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Islamic History as Global History by R. Eaton

Oriental and Muslim cultures have always been a complicated and frequently hard to understand objects of research for the Western historians and anthropologists. Thus, the studies of the Islamic world may include fallacies or misinterpretation of some facts. R. Eaton in his article Islamic History as Global History argues that all the previous research on the place of the Islamic civilization in the global historic context were biased by the views of the European scholars, who usually perceived Muslims as their enemies. His work supports the idea that Islamic world was always an active participant of the historic processes not only on the local, Middle Eastern, but also on the global level.

The author states that there are a number of stereotypes present in the views of the people of Europe and the United States concerning the Islamic culture and its history. These might include fanatical politicians seizing power in the modern Middle East, the amputation of the thieves’ hands according to some local religious laws, and images of women, who are doomed to domestic bondage. Such ideas are the result of the Europe’s long history of hostile encounters with the Muslim world. Starting from the 11th century, the scholars considered Muslims as the main enemies of the European Christianity creating the us/them opposition. Later, in the 19th century, the Western scholars started defining the Islamic civilization as a timeless, monolithic culture, which was not affected by time or any dynamics of change. Such understanding of Islam as a mysterious, static and exotic “other” had remained in the minds of people of Europe and North America until the middle of the 20th century. Only after 1960-ies the approach to studying Islamic history changed, the Islamists started analyzing not the Islamic civilization as a whole, but as a combination of separate societies. This shift of the object of the study allowed examining not only the elite classes of the Islamic world, but also other distinct communities that constituted it. This new focus of the research removed the stereotype that Islamic civilization was a monolithic phenomenon. Now, scholars studied it as a unity of a great amount of communities that varied greatly through its history. Thus, the uncovering of many new sources of the Islamic history took place, which allowed perceiving the Islamic civilization not as a separate and enclosed culture, but as a part of the global historic process.

For example, the 1974 work of Marshall Hodgson Venture of Islam offers a fresh view on the Muslim culture. Eaton stresses that the first positive aspect of this book is that it represents the history of the Islamic world as it actually was, but not through the lens of the Western European bias. The work challenges the unconscious terminological assumptions of the reader, which are present as a legacy of the years of the Europe’s depiction of the Islamic world as alien and “other”. Second, Hodgson rejected the idea of demonstrating the Muslim world only as the one located at the Middle East, but showed that Islamic culture stretched from the Mediterranean Sea to the borders of China. Thus, Islam was a global phenomenon, which integrated different civilizations. The other work, which demonstrated the global character of Islam, rather quickly followed Hodgeson’s book. Eaton emphasizes that the main advantage of this work conducted by N. Levtzion called Conversion to Islam is that this research analyzed the process of the growth of Muslim communities in Asia and Africa. Usually the scholars tend to picture the Islamization process as an expansion, which simultaneously implies imposition and the use of force. However, Levtzion depicted it as a process of assimilation. Thus, the reader comprehends that Islam is not a monolithic unstoppable religious tide that permanently widens and expands new territories, but a phenomenon that may acquire and incorporate local traditions.

Additionally, the newly emerged approach to global history, world systems theory, allowed the historians of Islam to realize that the Muslims starting the 13th century made great contributions to the world system. Through the networks of scholars and saints based on the shared perception of what a surrounding world should be, and how to structure personal relationship to it, the Muslims have created a world system that linked both men and women. The significant role in this system played the religious text Quran, to which people tried to respond, and to fulfill the idea of creation of the righteous social order through uniting the societies around their Maker.

R. Eaton constructs his main point that the Muslim civilization was always a participant of global processes in two steps. First, he explains that Europeans based contemporary knowledge about the Islamic culture on the concepts of prejudice and all the available research are not fully and completely true. Second, the author shows that Islamic society actively participated and affected the world history on the global level by giving specific examples. He divided his work thematically into three parts: the first one gives a general picture of the previous ways of perception of the Muslim culture, the second demonstrates how this understanding has changed during the 20th century, and what new approaches to the Islamic history this shift produced, and the third part explains how specific phenomena like the emergence of Islam, or the culture of merchants influenced the world culture.

Based on this structure, Eaton also manages to demonstrate that Islamic civilization was open and ready to incorporate features of other cultures. Nasr states that some schools of Islam tried to integrate the knowledge of Persia and Ancient Greece into Islamic concepts. Baloch also claims that during the Medieval exactly Arabic language was the most important scientific language of the world. There is a belief that the Arab-Islamic society tolerated not only Islam, but also Judaism, Christianity, and Zoroastrianism for a long time. Thus, it is clear that Eaton developed a correct and coherent vision of the Islamic civilization as a global actor of the world history.

Offered by Eaton approach to the problem of the Islamic civilization, and its place in the global historic context, fights the contemporary prejudices concerning the nature of the Muslim culture. The presentation of the facts and a number of studies of other authors are well-structured and thorough – every event or historic phenomenon the author mentions matches the discussed sub-topic of his article. Thus, Eaton’s claim that for a rather long time the developed over the centuries bias did not allow the scholars to perceive that the Islamic world was never a separated and enclosed civilization is clear and easy to comprehend. Thereby, in my opinion, Eaton’s work is very effective; by using a great amount of information from distinct historic sources the author builds a strong argument that convinces the reader that the Muslim culture is a very important link between the ancient and contemporary worlds, and, thus, that the Islamic civilization was always a phenomenon that actively took part in the global historic processes. The article is easy to read and understand. Eaton’s language is not overloaded with hard to perceive terminology, and his argumentation is coherent and apprehensible. Since the author discusses mainly how Islamic civilization participated in the global processes during the Middle Ages, the only improvement I would suggest is adding some information about the role of the Muslim culture in the world history after the medieval period.

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