Modern Arab historians should be given a wider audience

Why can't most people name modern Arab historians. Shatha Almutawa seeks to set things right.

Qasr Al Hosn in Abu Dhabi in the 1940s. We know something of our past, but do we know the living historians who can tell us more? Courtesy Al Ittihad

When I was teaching an Islamic Civilisations course last autumn, I asked my students at Qatar University to read selections from Ibn Khaldun’s Muqaddima. They were excited by Ibn Khaldun’s work and eager to test the wisdom of arguably the Arab world’s greatest historian by applying his theories to contemporary situations.

They found his analysis of sociology and economics convincing and useful. In the middle of the semester, they asked me why there aren’t great historians in the Arab world today. The question shocked me. “Of course there are,” I said and gave them examples, but months later, I am still thinking about their question.

Previously, when I was working on my doctorate at the University of Chicago, I worked with medieval Arabic texts, and to understand their context, I read books by contemporary western scholars.

I did not read many books by contemporary Arab historians, because the texts that are considered most important in academia today are texts that are written in English, French and German. But what about the works of the historians writing in Arabic?

I asked my colleagues and the general consensus was that Arab historians’ works are generally not used extensively, if at all. Everyone was curious about who the most important Arab historians are today. I contacted a librarian, Laila Hussein Moustafa, and she gave me a list of 12 historians, on which I recognised only one name. I had never heard of the Algerian Aboul-Kassem Saadallah, or the Moroccan Mustafa A’shi, for example.

Further research exposed me to the work of Falih Handal, the Iraqi historian who worked on UAE history. Mr Handal not only wrote important books about Iraq and the UAE, but also held regular salons in his home where intellectuals in the UAE got together to discuss ideas.

By reading about him, I learnt about the Emirati historian Abd Allah bin Saleh Almutawa.

One of the scholars who worked with him is Fatima Al Sayegh, a professor at United Arab Emirates University. She told me about how she used documents written by American missionaries in the UAE to learn about Emirati society in the 20th century.

We have many historians to be proud of. Hatoon Al-Fassi’s work on the history of women in the Arabian Peninsula is important. Her book Women in Pre-Islamic Arabia: Nabataea was published in English. In Arabic, her article “Arab Queens in the first millennium BCE” was recently published in the Journal of the History and Archaeology of the Gulf. Her chapter “Women in Eastern Arabia: Myth & Representation”, in the book Gulf Women, is also notable.

Nadia Cheikh, who received her PhD from Harvard University, has made important contributions in Arab-Byzantine studies, gender in the Abbasid period, and the Abbasid Court. Her 2004 book Byzantium Viewed by the Arabs was translated into Turkish and Greek.

She also co-authored Crisis and Continuity at the Abbasid Court and co-edited several collected volumes. She has published more than 39 papers and book chapters, including Ibn Khaldun, a Late Historian of Byzantium.

So why is it that we do not recognise the names of contemporary historians as we do the names of medieval historians?

Researching this question showed me that Arab culture still appreciates and honours historians. There are many newspaper articles about historians’ work, and many Arab historians write regularly for Arabic newspapers. They are frequently cited in articles written by journalists.

Arab scholars who write or wrote in other fields – Edward Said, Leila Ahmed, Abdel Rahman Badawi – are read in western courses about the Middle East.

But these writers should be introduced to students in the Arab world. Students should leave Islamic Civilisations courses not thinking of themselves as coming from a place of past glories, but seeing that they are part of a living civilisation that continues to make important contributions to the world.

Part of that is knowing about scholars who are producing knowledge today.

Shatha Almutawa is an Emirati with a PhD in Muslim and Jewish intellectual history. She is associate editor of the American Historical Association magazine Perspectives on History