Abdallah Laroui

Abdallah Laroui is one of the leading intellectuals of the Arab world; he is Moroccan, and was a historian and Islamic expert at the University of Rabat. It was an article in the journal History & Theory (Volume 54, no. 4, December 2015) that drew my attention to his work, and his exceptionally historicising view of the concept of 'temporality', based on the work of Reinhart Koselleck. Unfortunately, little of this can be found in this book. This book presents six lectures that Laroui gave to the famous Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris in 1997 about whether there is a specific Islamic historiography and what it looks like. The answer he gives is rather ambiguous, I fear.

On the one hand, he states that the predominant current in what could be called Islamic historiography is traditionalist/integristic. This is inspired by the 'hadith', the collection of works that report on the Profet Muhammad's actions and sayings outside of the Koran. Laroui clearly shows that this current is in fact a-historical: it is based on the point of view that everything that is relevant has already been said and happened in and through Mohammed, and that consequently there can’t be any real historical development in itself, historians are merely memorialists. It goes without saying that this view is detrimental to a real study of history; and that is also evident from the facts, I was astonished to learn from this book that there is no chair in history at any Islamic university (I wonder: is this really so?).

But at the same time Laroui emphasizes that besides this movement there is another one, which originates from the legal schools that played an important role in the first centuries after the emergence of Islam, and which focuses on the context, on common sense and thus on the spirit of the law instead of the letter. In that way it left room for what we now understand as real historical developments. According to Laroui the famous historian like Ibn Khaldoen (14th C.) must be categorized in this current. Thus, to deny the existence of Islamic historiography by reducing it to the traditionalist/integristic one is wrong, writes Laroui. But at the same time he has to admit that the second movement has not really been able to pursue its goals, and has rather developed into sociology and ethnology. I have the impression that Laroui contradicts himself on this point. He does this even more at the end the book, by suddenly adopting a very positivistic position and citing archeology as the decisive argument to make historicism possible (Laroui, in contrast to Popper, has a very positive interpretation of that concept), because, contrary to documents, according to Laroui archaeological finds are irrefutably scientific and objective, and therefore an indisputable proof of the possibility of historical developments. Strange, isn’t it?

So, this booklet has disappointed me, also because of its very theoretical content and the constant citing of Arabic notions and concepts that are very specific to the development of Islam (of course, it is my own ignorance that is to blame here). All in all, there is only one chapter that could charm me, and that was about 'history and theology', with which Laroui actually means teleology. He aptly demonstrates that no historian escapes a teleological vision, no matter how hard he/she does his/her best, because we live in a present in which we know how history developed, and that knowledge inevitably colors every historical work.… (meer)