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Making History: Connecting the Past with the Future
Professor Humayun Ansari
1 December 2012
Why is history important for Muslims in Britain?
Evans-Pritchard, an
anthropologist of considerable note, points out, “only by looking to the past can
present social forms and institutions be adequately comprehended”.
He
paraphrases another big gun, Levi-Strauss: “those who ignore history condemn
themselves to not knowing the present, because historical development alone
permits us to weigh and to evaluate in their respective relations the elements of
the present”. A very important reason for studying the past, therefore, is that it
enables us to establish ‘rootedness’. But why is this rootedness, this sense of
belonging, important for British Muslims, and where does the making of history
come into the equation?
A popular perception about Muslims in Britain is that they are an alien
presence, people who have arrived here only recently.
In other words, they
lack roots, and because of that they lack ties and emotional bonds with this
country. This perception has serious implications for what stake they have here
and what they are entitled to. Given that ‘rootedness’ is perhaps one of the most
important - though, possibly, one of the least recognized - human needs, and
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given too that it is the sense of rootedness that establishes emotional ties
between people and place, the question is: can the study of the past enable the
feeling of rootedness to become embedded?
It is only through the discovery of evidence, albeit largely negative, of a
centuries-old Muslim presence in this country that this popularly-held socially
corrosive view has been refuted. For instance, in 1611, Thomas Coryate wrote
about numerous Turks (used interchangeably at the time with Muslims) living
in the metropolis who could be identified by the “rowle of fine linen wrapped
together upon their heads” – their turbans. A 1641 document likewise confirms
the presence in London of a sect ‘with a certain foolish beliefe of Mahomet’.
Another referred to Muslims as ‘the deluded followers of the licentious
doctrines of a false prophet’ and then there was one that alluded to venues, ‘The
wonted haunts of Moormen (Muslims) and Gentoos (Hindus)’, where they
organised musical and dance gatherings. While negative, at the same time this
evidence has produced a greater awareness of past belonging among Muslims.
Much more evidence still can be gathered through studying a variety of
other sources - architecture, monuments, ceremonies, rituals and myths - (the
raw materials of history), since “symbolically-loaded sites and events provide
social continuity [and therefore] contribute to the collective memory, and
establish spatial and temporal reference points for society” and communities. In
other words, they “reinforce peoples' identification with specific values”,
distinctive traditions, and beliefs. Through them, collective memory can be
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strengthened and national and/or community identity constructed - both
formally and informally. But this process demands a lot of hard excavatory
historical work, and it has to be recognised that it is something with which
Muslims in Britain have only recently begun to engage.
One question that all this brings to mind is: why have Muslims
themselves written so little about their own histories in Britain? Put a little
provocatively, is this because British Muslims are simply not interested in the
study of the past? Why do they not appear to be engaged in and committed to
the preservation of the past and the recording of their history for future
generations?
Witnessing developments elsewhere in the world, available
evidence does not seem very encouraging. Take this lamentation regarding
Mecca by Sami Angawi, architect and founder of the Jeddah-based Hajj
Research Centre, who has spent the last three decades researching and
documenting the historic buildings of Mecca and Medina, few of which now
remain: ‘I lament the speed of change that is sweeping this city, obliterating
history and heritage in its path’.
“Towering over Mecca, this is the world's second-tallest building – and it
is just a tiny part of a voracious development that has seen historic sites
bulldozed and locals forced into shantytowns. Visible 30km away, the Abraj alBait rises like Big Ben on steroids to tower 600m over the holy mosque of
Mecca in the spiritual heart of the Islamic world. This thrusting pastiche palace
houses an array of luxury hotels and apartments, perched above a five-storey
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slab of shopping malls. Completed last year at a cost of $15bn (£9bn), it stands
where an Ottoman fortress once stood. A stone citadel built in 1781 to repel
bandits… The fortress wasn't just swept away – the hill it sat on went, too.”
“It is truly indescribable”, Angawi says. In particular, the house of the
prophet's wife, Khadijah, has been razed to make way for public lavatories; the
house of his companion, Abu Bakr, is now the site of a Hilton hotel; and his
grandson's house has been flattened by the King's palace. To quote Angawi
again, “They are turning the holy sanctuary into a machine, a city which has no
identity, no heritage, no culture and no natural environment. They've even taken
away the mountains”.
Early Muslims would certainly have had no truck with this kind of
vandalism of history! Indeed, some of them were great pioneers in history
writing. Al-Tabari (838-923) wrote The History of the Prophets and Kings.
Holding fast to his historical method of recording everything that had been
described to him and relying “solely upon what has been transmitted to me by
way of reports”, he was not afraid to mention the controversial story of The
Satanic Verses. Then there was Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406) who is acknowledged
as the father of historiography. His Muqqaddimah, the ‘Introduction’ to history,
considered to be one of the most phenomenal works on the philosophy of
history ever written, contained ground-breaking discussion of the historical
method providing the necessary criteria for distinguishing historical truth from
error.
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Ibn Khaldun certainly understood the value of history: “Know that the
science of history is noble in its conception, abounding in instruction, and
exalted in its aim. It acquaints us with the characteristics of ancient peoples, the
ways of life followed by prophets, and the dynasties and government of kings,
so that those who wish may draw valuable lessons for their guidance in
religious and worldly affairs”. History for him was one way of avoiding errors
and pitfalls in order to arrive at the truth, for “if [we] rely on bare tradition,
without having thoroughly grasped the principles of common experience, the
institutes of government, the nature of civilization, and the circumstances of
human society, [we] will often be in danger of stumbling and slipping and
losing the right road”.
However, the main reason why there appears to be so little history of
British Muslims is more mundane. It is because those who came and settled
here over the centuries largely belonged to the subaltern/subordinate layers of
society - servants and ayahs, peddlers, street hawkers, musicians, sweepers and
even beggars. But just like the lower classes in Britain more generally, they did
not create nor did they leave behind many records (that is, sources) of their
individual and social experiences. Their cultures, generally preserved through
oral traditions, were not particularly conducive to this. So today we have to
construct their history relying on fragments of sources created by elites or those
associated with them.
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Mainstream history after all has, by and large, been that of the elites,
based on the records generated and preserved by them. So most of the history
that has been written has been predominantly from their perspective. As a
result, it contains the potential for being inaccurate, biased and decidedly not the
whole. This is self-evidently inadequate and unsatisfactory. But extant records
are not “sufficient to explicate the whole of a society”. For a more holistic,
better balanced writing of history, we also need to pay attention to “the lives,
desires, [and] needs, of ordinary people”, by involving all layers of society as
participants in the record-making process”, as “records creators” and “records
subject”. We need to strive for a compilation of historical documents that
represents all of the records, all of the voices, for the “benefit of all members of
society”.
It was in the 1960s that the desire to understand the ‘masses’ provided the
impetus for an alternative approach to the writing of history. The arrival of
‘history from below’ meant moving away from focusing on great deeds of
ruling elites to reconstructing the lives, experiences and thoughts of ordinary
people; considering those seemingly lost in the past; people whose experiences
were thought to be of little interest; those whose actions and motives have
become obscured, if not wholly lost, in the historical record; to look not just at
momentous events but everyday life.
This shift in approach inevitably raises a lot of questions:
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How do we as historians address the lacunae or empty spaces in the
records?
How do we write the histories of suppressed groups, their
acquiescence and their resistance – in what forms and through what
channels?
How do we construct a narrative of a group or class that has not left its
own sources?
How do we make the subaltern the sovereign subject of history?
Even more specifically, how do we write Muslim subaltern classes
into the history of the nation and combat elitist biases in the writing of
history?
But in the absence of records, this kind of history usually ends up being written
largely from fragments of the past; by reading the ballad, poster or protest
banner; autobiographies, or oral reminiscences; a study of the funeral parlour or
the headstone, or a café – for instance, by delving deeply in the archives of the
London City Mission, and the records of the Strangers’ Home for Asiatics,
Africans and South Sea Islanders, of the Ayah’s Home for stranded
maidservants, and of the Dreadnought Seamen’s Hospital. The motivation for
the search for the sources for the view from below is that everything has a
history and nothing is without a story to tell!
But let’s not kid ourselves that ‘history from below’ is easy. Rather it is
particularly demanding! It requires imagination and creativity; re-thinking and
reinterpreting of scraps of records in all kinds of forms; discovering ingenious
methods for uncovering such fragments; the critical reading of canonical texts,
oral histories, and deployment of ethnographic techniques. Writing this kind of
history requires positioning the Muslim subaltern as the agent in the process of
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history; it takes their experiences and thought (and not just their material
circumstances) seriously, and listens for, and to, the voices of “those who are
marginalised or excluded by prevailing relations of power”.
By learning to
hear them, we allow them to speak, talk back to powers that marginalize them,
and document their past, thus shedding new light.
For this project, however, historians need to shake free of modernity's
master narrative, and free themselves from the shackles of chronological, linear
time. ‘History from below’ hinges on the mining of unconventional stores of
evidence, reading documents in unprecedented ways, and excavating noncanonical, unsophisticated varieties of printed material, advertising, downmarket, often not-intended-for-print ephemera of various kinds that have
somehow managed to survive, often in private or small institutional collections.
Then there is the domain of the audio-visual - popular prints, calendars,
book illustrations, photographs, radio and films etc, that enjoy enormous
currency in the popular domain. These visual sources, if properly read, might
lead to the writing of a history of the popular that would not simply be
illustrative of, but in fact different from, history written on the basis of
conventional textual sources.
‘History from below’ also requires methodological innovation.
In
particular, historical materials have to be read less along the grain but more
emphatically against the grain. But what do we mean by reading historical
sources against the grain? This is a “re-reading” of the materials “between the
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lines”, interrogating and interpreting them “to reveal the lives, the cultures, the
feelings of those appropriated within them”. So ‘history from below’ is about
recovering the voices of those who have remained silenced.
Another important tool in recovering the voices of the marginalized is the
contextualization of the archival record. Only after the historical background of
the record-creator has been thoroughly studied can a proper questioning of the
record begin. Understanding of the historical context and relations of power
between the records-creator and records-subject should reveal some of the
voices previously unheard.
Given the problems that I have been discussing in respect of writing
‘grass-roots histories’ of British Muslims today, it is our responsibility to ensure
that posterity does not face similar difficulties. Together with the writing of the
past from below we must also address the task of writing a ‘history of the
present’ in order to arrive at a more detailed interpretation of what has been
occurring in our living memory. While some scepticism about attempting to
write a history of significant events in the present continues, I firmly believe
that its purposes are intellectually valid.
Let me quote two philosophers of history in defence of my claim. Firstly,
the Italian philosopher of history, Benedotto Croce (1866-1952) who said, “[a]ll
history is contemporary history”. Secondly, the American philosopher and
educationalist, John Dewey (1859-1952) who argued that “[w]e are committed
to the conclusion that all history is necessarily written from the standpoint of the
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present, and is, in an inescapable sense, not only the history of the present but of
that which is contemporaneously judged to be important to the present”. The
aim of contemporary history is to conceptualise, contextualise and historicise –
to explain – aspects of the recent past or to provide a historical understanding of
current trends or developments. There is nothing new about people’s recording
the events of their own time. Indeed, this is probably the way the writing of
history began: two and a half thousand years ago, the Greek historian
Thucydides (460-395 BC) constructed his narrative on the basis of
contemporary observation, “partly on what I saw myself, partly on what others
saw for me”.
Indeed, the increase in the velocity of history means, among other things,
that the “present” becomes the “past” more rapidly than ever before. Observers
can collect and record documents in real time. They can interview participants.
They can view and interpret the communications of both the powerful and the
insurgents. And, on the basis of these kinds of investigations, they can begin to
arrive at interpretations of what is occurring, over what terrain, by what actors,
in response to what forces and motives. In other words, they can attempt to
arrive at an evidence-based integrative narrative of what the processes of the
present amount to.
Contemporary observers have the added advantage over posterity in that
they can assess more accurately the movements of opinion, the popular
inclinations of their times, the vibrations of which they can still sense in their
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minds and hearts. As witnesses, they may be better placed to describe the true
traits of the principal persons and of their relationships, of the movements of the
masses than are recorded by posterity. Furthermore, participants have an
immediate access to documents, speeches, and events that later historians can
only envy; so by recording these observations they can lay a good foundation
for later interpretations. What also makes a difference is that the participant
often has direct experiences that give him or her a specific understanding of the
events in question. Accordingly, their historical observations may in fact be
remarkably acute, taking observations of current activities and constructing
them into a historical representation that holds up well.
So writing the history of the present is our contribution to future history.
When future historians are looking at, among others, Muslim subalterns as
objects of history, say in a hundred years from now, they will not face the same
predicaments that we do at present - i.e. a lack of record. Let me illustrate this
point with the example of the history of funeral directing and burial taking place
among Muslims in London. Many Muslims, predominantly impoverished,
settled in London in past centuries - they lived and died here, in prisons, poorlaw unions, hospitals and in their own hovels. Like paupers more generally,
they were usually buried in unconsecrated spaces or those allocated to
nonconformist denominations. They died ignominiously leaving no record.
The only glimpses of their life and death that we have has to be gleaned from
accounts such as that of the Christian missionary Joseph Salter, who was keen
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to convert and civilize these “Asiatics”, in particular, “the Muhammadans”. It
is by reading Salter’s account, written for a different purpose, that we are able to
develop some sense of the determination of some Muslims who, much to
Salter’s chagrin, stuck “fast to their belief in the Islamic process of salvation
after death”. He gives the example of one such Muslim who, refusing his
invitation of salvation through Christ, wished to die reciting the 'Kulma': “the
next day he died calling Allah! Allah! Allah!”, surrounded by friends, family
and neighbours. When Shaikh Mohammed, another such Muslim, died, “a
coffin was procured somehow, and was carried to the grave and deposited in his
last home by his countrymen - a tribute which all Asiatics, even with difficulties
attending it in England, are always anxious to perform with scrupulosity”. Here
we are building a picture from scraps of information recorded by someone who
wrote from a very different perspective to his subjects, which can only offer a
very paltry understanding of the Muslim community’s experience. We mustn’t
allow this to happen ever again!
Fortunately, we have Salahuddeen Haleem with us today who will talk
about the archive of the Indigent Muslim Burial Fund, begun in 1925, some of
which he has meticulously preserved. But there are other rich sources in the
form of living persons and institutions that we must tap for posterity. For
instance, we know that the first Muslim funeral director in the East End of
London, and probably anywhere in Britain, was Haji Taslim Ali, who
established his business in the early 1940s. He, with his wife assisting, was
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given permission to start a mortuary and funeral service operating from the
ELM premises. Taslim Ali’s funerary business, as we are aware, continues to
flourish in the hands of his family.
Part of its history is now thankfully
available in audio-visual and printed archives.
But much more could be
systematically collected. For if we do not capture it now, then we are likely to
miss out on achieving rich insights into understanding the process of Muslim
community building in 20th century London. This is contemporary history, inthe-making, invaluable if future generations are going to understand the
unfolding of Muslim history in the East End, as well as appreciate how the
wider Muslim presence has become a distinctive element within British society.