Journal of Interdisciplinary History

The Journal of Interdisciplinary History appears in Edward Said’s account as the venue for a review-essay by Roger Owen. The cited discussion uses Owen’s critique of a major history of Islam to show how scholarly frameworks can reproduce inherited assumptions about religion, reason, and historical change rather than simply describe them.

The Journal’s Role in the Debate

Said refers to a review-essay in the Journal of Interdisciplinary History in which Owen examines The Cambridge History of Islam. Owen objects to treating Islam as a settled explanatory category for historical study, and his intervention brings disciplinary scrutiny to the terms through which broad histories are organized.

Critique of Historical Categories

The review-essay identifies an account of Islam, also associated with Carl Becker and Max Weber, that defines it as essentially religious, feudal, and antirational, and as lacking the characteristics credited with enabling European progress. The Journal is thus associated with a challenge to a comparative scheme that makes European development the implicit measure of historical possibility and casts Islam as its deficient opposite.

Place in Said’s Argument

Said sets Owen’s criticism alongside Maxime Rodinson’s sustained case against Weber’s account. In this context, the Journal represents a site where inherited categories could be contested through historical argument; its significance in the passage lies in this specific scholarly intervention, not in any broader institutional history supplied by the evidence.