I attended (virtually) a Room 19 presentation some time ago with an Iraqi historian, Dr. Sayar Al-Jamil – (تحقيب الأزمنة والتسارع التاريخي : في اي زمن نعيش اليوم؟ وما مستقبلنا ارؤيوية).
By Emad Aysha
There were many valued questioners, including my friend Dr Walid Ali from Alexandria, and I didn’t get a chance to interject. However, here’s my small contribution to the debate on historical phases and the controversy surrounding periodisation. With a sci-fi twist, typically!
CATEGORIES IN QUESTION: A summary of the Room 19 history presentation with Francis Iklas at the helm, and from San Diego no less.
First of all, overrating the role of culture as a variable explaining the backwardness of a country. The classic response to this came from the great social researcher in Egypt, El-Sayyid Yassin, in his book (الشخصية العربية بين مفهوم الذات وصورة الآخر). He argued, very rightly, that Egyptian culture was precisely the same in 1967 as it was in 1973, and yet in one year there was a crushing defeat and in the other a resounding victory!
He also provided a critical alternative explanation for several so-called characteristics of our culture and way of thinking, including passivity, fatalism, a lack of individual agency, and an unscientific approach to topics, among others.
His explanation, interestingly enough, was the second Abbasid era. During the Umayyad era, there were significant conquests and a growth in urbanisation. During the Abbasid era, conditions further improved, marked by increased urbanisation and a thriving commercial economy. That means science, investment, technology, and, critically, entrepreneurship.
Arabs are merchants initially, so this makes perfect sense. And then what happens? An internal collapse and backwards march, with Arabs becoming civil servants and bureaucrats, with a predatory junta taking over, making its money through feudalism and exorbitant taxes. It’s then that the Arabs fall into their fatalistic phase, learning to get along through being subservient to the state, even economically.
What went wrong? Obviously, the emergence of the Buyurid state in Iran, the first ever Shiite state, and their takeover of the Caliphate in Baghdad, turning the Caliph into a puppet. That’s when the Arabs fell out of the loop and stopped being in charge of their fate. Things only got worse afterwards when it came to the Turks taking over our part of the world.
So simple demographics, the changing composition of the Muslim population, and court politics and palace coups ruined everything. That’s when the Arab persona shifted into a negative one, as people acclimated themselves to circumstances they were no longer in control of.
Watch The Shawshank Redemption (1994) and you’ll see how people socialise themselves to adverse circumstances, becoming so ‘institutionalised’ that they can’t readjust to life outside of prison even when they get parole. The prison is inside them. That’s what’s happened to us, on a macro-scale.
MICROCOSMIC TIMES: James Whitmore as Brooks Hatlen, overreacting when he's told he's finally leaving prison in 'The Shawshank Redemption'.
A second observation of mine is the role of geography. When you talk about continuities in history and history repeating itself, you can’t chalk it all down to historical factors. We live in arid lands at the end of the day, and that creates extremes of one - overcentralization - and extremes of the other, rapid decentralisation, chaos, and tribalism.
Compare Egypt to Syria or Sudan. The Ayyubids were in Egypt as they were in Syria, but they failed to impose the centralised system they had established in Egypt on Syria. As a result, the Ayyubids in Syria fractured into warring city-states. It’s not just sectarianism, it's geography. Syrians aren’t squeezed around the Nile valley to be regimented and easily controlled.
A third observation is the overemphasis on religion and the clergy. Economic historian Timur Kuran critiqued this tendency, or obsession, with Orientalists. They often overlook, for instance, entrepreneurs, businessmen, merchants, and other financial groups, such as peasants and the urban proletariat.
If you look at the Ayyubid era, again, you will find how cash-strapped Saladin was up against the crusaders, with minimal armour, despite the fabulous wealth in the Near East at the time because of the trade routes. Europe, by contrast, was mired in feudal poverty; however, the Crusaders had control of every penny in their impoverished European economies and could therefore afford the costs of total war.
A fourth observation is the role of history in history. How we talk about, categorise, and study the past narratives. One of the reasons we’re in the fix we’re in is that we’ve borrowed our meta-history from the West.
This was touched on in the Room 19 session, but I’m going to take it to a whole other level. I attended a CEDEJ event once on modern Egypt. (Amr Khairy, “Industrie and Al-Industriya: The Origins of Capitalism between Rifāʿa al-Tahtāwī and Saint-Simonian Engineers”, 22 October 2024).
A lot of cultural and linguistic transfer occurred in that era, so I inquired about the annoying term we used in Egypt over and over again (مجتمع مدني), as if we had never lived in cities before. They confirmed that there was some annoying phrasing in French that got translated literally into Arabic. And we’ve been stuck there ever since!
These insidious words and maladjusted concepts have led us to reinterpret our history to the point of selective amnesia, disregarding all of our history before the modernist era of the 19th century. If you cut yourself off from the past, you cut yourself off from the good things, but also, critically, awareness of the causes of the bad stuff.
SCHOOLTIME OF THE SOUL: Orlando Jones as Vox, telling the Eloi boy (Omero Mumba) to read his history as well as eat his greens.
Methodical thinking and periodisation all over again. Without that, you end up like the poor Eloi in The Time Machine (2002), with Vox the AI librarian proclaiming: “They do not know the past. No ambition for the future.”
So, where to from here? Dmitri Medvedev, when he was president, tried to pitch the entrepreneur as the driver of history while using ‘science fiction’ as a representation of a futuristic information economy. (Katri Pynnöniemi, “Science Fiction: President Medvedev’s campaign for Russia’s ‘Technological Modernisation’”, Demokratizatsiya, 22, 2014, pp. 605-625). Forward-thinking combined with social agency.
That’s my recipe for success, along with not thinking in garbled French!
Here is an expanded version of this article.
