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Professor James McDougall
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Interviewer Tiram Mende
welcome to
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the New Books Network.
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Interviewer Tiram Mende
Hello everybody and welcome back to New Books Network. I'm Tiram Mende, the host of the channel. Today we'll be talking to Professor James McDougall about his new book, Worlds of a Global History, which was published earlier this year. Welcome to the podcast, James hi Tyrell.
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Professor James McDougall
Thanks for the invitations. Great to be here.
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Interviewer Tiram Mende
Thank you so much for joining us today. And in your acknowledgment, you wrote that this book idea emerged in 2004, almost like 20 years earlier at Oxford. And can you tell us a bit how this idea came to be and how much of this idea changed during this long period of time?
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Professor James McDougall
Yeah, sure. So in fact, when I was teaching at Princeton at the very, very start of my academic teaching career, yeah, about gosh, years ago now. And I was teaching a course, as people often do, especially in the United States, very broad survey course on Islamic history, you know, from the life of the Prophet to the present day, basically. And it struck me how difficult it is to teach those courses for curious, well informed students, even at quite prestigious Schools because of the, obviously the breadth and the variety of the subject, but in particular because of the difficulty of getting beyond some of the stereotypes and the kind of simplistic narratives that people often have, especially in Europe and the United States, in their heads. You know, if what they have to go on is mostly what's in the mainstream media and trying to bridge the gap between that kind of set of presuppositions that even smart, curious, you know, intelligent, well informed young people often have, let alone the general public and the variety of the more specialist scholarship, which is so diverse and so spread out and so divided between disciplines and area studies specialisms. And, you know, there are lots of books that are kind of introductions to Islam as a religion. There are lots of books that treat different parts of the Muslim majority world and look at the role that Islam has had to play in the cultural or legal or political formation of those places. So if you do Middle east studies or West African studies, or South Asian Studies studies, or Southeast Asian Studies, Central Asian Studies, you know, Islam is always part of that story. But the history of Muslims around the world and what Islam has meant in very different times and places is rarely treated in a single kind of synthetic narrative. And that's what I wanted to produce. And I guess one of the ways that the idea has changed or kind of what's developed over the 20 years in the gestation of the book, while I've been thinking about it, is just the immense volume of new research that's been done in so many disciplines, from early early Islamic epigraphy, the history of 7th and 8th century, 6th, 7th, 8th century, Near east, which has really transformed in the last 20 years, all the way up to the kind of anthropological and political science and sociological work that's been done much more recently. And I really wanted to encompass as much of that scholarship as possible.
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Interviewer Tiram Mende
Thank you so much, James. And I mean, there has been, as you said as well, there has been published a lot of books around this subject in the past 20 years, and early as well. What kind of inspiration did you take from the earlier published books around this issue, and what did you want to do differently with your new book?
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Professor James McDougall
I think some of the things that most inspired me have been the kinds of work that have looked in really close granular detail at what Islam looks like in particular places. So, for example, some of the work on West Africa, a wonderful book by Rudy Birch Ware called the Walking Quran, for example, about Islamic education in West Africa, or a book by a guy called James Marsden about Islam in Afghanistan written in the late 1990s, really close, kind of granular, ethnographic anthropological work about the texture and the meaning and the significance of being Muslim in very particular places for very particular communities with very long histories, you know, and how they relate to each other and how they see themselves as part of a broader tradition that has a very long history in many different parts of the world, but that also is very specific, very local, very particular, very embodied in particular believers in people's lives, in people's communities, and people's sense of themselves and their place in history. And I wanted to give a sense of that, you know, but across a much larger, larger span. So the book is about worlds of Islam, those very specific. When I say worlds, I mean there's kind of specific embodied life worlds, you know, of particular Muslims in particular places. And it's also a global history because it puts those very different places together. And that's what I wanted to do differently, I guess, is that a lot of the best work has been very specific and very local. And a lot of the most problematic perceptions and assumptions that people have about Islam, I think, or about Muslim history has to do with overgeneralization. And what I wanted to do was to produce a global history that wasn't overgeneralized, a history that had a global reach and a global span, both geographic and chronologically. So I start in the 620s, and I end in the 2000s. I start in Western Arabia, and I finish in Australia and the United States and Europe and kind of everywhere. And to try to put those different stories together in a way that's intelligible for your normal kind of average reader who doesn't already know a lot about the subject.
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Interviewer Tiram Mende
And very early on in the introduction, you write something like that, that Islam has its own history and its own biographies and people who inhabited the religion. What kind of. How did you want it to include the protagonists or persons in the book that were important for Islam? How did you know which to include them and to leave some out? Because, I mean, it's a huge book, like 600 pages. But you had to. Yet you had to think about how to work.
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Professor James McDougall
Yeah, I mean, on one hand, it is quite a big book, and it covers a huge span of space and time. But at the same time, yeah, I'm trying to cover a lot in a very little space, in fact. So half of the book covers the period up to 1800, and half of the book covers the last two centuries. So that was a decision to start with, to focus on the modern world and the making of what it means to be Muslim in the modern world. And that was the first decision. So there's a lot more in the 19th and 20th centuries than on the previous periods. The first half of the book is devoted to the period from 600 to 1800. And there, obviously, I'm trying to cover a huge amount of history in a very short span of pages, really. So it was really hard, actually, to know who to include and who to leave out. And I'm sure leaders will have their own views about, you know, who should really be there and who isn't. And there are lots of extraordinary figures and biographies and, you know, cases or people or places in the history of Islam that I don't get to cover. I mean, I think I. Obviously some of the most important kind of canonical figures who have to be in the story are in the story. So there's quite a lot about the Prophet Muhammad. There's quite a lot about Ali Hassan al Hussain, the first three imams, the. The first caliphs, the early dynasties. You know, Abd al Malik, the Umayyad caliph who built the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, gets quite a long treatment relative to some others. There's quite a lot about particular Mughal or Ottoman figures. There's as much as possible about as many ordinary people, too, as I could find space to talk about about, you know, slaves and workers, peasants, women, the people that we often don't have traces of in the written record, except for what other people say about them. But of course, I'm talking a lot about philosophers, writers, historians, Sufi leaders, spiritual figures of various kinds, the great scholars of the medieval period. I mean, I think I tried to find a way of narrating the most important trends and movements within the history of Islam through particular people who can be seen to be somehow emblematic of those things. So, for example, when I talk about the origins of Islamic law, I just take one figure, and the figure is Ibn Hanbal, because he's a particularly emblematic scholar, because he's also, you know, a fascinating, contradictory, sometimes quite funny individual, I think. And so there are ways, I think, of narrating the story that makes it more human and more relatable precisely because it's a story that's embodied in human lives.
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Interviewer Tiram Mende
And looking at the periodization of your book, which is divided into four parts, and looking at earlier books, I mean, of course, for example, Albert Hourani has focused on the 19th and 20th century with its own periodization, but is there a discourse on how to periodize this huge Time period or how did you divide it up into your own book? And did you have discussion with other scholars about how to periodize this huge amount of time? So how did you.
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Professor James McDougall
Well, Gonders, yeah, that's a good question. I didn't really talk to anybody else about it, actually. Maybe I should have done. And of course I'm by training and in my own specialism, I'm a historian of the 19th and 20th century and of the Middle east and North Africa. That's what I really work on. All my previous work has been on Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia, a little bit on the Arab East. But really, as all scholars do, I have my own little bit of the field that I really know very well. And in this book I'm talking about huge other areas that I know much, much less about. So partly the decision to focus on the 19, I also, as I said, focus really on the 19th and 20th century. Second half of the book is really 1800 to 1950 and then 1950 to 2020. So those parts three and four of the book that divide that kind of, first of all, the European colonial period of rule across most of the Muslim majority world and then the period since the middle of the 20th century, that's kind of where the center of gravity of my own expertise lies. But I thought it was really important to try to explain that story against a much longer background. And of course the earlier periods are just as important. So for me, I think it made quite a lot of sense to think in terms of very long periods for the earlier parts of the book. So that part one of the book covers the period from 600 to 1200, what would often be considered as kind of the formative and classical period of Islam. And then the part two covers the period from 1200 to 1800. So another 600 year period, what would often be considered as kind of the end of the classical period of Islam and so called the middle period, what people often refer to as the middle period or the period of the gunpowder empires or in other areas of world history, we'd call it the early modern period. Right? So the period from say the 14th or 15th century to the 18th century. And within Islamic historiography, or the way that Islamic history is often taught and researched, you know, by, by scholars in, within that field, those kind of older chronologies, you know, a kind of formative and classical period of Islam and then a middle period and then modernity, you know, is usually the way that the story is told. And for most scholars, I think, and poorly for most Students, Islamic history, properly so called, really only exists in those earlier periods. So the history of an Islamic civilization, if you like, or the history of Islam as a religious system kind of comes into being and then has its flourishing and then kind of declines a bit in the middle period and then everything goes wrong, you know, as soon as you hit modernity, colonial rule, mass politics, nationalism, empire, and the 19th and 20th centuries. And I wanted to approach things a little differently. I think that if we think again in terms of global history rather than in terms of a kind of self contained narrative of rise and fall, in a kind of civilizational narrative that we're used to, it makes much more sense to think about the way that Islam develops, spreads, is used, becomes a means of state building and means of forming credit networks, a means of creating mercantile trade relations, a means of forming new communities in new places around the world over this much longer period. And the ways in which that changes from a period in which Islam is expanding initially in that earlier period up to 1200, becoming part of world history, and then shifting its center of gravity from the Middle east into Central and Central and south asia from the 13th century onwards, and then splitting globally in the 18th and 19th and 20th centuries, such as today, Muslims and the worlds of Islam can be found everywhere across the geographical globe. So it's a story rather instead of that kind of old civilizational narrative which is kind of centered in the earlier periods and comes apart in the later periods, I want to tell a story about continuous expansion and diversification and proliferation and growth and contradiction and complexity over that whole long period. And I think thinking about the chronology in that way is a much more heuristically helpful. It's a way that helps us discover much more about the way that Islam has actually worked as an aspect of world history and as a factor in world history.
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Professor James McDougall
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Interviewer Tiram Mende
Yes, and when you're looking at your previous research that you did on Algeria, for example, which is concentrating on more local history, and now, in comparison, doing this kind of global history on world Islam, how different did you approach your research work on this? How did you work on it differently than like on your previous book? Or did you use the same techniques or methods that you usually do while working on a new book?
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Professor James McDougall
Yeah, it was completely different. So all my previous research has been firsthand, primary archival research, oral history, traveling around the country, getting to know it, looking at places, looking at space. I'm not an anthropologist, so I don't use anthropological methods, but I'm very interested in anthropological insights and the way that ethnographers really get to know places and people really closely. And I've tried to do some of that in my work on Algeria. So it's a country that I know very well from having traveled around, from having not really lived in for any long period of time, but visited very frequently over a long period of time. And this book is very, very different because no single scholar, of course, can visit, let alone spend time in and really get to know every part of the world where Muslims have ever lived. No single scholar, you know, even amazing ones like Michael Cook, you know, who wrote a history of the Muslim world that's much longer than Mine, a 900 page book that really only goes up to 1800. Even he doesn't know all the languages, right? So, you know, I don't read Malay or Urdu or Wolof, Hausa, all the many different languages that you would need to do this kind of work at firsthand. So this is a work of synthesis. This book makes no pretensions to being a work of original research. It's, on the contrary, really an attempt to put together much of the extraordinary original research that's been done by colleagues in many different fields who are much more expert in all these different areas of the subject than I am. And to try to kind of distill and narrate that research in a way that makes it accessible to a much wider audience. So it was a very different kind of method to the one I've used previously. I mean, there was a little bit of archival work in there and I do talk about Algeria now and again, maybe a bit too much. There's certainly quite a lot about Africa and North Africa. It's certainly a book that doesn't have a single center of gravity. One of the things that I was trying to do, again relative to some of those earlier books that you were mentioning in the literature, is to get away from an over emphasis on the Middle East. Although I'm trained myself in Middle Eastern and African Studies, I was trying to make sure that other geographies were equally important. So there's an awful lot, for example, on South Asia in the book, quite a lot on West Africa, quite a lot in fact, on China and Southeast Asia as well, areas that I don't know nearly so well. So for all of those parts of the book, I was really sifting and reading a lot of work by other scholars. And again, there's a huge rich bibliography, massive, massive wealth of scholarship out there that most general readers are never going to be able to access. But that is really great material for putting together to create the kind of overarching narrative that I wanted to produce.
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Interviewer Tiram Mende
And coming maybe a bit to the challenges and difficulties while working on this book concerning the sources that you use, did you have difficulties in obtaining them, maybe especially during the pandemic years from 2020 onwards, or do you remember something specific that you thought maybe this won't going to work or do you want to change it or.
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Professor James McDougall
Yes, yeah. So most of the writing of the book was done in, gosh, what year would it be? So 2023, 2024, I guess fairly recently. So that was all post pandemic. And in fact, some of the things that became much more normal during the pandemic, like working remotely and having access to materials online, actually helped me a lot. It's much more normal now to be able to access material online. Far more scholarship is digitally published, digitally available. It was certainly much, much easier to write this book now than it would have been 15 or 20 years ago. Just in terms of the volume of, as I said, the volume of material that I was trying to read from lots of different areas was much, far easier now to access a lot of that material online digitally, rather than having to, you know, in the old days, I would have had to go around five or six different libraries, spent a huge amount of time accessing the physical books. Now I'm a huge fan of physical books and I think they can't be replaced really by digital copy. But it's certainly much easier for certain things to be able to access monographs online as well as articles and other things, things like that. So that was, that was certainly a. That was the opposite of a challenge. In fact, that was much, much easier. Trying to marshal all of that information was really the challenge. You know, I mean, historians are always faced with information overload these days. Even, even historians who work on pre modern periods have so much more material to work with than we ever have had before. And managing all that information, I guess, was a bit of a challenge in itself. But I had a very clear sense of how I was going to arrange the periodization where I was going to focus my story. And again, so much material is now available in translation as well. So texts in Arabic and Persian and other languages. Some of those texts I had to go to and read in the primary sources to check translations and to make sure that I was quoting correctly. But generally speaking, there's a huge amount of material now also available. And again, for teaching. One of the things I'm hoping the book will be useful for is for colleagues teaching undergraduate courses in world history, in Islamic studies and in global history. And a lot of the primary sources that I refer to are sources that are now available in English translation. So a lot of the medieval literature, for example, that I talk about, you can get in English translation and use to get students to engage with directly. So those are real advantages, I think, that the field now has and that scholars in the field have relative to, say, 20 years ago, when it was much harder to do that.
- [23:54]
Interviewer Tiram Mende
And thank you so much, James. And I mean, do you have any particular event or person which you thought which you wanted to really include? And do you have like a special connection to some? I mean, of course you told us about the 19th and 20th century and Algeria, but especially for this new book, did you have like a special connection to a certain event or protagonist that you really wanted to include in?
- [24:28]
Professor James McDougall
Gosh, that's hard. There were so many. So there were some that I knew well already, like, for example, the Emir Abdelkader, I guess is the obvious example, the Algerian resistance leader who forms a state and tries to, you know, maintain Algerian sovereignty against the French invasion of his country in the 1830s and 1840s and later becomes one of the leading, maybe the leading Sufi spiritual master of the late 19th century. Extraordinary character, you know, very well known, but really endlessly fascinating. And there's a little bit about him. Some others that I didn't know so well, you know, are people that I, that I got really interested in. The queens of aceh in the 16th century. So the female Muslim rulers of the Sultanate of aceh in the 16th century and the way that they both were able to exercise political power in a very male dominated mercantile, you know, trading based society and play off the interests of different foreign powers, in particular the Dutch against each other. You know, there's great stories of, for example, how one of the queens of Ace makes the Dutch envoys to her court to dance for her to the great entertainment of her courtiers. You know, these periods in which the relationship between Muslim polities around the world and European imperialism wasn't yet one of subordination by Muslims of Muslims to European imperial power and the ways in which Muslim merchants, state builders, Sufi leaders and others could, could leverage, you know, different kinds of power in, in autonomous ways, in autonomous spaces that weren't yet dominated by, by, by capitalism and by European imperialism. Those were stories that I really wanted to tell. So those good ones, Hajd Amin Suare, for example, in West Africa as well, Sufi teacher who comes up with a particular prescription for how Muslims should live in majority non Muslim societies. Very, very early on, you know, we're not even very sure when he lived. There's a whole, there's a long period of time in which his biography might have taken place. We don't really know even when he lived. But someone who's extraordinarily influential in and after his own time and whose teachings remain very relevant to many Muslims in West Africa and beyond today. So people that I discovered in the course of research for the book as well and really wanted to include the stories of.
- [27:02]
Interviewer Tiram Mende
Thank you so much, James. And coming to the last two questions, I mean, Islam is not really seen always positive in the media now and in the past as well. And do you think these kind of books like yours are helping to change the view of this religion in the general media or general public consciousness? Or what did you want to try to achieve with publishing this kind of book?
- [27:32]
Professor James McDougall
I mean, I wish that were the case, as we've seen, you know, very recently, the extent to the book at the end, the end of my book talks about the extent to which in public discourse, not only in Europe, but in the United States in China and India, Muslims are increasingly demonized, dehumanized. The Islamophobic rhetoric in Europe in particular and in the United States, but elsewhere as well has reached almost unprecedented levels of violence in the last few years. Just, just this week, I think in the UK we've had a former chief of staff of a British Prime Minister who's now a Member of Parliament talking about how Muslims praying in public is an act of domination of a public space in Britain. I mean, it's extraordinary the extent to which this is now mainstreamed into our political discourse. Of course, it's hugely problematic in Germany, in France and the Netherlands, in Sweden, in Austria and Italy, almost everywhere. And I wish it were possible for books like this to change the tenor of the national conversation. I think unfortunately, probably the book will be ignored by most of the right wing media because the arguments that I make are inconvenient for them and there really is no open, serious public debate about these subjects. I think, I think there's a great deal of opportunistic, irresponsible, political fear mongering and hate mongering, frankly, especially in Europe and the United States right now. And again, that's why books like this so important, I think. I mean the attempt that we need to make to try to bridge, as I say, the gap between the rich, this detailed specialist scholarship on the subject that reveals the complexity and diversity and significance of Islam as a part of human history over a very long period of time and which should be a way of, of bringing into public conversation alternative perspectives that can debunk and correct and maybe be some kind of antidote to the poison of far like Islamophobic rhetoric. But unfortunately I think that's a very difficult thing to do. I think the narrative economy of politics in our countries right now obeys a particular logic of its own and it's pretty much immune to rational argument. That doesn't mean that we shouldn't still make the rational arguments. I think that's what scholars should be doing.
- [30:11]
Interviewer Tiram Mende
Thank you so much, James And I read earlier somewhere in Canada that I think you are publishing another book soon or that you're working on another book in the near future. Can you tell us about your next projects? Maybe?
- [30:29]
Professor James McDougall
Yeah. So the next book actually is the book that I should have finished before I wrote this one because that's often what happens, which is a big book about the French empire in Africa. So it's a book about colonialism and its afterlives in France and the French African empire. So that's the book that I've now gone back to. I don't know if it'll be out soon, but it should be. I should be writing that this year, hopefully.
- [30:49]
Interviewer Tiram Mende
Okay. James, thank you so much for joining us to the podcast today. It was an honor to talk with you about your work. Thank you so much.
- [30:58]
Professor James McDougall
You're very welcome. I hope people enjoy the book. Foreign.
- [31:14]
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