A34 - Réécritures de l’histoire et mémoires du passé dans les sociétés islamiques : perspectives depuis le Maghreb, l’Éthiopie, l’Anatolie et la Syrie

This workshop aims to bring together researchers‧se‧s working on different periods and on different Islamic societies but all of them interested‧te‧s in the phenomena of rewriting history.

Research on this issue is not new, but it has focused on certain regions (Syria, Egypt, Persian-speaking regions, al-Andalus...) and the aim here is to shed light on similar processes within spaces that have been less analyzed so far and to foster comparison with better known regions (Syria).

The aim is to compare our sources, our methods and our research tools, in order to collectively try to better understand the following questions: how can we make history from discourses produced sometimes several centuries after the periods they evoke? How can we untangle the threads of successive rewritings, distinguish different strata and find vestiges or traces of previous historiographies?

Beyond these reflections, which are now familiar to specialists in Islamic history, how can we interpret the moments of rereading of the past and those in which a new interpretation of the past becomes fixed? In what contexts do these rewritings occur and what are the reasons for them? In connection with the theme of the Insaniyyat Forum, "Crises", we will explore the possibility that moments of crisis generate epistemic upheavals and new relationships to the past, from which new historiographies may emerge.

Persons in charge: Zélie Lepinay, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, UMR 8167 Orient & Méditerranée, France et Héloïse Mercier, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, UMR 8167 Orient & Méditerranée, France
Discussant : Antoine Borrut, University of Maryland, États-Unis

Specialists of early Islam like to lament the dearth of Arab-Muslim narrative sources from the first centuries of Islam. This observation has generated abundant historiographical debates but there is still no satisfactory explanation to account for this paradoxical historiographical situation. Looking at an understudied corpus of astrological histories, I propose to shed light on the rise and subsequent disappearance of a specific mode of history writing, which enjoyed considerable success until the turn of the ninth and tenth centuries CE. These astrological histories, like historical apocalypses for instance, are written in the future tense. More aptly, they follow the logic of a specific regime of historicity focused towards a closed eschatological future. The period between 850 and 950 CE is marked by a profound change in connection with these eschatological expectations: long considered imminent, they are pushed back into a remote future. I suggest that the formidable movement of rewriting that took place in the ninth and tenth centuries CE was prompted by a change of regime of historicity linked to this postponement of messianic expectations.

I propose to take a fresh look at the writing of early Islamic history in Central Maghreb, and more specifically at the Ibadite history of this little-known region of the Islamic West. The emergence of the new social world that constitutes the Islamic Empire leads to multiform upheavals in Central Maghreb. More than the conquest, the end of the Umayyad period, in the middle of the eighth century, is accompanied by a major crisis. As for the other regions of the empire, is this crisis an opportunity to rewrite history in Central Maghreb and that of its inhabitants? One of the particularities of the region is that it is Islamized quite early on through the Ibāḍīs, who form a state independent of the Abbasids in the eighth century. What discourses do the Ibāḍī scholars produce on their past and on the history of Central Maghreb? Authors, such as Ibn Sallām al-Ibāḍī in the ninth century, develop the theme of the faḍā’il al-Barbar (praises of the Berbers). These narratives, competing with the pejorative discourses constructed from the center of the empire, but forged in the same way as those on the merits of the Arabs, lead to the attachment of the Berbers to Islamic universal history, while offering a singular and alternative variation. Cyrille Aillet, who studied these Ibāḍī sources, suggests an analysis from the point of view of a “conflict of memory” (Aillet, 2021). Hence the questioning that we propose here on the memory that the Ibāḍī community keeps of itself and of its past: does this memory constitute a rewriting of regional history?

Transcription and rewriting of a nomadic memory during a crisis of legitimacy: the writing down of Ketāb-e Dede Qorqūt under the Aq Qoyunlu (second half of the 15th century)

In the 15th century began the transcription of an oral tradition circulating among the Oghuz Turkmen, Turkic-speaking nomads settled in Anatolia since the 11th century. They are the heroes of Ketāb-e Dede Qorqūt, which was put into writing when the heirs of the Aq Qoyunlu – a nomad confederation – created a vast empire between Anatolia and Iran. We will examine how the process of writing down of this epic was related to the crisis of legitimacy which took place in the Islamic world during the 15th century. In order to solve this question, the Aq Qoyunlu promoted a new rule model based on the prestige of the social and political Oghuz organisation. In fact, the Ketāb-e Dede Qorqūt is the transcription of a mythologized nomad memory which has evolved over time. But it also seems to have influenced the rewriting and the appropriation of the Oghuz history by Muslims sedentary scholars to legitimize nomad rulers. This epic would thereby be a completion of the rewriting process and the synthesizing of the Oghuz memory which fixed the narrative around values legitimizing the Turkmens’ rule. 

The Fatḥ madīnat Harar (Eastern Ethiopia, 20th century) and the emergence of a new historiographical “programme of truth”

The Fatḥ madīnat Harar is a text written by Yaḥyā b. Naṣrallāh in Harar in the 1930s-1940s. It recounts a pseudo-medieval past for the city of Harar – the coming of Abādir ‘Umar al-Riḍā in 1216, accompanied by 405 other saints from Mecca, followed by a political pact between the saints and the people of the region, and their battles against “infidels”, especially Italians and Portuguese. In this paper, I will show that the Fatḥ madīnat Harar compiles several texts that were previously circulating orally or in writing. It draws from a repertoire of legends and hagiographic narratives and historicises them, by transforming them into a coherent narrative and by dating them. These historiographical ambitions are detailed by the author in the introduction of his text, on which I will dwell. Its analysis will allow us to understand that Yaḥyā b. Naṣrallāh develops a “programme of truth” (P. Veyne) at odds with the way scholars of Harar had written the past so far. I will question the reasons for this historiographical and epistemic shift, which occurred while Harar was occupied by Fascist Italy (1936-1941). This will allow me to examine what the experience of writing history in times of crisis can be.