The Cambridge History of Islam

The Cambridge History of Islam is a two-volume scholarly history first published in England in 1970. Edward Said examines it as a prestigious instance of Orientalist orthodoxy: a work whose scale and range promise a comprehensive account, but whose organizing assumptions leave Islam remote, fragmented, and largely detached from the lives and changing circumstances of Muslims. Its importance in his argument lies not simply in errors of detail, but in the way a monumental academic history can reproduce a narrow conception of its subject while appearing to encompass it.

Publication and Critical Context

Said presents the work as an intellectual failure by standards beyond those of Orientalism, while arguing that its shortcomings were built into the project from the start. The editors accepted too many inherited ideas without examination, relied on vague concepts, and gave little attention to methodological questions. The history did not make Islam itself seem intellectually or religiously interesting. In Said’s account, these are not isolated oversights that could have been corrected by more diligent execution: the assumptions governing the undertaking made a substantially different history difficult to produce.

The book also lacks a coherent conception of itself as a history. Its numerous contributors and enormous scope do not add up to an account organized by a clear understanding of Islam, its beliefs, or its historical transformations. Said uses that disjunction between magnitude and intellectual structure to show how an authoritative scholarly enterprise can accumulate information without developing a persuasive account of the human and religious reality it claims to describe.

Structure and the Missing Account of Islam

The opening chapter on pre-Islamic Arabia, by Erfan Shahid, offers a more promising point of departure. It sketches the relationship between topography and human economy from which Islam appeared in the seventh century. But Said contrasts that account with the history’s subsequent sequence: pre-Islamic Arabia is followed by a chapter on Muhammad, then chapters on the Patriarchal and Umayyad caliphates, while Islam as a system of belief, faith, or doctrine receives no corresponding account. The result is not merely an uneven distribution of topics. The organizing sequence makes Islam legible principally as political succession and historical event rather than as a religious tradition.

Across hundreds of pages in the first volume, Said finds an unrelieved chronology of battles, reigns, deaths, political ascents, and declines, delivered for the most part in a monotonous register. The Abbasid period, from the eighth to the eleventh century, makes the cost of that approach particularly visible. Although it was a high point of Islamic civilization and a period of cultural brilliance comparable to the High Renaissance in Italy, the forty pages devoted to it convey little sense of that richness. Instead, the narrative compresses history into court politics and revolt: al-Ma'mun remains at Merv, delegates the government of Iraq to al-Hasan b. Sahl, and faces the revolt associated with Abu'l-Saraya and Ibn Tabataba. To readers unfamiliar with terms such as Shi'i, Hasanid, or Jumada II, the detail is not made illuminating by explanation; it risks leaving the Abbasids looking merely dull and murderous.

The Two Volumes and Their Categories

Volume two extends the book’s geographical reach across India, Pakistan, Indonesia, Spain, North Africa, and Sicily, covering the tenth through twentieth centuries in roughly half its length. Said acknowledges that the chapters on North Africa show greater distinction, but considers professional Orientalist jargon and poorly guided historical detail characteristic of the work more broadly. After approximately twelve hundred pages, Islam still appears less as a cultural synthesis than as another roll call of rulers, battles, and dynasties. The last half of the second volume attempts a grander synthesis through sections on geographical setting, sources of Islamic civilization, religion and culture, and warfare; the architecture of the contents, however, does not by itself resolve the conceptual problem.

Said questions what an account of Islamic warfare contributes when the subject discussed is actually the sociology of certain Islamic armies, as if warfare were an essentially Islamic category rather than a subject that might be compared with Christian, communist, or capitalist war. He also challenges the use of opaque quotations from Leopold von Ranke in a discussion of Islamic civilization, asking whether their weight conceals the thesis that Muslims borrowed without principle from Judeo-Christian, Hellenistic, and Austro-Germanic cultures. Elsewhere, the unsupported assertion that so-called Arabic literature was written by Persians raises a related problem: large claims about cultural authorship arrive without proof or named evidence.

The book’s classifications of religion, culture, and geography likewise seem to Said to carry more certainty than explanation. Louis Gardet’s discussion of religion and culture restricts itself to Islam’s first five centuries, leaving unresolved whether religion and culture cannot be synthesized in modern times or whether Islam is being treated as having reached its final form by the twelfth century. The idea of an Islamic geography, including the description of Muslim cities as exhibiting planned anarchy, seems less like an established field of inquiry than a vehicle for geographical and racial determinism. The reference to the Ramadan fast and its active nights is expected to support the conclusion that Islam is designed for town dwellers, but the inference itself calls for explanation. In these examples, Said’s objection is not that a history asks questions about institutions and practices; it is that categories and conclusions substitute for an account of how they are justified.

A Remote and Text-Centered Subject

Said distinguishes the sections on economic and social institutions, law and justice, mysticism, art and architecture, science, and the literatures of Islam as markedly stronger than much of the rest of the work. Even those sections, however, do not persuade him that their contributors share a modern humanist or social-scientific approach. Techniques associated with the conventional history of ideas, Marxist analysis, and the New History are notably absent. Across the collection, Islam shifts among incompatible descriptions: for some contributors it is a politics and a religion; for others a style of being, something distinct from Muslim society, or a mysteriously known essence. Yet the shared effect is a remote, tensionless subject with little to teach readers about the complexity of contemporary Muslims.

Said identifies the governing presumption beneath this disjointed enterprise as the Orientalist truism that Islam is about texts, not about people. In his reading, that presumption helps explain why an enormous scholarly history can devote sustained attention to dynasties, terminology, and inherited categories while leaving belief, social life, human complexity, and historical change inadequately represented. The scale of the Cambridge History therefore sharpens rather than cancels the problem: comprehensiveness in volume does not guarantee a coherent or humane understanding of the people and traditions being described.