WHAT IS ISLAMIC HISTORY?
Efforts to define the concepts "Islam" and "history" have separately engendered rich debates with long intellectual genealogies. Both debates serve as a foundation for this essay's attempt to delimit the subject of "Islamic history." However, the essay also argues that a close examination of the int...
| Published in: | History & Theory Vol. 58; no. 4; pp. 7 - 20 |
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| Format: | Article |
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Wiley-Blackwell
Dec2019
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| Online Access: | View this record in EBSCOhost |
| fields | @attributes: recordID: 1 pdfLink: plink: https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=hlh&AN=140300114&site=ehost-live header: @attributes: shortDbName: hlh uiTerm: 140300114 longDbName: Humanities International Complete uiTag: AN controlInfo: bkinfo: jinfo: jid: 00182656 HAT jtl: History & Theory issn: 00182656 maglogo: Y pubinfo: dt: Dec2019 vid: 58 iid: 4 pid: 480 pub: Wiley-Blackwell artinfo: ui: 140300114 10.1111/hith.12133 ppf: 7 ppct: 13 formats: fmt: – @attributes: type: T – @attributes: type: P size: 159KB tig: atl: WHAT IS ISLAMIC HISTORY? aug: au: THUM, RIAN affil: University of Nottingham su: Hui (Chinese people) History of Islam Ascribed status Essentialism (Philosophy) Discursive practices Historiography sug: subj: Hui (Chinese people) History of Islam Ascribed status Essentialism (Philosophy) Discursive practices Historiography keyword: ascription discursive tradition essentialism historiography Hui Islamic history ab: Efforts to define the concepts "Islam" and "history" have separately engendered rich debates with long intellectual genealogies. Both debates serve as a foundation for this essay's attempt to delimit the subject of "Islamic history." However, the essay also argues that a close examination of the interaction between the two categories offers its own insights. Chief among these is the argument that a reliance on subjects' self‐ascription as "Muslims" for definitions of "Muslim" and "Islamic" is far more than the empty or "nominal" approach that some critics have described. Rather, Islamic self‐ascription is historically entangled, both an artifact of historical processes and an evocation of them, even an integral element of the phenomenon it seeks to define. The essay begins with an evaluation of the "islams not Islam" approach to defining the Islamic, rooting the argument not only in self‐ascription—a common social‐science tool for category definition and boundary making—but also in Islamic historical traditions themselves. It then demonstrates this historical rootedness through an unusually difficult test case: Chinese‐language Islams that eschewed the words "Islam" and "Muslim." After proposing a definition of "Islamic history," one that is particularly open and expansive, the article outlines some common characteristics of Islamic history across its many forms, asking what makes it distinct and where it can contribute to a global comparative historiography. Finally, it argues that when we generalize about these traditions, describing the features most widely shared among them, we find an Islamic history that reflects and substantiates the centrality of self‐ascription in delineating the scope of Islam. pubtype: Academic Journal doctype: Article src: R language: English refInfo: copyright: @attributes: flag: Y custom: Copyright of History & Theory is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites without the copyright holder's express written permission. Additionally, content may not be used with any artificial intelligence tools or machine learning technologies. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. item: History & Theory holder: Wiley-Blackwell dt: @attributes: year: 2019 holdings: @attributes: islocal: N |
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