Arabic in the Medieval World

Abstract

Observers of the recent political polarizations of western and Islamic culture might be forgiven for concluding that we are living in a new Middle Ages (Holsinger; Eco). Such narratives as “the clash of civilizations” (Huntington) and “the rise of the modern West” (McNeill; which beguiles with the dangerous fantasy of the fall of the atavistic East) have attained the status of cultural mythologies. Conversely, modern Arab cultures have never forgotten the shock of their first encounters with medieval Europeans in the Levant and al-Andalus: the legacies of crusade, countercrusade, occupation, and re-conquest. Extremists have politicized the orientalist divide described by Edward Said to create their own postcolonial mythologies. We are now in danger of projecting current impasses historically backward until Islam and the West seem always to have been enemies, inimical by nature and throughout history. Doing so would reify East and West and render them monolithic. Most troubling, such mythologies obscure the uneasy, strategic, and often stunningly productive interchanges that enrich what might better be considered as a complex intercultural evolution. The deep roots of the encounter between Islam and Christendom—the influence of Arabic science, literature, and philosophy and of Islamic forms of thought, historiography, economics, and cultural practice—deserve a richer, less politicized examination. It would be useful to try to see medieval Islamic cultures write back, from a time before European hegemony, decentering and defamiliarizing their Western neighbors. What would a medieval world look like if it constructed itself not as a tedious intermission between classical and Renaissance enlightenments, but rather as a heterogeneous fretwork of contact zones, aversions, and transmissions between sophisticated and acquisitive cultures? This medieval world could better serve our own twenty-first-century global culture, whose multiplex networks exceed simple polarization. To this outcome, the study of Arabic writing in the premodern and early modern world is key.