Re-Thinking Islam’s Global History

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For years, we've been told that the modern world was made in one place. Europe, and that everyone else simply had to catch up. That modernity was Western and universal. And that when other civilizations resisted it, They did so out of tradition or a refusal to change. But what if that story is wrong? What if Islam, for example, wasn't a bystander to modernity, but one of its architects?

What if the real divide today isn't between civilizations at all, but between how different societies understand history itself? James McDougall is a professor of modern and contemporary history at Oxford University, and the author of Worlds of Islam, a Global History. Professor McDougall argues that Islam's past and its present can't be understood in isolation from the making of the modern world or from the unequal, violent forces that shaped it.

This is a conversation about modernity and about why Muslims and Westerners so often seem to be talking past each other. I'm Thomas Small. This is my Conflicted Conversation with James McDougall.

James, welcome to the show. Very nice to have you on. Thank you very much for the invitation. Glad to be here. James, we've got a lot to talk about because your new book, Worlds of Islam, A Global History, and dear listeners, that book is pretty big. A chunky 500 pages or so before footnotes. My first question really is, so many scholars and pseudo-scholars have written histories of Islam, and it's an enormous topic. Obviously, it spans 1,400 years.

and includes basically every country under the sun. So when you sat down to write a history of Islam, you must have felt a certain trepidation. I mean, it is a massive undertaking. Absolutely. I mean, it's something I wanted to do for a very long time. And really, the motivation for writing this book comes out of my teaching. I taught a course at Princeton 20-some years ago.

which was called Modern Worlds of Islam. And 20 years ago, so that's like the peak of the war on terror post 9-11 world. So I arrived in Princeton in 2004, so yeah, just after the invasion of Iraq. It was a very contentious time, very flawed. I mean, it hasn't... ceased to be contentious, of course. Things have got more contentious in many ways in the United States since then.

But yeah, it was a complicated time to be teaching that history on a fairly relatively conservative campus in the United States, at least in terms of the politics of the student body at that time. Although, as you say, there were...

tens of thousands hundreds of thousands of books on the subject you know there's a bibliography that you couldn't conceivably read in several lifetimes there wasn't one single kind of good one-stop-shop book that you could give to smart curious interested undergraduates or general readers.

that would do the job of summarizing the most recent scholarship, telling the entirety of the story or as much of the entirety of the stories as possible between two covers in a simple kind of accessible way. And that's what I wanted to do. So, yeah. is putting it mildly. Well, James, I have to say you succeeded with aplomb. It really is an excellent overview and it shifts the dial in the sense that it does give the average reader with an interest.

in the subject it gives a genuinely multi-rounded view of what Islam is in history but in terms of like An elevator pitch. If you had to tell someone who knew nothing about Islamic history, what that story is all about, and what distinct contribution the worlds of Islam made.

to human life, to human culture. How would you pitch that story to them, like in an elevator pitch style? There are two things I'm trying to do. One is to say, you know, Islam needs to be taken seriously as a factor of world history and as a factor in world history.

That is to say that it's something that has shaped people's lives over a very long time, over a huge span of space, over many cultures and societies. And also it's something that is shaped over time and in space by human life and human society and human politics. There isn't a single story of a thing called Islam that comes into existence in the 7th century and then moves through history.

There are people called Muslims who've understood themselves as Muslims, who've used that word to describe themselves. That word has meant many different things to them in different languages, in different cultures, in different times and spaces, from the 7th century Western Arabia through to 21st century Jakarta.

Toledo and Stockholm and Berlin and Johannesburg and Tokyo, right? And understanding what those meanings have been, how they've shifted over time. And they've meant particular things, right? They haven't meant just anything anybody wants them to. They've meant particular things and particular things. spaces there is a tradition that is rooted in a set of beliefs and practices that come into existence in

the first community of Muslims under the leadership of the Prophet Muhammad in 7th century Arabia. But those meanings have, and that tradition has taken... people and their understandings of life in all kinds of different directions in many different places over time. So I wanted to tell...

something of that story, not by any means the entirety of that story. When I say global history, I don't mean it's encyclopedic. That would have been like a 20-volume work, at least. And there are lots of those.

And there are lots of those as well. The book is already long, as you said, and in some ways I'm only scratching the surface. It's meant to be accessible and an overview, but it also tries to get into some of the detail of what those meanings have been for particular people in particular places. So there are other stories about individuals.

People in individual places and buildings and, you know, artifacts. That wasn't really an elevator pitch. That was a walking up the stairs pitch. Elevator pitches are not easy. And anyway, you know, it's a huge story. It is chock-a-block full of annex. You shine spotlights on this and that corner of the Islamic world in a way that is truly revealing. And when it's all built up into the sort of quilt that it is, you leave the book with a much greater appreciation of Islamic history.

dedicated a whole series to interrogating Samuel Huntington's thesis of a clash of civilizations in which Islamic civilization was seen monolithically as sort of one civilization.

inherently at odds or in conflict with Western civilization, also depicted as basically a monolith. In the introduction to your book, you basically say you... prefer to focus on connections rather than clashes and see Islamic civilization or civilizations as part of a larger web that includes others, certainly our Western one.

My question is, so, you know, I know based on what we talked about before this conversation that you were trying to produce a kind of corrective to the usual one-sided framings of Islam. let's say, an Islamophobic right-wing perspective on Islam, but also, let's say, an apologetic, more left-liberal portrayal of Islam. Because for most of...

of its history, Islamic states were in some way or another aggressive and expansive. You know, Islam was understood as an inherently political project to some extent, at least in some places throughout time. Not to say that that marks it out as especially unique or anything. Christendom was also a political project fueled by faith, overseen by the church. But it is common today to hear people say Islam is a religion of peace.

And in general, you hear that apologetic framing of Islam that can underplay its aggressive expansionary dimension. So, understandably, you reject a clash of civilizations framing. But you cannot deny that imperialistic strain to Islam and to the states and caliphates and principalities that were inspired by Islam.

Just to kind of go straight into the deep end, what role does imperialism and military expansion play in your history of Islam? Cool. So let me... talk about the class civilizations thing first and maybe then answer that question, because that's a really great way into this bigger topic. As you just said, right, I mean, a lot of the white noise, as I call it, in the public debate, which has really divorced... quite radically from the way that scholars have come to

tell stories about the meanings of being Muslim or what Islam has meant historically in particular places over a different time. That white noise is very often now, especially in the United States and in Europe. dominated by this kind of bipolarity right a kind of islamophobic rhetoric on the one hand which is weaponized by the by the rights i mean we hear that all the time in european debates over multiculturalism and immigration for example it's been especially visible in the united states

looking at some of the rhetoric runs off on Namdani's campaign for New York City mayor. Islamophobia is a major... currency in US political rhetoric right now. And of course, a lot of that is rooted not only in Samuel Huntington's famous early 90s essay about the clash of civilizations and the bestselling book that followed it, but in a much longer 19th and 20th century European set of ways.

of understanding the world that basically grow out of a way of thinking about world history, which emerges in the 19th century, which uses this category of civilizations as a way of ordering global historical progress. The word civilizations in the way that we have it now comes into usage in French in the 1740s and in English in the 1760s and 1770s. It's an 18th century European invention. It gets popularized in the 19th century. The whole idea of the West.

as a civilizational unit as popularized again by European and British thinkers, but largely around from the 1830s into the 1860s. And at the same time, people start to think about other civilizations, not just Islamic civilization, but Chinese civilization, Indian civilization, as separable units of historical analysis. So it's a category that comes into European thinking. 18th and especially in the 19th centuries a category that is you know kind of manufactured

in this period as a way of thinking about, you know, what it is that has made Europe so special, what it is that has made the West so powerful, and how we can explain the sudden rise to dominance, in fact, of European imperialism in the 19th century. So it's a story that you... tell themselves in the 19th century onwards and it becomes very popular and it gets...

like many things manufactured in the 19th century, right? Like the idea of class, like the idea of revolution, like the idea of nation and nationalism. All of these terms that come to dominate our thinking in the 20th century and to organize the way that people think about themselves politically and culturally. And historically... it's tremendously problematic, right? Because that particular vision of the history of the world...

is by no means a self-evident, actually kind of spontaneously occurring natural fact of human social organisation. On the contrary, it's a way of thinking about the world ideologically, right? So where does Huntington get his units of analysis from, right? These are not things that actually exist in...

In nature, it's a way of thinking about the world for a particular set of purposes. In his case, to create a particular kind of post-Cold War narrative of the threats of the West was going to face. And other people, including Muslims, have adopted it too. part of my story in terms of when i tell the intellectual history of 19th century muslim reformism and ideas about what it was going to be

like to be Muslim in the emerging modern world have to do with Muslim thinkers also adopting this European category of civilization and beginning to think about being Muslim as being a member of a civilization in exactly those same ways. So that's a narrative that...

becomes enormously popular and enormously powerful. If we think about the way that that then feeds into how we think about Islam is a religion of peace on the one hand or is an inherently kind of aggressive expansionist imperialist kind of project on the other, those are narratives that... also emerge in the 20th century especially in response to this way of thinking about islam as

a separate civilizational system that has to be somehow related to a kind of normative European-Western dominant paradigm for what civilization looks like. Just to clarify, so when I imagine the 18th and 19th century...

shift towards this civilizational model. It seems to me what I'm seeing is in an Enlightenment era which was seeking to rationalize, secularize, and universalize. this-worldly categories of thought. The civilization model seems to be like a secularization of an earlier or covenantal model where the church or Christ was expanding his kingdom to every corner of the world.

And that model of understanding things is not so vastly different from a traditional Islamic model of the caliphate or whatever you want to say, you know, the light of Islam being extended. So the civilization model of the Enlightenment period... is a secularization of that earlier model. And then perhaps, as you say, throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, Muslims themselves, in encountering that secular model, secularize their own model.

inadvertently do so because they don't know that necessarily that's what's happening. But nonetheless, before any of that secularization happened, Those previous aggressive models on both sides pertain. So how does a modern 21st century scholar like yourself deal with that? covenantal expansionist dimension of old religiously influenced polities, imperial polities. So Islam, like Christianity, is a missionary religion. It presents itself as such from very early on. The idea that the community...

needs to continue to expand to bring God's message to the whole of humanity is one of the earliest, most dynamic kind of impulses in the Islamic tradition or in Islamic faith. And as you say, like Christianity, the idea of harnessing that vision to a political

project of expanding territorial sovereignty and rule over populations is one that's picked up and used by claimants to power, you know, as it is by medieval and early modern European state builders. So in the Islamic world, sometimes called the Islamic. world, right? It's picked up and used by lots of different state builders from the Arabs in the 7th century through to the Mongols through to the descendants of...

Genghis Khan in Timur and Central Asia and South Asia in the 15th and 16th centuries, right? So that's undoubtedly part of the story. I mean, there's an expansionist... dynamic to Islam, which is sometimes taken up by state builders to legitimize conquest.

But which is also used by lots of other kinds of Muslim movement, which may think of themselves as entirely apolitical, right? For example, in West Africa, you know, merchant communities that spread Islam by their own personal ethical example as a minority in a non-Muslim society. living as good Muslims in order to provide the conditions in which at some point in God's good time, God will bring other people to his truth. In the same way as Christian missionaries have sometimes sought to...

by good works living in communities where the presence of Christ is needed as an ethical imperative or an ethical injunction to improve the world. You know, rather than going out and actually kind of physically, politically conquering, you go out and you spread the light of the truth.

of in both christian and muslim traditions as an ethical kind of imperative to living well right and by your example you show other people the way to do that and god in his good time will bring those people to true belief right so very much like christianity i think islam has that has that dimension in it and

sometimes it becomes a political kind of legitimating ideology. And at the same time, it can be used in other ways which are not overtly political, which are not connected to military expansionism. But of course, it can be that too, and has been that too.

As we've said, you are determined not to see Islam or Islamic history as some kind of unidimensional monolith. You know there isn't one Islam, certainly not as it has manifested throughout time and space. There are many, many ways of being Muslim, and Islam has influenced many, many different cultures, societies, and civilizations. And none of them was isolated from other cultures and civilizations, both Muslim and non-Muslim. The point being...

that the story of Islam is a story of tremendous diversity. This should go without saying. It's not as if Christianity generated a single monolithic culture either, yet we often forget that when thinking about Islam. Now, after... let's say the mongol sack of baghdad in 1258 which extinguished the classical caliphate which was already on its knees After that year, 1258, Islamic diversity becomes almost explicitly the norm. And when it comes to Islam, people often imagine Arabia.

But that's not accurate. As a historian of Islamic diversity, how do you think people should be including Central Asia or... perhaps somewhere even further, like Java in Indonesia, as Islamic worlds, Muslim worlds, when building up a picture of Islamic civilization.

Again, the kind of civilizational narrative relies on a model of kind of rise, golden age and fall, right? So if you think in terms of civilisations, very often we have this idea that there's a kind of classical period which is the truest or fullest expression of the civilizational system.

and later periods or less pure areas somehow don't fully live up to that and needs to be reformed or corrected in order to get back to it. And that's often been the argument of Muslim revivalists in the 19th and 20th centuries, right? The glory days of the Abbasid. caliphate in the 19th and 10th centuries in Baghdad, before the Mongols came and ruined everything, is somehow kind of the model we need to get back to. Or the glory days of the very first generation of Muslims after the Prophet.

That's the Salafist narrative. Exactly. The Salaf, the forebears, the pious forebears, the first generation of Muslims in and after the lifetime of the Prophet Muhammad himself, are the kind of paragons. And after their time, everything kind of falls apart. There are religious versions of that. And there's a kind of...

as you said, earlier version of that narrative too, right? Which is the Mongols come along and they destroy Baghdad in 1258 and then everything kind of goes terribly wrong and the golden age is over and thereafter everything's terrible. Well, you know, if you abandon that whole civilizational narrative, you say that's just an ideological priority of the...

century and we can look at things much more creatively if we take different periods and places on their own terms and interrogate how they actually understood themselves things become much more interesting so 1258 the sack of baghdad yes is the end of if you like a classical period of islam

a particular kind of historiographical convention. But it's also much more importantly a kind of shift of geopolitical and economic and cultural gravity. The center of gravity shifts from Baghdad being at the center of a... mainly western-facing, Arabic-speaking Mediterranean world, to Baghdad being the western periphery of an eastern-facing and southern-facing...

Persian-speaking world, which spreads right over Central Asia and into South Asia. And some of the greatest scientific and architectural and cultural, musical, culinary kind of achievements of what we might call Islamic civilization in the non-ideological term.

as just the expression of refined urban cultural life, developed exactly in that period. And though that mode of Islam is often called Persianate. Indeed. That is a narrative that overlooks the Turco-Mongol contribution and indeed the extent to which through the kind of Indian Ocean littoral moves into areas like Indonesia. Indonesia, a country today which has like the most Muslim.

of any single country, and yet it's never really incorporated in people's imagination of what Islam is. Yeah, that's absolutely right. Islam arrives in Java and in Sumatra, you know, through trade, through merchants, through people moving from both China, interestingly,

where Islam is already established in South China in the late medieval period, and from South Asian, from the Indian Ocean. So Southeast Asia was really a great example of an area often peripheralized by a kind of civilizational narrative of Islamic history centered on the Middle East.

And by a perception, which is very common in Europe and the United States, the kind of heartland of Islam is in the Middle East. Well, only a fifth of the world's Muslims today live in the Middle East, right? As you said, Indonesia is the world's most populous Muslim country. Nigeria is also enormously popular.

Muslim country at the far end of the economy in West Africa. You know, the largest number of the world's Muslims now to be found in South Asia. If you add together the Muslims in India, Bangladesh, and Pakistan, right, that's the largest kind of community. So, yeah, the forms that Islam takes in what's now Indonesia, in Java and Sumatra, especially in the 14th through the 18th centuries.

are really interesting. There's a very creative synthesis that is going on between incoming Muslim modes of thought and forms of religiosity and spiritual experience with existing indigenous Hindu-Buddhist ideas that are powerful in Java especially and also in Sumatra before the arrival of Islam. Those are often seen as somehow not...

truly Muslim, right? Because there's this syncretic cultural adaptation that's going on. Especially by those who go hard on the Salafist kind of narrative, which feeds into contemporary politics in Southeast Asia, where Salafi movements are penetrating.

the political systems there and convincing Muslim Indonesians themselves that their Islam needs correction. It's not real Islam. Correct. And that's a narrative that's especially powerful, again, because of this idea of a kind of pure past that needs to be recovered.

especially in the face of the kinds of subordinations that Muslims suffer at the hands of European colonialism in the 19th century. So if we can rediscover the true Islam, then we will be... spiritually and morally and ethically and politically re-empowered to face up to these foreign challenges and this is an argument that begins to develop in the late 19th century yes so in places like west africa and in southeast asia the idea that locally developing forms of muslim belief

which are extraordinarily powerful and which are in fact being used already in the 18th century and 19th century to resist European imperialism, are later on denigrated and downgraded as somehow not truly Muslim. But what they really are is examples of the ways that being Muslim or...

Islam kind of comes to ground in many different places and in different cultural contexts and gives rise to new forms of belief. And some of those forms of belief are themselves enormously politically motivating. So in 1825, for example, the great... leader of Javanese resistance to Dutch imperial rule, Prince Dipanogoro, comes to see himself as the just king of promised Islamic tradition, the just king who's going to come and unite the community and fight against foreign aggression and local.

He sees himself as a Sufi. He has a very deep learning in the Islamic tradition in Java itself. And he's recognized as the national hero in Indonesia today. And the forms of Islam that he's mobilizing are very much these. syncretic but certainly locally deep-rooted forms of Islamic mysticism and belief that draw on a long history of kind of Indic or East Indian Ocean kind of Sufi Islam and on notions of divine kingship that are

in an older Javanese tradition. What I love about your book is how, you know, though pushing very much against the idea that Islam is a civilizational monolith, you don't swing to the other extreme and characterize it as simply fragmented because, you know, Islam, it's more like an organism, you know, because...

through trade links, scholarly links, pilgrimage links, because there is Mecca there at the center. Mecca becoming increasingly important in shaping Muslim identity. Have you been on Hajj or not? Becomes this kind of unifying factor across the whole. Muslim world. So you see there's a sort of bloodstream circulating through the different organs, Islamic organs from the Atlantic to the Pacific. So there's diversity, but there's a sort of unity in this organic way.

which is then in constant conversation with the world beyond it. You know, it's never isolated. And your book does draw that out very nicely. Now, your... undergraduate degree was in modern languages. That's right. And your initial focus, your initial scholarly focus was on modern Algeria and North Africa more generally, its experience of European colonialism.

and its fortunes in the post-colonial period. So how do you think that way into the subject of Islamic civilizations generally shaped your perspective? as your scholarly focus zoomed out to take in the entirety of Islamic history. A lot of scholars of Islamic history come through Islamic studies, and so they'll be more rooted in that Arabian 7th and 8th century.

world, whereas you're actually coming at it from the 19th century in North Africa and then going back. How did that shape the way you framed that history? So part of that has to do with what you're saying about connections. where you locate your objects of study or how you phrase the questions you're interested in. Partly I was interested in North Africa because it's a hinge, right? It sits at the hinge of Africa, the Middle East and Europe.

That's maybe a cliche, but it's also true. And I've always been interested in the question of what are the unifying forces of cultural and political and religious life?

that connect different places where you start off as a student of languages you're interested in you know the the commonality in a language and how people in many different places can use that language to express themselves right so any one language has many different literary expressions and you know religious systems are kind of analogous in that way that's part of what drew me to see things the way that i do

A lot of the literature on Islam, as you say, also comes out of a kind of tradition of Islamic studies understood as a study of religion, right? So people think about norms and they think about deviations from the norm, or they think about orthodoxy and heresy, they think about it in religious terms, right? As a linguist...

and as someone who came out of modern Middle East studies and history, I'm not so much interested in writing a history which is, again, a kind of history of religion, but a history of people, a kind of social history, and that's what I've tried to do. This is why I insist on... people who are Muslims rather than a thing called Islam. And I think...

Looking at North Africa maybe predisposed me to thinking in those terms, partly because of this thing about connections and it being a hinge and it's sitting in between a number of different worlds, which are kind of identifiably different, right?

the world of Saharan and Sub-Saharan Africa, the world of the Mediterranean, the world of Southern Europe and the world of the Middle East. That's often seen as a peripheral space, a little bit like Southeast Asia. It's often seen as a kind of space out on the edges of things rather than being a center in its own right. But again, if you can think of a kind of multi-perspectival history on any one.

things. What I'm trying to do is provide a kind of multi-perspectival history on Islam. And there's no way of looking at a place like North Africa without realizing that there is no single center to the story, right? Because you don't have one place to focus on. You don't have a kind of a Baghdad or a Cairo, right? What you have is a lot of...

provincial capitals. You have dynasties that move all over the place. You have territorial boundaries that are shifting over time. There's no kind of obvious single center. If you come out of, I don't know, working on Egypt or something, it's a country which has a very clear center over a very long period. time and it's a very centralized kind of story, whereas North Africa is much more fluid, much more shifting. It's always made North African Muslim history hard for me.

really to wrap my mind around because of that fluidity, because of the constantly shifting polities. It becomes a history of almost like city-states, but they're not city-states because you have the desert dimension, the tribal dimension, the kind of Berber meeting Arab dimension.

dimension and always in conversation with Andalusian and post-Antalusian Europe to the north, and of course, Islamic civilizations to the east and Africa to the south. So it is hard to wrap your mind around. So I can see how if you came into Islamic... history through that doorway, you would be predisposed to understand the diversity at play.

Nonetheless, the early Islamic period is something that any scholar of Islam, any historian of Islam has to wrap his mind around. That period has certainly been subjected to intense scholarly scrutiny over the past hundred years or so and for a few decades beginning in the 70s it became something of a truism in the study of early Islam that the earliest Muslim histories themselves mostly written in Arabic were not

trustworthy. The dial has shifted in the past decade or so, and most scholars aren't nearly as skeptical as they were about the reliability of the Arabic sources, but the debate is still very much alive. As someone whose focus had always been on the modern period, did you face a steep learning curve when setting down to narrate the story of Muslim origins? How did you approach the historical sources?

And for listeners who aren't familiar with this debate, can you sketch why scholars once were so skeptical and what changed? The holidays are expensive. You're paying for gifts, travel, decorations, food, and before you know it, you've blown way past what you were planning to spend. Don't start the new year off with bad money vibes.

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So we could have not only a whole podcast, but a whole podcast series just on that question, right? When I was an undergraduate in the mid-1990s, I was absolutely steeped in that kind of skeptical tradition of scholarship, the stuff that came out of the 70s and 80s. And, you know, it's intellectually enormously exciting still, I think, to read that stuff. It's like the Da Vinci.

code of Islamic studies. It's like a vast conspiracy theory. You start wondering, you know, and then you get popular versions of that story which really go big on the mystery of Islamic origins and has everyone been lied to? You know, it has that edge, which is... Very appealing, intellectually speaking. Yes, and I guess the spin-off to that is, as you say, a kind of...

more popularized version of that, which is not very helpful in scholarly terms. Da Vinci Code is probably the right kind of analogy for it, right? So it has this Orientalist kind of mystery to it. There is an Islamophobic dimension to that as well, right? Which is to say that Islam is a hoax. It's kind of a modern, a secular...

again, kind of variant of an older tradition of Christian apologetics, kind of Christian heresiology of Islam, which sees Islam as a false sect, Muhammad as a false prophet, all that kind of stuff. There are two things going on here. One is that I'm not a Muslim, I'm not a religious believer, I don't have any religion.

convictions of my own I come to this subject as a historian interested in the ways that other people have seen their histories interested in the ways that different human communities across time have related to each other and narrated their own pasts and I do that with a

a certain amount of critical skepticism because I'm a professional historian, but also with what I hope is an adequate respect for the cultural systems and beliefs of people other than myself. And I think it's possible and necessary to hold those two things together.

certain tension, but in terms of disciplinary honesty, that's the way that one ought to approach these questions, with an awareness also that they have a political combustibility in public debate. So the Islamic tradition itself, the Arabic historical tradition of the origins of islam itself in terms of what is written down yes emerges much later than the events that it narrates and much of that tradition is itself very preoccupied with the unreliability or the question of

authenticating the reliability of the early traditions. And by much later, let's say like 180, 220 years sort of thing. Yeah, the kind of earliest canonical narratives from the 8th and 9th centuries, and they're dealing with material from the 7th century, right? It's really in the 9th century that we get a kind of codified set of traditions and a codified set of actual written histories where we can know for sure that it was written down around this time, right?

He might have advanced that occurred 150, 200 years earlier. We have material evidence from much earlier. And one of the big things that shifted in terms of what you're saying about how the dial has moved back towards not maybe greater acceptance of the tradition as it presents itself, but a greater willingness to trust.

that some of the historical events narrated in the tradition did in fact happen in the places that they say they happened, has come out of things like radiocarbon dating. So we now know that the text of the Quran, parts of the Quran, certainly were in existence in the first half of the 7th century.

It was part of the skeptical scholarly tradition that the Quran, as we have it, may not have even existed in the lifetime of the Prophet Muhammad. And they would often say it didn't emerge from Arabia at all. It emerged from Iraq or more likely Palestine. Palestine, that's right.

after the Ark of Conquest, so after the 630s at the very earliest and maybe a little bit later than that. And it used to be said, you know, the earliest material evidence that we had for the text of the Quran doesn't come into existence until the 680s because that's when we have coins that attest a belief in the prophethood of Muhammad and that's when we have fame.

Famously, the arcades in the interior of the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, which have Quranic inscriptions on them. So those were thought to be the earliest dateable material evidence for the existence of the Quranic text. We now know 30 years later, 40 years later. The earliest datable texts of the Quran considerably predates that. So we know that Christian writers in what's now Jordan, Palestine, Syria, knew of the existence of a Muhammad who is a leader of the Arabs.

pretty soon after the traditional date of the death of Muhammad. We know that the text of the Quran was in existence in the first half of the 7th century. How the Quran came to be in its... current form, how the Quran came to be collected and put together as a canonical text is still a complicated story, right, which takes a certain amount of time. Again, the...

Different and conflicting traditions within the Muslim tradition themselves recognized the complexity of that story. And much of what early Muslims were trying to do in writing the historical tradition was trying to figure out things that had been forgotten by the early community.

And it's important, I think, and one of the things I try to stress in the book, and to answer your other question, right, which is how did I deal with this? I try to tell the story in a way that's accessible, again, to people who don't know the story at all. Without simply taking the Muslim tradition itself at face value, I present...

what the tradition tells us. And I also talk about, you know, one of the things that's perfectly clear in the first century of Islam is that much of what was known to the early community was later lost to its own memory.

and then had to be reconstructed. And it had to be reconstructed in a context of profound, world-changing transformation. It's really extraordinarily dramatic. Within 60 years after the death of the prophet, Being Muslim has gone from being a member of a small persecuted minority community to being a member of a triumphant and geographically expanding community to being part of a victorious ethnic elite, which has just wiped, you know, two massive worlds.

And just to make that real for people, it's like the sort of storytelling that, let's say, Americans began to have to be... involved in beginning in the late 19th century. And you think if they're thinking back to the 17th and 18th century foundations of America, you know, pilgrim fathers and all of these things, the transformation from small groups of people moving across the Atlantic, settling themselves. in new areas to becoming this continental behemoth with...

tons of migrants from all over the world and thinking, what actually happened to us? How have we got here? That is work that all states and civilizations have to undergo. And that was what was, to some extent, informing that.

Islamic historiographical impetus. Yes, and also, of course, the immense political stakes involved in that because the other thing that's happened in the first century of the community is that there's been a series of civil wars, three civil wars, a very significant and lasting confessional split, which turns into the split between Sunni and Shia Islam, which is a thing that develops over time, but which has begun to happen already.

680s, and competition to monopolize the memory, competition for whose stories are going to get told. There was a question of dynastic succession. There was a question of preeminence within the community. There were people who are known to have been enemies of the prophet during his life.

who become leading members of the community, whose families become central to the political power wielded in the community in the first couple of generations after the death of the prophet. And these are all stakes in telling the story. So it's not by any means...

a simple matter to reconstruct that. And I think what we need to do is to recognize both the importance of the difficulty of knowing what actually happened and the usefulness of taking account of the ways in which the Muslim community itself solved those problems early on because that itself is big.

part of the historical picture is how Muslims came to remember those things themselves. That's almost as important, in fact, as what I call the often unknowable story of what really happened. And in terms of the scholarly dial going back towards being more respectful or at least seeing the Arabic sources as more reliable. I think we have to admit that this is a

common thing when it comes to the first millennium in general. You know, the thing about modern scholarship is it starts from a position really of doubt. I mean, modern thought starts from a position of doubt, maybe like Descartes. You start by doubting everything. This is so different.

from what came before, you know, in Christianity, let's say, or Christian cultures, but obviously in Islamic cultures too. Islamic culture in general starts from a position of faith, not doubt, and that influences the way you analyze the world.

Modern scholars come to things from a position of doubt. And in the 19th and early 20th centuries, they were subjecting the Christian tradition to tremendous doubt. The earliest Christian histories that have come down to us are from the early 4th century, like you said. Eusebius of Caesarea, for example. And so it became extremely common for scholars to basically say,

Anything that Christian tradition remembers from the first and second centuries is just rubbish. And that kind of Da Vinci Code way of thinking started amongst Christianity. But now, just like in Islam, more scholarship is being done, more material artifacts are being uncovered, and people are much less skeptical about Christian foundations. They're much less skeptical about Islamic foundations, too. But, you know, in a way, scholarship starts...

with doubt and reaches a certain kind of reliable certainty. So maybe that doubt serves a purpose. But people in general, I think, are less doubtful now about the traditional narratives. Obviously still.

holding them to scrutiny. Yes, indeed. Exactly. But not so totally doubtful. Anyway, let's jump forward a millennium, say, to the modern period because that is ultimately your grounding in the modern period. In fact, you originally subtitled your book, How Being Muslim Became Modern, which is what makes your book so special and very valuable. I mean, here on Conflicted, we have tried to narrate the arrival of modernity. Let's say...

Western modernity into the Muslim world. This is often perhaps in an oversimplified way pegged to Napoleon's arrival in Egypt in 1798. But one of the things you are keen to draw out in your history is that modernity Trinity itself.

is by no means a wholly Western phenomenon, nor something to which Islamic cultures, Islamic civilization provided no input at all. Western states like the Kingdom of France, like the Holy Roman Empire, like the Spanish... empire, like the city-states of early modern Italy, were not hermetically sealed off from states in the Levant, in Persia, and in Central and South Asia.

turn in human history, which we call modernity, and which we locate in time as beginning in the 16th century, was a turn that all of urbanized politically developed humanity participated in. you know, from China to Mexico. So speaking generally, what role did Islamic civilizations play?

in the rise of modernity. And we need to be thinking most broadly here to include Iranian states, Mongol states, Turkish states, not just Arab ones. So again, you know, as with this idea of civilization, modernity has the same kind. of quality to it it's an ideological category often more than it is an analytical one if we think of modernity as a shared and profoundly unequal global condition something that emerges not out of you know a kind of isolated set of western ideas or

institutions, that 19th century idea of a kind of Western genius, right, which comes out of the Renaissance and kind of gets to the light and then spreads the light out to the rest of the world, okay? And which people still talk about, you know, like Neil Ferguson and the seven killer apps of Western modernity.

or the weird, you know, Western educated industrial, whatever that, you know, maybe it has a point and we'll get to the point, but it has a powerful political edge, those stories. They do. As I say, I think these are ideological more than analytical categories.

respectable tradition of some kind of conservative scholarship that operates in those terms. Neil Ferguson and Samuel Huntington, for example, are great examples of that. I don't happen to agree with that reading. I don't think it's very helpful. I think it's more often... used and actually weaponized for political purposes now than it is used as an actual heuristic to explain the human past. And that doesn't mean that we should simply come at it from an equally politicized kind of opposite.

perspective, as you were saying earlier. There's no help to just being kind of liberal and apologetic in response to a kind of conservative. An Islamophobic perspective, that's not what I'm interested in. All non-Western cultures are somehow gentle and kind and good, and the West is just inherently perverse and evil. Yeah, and that's obviously nonsense, right? That's just what's been called Orientalism and Reverse.

or whatever. So yeah, those are not very helpful narratives. If we think about connection, again, going back to what we're saying about North Africa or Southeast Asia, if we see modernity as a condition which is shared, which emerges out of relationships and the...

increasingly unbalanced nature of those relationships as Europe and North America become more central to the world economy over a long period, right, but especially with the beginnings of industrialization. And that's something that happens out of a developing global division of labor.

a developing global division of resources, a developing global division of the capacity to generate and deploy violence, what I call Europe's comparative advantage in organized violence and wealth and science, right? The way to understand what it means to be Muslim in that story is not to say, well, here's this thing called modernity, which is kind of created in the Western Iraq, with Napoleon's armies, is often the story, right, in 1798 in Egypt. And he brings a printing press, okay, so...

Here we are, modernity, and a bunch of scientists to kind of map the pyramids and all that kind of stuff. Although the lack of a printing press throughout the, you know, certainly the Ottoman Empire, that is pretty decisive. That is a big difference. The proliferation of scholarship, of writing. reading, that did set Western Europe rather apart, it seems to me. So it's, again, and that's part of the older story about, you know, what makes

Western modernity, to use the term that you used earlier, a thing and its absence elsewhere. Although actually, there were a bunch of technical reasons for this. Arabic script is quite hard to do with movable types, so it doesn't happen until much later. There were other forms of printing, especially the lithography, which develops it.

and South Asia and Southeast Asia relatively early. In fact, early in the 19th century, people were already using lithographs. And the press also exists in the early modern period in the Ottoman Empire, for example. It's just that it's being used by Jews to print stuff in Judeo-Arabic and in Hebrew type. And Greeks as well.

And that also has to do with who is producing what kind of knowledge and the very particular things that are happening and the competition over that in 16th century Europe. So again, we get into the story of the Reformation and what role that plays here. But it's all interesting. I mean, new scholarship showing how the Reformation...

is in conversation with Ottoman developments. Indeed. The point being that it's all connected. Exactly. So we come back to this thing about connection, I think, all the time. And again, when I'm saying connection, I don't mean flow, right? This isn't to kind of go back to a kind of, again, irenic 1990s version.

of globalization history, right? Where everything is kind of flow and it's kind of friction free and it's nice and friendly. Connection is often frictional, right? There is conflict involved in that as well. And the story that I'm telling is a story of connections across space in between.

cultural spheres or communities and the ways in which people are both conflicting and negotiating their interests over those spaces over a long period of time. what we call modernity, whatever that means, which has something to do with a kind of relationship to time and a certain relationship to the speed of travel over space in particular, I think, and something to do with the rise of capitalism and its connections to the rise of networked Europeans.

and imperialism, which often sits on top of these earlier connections that have been created by Muslim shipping and Muslim merchants and missionary communities and Sufi orders and state-building enterprises, especially around the Indian Ocean. That is experienced by Muslims as well as by Europeans.

There's nothing less modern about a peasant cultivator in Java in the 1820s or a peasant cultivator in France in the 1820s. They're both peasant cultivators, right? They're ecologically quite similar. And they're both experiencing the arrival. of industrial finance capitalism as a kind of violation.

Absolutely. And often there's a violent overturning of their world and their experience of the world, and it's something that they have to adapt to, and they adapt to it maybe in different ways. So if we think about, again, the growth of the world economy, if we think about...

Muslim spaces like West Africa or Southeast Asia, these are being tied into the emerging Atlantic-centred... growing modern economy pretty early on certainly in the 18th century south asia southeast asia and west africa there's already european colonial presence they're already producing commodities including slaves for the european dominated global market so they're already part of that story

And I think we need to think about the emergence of modernity as a networked, connected, globalizing phenomenon, rather than as something that just happens in, say, London and Manchester and Paris and Lyon and wherever else, and then gets kind of taken. out to these peripheries. It's something that emerges in the relationship between these places themselves, where certain places are going to become peripheralised.

but they have themselves been centres of that story from an earlier period, in fact. And the idea by the late 19th century that what Muslims need to do is to respond to this, or that Muslims have somehow been left behind by this, is a reflection of the shock.

but suddenly you find yourself on the wrong side of a new global imbalance of power where you no longer have the kind of reciprocal relationship with people that you used to have. There's an amazing illustration of this that I use in the book, which is 1830. In 1830, the French invade.

Algeria, what becomes Algeria. They take the city of Algiers. And one of the guys who goes out from the city of Algiers to negotiate the surrender of the city to the French army in order to preserve the city and its property from destruction, in order to bring an end to the war, is this

guy, Ahmed Boudarba, who's an Algerian merchant from an Andalusi family originally. So he's part of this connected, you know, kind of Mediterranean world all the way back to the medieval period as his family has been. He's married to a French woman.

He has business interests in Marseille, and one of his sons was born there. So he's part of a connected world. He speaks French. He reads French newspapers. He reads the emerging French kind of post-revolutionary opinion pieces that are being published. And he thinks of himself as part of that world. Experiencing the arrival of agents of the French state as like these fully other things. He has no idea of how to interpret them.

Exactly, not at all. On the contrary, he's someone who shares a world with them. He's a Muslim, he's an Arab, but he understands himself to be part of a broader, connected, cosmopolitan world that has existed right back to the medieval period. And all of a sudden... He doesn't have the kind of leverage that he's used to having. Something else is happening in Europe.

after the French Revolution, after the Napoleonic Wars. And it's that transformation in the willingness of Europe to rewrite the rules of the game, which have previously been perfectly understood by both sides, that is experienced by Muslims as a violence and a violation in which they then have to respond. Because that happened with that, basically he gets arrested, he gets deported.

He ends up living in Marseille, interestingly enough. But he initially tries to say, you know, this is a pretty bad thing for us, right, this French conquest. But please don't destroy our mosques. Please don't destroy our country. We can work together. We can publish newspapers. We can have a liberal commercial society. That's what I'm interested in.

in as well as you, right? And the French are like, no, no, no. We're interested in you. You don't get to speak that language. That language is ours. That language is called modernity and it's a thing that we own and we're going to put you in jail.

Well, that's really interesting because, you know, I want to ask you to sum up this conversation or to bring this extremely fascinating conversation to an end. You know, how did being Muslim become modern? Because... Having discussed everything that we have, I think we're in a better position to understand how European civilization, if we want to call it that, was greeted by Islamic cultures.

When Europe arrived in that bigger way in, let's say, the 19th century, and what set it apart wasn't so much that it was modern, but what that European civilization was in. industrial, wholly rationalist, secularist, and that It was industrialized in terms not only of manufactured goods, but also in terms of the arts, of scholarship, of literature, and maybe most of all, that it waged war on an industrial level. So, James, how did... being Muslim become modern.

So one of the things that I'm trying to do in the book is to account for not only the variety, but the intense contradictions that Muslim experience often looks like. There's a great scholar, sadly died far too young.

called Shahab Ahmed, who had an extraordinary book a few years ago called What is Islam? The Importance of Being Islamic, which is a kind of very different book to mine, much more knowledgeable, much more sophisticated. I read that book. I actually reviewed that book for the TLS. Ah, okay.

I thought it was remarkable. I loved it. Yes, very remarkable. A phenomenology, really, of Islam rather than a history. Very, very different to what I'm doing. But one of the arguments that he makes is the extent to which Islam has always been a human phenomenon marked by the prodigious...

of outright contradiction, he says. Being Muslim became modern in profoundly contradictory ways, I think, just as anything became modern in profoundly contradictory ways. There's a great romanticism for the pre-modern, as well as a celebration of modernity.

marks European culture in the 19th century. European culture in the 19th century is obsessed with chivalry and Arthurian legend and kind of medieval stuff. Absolutely. You think of a Victorian gentleman, he owns a factory that is shipping manufactured goods to every corner.

the world and dreaming of his Anglo-Saxon forebears. It's odd. Absolutely. And building country houses that look like Gothic palaces and decorating it with tapestries and faux medieval kind of architectural motifs, right? I mean, this is a thing that is very characteristic. So again, this is why we often think of modernity in a kind of tick box definitional way of a certain set of characteristics that make you modern again.

according to the 19th century narrative of what being modern means, which comes to be adopted in Europe as it begins to understand its position relative to the rest of the world. So for Muslims, it's very complicated. One of the things the French do after they invade Algiers is they announce...

that this is a crusade to reclaim North Africa for Christianity. And Charles X, who's the king, who's a very Catholic guy, organizes a mass and a todayum to be sung in Notre Dame in Paris. So secularizing, not so much, actually. It's always helpful using the word crusade. It reminds me of...

when George W. Bush literally used that word in 2001 in a speech, and people were like, dude, what are you saying? Indeed, yeah, which was revealing, right? Because in PR terms, optics were not good. It was not a particularly good move rhetorically anyway, but also...

It kind of reveals something, right? So secularizing, maybe not so much. Industrializing, yes, absolutely. But again, France in 1830 is still primarily an agricultural society. And at the same time, in Egypt, there's the beginning of an import substitution industrial revolution being led by the Egypt.

Egyptian dynasty at the same time. So these things are very uneven, I think. One of the things that comes to be the case by the end of the 19th century is the way in which Europe is doing all these things much faster than anybody else. At least Western Europe is doing these things much faster than anybody else.

More ruthlessly. And more ruthlessly, yeah. I think we can be honest. The Europeans and then their American satellites were just bloody ruthless in pursuing power and money. And that has to do with the dynamic of capitalism. I think this comes back to a very material... understanding. Probably my slightly materialist kind of Marxian undertones as a historian are coming through here. But I mean, I think that has to do...

with the developing dynamic of the impetus of global capitalism itself as a system with its own motor forces. It has nothing to do with anything cultural, particularly, or indeed with human agency, even particularly. It has to do with a certain kind of system, which is developing at this period. And Yeah, what it meant to be Muslim by the late 19th century often had to do with a sense of recapturing an authenticity or an autonomy which had been lost to the agency of others.

And I think that's one of the things that being Muslim in the modern world continues to mean.

for many people in profoundly unsettling and difficult ways. And that's not because, you know, there's a kind of Western challenge of modernity that Muslims fail to meet. On the contrary, it's because Muslims have always been caught up in the dynamic, economic, social, political and cultural forces of modernity, but often in ways that have robbed them of autonomy and told them that they are somehow outside of this system when in fact they've been on the wrong side of an emergency.

global imbalance of power and the whole history of Muslim revivalism, a response to that condition, which is also reimagining Islam in profoundly new and revolutionary ways, using the categories of thought that that modern world has imposed upon them.

Well, James, thank you very much. If you say that that civilizational narrative that came of age in the 19th century was coterminous with the moment when European culture and society was on the more powerful... side of a global imbalance that had emerged. Now that we are moving as the 21st century progresses into this new multipolar world.

Where, relatively speaking, Western nations, including even the greatest of all in terms of power, the United States, are less powerful than they were, relatively speaking, as new sources of power. global power emerge across Eurasia and Africa. I think we need to really be subjecting that civilizational narrative to scrutiny and try to develop a new way of understanding our shared global history that does justice to each perspective, a multi-perspectival.

kind of view. That's what we're trying to do here on Conflicted. And thank you for coming on, James. And dear listeners, do read James's remarkable book, Worlds of Islam, a Global History, originally subtitled, How Being Muslim... became modern, which really tells you a lot about what James is trying to do. So that's James McDougall's Worlds of Islam, a global history. Read it. You will learn a lot. You won't regret it. And James, once again, thanks so much for coming on Conflicted.

Really enjoyed it. Thank you so much, Thomas, and I hope I can speak again. That was Professor James McDougall. His new book, Worlds of Islam, a Global History, is available to buy from all good booksellers. If you'd like to follow him, you'll find links in the show notes. And remember, for deeper dives into the ideas we explore on this show, including extended conversations and Q&As with my co-host, Eamon Dean.

Check the show notes for details on how to join the Conflicted community. I'm Thomas Small. Conflicted is a Message Heard production. Our executive producers are Jake Warren and Max Warren. This episode was produced by Thomas Small and edited by Lizzie Andrews.