Geschichte Als Widerstand: Geschichtsschreibung und Nation-Building In Qaḏḏāfīs Lybien par Jakob Krais

Abstract

BOOK REVIEWS / COMPTES RENDUS 373 the last twenty years, almost none of which is cited in the book. This is unfortunate given the author’s ambition to offer an account that integrates recent scholarship. To conclude, apart from disentangling confusing events and despite the lacunae in religious and ideological matters, this book illustrates the advantages of studying history as entangled history. The history covered here is entangled in the conventional sense in that we can recognize the relationship between Christian-Muslim encounters at different points around the Mediterranean. It is also a case of entangled history within the Muslim world. Entangled history typically tells the story of regions and actors separated by culture. The present book demonstrates that even within what is considered a single culture there are the barriers between Maghrib and Mashriq which endure in modern scholarship. ANNA AKASOY Hunter College, New York KRAIS, JAKOB. GESCHICHTE ALS WIDERSTAND: GESCHICHTSSCHREIBUNG UND NATION-BUILDING IN QAḎḎĀFĪS LYBIEN. WÜRZBURG 2016. The Arabist and historian Jakob Krais investigates in his doctoral dissertation, written at the Berlin Graduate School Muslim Cultures and Societies and published in 2016 as ‘History as Resistance: Historiography and NationBuilding in Qaḏḏāfī’s Libya’, the official depiction of Libyan national history under the Qaḏḏāfī regime. His dissertation, which is the first monograph on this subject, analyses the output of the Libyan Studies Centre (LSC) between its foundation in 1978 and the start of the Libyan Revolution in 2011. The goal of the LSC was, according to Krais, to help create national identity through the decolonisation and reclaiming of Libyan historiography, based on the assumption that complete independence could only be reached once historiography had been cleansed of all colonial ideas and thought processes. While Krais highlighted the influence of the ideology of the Qaḏḏāfī regime on both the ideas expressed and the research topics chosen by the LSC, he is careful to note that their publications could not be dismissed as political propaganda. However, the various large-scale research projects of the LSC clearly show a political orientation. Among them were, for example, an oral history project which focused on collecting eyewitness statements about the fight against Italian colonial rule, an investigation in Ottoman archives for relevant material, and a project collecting and translating other foreign (nonItalian ) documents and travel accounts. This focus on oral history and Ottoman 374 BOOK REVIEWS / COMPTES RENDUS source material tried to address the problem of dependence on European archives, and the Eurocentric perspective that comes with both European archives and European material. Krais states: ‘The core of a decolonised rewriting of history consists of the concentration on local primary sources.’1 While Krais’ monograph is an important contribution to the history of Libya, by portraying one strand of politicised academia, it is equally significant to postcolonial studies of historiography. He clearly sees his project as a practical case study illustrating a broader movement of reclaiming historiography in former colonies by opposing colonial and Orientalist perspectives and discourses, which started in the 1960s. He continuously contextualises the situation in Libya by giving information on similar or dissimilar developments in other former colonies, especially in the other North African nations. This movement sees historiography as capable of creating a new, shared and staunchly postcolonial identity, free from internalised colonial stereotypes. This process of reclaiming and rewriting history is mainly marked by a shift in perspective, turning the colonised, formerly described by colonial authors as passive, degenerated and in decay, into active and central participants in the development of their respective countries. The LSC constructed the refutation of all forms of imperialism and the active resistance against Italian rule as the central theme in the composition of a new and comprehensive national Libyan history. Krais argues that the emphasis the LSC placed on resistance (i.e. the active struggle against colonialism, and the reinterpretation of people fighting in any way against colonial rule as heroes) ‘decisively shapes the assessment and interpretation of all other historical epochs’.2 His book analyses the reframing of precolonial Libyan history by the LSC as a constant form of resistance against foreign enemies and points out the problematic anachronism of using a vocabulary and theories...