Using History in North Africa and the Levant

Volume 4 | Issue 5 - Non-Western Perspective

Article by Hayley Arnold. Edited and Researched by Hayley Arnold.

Mention anything related to North Africa, and one might be forgiven for instantly conjuring up in the imagination scenes straight out of Michael Palin’s Sahara. A sense of exotic otherness appears to forever guide understandings of this vast and varied region. A cursory look at the modern British media can serve to illustrate why this should be so, beyond such fantastic documentary works as Palin’s and dedicated news outlets concerned with North African politics, it is a rarity that anything North African makes the headlines. Even those concerned with the progress of the so-called Arab Spring have ceased to trace the contours of the conflict in any real depth anywhere but Syria, further afield in the Levant.

Is this overlooking of political North Africa just further evidence that the West cares little historically for the ‘unedifying gyrations of barbarous tribes in picturesque but irrelevant corners of the globe’? What it is important for people in the West to realise is that the uses to which history is put differs across time and space. Cutting through the verbosity, the study of history writing, as well as the history, of non-Western regions offers us new and fascinating perspectives on how different people think about history; and as a consequence of this, how people imagine their wider connections to the present.

Regarding the literature in English on the history of the area by North African writers, I was instantly struck by its unabashed moralism: not only with regard to informing what happened in the past in an antiquarian sense, but also regarding ideas about where the modern North African nation states ought to be going. In this vein current problems appear not so much historicized but almost explicitly politicised.  Abd Allah Arawi’s 1977 The History of the Maghreb is symptomatic of these ideals. For Arawi, the history of the Maghreb as a region was lost in the opaque nature of historical writing in the colonial period. Thus, Awari wanted to make a clear link between past and present with a view to giving his fellow citizens the tools with which to challenge dominant colonial perceptions of history. Here was a historian, arguing with both subtlety and wit, for how the history of his region was inescapably caught up in his own present. The characters of Awari’s historical writing may have been dead for hundreds of years, but his writing was very much alive!

In scathing tones Arawi thus criticised the presentism which guided both Maghrebi and American understandings of the North African past. Awari complained that for foreign students the history of North Africa apparently existed as ‘no more than a convenient introduction, required by the academic curriculum, to studies in sociology and political science’.  Here, however, I began to have slight misgivings about Awari’s approach. In particular, his emphasis appears implicitly to countenance the idea that nationalistic usable pasts should be created, in order that indigenous myths of the nation should not be corrupted or undermined by outside influence.  Arawi appears not so much to criticise presentism inasmuch as he appears to want to apply a differing way of interpreting the facts from his colonial predecessors and contemporaries.

From this one might conclude that a colonial frame of reference still permeates much of the literature on North African history. North African history is thus written within a perceived narrative of domination and emancipation. The practice of discussing the history of a region plays an important role in determining how people think about their present. Altering the framework of historical analysis alters the common ground of ideas that a society may hold, and in so doing alters that backcloth of ideas which can be said to loosely govern in the abstract current political discourses. Put simply, altering the way people think about the past can radically alter how they think about the present.

Beyond this, the use of historical sources written outside of a European context can do much to change how people understand historical periods. In particular, sources by Usama Ibn Munqidh, well known among medievalists, are incredibly useful in this regard: affording us a hugely more complex view of how the people involved in the crusades actually interacted with those they came into contact with in the Holy Land. In particular, his anecdotes serve to challenge dominant modes of thinking about the crusades as a clear-cut, black-and-white, portrayal of east-west conflict. An acquaintance with non-European source material can help to shake down monolithic understandings of the crusades as a simple clear-cut clash of east and west.