Islamic Myths and Memories

Mediators of Globalization

Itzchak Weismann, Mark Sedgwick, Ulrika Mårtensson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317112204
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Estudios islámicos

Islamic myths and collective memory are very much alive in today's localized struggles for identity, and are deployed in the ongoing construction of worldwide cultural networks. This book brings the theoretical perspectives of myth-making and collective memory to the study of Islam and globalization and to the study of the place of the mass media in the contemporary Islamic resurgence. It explores the annulment of spatial and temporal distance by globalization and by the communications revolution underlying it, and how this has affected the cherished myths and memories of the Muslim community. It shows how contemporary Islamic thinkers and movements respond to the challenges of globalization by preserving, reviving, reshaping, or transforming myths and memories.

PART I
The Past in the Present

Chapter 1
Modern and Islamic Icons in Arab-Islamic Popular Historical Memory

Mark Sedgwick

Myth and memory are, as Itzchak Weismann writes in the introduction to this volume, ‘constantly deployed, on both global and local levels, in evolving public discourses’, providing explanations of reality and sometimes mobilising for action, either for or against a dominant system.¹ Myth and memory are used not only in public discourses, however, but also in private discourses, and in private reactions to public discourses and to actual events. Myth and memory are consumed, or perhaps not consumed, in ways explained by the social processes identified by Maurice Halbwachs, as well as produced, in ways explained for example by Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger.² The relationship between public and private uses of myth and memory, between production and consumption, may usefully be understood in terms of a market in myth and memory, just as the production and consumption of religious goods is understood in terms of a market, or ‘field’, by Pierre Bourdieu.³

This chapter focuses on two aspects of the market in myth and memory: the relationship between production and consumption, and the consequences of consumption, understood in terms of popular historical memory. The chapter reports a study of contemporary Arab-Islamic popular historical memory that identified its major and minor ‘icons’. This study confirmed the importance of Islamic myths of origin, of the Prophet and the Rightly Guided Caliphs, and the importance of one later myth, that of the period of the Crusades. It also suggested, however, that Arab-Islamic popular historical memory has three elements: a common Islamic element, a common modern element and a segmented modern element. While Arab-Islamic popular historical memory is unified with regard to its Islamic element, popular historical memory of the modern period is diverse when it comes to Arab icons. With the single exception of Egypt’s President Nasser, the common modern icons of Arab-Islamic popular historical memory are non-Arab: Adolf Hitler, Napoleon Bonaparte, Abraham Lincoln, Mahatma Ghandi, Karl Marx and others. Although it is hard to say what these have in common, they all suggest a preoccupation with liberation.

Finally, the study suggested that the various and diverse modern national Arab icons are more prominent in Arab-Islamic popular historical memory than are the common icons that make up the Islamic element. This raises the question of the extent to which it is possible to speak of one ‘Arab-Islamic’ popular historical memory, save in relation to its (less prominent) Islamic element.

The Market in Myth and Memory

To understand the market in myth and memory, a distinction must be made between what Halbwachs called ‘formal history’ and what later scholars have called ‘popular historical memory’. Formal history is what is produced, and includes the history that historians are professionally concerned with. Popular historical memory is the consequence of consumption, and includes what historians who teach at universities find in really bad student essays. Teaching history is partly about trying to fill a tabula rasa, but it is also a struggle to replace popular historical memory with formal history. As Pierre Nora puts it, somewhat lyrically, ‘history is perpetually suspicious of memory, and its true mission is to suppress and destroy it’.⁴

Formal history is not, of course, ‘what really happened’. Except at the most basic level of the date of a king’s death, formal history is a constructed narrative, and like all constructed narratives it to some extent reflects ideologies and agendas. Formal history, then, is also myth. Sometimes the ideologies and agendas reflected in formal history are those of the individual historian or of an intellectual consensus, and sometimes they are those of a state. The vast differences in narrative between an English history of the conquest of India written in the 1890s and a similar history written in the 1990s above all reflect changes in intellectual consensus. The equally vast differences recently noted by Michael Kemper between a Russian history of Dagestan written in 1937 and one written only 16 years later, in 1953, reflected changes in Soviet state ideology.⁵ Formal history, then, may be produced by states as well as by historians. A third variety of formal history, which matters more in some times and places than in others, is the formal history incorporated into a religion. This may be understood, as it was by Halbwachs, as former formal history: as Halbwachs noted, the essence of many religious ceremonies is commemorative.⁶

The supply of formal history is one of the major sources of popular historical memory. Everyone learns some history at school and during religious instruction, and no one forgets all of it, but school is not the only channel through which formal history is made available for consumption; others include the media, monuments and place names. For the formal history of religion, preaching is also an important channel of distribution.

Formal history, however distributed, is not the only source of popular historical memory, however. That something else intervenes is shown by the distance between formal history and popular historical memory, which can be significant. This was recently demonstrated by a survey testing 5,219 German schoolchildren’s knowledge of the former German Democratic Republic (GDR, East Germany, DDR) reported in 2007 by Monika Deutz-Schroeder and Klaus Schroeder. This survey found that 55 per cent of schoolchildren in the eastern part of Berlin thought that Konrad Adenauer had been an East German politician, that only 32 per cent there knew that democratic elections did not take place in the German Democratic Republic, and that more children in Brandenburg (in the former GDR) than in Bavaria (in the former Federal Republic) considered the Stasi to have been ‘a normal secret service’.⁷

Deutz-Schroeder and Schroeder, who were not interested in popular historical memory, concluded that the schoolchildren’s knowledge of the GDR was inadequate. In fact, their survey revealed differences in popular historical memory between two segments of the school-age population of Germany, and thus revealed the impact of other factors on the consumption of formal history. These other factors include family history and, perhaps most important of all, the process whereby, in the words of Halbwachs, ‘the collective memory [reconstructs] an image of the past which is in accord, in each epoch, with the predominant thoughts of the society’.⁸ These two factors may be understood as the most important determinants of demand within the market in myth and memory. ‘Ossis’ and ‘Wessis’ remain distinct groups, in a sometimes uncomfortable relationship. A slight majority of eastern Berlin schoolchildren thought that Ossis had nothing to thank Wessis for, a view held by only half of that percentage among Wessi schoolchildren.⁹ Given these predominant thoughts, it is hardly surprising that Ossis have a more positive view of their former state than Wessis do, resulting in different patterns of consumption of formal history, and thus in different popular historical memory.

Deutz-Schroeder and Schroeder’s survey was unusual. Scholars interested in memory have generally focused not on popular historical memory but on one or another variety of formal history, a focus against which Alon Confino warns in an excellent essay in the American Historical Review,¹⁰ drawing attention to the risk of failing to distinguish clearly enough between the production and reception of memory. As he argued, many studies of memory focus on objects – museums and monuments, for example – and then interpret them either in terms of existing understandings of history, making them into mere illustrations of what is already known, or in terms of the understandings of the researcher, not of those who actually encounter the objects in question. Confino argues for paying more attention to how and why the understandings of the general population differ from those intended by the patrons and creators of objects, and to how and why understandings among different segments of a population differ and change. In effect, he was arguing for the study of the consumption of formal history.

One of the pioneers of the study of Arab-Islamic historical memory was Yoram Meital, who examined Egyptian official commemorations of the 1973 October War (known in Israel as the Yom Kippur war). Meital looked at the monument to the Unknown Soldier in Cairo, at the October War Panorama museum and at a selection of postage stamps.¹¹ In so doing, he revealed much about how the Egyptian state would like the October War to be remembered, i.e. about the formal history produced by the state. This, however, tells us nothing about how Egyptians actually do remember the October War, about how they consume formal history, converting it into popular historical memory. Apart from anything else, almost nobody in Cairo ever visits the monument to the Unknown Soldier or the October War panorama, and normal Egyptians pay little attention to postage stamps, if only because the post is much less used as a means of communication than it is in the West.¹² It cannot be assumed that the formal history of the Egyptian state has the impact on Egyptian popular historical memory that the Egyptian state wishes it to have. If a significant gap between formal history and popular historical memory is found in Germany, the gap in Egypt may be expected to be even wider.

As well as gaps between formal history and popular historical memory in terms of content, there are gaps in terms of structure. Formal history, as has been said, generally takes narrative form, though the formal history promoted by a state may be represented in objects. According to Joanne Rappaport, who worked on the popular historical memory of a small Andean community, popular historical memory, in contrast, ‘is not made up of carefully woven narratives but of a series of brief and incomplete images, which are never developed in any detail’.¹³ This lack of coherent narrative was thought by Antonio Gramsci to be one of the characteristics of ‘subaltern thought’, which he sees as a ‘counter-hegemonic’ force.¹⁴ Rappaport may be going too far: while it is certainly true that popular historical memory is not as narrative-based as formal history, it does also contain narratives, or at least narrative fragments. Gramsci may also be going too far: popular historical memory is not only popular or subaltern. It is shared, in one form or another, by all who are not professional historians. Even when the latter think of places or periods way beyond their own fields of expertise (let the average historian of the Middle East here reflect on nineteenth-century Siam), popular historical memory to some extent replaces formal history, though professional historians are naturally more cautious about accepting it. Popular historical memory is not only subaltern, then, even if it is counter-hegemonic in the sense that it is in tension with formal history.

Following Rappaport and Gramsci in modified form, then, we may see popular historical memory as counter-hegemonic and fragmentary, consisting of incomplete ima...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• List of Contributors
• Introduction:Islamic Myths and Memories Facing the Challenge of Globalization
• The Past in the Present
• Sacred Places and Persons
• Preaching, New and Old
• Select Bibliography
• Index