Why post-colonial history is bunk

A book review in the New Yorker:

A Better Place

What if the Muslim armies hadn’t been stopped at the French border?

[...]

Lewis’s book is part of that revision. The Muslims came to Europe, he writes, as “the forward wave of civilization that was, by comparison with that of its enemies, an organic marvel of coordinated kingdoms, cultures, and technologies in service of a politico-cultural agenda incomparably superior” to that of the primitive people they encountered there. They did Europe a favor by invading. This is not a new idea, but Lewis takes it further: he clearly regrets that the Arabs did not go on to conquer the rest of Europe. The halting of their advance was instrumental, he writes, in creating “an economically retarded, balkanized, and fratricidal Europe that . . . made virtues out of hereditary aristocracy, persecutory religious intolerance, cultural particularism, and perpetual war.” It was “one of the most significant losses in world history and certainly the most consequential since the fall of the Roman Empire.” This is a bold hypothesis...

No kidding.

...when he can give the Muslims an edge in these matters he does so. Unlike others, he says, they did not enslave their co-religionists, only infidels. (Why is that better?) As for restrictions on women—an inflamed topic in our time—he acknowledges that the Muslims’ were harsher than the Franks’, but he believes that Muhammad did not intend this severity, and that the Koran is kinder to women than either the Torah or St. Paul. When the Muslims crucify infidels, this is one of the “regrettable aspects of nation-building.” When the Muslim state falls, the jihad on which it was built is not in view—only the Christian jihad...

If, as Edward Said wrote, the old history books were covertly ideological, the current ones tend to be overtly ideological, as each new generation of scholars rides in to rescue supposedly worthy peoples who were wronged by earlier scholarship and, in their time, by axe-wielding conquerors. But all these peoples, or all the ones in Lewis’s book, were conquerors. If the Christians took Spain from the Muslims, the Muslims had taken it from the Visigoths, who had appropriated it from the Romans, who had seized it from the Carthaginians, who had thrown out the Phoenicians. Lewis does not pretend that the Muslims were not conquerors; he simply justifies their conquest on the ground of their belief in convivencia ['the word means “living together,”'] in spite of differences, a pressing matter today. I can foresee a time when another matter important to us, the threat of ecological catastrophe, will prompt a historian to write a book in praise of the early Europeans whom Lewis finds so inferior to the Muslims. The Franks lived in uncleared forests, while the Muslims built fine cities, with palaces and aqueducts? All the better for the earth. The Franks were fond of incest? Endogamy keeps societies small, prevents the growth of rapacious nation-states. The same goes for the Franks’ largely barter economy. Trade such as the Muslims practiced—far-flung and transacted with money—leads to consolidation. That’s how we got global corporations...

Someone please inform Naomi Klein of the true origin of all those logos.

Mark C.

Posted by markc at January 30, 2008 09:12 PM