The theory of crisis and the crisis in a theory intellectual history in twentieth-century middle eastern studies

Intellectual history as a subdiscipline of Middle Eastern studies was not in vogue in the last decades of the twentieth century. In fact, the study of the history of ideas and concepts produced by intellectual elites has for a long time been out of the forefront of the historical discipline. From the time that more materialistic, structural, and quantitative modes of history became dominant in the profession in the 1960s and 1970S, and later with the profound changes that occurred in history studies and gave rise from the late 1970S to "new social history," followed by "the cultural turn, which led to the new cultural history," intellectual history has been relegated to the sidelines of professional interest. Even during the 1980s when cultural history-which stresses text, representation, meaning, and narrative-became hegemonic and took shape "as an upstart critique of the established social, economic and demographic histories,'" intellectual history remained peripheral in Middle Eastern studies. In the general study of history, intellectual history took on new life in the 1980s and 1990S, after a temporary crisis in the 1970S, and it was redefined as a new intellectual history after the linguistic turn.2 New methods and approaches, the fertile influences of poststructuralist culturalism, "the return of literature" and the "invasion" of literary criticism into the study of history, Hayden White's narrativism, the radical contextualism of the Cambridge school espoused by Quentin Skinner, J. G. A. Pocock, and John Dunn, and, more recently, the study of collective memory, have given new momentum to "old" history and reshaped it into a more attractive, forward-looking discipline.3 In Middle Eastern studies, however, similar changes have not taken place, and intellectual history has not been rescued from its diminished status. Apparently in our profession, the flight from any type of elitist history, certainly from the history of ideas produced by intellectual luminaries; the continued avid interest in "history from below," both socioeconomic and sociocultural; the ongoing emphasis on political history and the history of political economy, world systems, and dependency theory; the reception and emulation of postmodernist and postcolonial paradigms and their application to the study of nonelitist groups; the growth of women's studies and the history of gender-have all combined to impede the recovery of intellectual history. What Murray G. Murphey stated at the end of the 1970S in regard to intellectual history in general continued to characterize the dominant mood in Middle Eastern studies in the 1980s and 1990S: "Students no longer see intellectual history as the place 'where the action is,' and the profession seems to concur that the 'cutting edge' of historical scholarship lies elsewhere" (in "the history of the inarticulate and the oppressed," what we today call the "subaltern").4 Significantly, Edward Said's Orientalism (1978), which used the method of the history of ideas (generally European), or discourse analysis, had a paralyzing effect on Middle Eastern intellectual history.5 After Orientalism, Middle Eastern intellectual history was subsequently identified as a. subdiscipline that applied distinctly Orientalist methods, and it continues to be viewed as obsolete, a history where confirmed Orientalism finds one of its most characteristic expressions. With a good deal of justification, the history of ideas and intellectual history have been perceived as a direct continuation of the overtextualism and philological hermeneutics that marked classical Oriental studies, against which Orientalism brilliantly inveighed. In the first half of the twentieth century, however, intellectual ecology and the historiographical fashion were entirely different. In the 1930S and 1940S, the history of ideas and intellectual history were on the rise. After World War II, intellectual history reached new heights and in the 1950S, as Robert Darnton so aptly put it, was "the queen of the historical sciences" - a. fashionable history highly regarded by the historians' guild.6 The effect of these developments on Middle Eastern studies was obvious. In this early period, some of the most respected Orientalists studying Islam and the societies and cultures of the Arab Middle East were intellectual historians or historians of ideas. The paradigm common to these Orientalist scholars was that inner understanding of "Islamic" or "Arab" ideas would not only provide the key to understanding the meaning and ideational quality of ideas but, moreover, that these ideas contained the secret to comprehending ArabIslamic reality as a whole-patterns of social behavior, economic institu tions, systems of political control, and cultural symbols and icons. The idea and the thinker provided the sites for methodical study, and it was assumed that only from them was it possible to glean knowledge about the historical evolution of Muslim cultures and societies. Orientalist intellectual historians thus focused their efforts on reading and presenting Islamic dusters of thought or belief systems that, they posited, were autonomous, coherent, and essential entities. Given the overall correspondence in this early period between the popularity of the history of ideas in the historical profession and its broad acceptance in the study of modern Islam, it is all the more surprising that those engaged in this subdiscipline, that is, Orientalist scholars, did not refer to these links and influences. The Orientalist scholars developed their approach to the history of "Islamic ideas" without reference to methods, theories, and insights then taking shape in professional schools of intellectual history and the history of ideas in Europe and America. It is sufficient to note that some of the intellectual historians of the era who made the greatest contributions to shaping the subdiscipline-Carl L. Becker in the 1930S, Arthur O. Lovejoy and the Journal of the History of Ideas under his editorship in the 1940S, Isaiah Berlin and John Higham in the 1950S and 1960s-are not cited in any of the hundreds of works produced by these Orientalistsl Apparently, one reason for the severance of the study of Middle Eastern ideas from the history of ideas as studied in Europe and America was the essentialist efforts by Orientalists to prove the cultural uniqueness of the "Islamic worldview" and its detachment and even alienation from Western ("Judeo-Christian" or modern-scientific) worldviews.