Social evolution.
I had an interesting conversation tonight with Dr. Alverez, my Medieval Spain professor. It was one of those conversations that sort of developed by accident, and I didn't fully realize what it was we'd been talking about until after, when I was sitting on the metro. But for all that, it was rather interesting.
At the tail end of class tonight, she told us that almost all the works of the historian we'd been discussing, Ibn Khaldun, haven't been translated from Medieval Arabic into any language; and, for that matter, neither has most anything else written by an Islamic scholar between 1100-1500 C.E.
For those of you who aren't that up on your Medieval history, I can't stress how mind-blowing this is. Medieval historians are constantly lamenting the painful dearth of available sources in every area and every year, from the 'fall' of Rome up through the beginning of the Modern era. The sources we do have have been worked half-to-death. So the idea that there are literally thousands of pages of resources that have hardly been touched by any historian, Western or Eastern, is absolutely insane. According to Dr. Alverez, Islamic scholarship hasn't been terribly interested in the material, and because almost no one else can read Arabic (let alone Medieval Arabic), Western scholars have completely ignored the sources altogether -- if they were ever aware of them in the first place.
"I can't believe someone's taken the time to translate Harry Potter into Latin, but no one's touched these sources," I commented as I was packing up my stuff. Somehow, that turned into me walking with Dr. Alverez back to her office while we had a twenty minute conversation about the 'blind spot' in Medieval scholarship: The Iberian Peninsula.
"I can do things that the Medieval professors here can't," she told me while we walked, referring to her ability to read Medieval Arabic and teach the material. "But no one's interested in this subject." I told her that I had been discouraged from taking her class (something I wish I hadn't said, in hindsight -- small campus, word spreads, and Dr. Davis and Dr. Jansen are already not my biggest fans; but it was just the truth), and suggested that the history department just wasn't open to interdisciplinary studies. "No, it isn't that," she told me. "It's the material itself. They don't think it's worth while."
I was really struck by how frustrated she sounded; like this is a battle she's been fighting for years. By that point, we'd reached her office and I told her I was enjoying her class and was glad I'd taken it, then wished her good night and headed for the metro stop. I wished I'd stayed and talked more with her, but at that point, I wasn't sure what to say; the full weight of what we were talking about didn't hit me until I was sitting on the train a little while later, replaying the conversation back in my head.
Historians are always trying to advance new theories and reinterpret old evidence in new ways. Because of that, I never actually considered the field as a whole to be 'conservative.' And I certainly never suspected that, in 2011, I'd have to ask myself whether or not it was still dominated by racial prejudice. White Christians studying white Christians. It sounds absurd, doesn't it? I mean, look how much women's studies have advanced in the past decade, especially in Medieval history. And yet, even though I've been studying this period in some form or another since middle school, I took Medieval Spain because it's a glaring blind spot in my own knowledge base. Cullen took a secondary focus in Islamic studies when he was a graduate student, and so some of his courses touched more on Islamic history than others. But Islamic history was still peripheral to those courses, and that's the only encounter with the subject I ever had. (To be fair to him, he taught a course exclusively on Islamic history -- but I never had a chance to take it.) More to the point, almost all the survey classes I've taken for the period have been ominously silent on the topic. At most, we get a little bit on the prophet Muhammad and the rise of the Umayyad caliphate, but that's it. Nothing about the Iberian Peninsula. I had a vague understanding that Medieval Europe owed its limited knowledge of astronomy, math, and canal systems to Muslim scholars, and of course there's the Crusades, but that was it.
I always considered this a blank patch in my own knowledge, but I never thought that it might be a void in the discipline's knowledge, too. "I taught Medieval Spain to a class of undergraduates last year," Dr. Alverez told me. "Do you know what they wrote on their course evaluations? 'She didn't talk enough about the Crusades.' That's all they wanted to learn about: the Crusades."
White Christians learning about white Christians.
What do you guys think? Is history primarily a conservative field? Did any of you learn about Islamic history in school, beyond Muhammad and the rise of the new religion?
It makes me wonder what else I'm missing out on; what other topics of interest are out there, waiting to be explored, never touched upon in my education and never even thought about in my contemplations.
It's 2011. And in this future of supposed 'enlightenment,' is our education still fueled primarily by politics, cultural and racial discrimination, and worn-out gender priorities?
Talk to me. What do you think?
At the tail end of class tonight, she told us that almost all the works of the historian we'd been discussing, Ibn Khaldun, haven't been translated from Medieval Arabic into any language; and, for that matter, neither has most anything else written by an Islamic scholar between 1100-1500 C.E.
For those of you who aren't that up on your Medieval history, I can't stress how mind-blowing this is. Medieval historians are constantly lamenting the painful dearth of available sources in every area and every year, from the 'fall' of Rome up through the beginning of the Modern era. The sources we do have have been worked half-to-death. So the idea that there are literally thousands of pages of resources that have hardly been touched by any historian, Western or Eastern, is absolutely insane. According to Dr. Alverez, Islamic scholarship hasn't been terribly interested in the material, and because almost no one else can read Arabic (let alone Medieval Arabic), Western scholars have completely ignored the sources altogether -- if they were ever aware of them in the first place.
"I can't believe someone's taken the time to translate Harry Potter into Latin, but no one's touched these sources," I commented as I was packing up my stuff. Somehow, that turned into me walking with Dr. Alverez back to her office while we had a twenty minute conversation about the 'blind spot' in Medieval scholarship: The Iberian Peninsula.
"I can do things that the Medieval professors here can't," she told me while we walked, referring to her ability to read Medieval Arabic and teach the material. "But no one's interested in this subject." I told her that I had been discouraged from taking her class (something I wish I hadn't said, in hindsight -- small campus, word spreads, and Dr. Davis and Dr. Jansen are already not my biggest fans; but it was just the truth), and suggested that the history department just wasn't open to interdisciplinary studies. "No, it isn't that," she told me. "It's the material itself. They don't think it's worth while."
I was really struck by how frustrated she sounded; like this is a battle she's been fighting for years. By that point, we'd reached her office and I told her I was enjoying her class and was glad I'd taken it, then wished her good night and headed for the metro stop. I wished I'd stayed and talked more with her, but at that point, I wasn't sure what to say; the full weight of what we were talking about didn't hit me until I was sitting on the train a little while later, replaying the conversation back in my head.
Historians are always trying to advance new theories and reinterpret old evidence in new ways. Because of that, I never actually considered the field as a whole to be 'conservative.' And I certainly never suspected that, in 2011, I'd have to ask myself whether or not it was still dominated by racial prejudice. White Christians studying white Christians. It sounds absurd, doesn't it? I mean, look how much women's studies have advanced in the past decade, especially in Medieval history. And yet, even though I've been studying this period in some form or another since middle school, I took Medieval Spain because it's a glaring blind spot in my own knowledge base. Cullen took a secondary focus in Islamic studies when he was a graduate student, and so some of his courses touched more on Islamic history than others. But Islamic history was still peripheral to those courses, and that's the only encounter with the subject I ever had. (To be fair to him, he taught a course exclusively on Islamic history -- but I never had a chance to take it.) More to the point, almost all the survey classes I've taken for the period have been ominously silent on the topic. At most, we get a little bit on the prophet Muhammad and the rise of the Umayyad caliphate, but that's it. Nothing about the Iberian Peninsula. I had a vague understanding that Medieval Europe owed its limited knowledge of astronomy, math, and canal systems to Muslim scholars, and of course there's the Crusades, but that was it.
I always considered this a blank patch in my own knowledge, but I never thought that it might be a void in the discipline's knowledge, too. "I taught Medieval Spain to a class of undergraduates last year," Dr. Alverez told me. "Do you know what they wrote on their course evaluations? 'She didn't talk enough about the Crusades.' That's all they wanted to learn about: the Crusades."
White Christians learning about white Christians.
What do you guys think? Is history primarily a conservative field? Did any of you learn about Islamic history in school, beyond Muhammad and the rise of the new religion?
It makes me wonder what else I'm missing out on; what other topics of interest are out there, waiting to be explored, never touched upon in my education and never even thought about in my contemplations.
It's 2011. And in this future of supposed 'enlightenment,' is our education still fueled primarily by politics, cultural and racial discrimination, and worn-out gender priorities?
Talk to me. What do you think?