Islam's Transformative Impact on World History: A Deep Dive

Ferdinand and Isabella, the “most Catholic” rulers of Spain, didn’t back Christopher Colombus’s first voyage in order to find a New World. Instead they sought to conquer Jerusalem back from the Muslims and use it as a base from which to launch a global Christian empire. A few years earlier, when that other sea voyager, Vasco da Gama, landed at Calicut in India in 1498, after reputedly discovering the first direct maritime route between Europe and Asia, he was guided by a Gujarati Muslim. The guide introduced him to Muslim speakers of Genoese Italian and Castilian Spanish from Tunis who congratulated him on his “lucky venture”. Through such thrilling if subtle reformulations of familiar histories, usually cordoned off among the achievements of the so-called West, historian James McDougall’s masterful new account of Islam reminds us that the faith’s history – at its core a cosmopolitan one – is quite simply a history of the whole world. The idea of “global history” is being instrumentalised by so many within academia and publishing, who often repackage staid imperial history in new equality, diversity and inclusion-friendly garb so as to begrudgingly appease “woke” students and state funding bodies alike. McDougall’s impressive tome – which explores Islam from its origins to the digital age – reveals not just the poverty of such approaches but, more importantly, how such a “global history” might live up to its name. With its sweep and its descriptive textures, Worlds of Islam responds to the urgent call made by the philosopher Norman O Brown in the aftermath of the 1979 Iranian Revolution (when thinking about Islam was becoming more and more segregated from world history) to write “a universal history [of Islam] with cosmopolitan intent”. McDougall’s intercontinental account is eclectic and unpredictable, guaranteed to open the eyes and minds of the general reader no less than scholars of the world’s second-largest faith. The author, by training a historian of Algeria, apparently takes seriously the Prophet Muhammad’s injunction that one must “seek knowledge even unto China”. In doing so, he follows Islam – that is, wherever there are people who call themselves Muslim – from 1620s Cartagena (in present-day Colombia), where Africans of diverse ethno-linguistic backgrounds found common cause in their Muslim faith, to Philippine communities in which women had multiple sexual partners before marriage and could divorce their male spouses if they went awry. He takes us from the inhabitants of South Sulawesi (now in Indonesia) belonging to a third gender known as bissu, who converted from animism to Islam after the 17th century, to West Africa, where Guinea’s Democratic Party government was inspired by the Muslim kings of ancient Mali. The breadth and promiscuity of McDougall’s wide-ranging examples advance a number of original, if deliberately understated, claims. First, he shows that Islam is perhaps best understood from its peripheries, in South-East Asia, West Africa, Siberia, South America and China, than from its heartlands in South-West Asia and North Africa. Second, he demonstrates that Islam reached every corner of the globe, in one way or another transforming it. Indeed, there’s hardly a place in the world that, in turn, didn’t remake Islam. Third, he suggests that the West’s obsession with Islam’s relationship to violence has blinded it to the recognition that victims of “Muslim” violence are, more often than not, Muslims themselves. Lastly, he asserts that Islam is whatever people who claim to be Muslim say it is, whether scripturally orthodox or not. At the same time, McDougall doesn’t shy away from developing his own conceptions of Islam as a historical force. He suggests that Islam could also be understood as a political language of power that relied on the force of arms as much as it did on the force of argument. And understanding Islam as a political language means recognising how it was able to permit tendencies that, viewed from the present, we might regard as contradictory. McDougall rejects the two dominant, present-day modes of writing Islamic history. The first – favoured by think-tankers and policy hawks for whom “Islam”, overwhelmingly, is a problem to be solved – sees the faith as inflexible, unusually if not uniquely legalistic, and dominated by scripture and the opinions of those who interpret it in an orthodox way. The second found popularity in liberal circles after 9/11. It tried to define “true Islam” from the practices most agreeable to multiculturalism and religious liberty. These well-meaning accounts – of syncretism, of folk religion and of mystical thought – sought to emphasise the diversity of what we think of as “Islam”, and to make the point that the practice of Islam rarely conformed to its theory. But they have found themselves ill-equipped to make sense of the continued global dominance of an intransigent orthodoxy and the sometimes spectacular violence it has authorised. McDougall rejects both these accounts. There has never been a time when what is or isn’t Islam hasn’t been contested both from within the faith and outside of it. He resists the temptation of privileging orthodoxy over heterodoxy, or the rational against the mystical, as much he refuses to treat Western converts as less or more Muslim than those born into the faith. Formations like the Nation of Islam in the US are treated with the same seriousness as the Wahhabis of Saudi Arabia. And origin myths that imagine a Filipino ruling dynasty to be descended from the Prophet and a bamboo shoot are treated with the same respect as the Nation of Islam’s conviction that white man was the accidental creation of a lab experiment gone wrong. In doing so, McDougall shows all along that Islam is what those who call themselves Muslim say it is. This is an argument with real, present-day political stakes. Historians and commentators have, all too often, unwittingly adopted their subjects’ views of what Islam is or isn’t. In titles such as the Atlantic, it has been argued Isis “is Islamic. Very Islamic”, while failing to account for just how contested Islam has been. McDougall rejects dogmatic assertions of this kind. Violence wielded by militant Islamist groups, he repeatedly points out, has more often than not been directed at Muslims themselves, not their infidel opponents, as is commonly imagined. As McDougall reminds us, Islamic State’s jihad was, first of all “a war over Islam against other Muslims. It was only secondarily a war claiming to be for Islam against non-Muslims. It actively sought a global war; it claimed responsibility for terrorist attacks across Europe, and from the US and Canada to Israel, Mozambique, Australia, New Zealand and the Philippines. The great majority of its victims, though, were other Muslims in predominantly Muslim countries.” Recognising that the war for Islam was, more often than not, a war within Islam demands from historians a kind of intellectual humility. As Muslims resisting their co-religionists’ extremist tendencies often say, Allah knows best. Humility towards his subjects is everywhere present in McDougall’s book. For example, he reminds us that though they regarded themselves as Muslim, Indonesia’s third-gender bissu – believed to be the androgynous descendants of a moon goddess, with magical capacities – would come to be regarded as heretics from the 1960s onward. McDougall is able to show how the origins of bissu practice predate Islam’s arrival in South-East Asia. It is in the spirit of this cosmopolitan history to remind us that most of what we understand as “Islamic” came from somewhere else. Nowhere is this kind of counter-intuitive insight wielded to greater effect than in McDougall’s retelling of the story of Islam’s origins. This is sensitive territory. For many Muslims, Islam emerged fully formed in seventh-century Mecca, even if it related its beliefs to the pre-existing books of Christians and Jews. The staggering speed with which Islam’s early adherents would come to govern vast territories, from the hinterlands of China to the Atlantic shores of Morocco, was evidence, they felt, of divine providence. However, a number of historians from the 1970s onwards sought to revise Muslim accounts of the faith’s origins with the purpose of imputing to Muslims an almost unique gullibility and unreliability. They suggested that such extraordinary military success was unfathomable and that most of the things we know about Muhammad, as per Muslim accounts, actually date from more than a century after his death. Whether through the sophisticated, deliberately provocative scholarship of Patricia Crone and Michael Cook, who argued that Islam was a Jewish messianic movement centred on Jerusalem, or through vulgarisations of that work by the popular classicist turned Christian polemicist Tom Holland, the overriding claim of these revisionist histories of Islam’s origins has been that Muslim authors are fundamentally unreliable, that they disguised political motives in religious terms, and that their ruling classes lacked the intellectual sophistication of the Christian, Jewish and Zoroastrian populations they would govern. McDougall instead locates the genesis of Islam within a set of interlocked political, economic and environmental crises. He neither downplays the unprecedented success of early Islamic imperial expansion, nor sets Islam’s miraculous growth outside of human history. He reminds us that Christian sources nearly contemporary with Muhammad’s life, mainly in Syriac, back up many of the claims of Muslim authors. Papyri and inscriptions confirm that the Islamic hijri calendar became widespread very quickly, predating by a century the adoption of a dating system from the birth of Christ, which had occurred 600 years prior. The claims that early Muslims made about themselves, therefore, were much more trustworthy than their modern revisionist critics argue. McDougall’s own revisionism is wielded not for bigoted purposes but to opposite effect. In re-examining the story of Islam’s beginnings, he quietly demolishes the post-9/11 consensus that concepts such as jihad were totems of Islam’s otherness, when in fact they owed their origins to the very Christian polities that preceded the crystallisation of the faith’s rules into dogma. The characteristics of jihad were first articulated in Byzantine political thought in the decades immediately before Islam. As McDougall reminds us: “To the Byzantines, Persia’s offensive threatened not only the inheritance of Rome but the empire of Christ on Earth. For the first time, they declared a holy war in defence of the true faith, promising the martyr’s crown and direct entry into paradise for all those who fell in the struggle.” By deconstructing the genealogies of some of the concepts seen as central to Islamic thought, McDougall aims to un-Other Islam. If such an intention sounds refreshing, it’s because we are being reminded of how much Anglophone writing about Muslims is underpinned by assumptions about the religion and its adherents’ difference (sometimes naive, often bigoted). It’s also a demonstration of how and why the much-bemoaned caricaturing of Islam by European and North American authors actually misses the mark: what we unthinkingly decry as “orientalism” doesn’t only render Islam as homogeneous, static and essentialised but also does so to the very idea of “the West”. One cannot give an account of the emergence of the secular state in the 19th-century Islamic world without revisiting the story of the “secular state” in the so-called West. By rewriting the history of both, McDougall demonstrates that the story of “Muslim failure” is in fact an optical illusion. He writes, for example: Religious equality for all, and the neutrality of a secular state relative to the religious sphere, was far from established in Europe. Catholic emancipation had only been enacted in Britain in 1829, and confessional equality was far from being a reality in British-ruled Ireland. In Germany, a “cultural struggle” would be waged over the political life and loyalty of German Catholics in the 1870s and 1880s. The formal separation of church and state remained the most contentious of all struggles in France until it was enshrined in law in 1905. Russia made the loudest noises about needing to protect its Christian populations from Ottoman depredations, but Russia’s Jews were the targets of pogroms, and Muslims were forcibly deported in the thousands from Crimea and the Caucasus. Religious equality in the Ottoman lands, then, was not about catching up with a more enlightened Europe. The orientalist tendencies that have dominated and continue to dominate writing about Islam cannot be overturned merely through a better, or more accurate, account of Islam itself. Instead, such writing must take aim at the history, the foundational assumptions and the delusional fantasies that underpin our understanding of the so-called West. Explicitly or not, this is the entity against which Islam is held up and typically found to be deficient. As McDougall deftly demonstrates, ironically perhaps, rewriting the former means upending many of our most dearly held assumptions about the latter. It isn’t just that the history of Islam is a history of the world, but that, as Worlds of Islam so convincingly shows, the history of Islam requires the upending of many of the things we think we know about the world. Hussein Omar is writing a 500-year history of Cairo through the story of his family Worlds of Islam: A Global History James McDougall Basic Books, 608pp, £30 Purchasing a book may earn the NS a commission from Bookshop.org, who support independent bookshops