Image Credit: Mark Cartwright. ‘Greek Colonisation’, World History Encyclopedia. Last modified: May 07, 2018 (https://www.worldhistory.org/Greek_Colonization/)

I want a new ancient history of the world. That’s a big ask, I know. But it is one that I believe to be crucial to the interconnected projects of Critical Muslim Studies (CMS) and Critical Ancient World Studies (CAWS). I want an ancient history of the world that is intellectually and ethically organised around unpicking the world’s unequal, racist, colonial and neo-colonial structures. Another way to put my aim would be thus: I want an a-history of the world, a term I am using to indicate that I think certain methods of history and historiography are deeply implicated in the narratives that sustain this unequal world. In particular, I think that the framing of world history as a line that connects up the past, present and future is deeply implicated in the creation of this unequal present. In other words, the problem is a problem of temporality.

It is this temporality that sets the ‘Muslim’ in opposition with the ‘European’ or the ‘Western’ in its narrative of world history. It positions the Muslim both as coming after the classical and – in some versions – as ushering in the end of the classical. The Muslim comes as and at the end of the world when we tell the story of world history through this narrative of linear time. In saying this, I don’t mean to imply that there is no work in Classical Studies that does not exclude the Muslim in this way (to say this would be patently silly, and would neglect work, especially in Late Antiquity studies and reception studies, which has often sought to re-organise the timeline of the ancient world in important ways). But in this blog post I will show that this Islamophobic trope is still alive and well in Classical Studies in spite of this work – and that it has ramifications for the wider world.

Introducing Critical Ancient World Studies

First, let me introduce CAWS, the research project I co-run with Mathura Umachandran, that aims to re-organise the study of the ancient past in service of a more equal future. Perhaps the most straightforward way to introduce it is via its manifesto, which can be found in the opening pages of a forthcoming book, Critical Ancient World Studies: The Case for Forgetting Classics:

Critical Ancient World Studies (CAWS) is a methodology for the study of antiquity broadly defined (temporally, ideologically and geographically) that makes the following four critical steps away from the field known as ‘Classical Studies’ and/or ‘Classics’. Firstly, it critiques the field’s Eurocentrism and refuses to inherit silently a field crafted so as to constitute a mythical pre-history for an imagined ‘West’, in particular, by rejecting the ‘universal’ as synonym for the ‘Western’ or the ‘European’. While Classics has been content to construct an ancient world whose value lies in its mirror image of modern Europe, CAWS investigates the ancient history of a world without accepting the telos of the West. Secondly, it rejects the assumption of an axiomatic relationship between so-called ‘Classics’ and cultural value, divesting from cultural capital as a mode of knowledge-making in the field. Thirdly, it denies positivist accounts of history, and all modes of investigation that aim at establishing a perspective that is neutral or transparent, and commits instead to showcasing the contingency of history and historiography in a way that is alert to the injustices and epistemologies of power that have shaped the way that certain kinds of knowledge have been constructed as ‘objective’ within the discipline known as ‘Classics’. Fourthly, it requires of those who participate in it a commitment to decolonising the gaze of and at antiquity. It is not simply, however, the application of decolonial theory or the search to uncover subaltern or ‘wretched of the earth’ narratives within a subject that has special relevance to the privileged and the powerful. Rather, it dismantles the structures of knowledge that have led to this privileging, and questions the categories, ideas, themes, narratives and epistemological structures that have been deemed objective and essential within the inherited discipline of ‘Classics’.

The project, as the book goes on to explain, takes both its epistemic and its theoretical example from the CMS project – and its manifesto was inspired by the manifesto of ReOrient, the CMS journal. CAWS began in 2020, when we brought together a global collective of scholars interested in thinking about more critical (and especially decolonial) ways of organising the ancient past. Like any collective, we each have our own individual intellectual priorities within the project. I have hinted above that my own is best articulated as an issue of temporality. The classical is not a neutral category of time. I am less and less convinced that it is a particularly good category to think with. And it is especially unhelpful as a framework for a prehistory to a world where ‘Muslim’ will become a meaningful interpretive category.

The Muslim Anachronism

The discipline in which I teach – known as Classical Studies – depends on linear time both for its constitution as a unit of study, as well as for its modes of investigation. The easiest way to tell you what I do is to locate it in time – to tell you that I research and teach the so-called ‘ancient world’. But that ‘ancient world’ is famously lacking in clear boundaries, either geographical or chronological. Despite the fuzziness of these disciplinary boundaries, with both its beginning and its end point shrouded in argument and mystery, one thing remains clear: the timeline of Classics, in most framings, ends before the coming of Islam. This is a well-known reflex of historiographical writing framed around a ‘clash of civilisations’ narrative, which deliberately excludes Islam from the paradigm of the classical in order to Orientalise it (infamous examples of writing in this category include Bernard Lewis’ 1996 Islam and the West and Samuel P. Huntington’s 1993 Clash of Civilizations ­– as well as more recent white supremacist texts). But it also remains a current reflex of scholarship on the ancient world, and even scholarship that positions its field of investigation as global: ‘Asia, Europe and Africa before Islam’ reads the subtitle to Eivind Heldaas Seland’s (2021) A Global History of the Ancient World. The two discourses – one, openly ideological, racist and Islamophobic; and the other presenting Islam matter-of-factly as the temporal end point of the classical – are not separate from each other, and both attempt to tell the story of the exclusion of the Muslim as if it were simply an accident of arbitrary temporality.

Naturalising linear time, and assuming it to be a simple fact of the discipline of Classics depoliticises the exclusion of Islam. It engineers a world narrative where Islam is both outside of the ancient world, imagined to be the mythical origin point of modern Europe, and the destructive force that brings about the end of an idealised classical world. This temporal separation between the classical and Islam encourages the presumption of a cultural one. McKittrick remarks that disciplines can have the effect of creating what she calls ‘fictive distances’ in this way, in her 2021 book Dear Science and Other Stories:

“Disciplines stack and bifurcate seemingly disconnected categories and geographies; disciplines differentiate, split and create fictive distances between us. Discipline is empire.” (McKittrick, 2021, 36).

The effects of these fictive distances in the real world are multiple. The false notion that Muslims are culturally different from Europeans (and North Americans) is a remarkably pervasive tool, underlining hostile environment policies as well as widespread Islamophobic attitudes more broadly.

The idea that the Islamicate is outside of classical influence (and therefore distinct from those cultures presumed to be classical influenced – usually European and North American) is still in evidence in scholarship in Classics written in recent decades. In the opening lines of their much-celebrated book The Classical Tradition (2010), the classicists Anthony Grafton, Glenn W. Most and Salvatore Settis set out to describe what they understood to be a linear tradition of ‘the classical’:

“This book aims to provide a reliable and wide-ranging guide to the reception of classical Graeco-Roman antiquity in all its dimensions in later cultures. Understandings and misunderstandings of ancient Greek and Roman literature, philosophy, art, architecture, history, politics, religion, science and public and private life have shaped the cultures of medieval and modern Europe and of the nations that derived from them – and they have helped to shape other cultural traditions as well, Jewish, Islamic and Slavic, to name only these.” (vii)

Here, Grafton, Most and Settis attempt to pass as neutral a number of assumptions that are deeply ideological. The list of later cultures “classical Graeco-Roman antiquity in all its dimensions” has shaped masquerades as a neutral description of classical influence – but in fact amounts to a carefully curated exclusion of “Jewish, Islamic and Slavic” cultures from proximity to the classical. To take only what Grafton, Most and Settis call “Islamic…cultures” as a representative example, it is clear that their exclusion of Muslims from Europeanness in the world narrative they construct here is an Islamophobic fiction. There are multiple Muslim-majority countries in Europe and about 44 million Muslims; nor has it ever been accurate to describe the Islamicate as less proximate to the texts and artefacts of ancient Greece and Rome.

Towards A New History of the World

This narrative of the classical offers a false ancient history for an idea of Europe premised on the exclusion of Muslimness. Time’s supposed linearity provides an excuse for these fictive distances, presenting as objectively true a segregation that in fact comes about narratively and discursively, reflecting ideological and disciplinary rather than historical biases. Linear time is an Orientalist temporality. It is unsurprising that Orientalism is intertwined with a narrative of time – the Orient is, after all, the place where the sun rises. And Edward Said was already aware of the problem of Edward Gibbon’s reading of “the lessons of Rome’s decline in the rise of Islam” (Said, 1978, 59). By reorienting temporality beyond this false and misleading linear narrative – among other goals –  my hope is that CAWS might enable a new narrative of world history that could function as a prehistory for a more equal world.