a generation of historians, Islamicists, and anthropologists to develop an analysis of Muslim literary sources enriched by questions originating in other areas of study and other disciplinary fields.⁴ Throwing off the shackles of textual genealogy, articles by Jocelyne Dakhlia, Houari Touati, Abdellah Hammoudi, Fanny Colonna, Baber Johansen, and others offered new approaches to the role of Islam in different societies, while also placing the dialectic of society and cultural production at the heart of their analysis. The aim of this approach was highlighted by Valensi herself in her introduction to a thematic dossier entitled “Orientalism Today,” which she edited in 1980: “New readings, new objects, intersections between different fields of knowledge: what we have sought to show here is that Islam can be addressed using methods that readers of the Annales have already seen deployed with respect to other sociocultural spaces.”⁵

Much of the research published in the journal at this time was centered on the Maghreb from the early modern to the contemporary period. It sought to present a view of North African Islam based on accounts by local actors, in the first instance men of religion, whether saintly figures (walī) or jurists (faqīh). The aim was to better comprehend the complexity of the relations between local populations and religious elites, and thereby to transcend the simplifications of a colonial ethnography all too ready to reduce the question to the eternal confrontation between the urban jurist and the unlettered rustic marabout. This foray into a “historical anthropology” of Islam in the Maghreb proved to be a remarkable historiographical laboratory. Bringing together researchers from both sides of the Mediterranean, it fostered an interdisciplinary atmosphere rarely encountered in the domain of Arabo-Islamic studies. Anthropologists, sociologists, and historians discussed their work against the backdrop of animated debates taking place in the social sciences, such as the controversy between Clifford Geertz and Ernest Gellner.⁶ They scrutinized the source material using methodological approaches far removed from Orientalist philological dogma, a point illustrated by the title of Touati’s 1989 article “A Semiological-Historical Approach to an Algerian Hagiographic Document.”⁷

It is useful to recall these initiatives at a moment when the field of Islamic studies, in francophone academia at least, appears to be gripped anew with a passion for classicism and positivism, favoring a descriptive approach to its objects of study that is ill-suited to reflection from a social science perspective. Recent work on early modern, modern, and contemporary Islam unquestionably illustrates a process of disciplinary renewal whose importance should not be underestimated. A rich historiography on Islam in the Ottoman Empire and the Indo-Iranian region has made it possible to invest long-neglected fields of inquiry—as Catherine Mayeur-Jaouen forcefully reminds us in her article—and to challenge a number of obsolete clichés, beginning with the Orientalist narrative of the “decadence” of the “postclassical” Arab world. A whole raft of publications combining Islamicist scholarship with historical analysis has demonstrated that Muslim societies did not wait on Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign to engage with critical thinking, and has shown that the issues addressed by nineteenth- and twentieth-century reform movements can only be understood in the context of a longue durée stretching back to the fifteenth century. Regrettably, however, the tendency—especially in France—has been to adopt a descriptive approach that is rarely conducive to interdisciplinary dialogue: the renewal of approaches that took place in the 1980s and 1990s seems to find few echoes in today’s scholarly landscape.

There is another striking difference in comparison with the late twentieth century: research on North African Islam from the early modern era onward is far less dynamic than that on the Muslim worlds of the Middle East and Asia. Generally speaking, historical studies of the Maghreb appear to have dwindled in number, and the history of the region is mainly approached from a colonial perspective, drawing on sources in French without reference to local languages and cultures. In contrast, the principal focus of the articles presented here is the Maghrebi space, for it is our conviction that the study of this region has vast potential to drive historiographical and epistemological renewal. The article by Ismail Warscheid shows that the cultural life of North African regions challenges the topos of enduring decline to which conventional historical narratives have accustomed us. The diffusion of scholarly Islamic traditions in the Sahara also radically contradicts the vision of Muslim erudition as an urban phenomenon contrasting with supposedly unlettered rural zones.⁸ Indeed, the Maghreb participated fully in the Islamic intellectual renewals of the early modern period: the disintegration of Morocco after the downfall of the Saadians in 1603 drove scholars eastward, some of whom settled in the Hejaz and Cairo. They took with them the influential works of the great Algerian theologian Muḥammad b. Yūsuf al-Sanūsī (d. 1490), whose texts dominated the teaching of theology (kalām) and logic (manṭīq) in the Egyptian capital up to the late nineteenth century. As recently demonstrated by Khaled El-Rouayheb, this case decenters the narrative and challenges perspectives that still consider the Maghreb as a fringe or periphery of the Arabo-Muslim world.⁹ The way in which the region, in a context of colonial domination, subsequently assimilated global calls for reform into a language of its own, has much to reveal about what we term the “identitarian turn” of Islam. In return, we are convinced that Islamic sources (the texts produced by actors in the religious field, such as compilations of jurisprudence or doctrinal treatises) offer an invaluable entry point to the cultural and social history of urban and rural societies in the postmedieval Islamic West, making it possible to overcome the omissions of approaches based solely upon European sources.¹⁰ Thus, in his article, Augustin Jomier makes use of a jurisprudential controversy to better understand how Maghrebi societies experienced the colonial period and made sense of the European occupation of their territories.

Moreover, using the Maghreb as a vantage point, the present collection of articles allows us to frame certain methodological propositions. Following Colonna’s extensive work in Algeria, but also echoing Mayeur-Jaouen’s call for a religious anthropology, we make a plea for the practice of field-based history. To obtain a better understanding of Islam in the Maghreb, it seems to us indispensable to spend time in the area under study: beyond the obvious interest of developing an intimate knowledge of places and languages, it is through fieldwork that new sources can come to light. The past decade has seen the discovery of numerous libraries and private, family, and community archives, dating back, in some cases, to the early modern period. This is especially relevant for former rural bastions of knowledge such as Kabylia, the Sous region, and the island of Djerba, where digitization and cataloging programs have made it possible to identify an as yet virtually unexplored wealth of documents. The field itself ultimately turns out to be an archive: enabling researchers to gather oral testimonies and direct observations, and to consider present-day usages of their objects of study, the fieldwork carried out by historians is essential to grasping Maghrebi Islam through a bottom-up approach, starting from the societies that claim allegiance to its precepts.

This preoccupation with fine-grained contextualization ultimately calls into question the grand theories of modernization and secularization. The dialectic between Islam and society cannot be grasped using reductive binary oppositions such as modernism/archaism, enchantment/rationalization, or public/private space. These categorizations, originating in the early twentieth-century social sciences, are unsuited to unraveling the complexity and paradoxes of developments within Islam since the late eighteenth century.¹¹ The educated Muslims who considered themselves “modernists” or “reformists” were not so unlike their adversaries who styled themselves “conservatives.” Modernity was not the only question at stake; other lines of religious or juridical reasoning were also grappling with the issues of the day. As the global history of Islam outlined by James McDougall shows, the early twentieth century’s transnational—and even transimperial—calls for unity among Muslims and reform of Muslim practices and societies were accompanied by a proliferation of cultural productions, expressions, and spaces associated with Islam. There was also a multiplication of actors claiming to be holders of religious authority, which thus became fractured in often conflictual ways. For McDougall, only an approach that takes Islam as a social practice integrated into forms of secularization specific to contemporary societies can resolve the apparent paradoxes present in its twentieth-century history.

Finally, analyses of late modern and contemporary Islam must reflect on its relations with imperialism and its postcolonial dimension. Here, too, the Maghreb is particularly well suited to such an approach. Whereas the region’s nationalistic historiographies have focused on the way Islam was used to resist colonization, the past decade has seen a profusion of research north of the Mediterranean on the colonial management of religious matters, fostered both by the “imperial turn” and by the political relevance of these questions.¹² Today it is crucial to recognize that Muslims, their doctrines, and their cultures have not been merely the passive recipients of these policies, and to give serious consideration to the dialectic that emerged between imperialism and Muslim societies. Studies of West African societies have paved the way in this respect, illustrating the development of new forms of religious authority through negotiation with colonial authorities,¹³ as well as the use of Islam and its normativity by subaltern groups such as women or freed slaves and their descendants.¹⁴ Islam provided colonized populations with categories that enabled them to conceptualize the colonial conjuncture and reconstruct their societies—as demonstrated by the case of the Mzab studied by Jomier. Confrontation with imperialism and, more broadly, the transformation of the world of which Muslim societies were a part, led to a reshaping of Islam.¹⁵ While religion unquestionably enriched nationalistic and anticolonial thinking and ideas, these were just some of the many changes that can be subjected to the historian’s gaze. Studies that contextualize these discourses make it possible to measure the extent of their renewal and to trace the ongoing “invention of tradition,” from the new insistence on the umma—the community of Muslim believers¹⁶—to the centrality of questions of purity. In this context, the complex interchanges between European scientific discourses—including but not limited to scholarly Orientalism—and local, situated thinking warrant particular scrutiny.¹⁷ It seems imperative that we engage fully in the study of these nineteenth- and twentieth-century transformations if we wish to understand what Mayeur-Jaouen has termed “the rupture represented by the explosive proliferation of contemporary Islamisms.”¹⁸

For all these reasons, and driven by the political urgency of the present moment, we argue for a history-oriented Islamology: a science that takes Islam as its object, that is grounded in skillful philology and a knowledge of Muslim doctrines and Islamic cultures, while indissociably remaining a historical science, careful to mobilize the full complexity of its sources and anchored in the reflexivity of the social sciences—in short, a rupture with the Orientalist unconscious.