Micro-narrative and the Historiography of the Modern Middle East

Abstract

Most recent scholarship on the early-20th-century Eastern Arab World (Mashriq) has been preoccupied with locating the words and actions of historical actors into one or more of three overarching and interconnected (post-colonial) themes: colonialism, nationalism, and modernity. As a result, historians have produced very few micro-narratives whose protagonists are individuals from the region and which take as their starting point the prosaic concerns of daily life. What explains this historiographical trend? The relative scarcity of micro-narratives is due to a number of factors, including challenges in using particular genres of Arabic source-materials, as well as the impact of Edward Said’s Orientalism generally and post-colonial concerns about narrative as a mode of representation in particular. Two fragments from the life-story of an early-20th-century Arab soldier are introduced in order to show how these factors play out in the crafting of a micro-narrative. Compared to historians of Europe and North America, those working on the history of the early 20th-century Mashriq (what is today Syria, Jordan, Palestine⁄Israel, Lebanon, and Iraq) have produced relatively few micro-narratives whose protagonists are the people of the region. Where is the level of human detail found in classics such as Alan Taylor’s William Cooper’s Town, or Natalie Zemon Davis’ The Return of Martin Guerre or even ‐ to take a non-Western example ‐ Susan Mann’s The Talented Women of the Zhang Family? This essay tries to explain this absence and tease out its implications. 1 In the 32 years since its publication, Edward Said’s Orientalism has reverberated in each of the disciplines that collectively constitute Middle East Studies, including history. The book had positive effects that those of us in the field know well. It forced us to take seriously the reality of the power relations produced and reinforced by British and French colonialism, and to detect the way in which those power relations are reflected in texts. Partly as a result of Said’s work, most recent historians of the Middle East have produced scholarship that is strongly critical of the British and French colonial projects in the region. These are works that have exposed the power of colonialism to destroy not only lived lives but also imagined futures. Some historians have also shown how the independent states of the 20th-century Arab Middle East were largely continuations, rather than ruptures with, their immediate colonial pasts. And, in general, most recent historians of the Arab Middle East have drawn the lesson that they must steer clear of employing general oppositions ‐ secular vs. religious, traditional vs. modern, Sunni vs. Shi’ite ‐ as explanations for historical events, when these essentializing binaries inevitably collapse under the weight of counter examples. Examples of such works include: Joseph Massad’s Colonial Effects, Elizabeth Thompson’s Colonial Citizens, Toby Dodge’s Inventing Iraq, Jim Gelvin’s Divided Loyalties, Keith Watenpaugh’s Being Modern in the Middle East, Martin Bunton’s Colonial Land Policies in Palestine, Ellen Fleischmann’s The Nation and its ‘New’ Women, and Rashid Khalidi’s