James McDougall is skeptical of historians who try to predict the future. Yet, he argues, their role remains crucial in helping us move beyond binaries and challenge myths. The Oxford professor and author of ‘Worlds of Islam: A Global History’ speaks to Shruti Sonal about why we need to move past reductive ‘Orientalist’ views of the Muslim worldYour book is an attempt to move away from Orientalist views that focus on a single, monolithic Muslim world, distinct from an equally monolithic Euro-American West. What drove you to write it?The funny thing is that historians moved away from that kind of Orientalist account 30-40 years ago, but it still dominates public perceptions.
I particularly wanted to look at what being Muslim means in the modern world and challenge the perception that Muslims have been anti-modernity in a sense. If we think the modern world is defined by a certain set of institutionally organised systems, defined by technology, individual rights, autonomy, and liberal democracy, then people point out that Islam isn’t modern.
This argument takes a particular ideological reading of what it means to be modern, bases it on an ideal understanding of European and American history in the 19th and 20th centuries, and then measures the rest of the world by that standard.
That’s an imperial narrative, and it continues to be used as justification for European and American military power exercised over the Global South today.In particular, you’ve addressed how Iran is still imagined in Europe and the US as the model of a ‘monolithic, civilisational otherness’, but that’s far from the truth. What’s your take?People who support the war, including the right-wing Iranian diaspora in America, are mobilising a certain narrative of Iranian civilisation as a separate pre-Islamic thing onto which Islam has been somehow imposed. They are propagating a myth: a civilisational narrative that was propagated by the Pahlavi monarchy from the 1920s onwards of a certain kind of Iranian national identity.
In the book, I have looked at the very early incorporation of Iran into a Muslim-majority world and the rapidity with which people within Iran itself rewrote their pre-Islamic history in the early years after the Muslim conquests to incorporate an Islamic vision into their own understandings of themselves.
People take these different narratives and cultural resources on Islam and combine them in creative ways to make sense of the world they live in at different moments.
And those things change over time.After 9/11, during the Iraq War, and during the ongoing war with Iran, a key rhetoric of Western politicians has been liberating local women from conservative Islamic clergy. Your thoughts?These narratives are historically very selective and politically often very opportunistic. We saw it in 2002 in Afghanistan, then in 2003 in Iraq, and more recently in Iran, and in justifications of Israel’s genocide in Gaza. If you’re trying to act in favour of Iranian women’s rights, the best way to do so is probably not to kill large numbers of Iranian women in airstrikes. But it’s astonishing how much traction those narratives have, particularly in Europe and the US.One of the ways that the older Orientalist narrative often tries to exceptionalise Islam or Muslim societies is by suggesting that they’re somehow uniquely bad at gender relations or uniquely repressive to women, which is simply not true. Islam is, like most religious systems, a patriarchal religious system that privileges maleness and a male-dominated hierarchy. But it’s arguably considerably less patriarchal than Catholic Christianity, in which women are systematically denied any kind of leadership role.
In contrast, women have had leadership roles in Muslim religious and political systems at different moments in history, including the famous Razia Sultan and a series of queens who ruled in Southeast Asia in the early modern period.You’ve spoken about how India is a good example of how the clash of civilisation narrative didn’t always hold true. What set it apart?The argument that Muslims are inherently foreign to India is too simplistic.
Islam has been adopted by large numbers of people in North India over a very long period of time, much more slowly than elsewhere. It took several generations in places like Punjab for local communities to identify themselves as Muslim. It was not a period of conquest and conversion, but incorporation and adaptation. There’s also the fact that in India, Muslim rulers, especially from the beginning of the Mughal period onwards, were ruling over a very large territory, most of whose subjects weren’t Muslim and didn’t want to become Muslim.
There was very little push to convert large numbers of Indians to Islam, unlike in the Middle East. The way Islam was understood by the Mughal court itself and by the scholars around the sultans, in particular under Akbar’s reign, was much more adaptable because the majority population was never going to be Muslim. There was a demographic difference compared to the Middle East or North Africa, where Muslims were the dominant sector.Will the Iran crisis widen the Shia-Sunni gap or help in bridging it?The split between Sunni and Shia is one of those things that’s often assumed to be a binary divide. That’s too simplistic. Over the course of much of Islamic history, there has been a lot of crossover between Sunnis and Shias. Sectarian distinctions aren’t always as distinct as people like to pretend they are, especially the Islamists on both sides. There’s a lot of sympathy right now in responses to the attack on Iran.
It’s not just Shia Muslims who are outraged and offended at what Israel and America are doing to Iran. In the Gulf, people are quite divided because they’re also being attacked by Iran, but they know they’re being attacked because the Americans attacked Iran. The way the Sunni-Shia division has been played up by the Gulf monarchies, often to the detriment of their own Shia population, is going to be increasingly difficult to maintain in the future. In Europe and the US, on the other hand, the Sunni-Shia difference is much less politically salient than people might assume it is. Does the fact that Zohran Mamdani is a Shia actually matter? I don’t think so. The fact that he’s Muslim matters. Globally, I think people look at Sunni Muslim Palestinians in Gaza and Shia Muslim Iranians in Iran as being the targets of imperial violence. It might be a unifying factor in some respects.
