7th century

The seventh century matters in Edward Said’s argument less as a self-contained historical period than as a past repeatedly made to explain the present. He notes that Islam appeared in this century, but criticizes Orientalist accounts that treat an idealized early Islam as the timeless essence of later Muslim societies, obscuring colonialism, imperialism, and ordinary politics.

Islam’s Appearance and Historical Context

In discussing The Cambridge History of Islam, Said singles out Erfan Shahid’s opening chapter on pre-Islamic Arabia for sketching the fruitful relationship between topography and human economy from which Islam appeared in the seventh century. The account offers a historically situated beginning: an emergence connected to the conditions of a particular region, rather than a timeless religious essence detached from human circumstances.

Said contrasts that contextual opening with the book’s subsequent organization. After pre-Islamic Arabia, it moves to a chapter on Muhammad and then to chapters on the Patriarchal and Umayyad caliphates, without providing an account of Islam as a system of belief, faith, or doctrine. In Said’s assessment, the history consequently substitutes a chronology of battles, reigns, deaths, rises, and declines for an explanation of the religion and its historical life.

The Seventh Century as a Modern Explanatory Device

Said argues that modern Orientalists often use texts associated with early Islam to interpret every aspect of contemporary Egyptian or Algerian society. In this procedure, a seventh-century ideal constructed by the Orientalist is treated as a unity that supposedly governs the present, while the more recent and consequential influences of colonialism, imperialism, and ordinary political life are pushed aside. The temporal distance does not produce historical perspective; it becomes a means of making diverse modern societies appear governed by an unchanging past.

This assumption belongs to a larger essentializing account in which the Muslim, the Arab mind, or an Oriental psyche is treated as a stable type. Said observes that clichés about Muslim behavior circulate with a casualness that, he argues, would not be accepted in descriptions of Black people or Jews. Muslim scholars’ challenges to these assumptions have had little demonstrable effect on the academic and governmental consensus, leaving Arabists and Islamologists, in his account, unusually unrevised compared with specialists in other area studies.

A Chronology Without Cultural or Religious Explanation

The Cambridge History’s treatment of the Abbasid period, from the eighth to the eleventh century, illustrates for Said what its chronological method leaves out. He describes the period as a high point of Islamic civilization, comparable in cultural brilliance to the High Renaissance in Italy, yet says that its forty pages of coverage give no sense of that richness. Instead, the narrative proceeds through political episodes in a monotonous register.

Said quotes an account of al-Ma'mun’s withdrawal from Baghdad society to Merv, his delegation of the government of Iraq to al-Hasan b. Sahl, and the revolt associated with Abu'l-Saraya and Ibn Tabataba. The accumulation of names, offices, and dates does not orient a general reader: terms such as Shi'i and Hasanid go unexplained, as does the calendar notation Jumada II. The resulting impression, Said argues, is not an intelligible history of Islamic civilization but a dull chronicle that can leave readers imagining the Abbasids, including Harun al-Rashid, as merely murderous and tedious.

Historical Difference Against Fixed Essence

Said’s criticism does not deny that the seventh century is important to Islam’s history. It challenges the conversion of that importance into a master explanation for societies separated from it by centuries of change. Treating early Islam as a single, enduring key conceals the historical forces that shape later life and turns a complex past into an instrument for classifying the present.

His alternative emphasis is on historical specificity and the revision of inherited accounts. In his discussion of Subaltern Studies, he notes the effort led by Ranajit Guha to rescue Indian history from the dominance of nationalist elites and restore the urban poor and rural masses to its narrative. The example belongs to a broader call to scrutinize sources, introduce theory, and dislodge Eurocentric perspectives. Applied to the seventh century, that approach means distinguishing the historical emergence of Islam from later representations that make it a fixed essence.