Concluding Essay

Increasing Need to Bridge Scholarly Knowledge on Muslim Societies with Politicized Public Knowledge

In these brief concluding remarks, I would first like to thank the more than 100 participants in our NEH program for their intellectual input and reflections during our scholarly forum and public outreach program. The results of these reflections, as summarized in other parts of this website, shows the need to truly bridge the gap between scholars of Muslim societies at universities and public knowledge practitioners in order to create healthier debate on key issues on democratic values and pluralism in national and global politics.

While we were preparing the reports on this NEH project during the summer of 2012, we were saddened to hear the news of a terror attack by Anders Breivik on British Labor Party youth camp on July 22nd. What shocked us further was the justification of this terror attack by the perpetrator in reference to the entrenched civilizational narratives of Islam versus the Christian West. A very long and highly footnoted manifesto announced by Anders Behring Breivik just hours before he committed his crimes illustrates the dangerous politics of a set of racial, religious and civilizational assumptions about Muslim societies and their imagined threat to Europe and America. Although none of the scholars and intellectuals quoted by Breivik in “2083: A European Declaration of Independence” could be blamed for this act of terrorism, his manifesto alerted us to some of the uses of the obsolete and incorrect posturing of academic knowledge about Muslims and Christians in world history and the dehumanization of Muslim societies. We are still faced with prominent political and public figures’ pronouncements about Muslims’ essential and unchanging character, their threat to the West, their violence, and intellectual inferiority. We can expect a certain level of misrepresentation in depictions of different religions, cultures, societies and nations in any public sphere. However, a set of negative associations about Muslim societies as an imagined threat to Europe and America is clearly out of the ordinary in terms of its politicization and propagation in recent years. Thus, the need for cooperation among scholars of Muslim societies and practitioners of public knowledge such as museum curators, journalists, librarians and school curriculum designers has become more urgent.

As underlined by scholars gathered at our forum, multiple fables and narratives of failure and decline (or earlier rise and golden age) of Muslim societies emerged in the global public opinion and humanities-social sciences in the second half of the 19th century, both as a response to demands for a more universalistic view of the history of the globalizing community, and as a betrayal of this universalism. Rise and Decline tropes in human history soon became dominant not only in the history of Muslim societies, but also in historical views of the rest of the world, ranging from Latin America to Africa, India and China. Muslim nationalists and reformists were themselves interested and invested in reproducing and spreading various versions of golden age and decline narratives due to their revivalist agendas. The broader acceptance of this narrative by different actors of history, including nationalists who thought of their project of radical reform as a decisive movement to awaken their "declined" societies, turned the story of golden age and decline into a common knowledge category for many people in the world. The contradictions inherent in this narrative led to serious discontent about it. First of all, a golden age-decline narrative imagined a world divided into civilizational containers, at a time when globalization made any notion of civilizational boundaries obsolete. Moreover, golden age and decline thinking made it impossible to imagine an inclusive universalism in social sciences and humanities at a time when intellectuals in all over the world were participating in a globalizing public sphere and intellectual networks. Today, scholars of humanities consistently underline the contradictions and fallacies of this entrenched narrative of civilizational rise and decline, and in a world being reconfigured by new economic and political powers like China, old arguments about the decline of the East make even less sense. For these reasons, overcoming this hundred-year-old paradigm was long overdue, leading to vibrant intellectual debates about its viable alternative. Connected histories or global cross-cultural exchanges seem to be two credible new paradigms that aim to do justice to both the diversity and unity of human experience in world history. When we look at the details, it seems that scholars of Muslim societies, China or Africa have already achieved a lot in shattering various myths and pointing the way toward a more accurate understanding of history.

Yet despite overwhelming doubts about the rise and decline narratives and civilizational thinking on world history, as well as scholarly alternatives to it, those narratives persist in various public spheres as well as in the social sciences. Thus, the challenge of overcoming Eurocentrism and civilizationism in social sciences and world history requires more cooperative efforts and is proving more difficult than initially predicted. Even though every single version of the rise of the West/decline of the rest literature has been challenged and overturned in different area studies, this grand narrative continues to stalk like an omnipresent ghost. In various branches of social sciences, there are about twenty different narratives of the concomitant rise of the West and appearance of modernity, ranging from scientific and industrial revolution to Protestant ethics and maritime explorations. All of these modernity narratives come with a set of assumptions about the non-Western world, making big claims about inward-looking and stagnant Chinese, Indian, African and Muslim societies that invariably missed the opportunity to be modern because they lived in a separate and unconnected civilization from that of the West. Unless these civilizational narratives in the social science literature and world history writings on modernity are tackled specifically, with different alternatives emphasizing the connectedness of world cultures, religions and regions, the gap between the new humanities scholarship and public knowledge on Muslim societies could grow even bigger.

Participants in our scholarly forum generally suggested continuing the patient work of breaking down civilizational and triumphalist Eurocentric narratives about globalization and modernity through contrary examples, utilizing public programs in order to show how histories and cultures are connected. We hope that these efforts could lead to better formulations of shared experiences and universal values not only across Muslim and Christian societies in different continents, but also across Chinese, Indian and African societies. In many universities all over the world, this patient work has already produced a rich body of humanities scholarship. It is now time to promote more interdisciplinary sharing of these new research results, especially between the humanities and the social sciences, and to open academic knowledge to the general public through mediums such as museums, exhibitions, journalism and new media products. Signs that this work is bearing fruit are illustrated in the resources featured on this website in terms of articles, new exhibitions and proposed public projects, and we hope to continue to collaborate with various institutions and individuals to realize further progress.