Making global connections: Critical pedagogy and the decolonization of history

Abstract

This chapter explores the theory and practice of teaching undergraduate courses on Islam and modern Middle Eastern history. General education requirements offer an opportunity to raise open-ended questions about representations of the past and the ways they impinge on the present. Reading religious and transregional history as the practice of critical thinking affords an opportunity to advance analytic techniques in decoding primary sources while questioning the conceptual basis of underlying assumptions. Coursework on the modern Middle East, Muslim Spain and Islam allowed students to sift through the multilayered past and trace the making of the conflicted present. Locating the empty spaces-the unsaid-in dominant narratives enabled a critique of accounts that suggest perpetual conflict rather than common understanding. In reorienting regional geography from fixed categories based on the nation states of West Asia and North Africa, these courses re-envisioned the region from the perspective of the Mediterranean, Arabian and Red Seas, enabling observers to chart the flows of people, goods and ideas. The notion of connected histories, in relation to the reconquista of Muslim Spain and the colonization of the Americas, illuminated how relations of power have impinged on knowledge formation in the transition to “modernity”. The contributions of al-Tabari, Ibn Khaldun and al-Mas’udi figured as alternative traditions of historical writing that predate colonialism. Al-Jabarti furnishes an example of how an indigenous historian recorded the French presence in Egypt. Finally, examining the Convivencia of Moorish Spain as historical conjuncture raised questions about how the study of history contributes to notions of coexistence. Critical thinking intrinsic to historiography provides a means to reassemble the past and provincialize Europe, while building connections that bridge the knowledge divide.