Introduction

Annick van Rinsum

Welcome to this podcast by NIAS, the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences. A place for researchers to find the time and space to fully pursue their curiosity and ask new questions. My name is Annick van Rinsum and in this episode I’ll be speaking with Ahmed El Shamsy and Pieter Coppens.

Ahmed El Shamsy is a professor in the Department of MiddleEastern Studies at the University of Chicago. He studies the intellectual history of Islam, focusing on the evolution of the classical Islamic disciplines and scholarly culture within their broader historical context. His research addresses themes such as orality and literacy, the history of the book, and the theory and practice of Islamic law.

Pieter Coppens is associate professor of Islamic studies at VU Amsterdam, specialising in Islamic intellectual history. He was a NIAS fellow in the academic year of 2022 to ‘23, and he has just received an NWO Vidi grant for a project on the history of the art of dying in Islam.

Podcast

Annick van Rinsum

Dear Pieter and Ahmed, welcome to the NIAS library. Pieter, you are mainly here as Ahmed’s interlocutor. Do you want to take it away?

Pieter Coppens

Ahmed, can you share something about your book project and how the NIAS environment is supporting you in writing that book?

Ahmed El Shamsy

My book project that I’m pursuing here is on the history of early Sunni Islam, the emergence of Sunni Islam, and it’s a changing phenomenon. Sunnism in the 8th century is different from Sunnism in the 18th century, just as it is different from Sunnism today. But there are continuities, and it’s important to think about it as a historical phenomenon rather than as an essentialised phenomenon.

I think it’s the first real monograph, a single book-length study on this topic. It’s one of those things, I felt I needed to get away from where I normally work at the University of Chicago because I needed a new place to be, a different place. And then, of course, you never quite know where you land, you don’t know who the other fellows are. In a sense, it’s a gamble. But it’s also a gamble in the sense of, you know, you can be inspired in different directions. So we have historical sociologists here who I can have a conversation with on group formation. We have scholars in religious studies who I talk to about sense of belonging, for example. It’s nice to have people you only talk to about ideas. That is really kind of supportive.

As you know, writing a book is a complex project. In your head, you are rearranging the information: how would I even tell the story? How do I also tell a story that doesn’t just speak to the most specialised people in the field, but to other people who are interested in history but not experts? So on the one hand, I sit alone in front of my laptop and write, and NIAS gives me the opportunity to do this. I get different levels of people; of colleagues to talk with about this topic. And so far it’s been good. Not enough desserts, I’ve told you. Very rarely they give us desserts…

Pieter Coppens

Do you have some conclusions to share already from your new book?

Ahmed El Shamsy

No, you have to buy the book. I’m not giving this out for free [laughing]. Basically, I’m trying to tell a complex story. Sunni Islam is not one thing. It’s not like a group with a group identity only. There are times in which it is and times in which it isn’t. It’s not just a theology or, shall we say, a spectrum of theological debates, tradition of theological debates. It has a legal dimension. It has a political theory dimension. In different historical moments, it serves as an identity to groups in contestations with other groups.

The one conclusion that I already know now is going to be at the heart of my book: it’s that Sunnism isn’t one thing. It’s not one thing that you can give a definition for, because a definition you can only give to things that have no history. You need to be aware of what the historical context of its emergence was. But then I also want to provide an account of how in different places and different times the phenomenon changed and took on different forms.

Annick van Rinsum

Why did you choose this project to do here?

Ahmed El Shamsy

One of the strange features of being an academic is that one has two jobs that are strangely connected. So one of them is to research and write stuff, and then one of them is to teach to people. And the way this comes together for me, sometimes, is that I teach something and I teach things that I don’t actually understand myself. And then I have these moments where I stand in front of a class and I tell them something and then I realise that I hope they’re not asking me a question about this because I actually don’t quite understand what I just said.

Pieter Coppens

[laughing] Very relatable.

Ahmed El Shamsy

…and that is then really interesting to go back and say, well, let me read up on this. Then sometimes you find, well, it doesn’t seem that anybody else has really understood it like the way I would like to understand this phenomenon. And so the topic of Sunni Islam is that it’s the dominant form of Islam, the dominant group of Islam, the dominant understanding of Islam. But just because it’s the dominant one, it doesn’t mean that we really understand what it is. In fact, I think part of the problem of it being dominant is that everybody assumes that we know what it is rather than having to verbalise what it is that characterises this phenomenon over time rather than giving a simple definition that might shut up other people who ask the question. I can give you a definition of it if you want to satisfy an undergraduate, I can tell them something. But, in my heart, I’m not convinced that that’s a really honest or sophisticated enough answer to give.

Annick van Rinsum

What are the common ideas that people have about it [Sunni Islam]?

Ahmed El Shamsy

So part of the problem is, there are people who call themselves Sunnis and then there are people who talk about Muslims and they refer to Sunnis. And they don’t necessarily overlap. To take a recent example: after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, you heard a lot of Iraqis say “we used to be just neighbors, and now suddenly, this family are Sunnis and this family are Shiites.” There was a lot of intermarriage. And when people say this, of course, it’s not a 100 percent true in the sense of, nobody even knew these words. That’s obviously not true. But the relevance of these two terms has suddenly taken on a very political nature after the invasion.

In the same way, we can give a religious definition. Saying it has something to do with the succession of the Prophet Muhammad, the political succession. But that’s a very partial description that doesn’t really capture much of people’s perception today. It’s not like people walking down the street and really thinking about the succession of Mohammed as a burning issue in their self-understanding. But out of this, you take a part of the discussion and you make it the kind of defining issue.

As a phenomenon, it’s much larger. It’s a whole bundle of understanding what it means to be Muslim. That happened at a time when people started to theorise all kinds of things. When people started to write books about religion, about Islam, about history. When all of these different ideas coagulated into a kind of mutually intelligible sense of the past, of what Islam is, of what you should do in life, what your relationship to the state should be, what your individual obligations to God are, what your individual obligations to society are. And most discussions of Sunnism these days, or even in the literature, are about Sunnism versus Shiism. It’s an account of the two groups that are kind of going at each other. But again, that’s a very simplistic idea that also really does injustice to the material because there are actually deeper discussions underlying this division that one needs to excavate.

And again, I keep saying in the United States, you can say the Republican Party was the party of Abraham Lincoln, the party that did the American Civil War to abolish slavery. And it’s also the party of Donald Trump. So what’s the definition of the Republican Party? It’s a historical phenomenon. There was a different thing in the 1860s than in the 1960s and in the 2020s.

Annick van Rinsum

And also in every time there’s contesting ideas.

Ahmed El Shamsy

Yes, and it’s not that you can say there’s no connection. There’s obviously a continuation, an institutional continuation or whatever. But, what is the real Republican Party? People who are part of the Republican Party will say: “The real Republican Party…”, and then they put some definition in. Because for them, there is an essence of being a Republican. But as a historian, that would make no sense. My task is to describe how we got from somebody like Lincoln to Reagan to George Bush, the father, and then the son, and Trump, et cetera, if I was an American historian.

Similarly, Sunnism is a phenomenon that emerged in a very specific context, but then it persisted and it changed. And it’s a changing phenomenon. Sunnism in the 8th century is different than the 18th century is different as it is today. But there are continuities and for me, what’s important is to show important points and exemplary processes.

First of all, for the pre-modern period, we don’t have enough material to really speak. I can’t say, Sunnism in Central Asia looked different to Sunnism in eastern Iran and, you know, western Iran and Iraq and Egypt and Morocco and Muslim Spain. I don’t have enough material to talk about everything all the time, but I have enough material to give examples and case studies that show you how it turned out different in different localities, spatial localities, temporal localities.

Annick van Rinsum

And where and how did the two of you actually meet each other?

Ahmed El Shamsy

Okay, let me start with that. I think it was 2020?

Pieter Coppens

2019

Ahmed El Shamsy

Oh, was it 2019? Okay, all right, like an old couple, remembering where they met the first time. I was finishing my book, my second book, on the history of print in the Arab world. I was in this kind of stage where I wasn’t quite sure whether there was anybody actually interested in what I was about to publish. So it was the story of how medieval works were printed, rediscovered as manuscripts and edited and printed in the 19th and 20th century and that was something I had gotten really interested in. But again, this was neither something that medieval historians had written about, nor modern historians. It’s one of those things like, okay, it interests me but whether anybody else is interested in it, I don’t know. And so I got this email by somebody I had not met before and didn’t know, having heard that I’m about to publish about this and wondering whether I could tell him about my project and I think I had a full draft of my book and I sent it to you.

Pieter Coppens

Yes, what he’s saying is correct. It was in 2019. I remember very well. I just started a project on one of the main figures in a chapter of Ahmed’s book. And indeed, I heard that Ahmed was working on, or had been working on this book and that the main figure of my research project was actually part of that. I got a bit nervous, I’m just starting my project and does this mean that Ahmed has already found out about everything that I intend to find out?

This main figure that I was working on, Al-Qasimi, he wrote a very big crown commentary and one of my theses was actually that he could only write this because of the very recent rise of print culture in the Arab world. Because of that, he had completely new sources to his availability. That was supposed to be my story and I got very nervous and then I indeed thought, I’ll just send Ahmed a message. And Ahmed, in an act of kindness, that I hink is quite rare in academia, he just shared the complete manuscript with me. I was kind of relieved when I read the manuscript, he did leave something for me to research [laughing]. But I also realised this book of his is going to be a paradigm shift in the field. That’s what I realised right away. He really discovered something that is so important. And I think everyone who is now working on at least early 20th century topics in Islamic studies, they cannot go around Ahmed’s book. I think it really changed the perspective on this era.

Annick van Rinsum

And what is this paradigm shift in your words?

Pieter Coppens

I would say what is really important is that Ahmed really showed that a lot of pre-modern names that we consider to be household names nowadays were really not household names before the rise of print. I think that is an important insight of Ahmed. So there’s a lot of names of certain Islamic scholars that we take for granted and we imagine them to have always been available to everyone within the pre-modern intellectual history, while a lot of these works were really not as widely available to scholars as we think. I think people never really realised that deeply enough.

Annick van Rinsum

I think an overarching theme in both your works is that histories are so much more complex than is often thought of.

Ahmed El Shamsy

I’m originally a medieval historian who got interested in the modern period because I realised that a lot of what we see in the medieval period, we see through more recent events. It happens with everything, of course. You perceive the relevance of things through how the world is around you right now, what your present concerns are, et cetera. And one of these moments that really changed our view is the introduction of the printing press. In Europe that happened in the late 15th century and in the Muslim world it was really only adopted in the 19th century. What that allows is for books to be printed and circulated much quicker and much wider.

Because of this process, books were printed that we now think of as the great works and the authors that everybody has to be aware of. When you think about British literature, we think Shakespeare is a big deal. But I don’t know, maybe 200 years ago, people wouldn’t have mentioned Shakespeare. It’s very possible. Shakespeare wasn’t always the great British poet and dramatist. Being conscious of this, that ideas have histories and you cannot just assume that just because you study somebody that they were aware of everything else that had been done before them. You really actually have to look at, what was their library like? What education did they have? So it’s about going deeper into individuals and their backgrounds rather than just studying texts.

I think that’s one of the issues that both Pieter and I are grappling with in our work, is that orientalism, if we call this orientalism: kind of the Western study of the Muslim world, used to be almost exclusively concerned with studying languages and reading texts. A lot of the techniques of other fields such as history weren’t really adopted for a long time. So the image that we have of the history of the Muslim world very often is kind of two-dimensional in a way that we wouldn’t accept for Roman history, or we wouldn’t accept for Renaissance history, or early modern history, or Reformation history.

Annick van Rinsum

What kind of things were missing? What would we have done if we would have seen it from the beginning as one collective humanity?

Ahmed El Shamsy

When I started my PhD at Harvard University in 2003, I was already in the 21st century. I met a professor, an older French professor, and he asked me what I’m doing. And I said, “I’m studying 9th century Egyptian history.” And he said, “Did they have history back then? I thought they only had myths.” And I was so shocked. I was under the impression that history was the story of human history. But really, and this is still the case today, the non-Western world is often either not studied or only studied after it comes into contact with the West. So after it’s colonised, then suddenly it’s in the light of history. I mean, there might be a reason if you study, let’s say, societies that didn’t have writing before. Okay, then I understand. You just don’t have the sources. But for literate societies, there really is no excuse why you would separate that.

Institutionally speaking, very often, you have this distinction where somehow the study of history is basically the study of the West and its expansion into the world, while these other parts of the world, they are banished into their own worlds. The excuse and partly the justification for this is that you need to study all those languages to look at this. So there’s some excuse to it. Somebody who wants to study with us, who wants to study history of the Middle East or whatever, they have to learn a lot of languages. If you study English history, then you only need to know English. But there is still something about the nature of it, the view of the world is still affected by this, that there is the West and then there’s the rest.

Annick van Rinsum

And also, “Did they have history?” is a completely ridiculous statement and that it is so normalised that he wasn’t even ashamed to have said that, says a lot, I think.

Pieter, how did you see this? Because you are a white man, so maybe it’s a different path into seeing how these structures function.

Pieter Coppens

I recognise what Ahmed says. My latest research topic was very much focused on Damascus and Damascus in the late Ottoman Empire and I mean, colonialism already happened…

Ahmed El Shamsy

….And by the way, he would totally pass as a Syrian man as well. He could be from Damascus.

Pieter Coppens

I’m half white. [laughing]

When you look at the scholarship on this this era, late 19th century to early 20th century, you see that as for the Islamic reformers that got a lot of attention in Western literature – then i think in India, Syed Ahmad Khan for example, or in Egypt, Muhammad Abduh, and Rashid Rida who was actually from the Levant but lived in Egypt – there’s constant engagement with their works and with their history. Why? Because they were very much engaged with the colonial powers and were very much engaged with what was going on in the West. We study them to study ourselves, so to speak.

My impression was always, and I actually took that from Ichak Weissmann from Haifa University who also made that point, we have completely overlooked all these Levantine reformist scholars because they were living in the Ottoman Empire and they were not so much engaged with all these Western ideas. And they were not directly, indirectly of course, confronted with the colonial powers. They were not really interesting to us somehow. It’s an overlooked subject, but there were all kinds of reform movements in the Muslim world going on that were not under colonial rule. Somehow, we missed out on them in our studies in the West. I feel I’m trying to compensate that now a bit. There were also interesting reformers who were not constantly occupied with the West and are also interesting, even more interesting, perhaps. That’s an important point for me.

Annick van Rinsum

Could you give an example?

Pieter Coppens

Al-Qasimi, who I’ve been working on. I’ve spent 6 years of my life on that guy by now [laughing]. I think another good example is Musa Jarullah Bigiev. I think he also was a Tatar. He was from Kazan, I think. In Turkey there’s a lot of interest in him. There’s a lot of scholarship in Turkish on him and he’s considered a very important reformist scholar with very interesting ideas about Islamic modernity. We have missed out on him. Why? Because he was not a colonial subject of ours. I think he was struggling with the Russians more so probably there’s a lot of scholarship on him in Russian. And I think there are many more examples like that.

Ahmed El Shamsy

I don’t want to just kind of denounce this without also giving the background of this, that it’s much easier to engage with people for whom you have a whole vocabulary. So are they conservative?Are they progressive? Are they socialist? What policies do they advocate within a colonial state? Then they will fit into categories that we already have established. But if you deal with people who are in a different political system, who did not engage with Voltaire, either in the original or in the translation, then you really have to build up an image of them from the ground up and from an education that is alien to you. So it’s difficult to even just say, okay, so what does that mean in the greater story of the historical period that we are talking about? Is this just a dead end? What exactly are the genealogies?

I remember after 9-11, there was the 9-11 report. This was an official report about what happened on 9-11 and it includes a basic history of jihadi extremism and it’s just such an incredibly primitive account of history. So the people who flew planes into the Twin Towers, there has to be a line of thought, that goes back, I don’t know a thousand years, that led straight into the Twin Towers. And with what other…[..]would you do this?

Pieter Coppens

I think they tried to do this with the Japanese kamikaze pilots.

Ahmed El Shamsy

There were attempts to say for example, does Martin Luther lead straight to Adolf Hitler? You can understand, in the moment, an attempt to understand history like this. But if you really look at it, you can’t blame Martin Luther for Adolf [laughing]. You could not have predicted what would happen 500 years later.

In the same way, this kind of, “well I know nothing about the history but just tell me where it’s from. Tell me in less than 100 words that leads to a kind of view of a whole section of the world as just one thing.” They’re not complex people, they don’t have all kinds of strands.

Every society that didn’t start yesterday has all kinds of strands in them, right? Attitudes to life, to family, to men, to women, to war, to whatever. And the longer the history, the more material you have that you can draw on and that you can selectively put together. When a new situation arises, you can say, “Oh, yeah, this is exactly like when the Mongols came.” And then you have something. Is it new or does it have a genealogy? Both of these things are in a way true, but serious history needs to be, first of all, aware of what all these strands were to make sense of what people are doing and not just say well, they just took from the past, so that’s who they are in a kind of deterministic sense.

Annick van Rinsum

How do you go about making this history visible in this way? Also within the context of a primitive field?

Ahmed El Shamsy

The anxieties Pieter spoke of at the beginning, when somebody studies the same topic in our field, is rarely a problem because we rarely meet somebody who has read the same books or even just has some overlap with you because it’s such a huge field.

Pieter Coppens

You’re just happy to meet one.

Ahmed El Shamsy

Yes, you’re just grateful. In my book, there is half a chapter on this person and I think there’s enough material in it for Pieter to kind of work on and expand and critique. It’s definitely not something that somehow takes away from each other. And so there’s something beautiful, in the sense that you can really deal with big questions and there is a lot of space but at the same time it’s challenging.

A simple example: what I keep telling my students is, if we have one person, it’s not enough to just read what this person has written. It should start with you reading what this person, either we know has read or we can kind of surmise has read, or studied or was familiar with. If somebody were to study you, they should be aware of what time you lived in and what kind of ideas were around.

We partake in ideas, even if we haven’t read the book. Even if you haven’t read Foucault, somehow his ideas, even if you’re not aware of it, there’s something that you…

Annick van Rinsum

….pick up.

Ahmed El Shamsy

…that’s been diffused in culture, in discourse. You can’t just think that you would be the same person in the 21st century as you would be in the 19th century. Even the same biological person would be different because of the education, because of your position in society and the ideas that are circulating. You need to make yourself at home in the time period that you study. I remember I had one professor who studied early modern German Reformation history and he said, “most of my waking hours, I live in the 16th century.” That was so impressive to me: somebody saying, yes, to be a serious scholar of this, I live in this century so I can report back to you.

The basic distinction is that the natural sciences explain things, whereas we who deal with humans have to understand them. These are people that might have lived very far away in time or in space but we should still assume that we can understand something kind of fundamental about them. It doesn’t have to mean excuse everything they were doing. It’s not about advocating for their morality but in the same sense, that I’m sure people in the future will find many faults with us, it might still be useful to understand why it is that we acted the way we acted and that we had our own struggles. I think it’s very important to bring this to the fore: that people weren’t just ideas, kind of two-dimensional representations, but that they had lives, they had families. If you ideally gather all the sources that you can have, whether it’s what they wrote, or whether it’s the houses they lived in, or the documents they left, or the art they produced or consumed, we can get closer to understanding who these people were.

Annick van Rinsum

What have you learned about people through your studies?

Ahmed El Shamsy

When I was young, I was actually not a fan of literature. I thought it was a waste of time. But with age, I realised that it’s useful reading literature, even as a historian, because there is a large role for the imagination in the sense that, however good sources you have, there’s so much you have to imagine; what this meant and what this was. Whether you have a document or letter that somebody wrote. Who is this person who produced this? I think I learnt a love for for humans. Not an idealism in the sense of simply judging: are they good guys or bad guys? But love for human mistakes, human frailties, moral compromises. The older you get, the more you do this yourself and you realise how people are struggling and the universality of people’s concerns.

Annick van Rinsum

Like which concerns?

Ahmed El Shamsy

You know, I remember reading a very early text of a man who had a dream in which the Prophet Muhammad appeared to him. The Prophet told him, “Clean your house, purify your house.” And he said, “I’m sorry I can’t, I have young children.” I totally understand this feeling; dirty diapers everywhere [laughing]. So even this man who was this saintly figure, in his in his dream vision of the prophet couldn’t let go of this daily struggle of dealing with his young children.

I’m primarily an intellectual historian, so I’m interested in big ideas, but then you reach points where you’re like, oh yes, this also was a person. This also was somebody who, apart from thinking about big ideas, had to deal with the most basic concerns that one could have.

Annick van Rinsum
What I understand from your work, you study mostly people who were concerned with transmitting knowledge and all the different ways in which this has been done and the contesting ideas about it in different time periods. What have you learned about how humans try to make sense of the world and how they want to transmit this knowledge?

Ahmed El Shamsy

That’s very true. I’ve always been fascinated with things written by hand and for the pre-modern Muslim world, that is the way in which, apart from oral transmission, people transmitted knowledge. And what I realised in recent years is actually how similar the world still is.

My father died eight years ago, and I realised how much knowledge died with him despite the fact that shortly before he died, I did a long interview with him still. Anything comes up. He was born in 1930. He has active memories from World War II. All of this is gone now and whatever we didn’t write down or record is now gone. And this is how much information dies when a generation disappears.

Strangely, culture is a struggle to transmit knowledge and to figure out what kind of knowledge is worth transmitting and what is worthless transmitting. These days, I do not envy future historians because it seems like no information is dying. How do you even make sense of this when so much survives? The kind of day-to-day struggle of telling stories and retelling stories…, how generations relate to different ages and attitudes.

We talked about the 2008 financial crash today. How that affects a whole generation of people. This financial insecurity about themselves, the value of the houses, these are basic things. And then a generation later, people will have forgotten about this. I grew up with a great fear of nuclear war. I still remember I had nightmares as a child after watching this movie, the day after, about a hypothetical nuclear war. You speak to kids today about nuclear war, and they’ve never thought about this. And NATO is at war with Russia, basically. It’s like: how? This should be, like, you should watch these movies again, you know?

Annick van Rinsum

….Or not.

Ahmed El Shamsy

On the one hand, information survives. That’s something that humans kind of uniquely do, we store information. We are able to communicate it. I once read that basically the only reason why octopuses don’t have civilisations is they haven’t figured out ways of communicating. They only live two years and then they don’t have ways of communicating to their kids what they learned in those two years. So that’s part of who we are, how we work.

But it’s never clear what the next generation learns, right? We think we’ve learned one thing and the next generation actually thinks it’s the other thing or we’ve learned the wrong things. So part of the history is how we think about history and what lessons we’ve taken from it.

Sometimes the slapstick humor is, totally misunderstanding what actually happened in the past or us rethinking what actually did happen. What actually did happen when the Cold War ended? And maybe we learned the wrong lessons from what we thought had happened, and so on and so on. This is kind of meta history that I find is relevant here in considering how societies not only transmit knowledge, but also who are the people in charge of…

Annick van Rinsum

….picking up that knowledge.

Ahmed El Shamsy

Yes.

Annick van Rinsum

And what do they make of it?

Ahmed Al Shamsy

Yes. [Addressing Pieter]You are dealing with modernising Syria in the early 20th century. How has the Syrian civil war and now the end of the civil war – or I don’t know whether you want to call this end of the civil war now – how has that affected your vision of what was going on in the early 20th century and what they were doing then?

Pieter Coppens

The Syrian war, it created the situation that I could not travel to Syria. That was a problem in my research. There’s this famous book by David Commons from, I think, 1990, Islamic Reform, that’s completely about all these Syrian reformists. He had private access to the Al-Qasimia Library and the family archive. I have not been able to smell that and that is very influential. The Syrian war, it really created the situation where I could only do my research from behind my desk and that’s already a problem.

But one thing I’ve come to realise is that a lot of the debates nowadays that we see among Islamic scholars, also in relation to the different scenes within the Syrian ulema class or the Syrian scholarly class, that very often they are repeating things that were happening back then. So even nowadays there’s a big Salafi neo-traditionalist debate going on and you can see the roots of that debate in that era. And that actually a lot of the pushback against the rise of Salafism at the time used the same arguments and the same criticism. I think very similar political points of view were at stake and it was all about patronage to rulers in that time, whether you were loyal to the rulers or not.

In that time, for example, there was one journal, it was called Al-Haqaiq. It was a journal that was completely aimed against reformists and against fighting reformist ideas. I always feel that a lot of arguments they used: it’s exactly what you now see in the social media debates. It’s just coming up again and again. Even this leading figure of the anti-reformists, the Lebanese…

Ahmed El Shamsy

…Al-Nabhani

Pieter Coppens

Yes Al-Nabhani. He is, now again, popular in these neo-traditionalist circles. So you actually see they are very much invested in this era still. And they are constantly repeating things that happened back then. Of course, it has a new cloak and it has a new context but it’s not gone.

There’s a Belgian scholar who works in Ais-en-Provence, Thomas Pierret. He wrote a brilliant book on the Syrian scholarly class and how they are related to the Assad regime or not, et cetera. And I noticed when I read that book, everything that happened early 20th century, it was so determinative for a lot of debates that are going on now.

Ahmed El Shamsy

I might have told you this story before: because of the Syrian civil war I had to stop writing my book for like a year and a half because I just could not…

Pieter Coppens

I can imagine.

Ahmed El Shamsy

Writing about Syria, writing about places that I had seen that day in the news where that library I was studying had just been burnt down, it just created this sense of loss. You see all this optimism of people thinking, oh, we’re building a new world and then you’re like, if only you had known what would happen in fifty, sixty, a hundred years later.

[Addressing Pieter] What do you think? You might not primarily see yourself as a historian, but at least as historians, we always have this anxiety; we don’t want to write history from purely today’s perspective, but at the same time, you can’t help it.

Pieter Coppens

It’s inescapable. When the Syrian war was at its height, I was doing my PhD. I can really relate to what you’re saying here. And for me, it was also like a personal crisis. And I’m looking here at all these 12th century manuscripts and at this very moment, people are dying in the most cruel imaginable circumstances. I mean, what’s the point of what I’m doing here? And I shared that with my supervisor as well: “I don’t know what I’m doing.” At my viva, he spoke about this in his laudatio and he said something that I really try to remember every day when I have this kind of doubt. He said you should consider us archaeologists and at this moment so much is being destroyed in the world and you actually have a very beautiful task of preserving something. And maybe it’s very little what you are preserving, but actually you’re preserving something that embodies certain humanist values and you’re preserving something in an age of destruction. And that is actually one of the most beautiful and meaningful things you can do at this point.

I did feel that also during my my project on Syrian reform, I had the same feeling, I’m preserving something that may be lost in this war as well. This family library that I just spoke of, at the moment it’s not clear where it is. And the last heir of the family has passed away and I have very conflicting information. So some people say, no, it’s still in Damascus and nothing happened to it but other people say, no, the family sold it. It’s totally unclear what happened to it. And I feel like, I tried to keep something relevant that the Damascene society at this moment perhaps does not see the relevance of anymore. Maybe in 50 or 100 years, they will suddenly realise: well, there was this super important family library in this city and actually, we should care about that. And then I have left something for them. I feel that’s really motivating me in this age of destruction.

Just imagine you’re working on Sudan at this moment. What will be left there? The Syrian war was a tragedy but there are even much bigger tragedies going on now and also awaiting us. It never left me untouched. This idea that you can study these societies without being touched or moved by what’s going on there that’s… I don’t know. I think such scholars do exist but it’s…

Ahmed El Shamsy

In addition, I find it interesting how, even in the most dramatic moments of destruction and life or death, things that people are still concerned with preserving, even the distant past.

I lived in Berlin for a year. I heard the story there. I don’t know whether it’s true or apocryphal. When the Russian troops were flooding through Berlin, the German troops were considering taking the Pergamon Temple, this Greek temple that is in the museum in Berlin, and to use it to block one of the bridges. The director of the museum convinced them, like, this is going to buy you 15 minutes and you’re going to destroy a priceless historical artefact.

At this moment, what is even the calculation? It’s life and death and war and whatever. But still there were people who are…, and you see this all the time.

Pieter Coppens

Sarajevo.

Ahmed El Shamsy

Yes Sarajevo. You see this with ISIS in Iraq, or you see this in Timbuktu or I think in Aleppo as well, in Syria, where people smuggle out manuscripts, et cetera. Or in Gaza, apparently the oldest mosque in Gaza was destroyed by Israeli airstrikes, and there they also kept a lot of pre-modern manuscripts. The last news I heard that they had actually been evacuated before that. So there is people who see that preservation of history is part of survival. It’s part of communal survival.

Pieter Coppens

Wat you just said about your father passing away and all the knowledge that’s lost with him. In these wars, just imagine. In Syria, the estimations are around 1 million people that have died. Just imagine how much has been lost with that as well. No library can replace that of course. That’s a big tragedy. Now in Sudan, when you look in Darfur, just imagine how important oral history there still is and how much oral history is actually lost in the genocide that’s going on there now. That’s irreplaceable.

Annick van Rinsum

We’re talking about preserving, also in periods of destruction. But also, how do we make sense of these periods of destruction?

Ahmed El Shamsy

I have a good answer to this. There is something beautiful about these moments of optimism when you say, “Okay, we discovered logic. Hey, we have ways in which we can find the truth. Just by looking at words, we can put words in a syllogism and like in math, we come to a conclusion about the truth of the world. Finally, we can solve all our disputes. You know, you like potatoes, I like rice. We can solve all of this. We have rational methods.” If you keep doing this for a couple of generations, you realise, “It actually doesn’t really solve all the questions.” And then more and more ideas and after a while, It’s just too much.

I think if you have moments like the Renaissance or the adoption of print in the Arab world, there’s a lot of optimism because there’s an excitement of ideas. I don’t think we’re living at the moment in a time where people are really excited about ideas, and we might find an idea that’s really going to solve all the… At the moment, people want to… “Let’s have some AI overlords. Because they can read all the books. They can take all the information and make sense of it.” Because we don’t understand anymore what’s going on. We don’t understand what’s happening in the world.

Rebuilding is also a way of feeling that we are in charge again, maybe, because the more you have, the more difficult it’s like, “Okay, we have all these old houses here, where do we build a new house? No, we can start anew.” I think there are a lot of people who dream about going to Mars. They don’t actually know what’s expecting them on Mars, but it feels there’s all these constraints we have today and maybe there’s a new place where we can start anew and maybe something nice will happen.

Annick van Rinsum

Still, I don’t think it would be such an ideal way to start anew if it is on the ruins of destruction.

Ahmed El Shamsy

But if you read accounts of people, even in World War II, who are super optimistic; some sort of possibility of the future and what will come and so it’s not necessarily that you need you know…. There is this great monologue in The Third Man about Switzerland not having had a war for 500 years and at the end he says “What did it bring them? The cuckoo clock.” Of course, that’s very offensive to the Swiss, to all the Swiss, I apologize. I don’t agree with this.

Pieter Coppens

He compares it with Italy: Italy has only known war, but look at all the beauty of the Renaissance.

Ahmed El Shamsy

There is a very kind of neoliberal idea of creative destruction. But sometimes the more stuff you have… it drags you. It becomes more difficult. People who have less to tie them down are maybe able to rethink. Once you turn into a kind of middle-aged person with a stable life, you’re much less able to rethink questions of the world in a more radical way. I don’t mean radical in a negative sense, but you’re much more tied to the status quo. And so there is maybe a possibility for new ideas or new people to take over in a space where you don’t have to master all the registers of history and information that you’ve had before. When a society decides that, “Okay, we go forward but on the basis of something else now.” Moments like the Renaissance are moments when you say, “This body of knowledge maybe isn’t so relevant. Maybe let’s shift to a different body of knowledge.”

Pieter Coppens

You could argue that is a bit what happened in your last book, right? It was after the decline of the Ottoman Empire that this whole print revolution happened and that there was a change in the religious discourse. In a sense, that is a process that you’re describing in your last book, you could argue.

Ahmed El Shamsy

Yes, and and it made people who studied that later period uncomfortable. It felt to them that I was saying that there was a time period that was decadent or not worth studying and really what I tried to say was that there was a generation of people who felt printing otherwise forgotten texts will allow us to to start anew in a way that is true to us. So we’re not becoming existentialists, but it’s also different. It’s not the status quo. It’s also a different group of people.

One of the problems is that it’s the old farts who are in charge. They also have specific kind of knowledge that you need to know to be in that group, to be cultured, that’s what you need to know. That’s what you need to be familiar with… That’s the way in which you speak. That’s the references you make. And the new generation of people saying, “No, I don’t care about this stuff, there’s something else that we are familiar with and you don’t know.” There’s something culturally revolutionary, radical and iconoclastic about this. So, yes, there is a point to the historical comparison, even though I didn’t use the term Renaissance, I don’t think so.

Annick van Rinsum

What I find interesting is that you also advocated for having less information in order to look with optimism towards the future. But, in a way your research also tries to get more information in about the complexities of the past that we’ve overlooked. How do these two balance?

Ahmed El Shamsy

There’s a difference between somebody who wants to act in life as a member of society and me as a historian. My responsibility is to develop a complex image of the past that people have access to if they want to. And particularly, let’s say, in a comparative setting.

The most recent chapter I wrote for my book, that I’m writing at the moment, is on classical Islamic idea about the rule of law, i.e. that the ruler does not stand above the law. The ruler himself is bound by the law. And you have almost infinite number of studies on the Western roots of the rule of law idea; the Magna Carta and whatever else. While for the Muslim world, very often in handbooks about the topic, you have one or two paragraphs maximum on this. And that is just not reflecting of the actual material.

There’s so much there. And if we don’t come up with an account that reflects the sophistication of the tradition, then we’re just part of a crime against history. Because any normal person who looks at this will say, “Well, these non-Western people clearly didn’t have a tradition on the rule of law.” And that’s just not true. It also helps perpetuate a kind of delusion among Western people that there’s this miracle that happened in Greece and it led to this unique civilisation that came up with these things without any precedent or without any parallel in the world.

First of all, I’m by no way advocating of people burning down libraries or reducing the material. I’m just saying in terms of the future, this mindless accumulation of material and of information, it just makes it difficult for individual humans to distinguish what is relevant and what is just noise. You could spend your day just reading about celebrities’ private lives, but that’s really distracting.

Pieter Coppens

I’m wondering, so probably you did your undergrad studies in the 1990s?

Ahmed El Shamsy

Yes.

Pieter Coppens

So you have had a scholarly training before the digital revolution in a sense. Now if I would want to look for new literature I would go to Google Scholar or if I want to know what is written on a certain concept or a certain term, I very often go to the Brill page and I just type it in to see the entire Brill archive. I mean I have never really known anything else. I can imagine you have also had a different way of dealing with this huge amount of information that is present and I was wondering how did you experience that? How was scholarship in the 90s compared with the 2000s, and how was this still revolutionary in the way you worked?

Ahmed El Shamsy

I have to say, my undergraduate degree, I have very hazy memories of it and I might have taken like ten books out. When I started my undergraduate degree, I got my first email address and we already had computers then. I never used a card catalog before I started my PhD. I used the card catalog in the Süleymaniye Manuscript Library in Istanbul. In the Widener Library at Harvard on the sixth floor, they still have the card catalog. When I was a PhD student, I worked there as a cataloger and old faculty still came to use the card catalog. It’s like, “what is it? They hadn’t learned how to use computers?”.

What I found interesting, as a graduate student as a cataloguer, was how much, when you use an online catalogue, you are at the mercy of the person who catalogued these books or catalogues books. Because if they misspell this, for example, Arabic books, if they mistransliterate it, then you can’t find the book. In fact, we were getting so many Arabic books and we had so few catalogues that there was this place in the library we called ‘The Cage’, where you just put the books in. You just wrote the title and what you thought the name of the author was and then you just left it there and it was in a state of limbo. It was like 10 percent catalogued. And so people, they couldn’t borrow it, but they could find it. They could find a reference to it in the catalogue, and then they had to ask for it, and then you tried to catalogue it properly. There is this idea when you have like an online catalogue, it means that everything is transparent. We know what is in there but even, one of the richest libraries in the world, there is so much information in there that you can’t actually have access to.

We talked earlier today about remembering names or remembering dates and whatever. We have struggles even finding information in our own heads. But if you have a culture with more than one story or two stories and you write stuff down and then like, “Wow, where do we keep this? How do we know about knowledge?”And that this is, in fact, a constant struggle.

In a sense, the internet gives us the impression that everything is out there and easily accessible and that all languages are equal, that we have somehow access to all languages or the universal catalog or whatever. But in reality, when it comes down to this, so much of it is just not accessible. We can’t find it. We don’t know how to ask for it. And so there is a lot of communication going on. One person speaks to another person and the other person says, “Oh, I’ve seen this somewhere. Let me ask,” and then you ask some old person who’s like, “Oh, yes, I know.” So, under the veneer of this digital, you can access everything everywhere all the time. There are actually so many things that still work according to: “I know a guy or somebody once told me…”

Annick van Rinsum

This also reminds me of the tradition of orally repeating text. Did you study it by heart so that you have such a different relationship with the knowledge?

Pieter Coppens

Absolutely. In the past I’ve worked on Quran commentary and I’m always surprised to see they have cross-references to other places in the Quran. I always tell my students, imagine all these scholars knowing the Quran by heart. Actually having spent years, basically from their 6th year to their 12th year, on memorising the Quran. This stays with them for the rest of their lives. There’s no way with all your 21st century academic knowledge and all the digital tools that you have, you will ever understand the Quran the way they understood the Quran. There’s a certain depth in their understanding of the Quran that we can simply not attain with our academic…[knowledge]. I think it counts for poetry as well. In Germany probably you had to memorise a lot of poetry in high school, or… am I now kind of Germany orientalist [laughing].

Ahmed El Shamsy

Occidentalising me…

Annick van Rinsum

There’s a difference between having access to knowledge and understanding the knowledge and being able to… If it sits in your head you can make new connections with it more than if you just look at it through a computer screen.

Pieter Coppens

Yes, I remember in high school I had some friends who were in Steiner schools, Vrije school we call it in Dutch, and they memorised so much poetry and it was part of their daily repertoire. It really changes how you relate to a text so yes, I agree with that and I miss that in the way we educate our students nowadays.

Actually, I studied with an Arabist professor, Kees Versteegh, and he was always very strict: every Arabist should know the opening chapter of the Quran by heart. So you’re not a proper Arabist if you don’t know Surat al-Fatiha. You have to memorise this. He was very strict on that. And he felt like if you don’t know these basic texts from the Arabic tradition that every Arab knows, then how can you ever be an Arabist? I remember also in Egypt, we had to memorise some Arabic poetry in our Cairo semester. I forgot it, but they were very strict on that as well. It makes you understand the language.

Ahmed El Shamsy

It’s a basic cultural rule that each culture has texts, whether they are oral or written, that you can relate things to easily and that you can reference in your conversations. Being in the American college system, people don’t go in with a specialisation like in many other countries, but at least the first 2 years are considered general education. And so, people used to have the kind of Western canon: you read Shakespeare and Machiavelli or whatever, the Bible. And now it’s much more; it’s become much more problematic. Like, what is the canon? Do we even have a common canon? Of course, everybody says “Oh we need to have a woman, we need to have an African, we need to have some Asian or whatever”. This need for you to have a connection to your fellow men and women in society; that you have reference points that are not constantly shifting. That’s not like: “What was the latest on Twitter? Did we see the same Twitter memes today?” but rather like the deep things that we remember from our childhood and that are kind of profound truths about human condition, that we can relate our experience. Whether it’s grief or tragedy or triumph. And the fact that we don’t have that anymore or that we don’t have common texts like this, even though we might have the same language, a lingua franca… It makes it more difficult to connect I think.

Pieter Coppens

Yes, I agree. I think it’s already 15 years that we have a fundamentalist Christian party in our parliament, SGP. The leader of that party, Bas van der Vlies, was referring to the Bible all the time in his lectures. In the 1970s, everybody would have understood him, even though he was a fundamentalist and the other Christians would still feel that he was a weird kind of Christian. But they would understand his references. You can really notice in the last days of his career, in the early 2010s, nobody understood what he was talking about when he was talking about the fleshpots of Egypt for example. Everybody would just be staring at him like, what is this guy talking about.

Recently we have a reading group from NISIS, Netherlands Interuniversity School for Islamic Studies, where we were reading a text on Abu Zar al-Ghifari from an Egyptian author. I forgot his name. Abdel Hamid…[ AbuSulayman]. He’s trying to make this case for an Islamic socialism. The foreword is done by Hassan al-Banna, the leader of the Muslim Brotherhood. I noticed when I was reading the text with the students, it’s filled with Quranic references but in a very subtle way. You can really see his entire idiom, he takes it from the Quran but there’s no way that the students, even the Muslim students, that they recognise these things. You can only recognise it when you really know the Quran so well. I think in Islamic studies in the West… I mean, how many people really know the Quran well enough to recognise all these things even? This author, I think he was writing this in the 1940s and he was writing for an audience who would just catch that right away. I don’t know what kind of reference point would we have nowadays. Yes, when we’ve all watched friends in the 1990s or something [laughing] but it’s a poor reference point for civilisation I would say.

Annick van Rinsum

You said before that the the lack of knowledge in the field allows you to ask big questions. What are these big questions for you?

Ahmed El Shamsy

One of the questions I’m interested in, also for this book, is the idea of schismogenesis, i.e. it’s not just that, let’s say, Sunnism and Shiism developed somehow, but they also developed in conversation with each other in the sense of, they diverge from each other with the need to diverge. So, I take this position because the others have taken the other position. At the beginning, you might have a rather diffuse culture or position on things in law or theology and then at a certain point, like, “Well, okay, this becomes associated with my people and then this other thing becomes a sign of these other people who differ from us and who are wrong.” And so over time, differences become more entrenched.

That understanding of social change, of laws of social interactions and formations of groups, that’s something that was developed in other fields and that we don’t get trained in. Therefore, it’s also something that I’m benefiting from other colleagues, including here at NIAS, in conversation with the methodological insights from their fields.

Annick van Rinsum

If we see this conversation as a time capsule, what do you think we need to include?

Pieter Coppens

How dystopian are you, Ahmed? How long do we have as humankind? [laughing]

Ahmed El Shamsy

As somebody who’s spent the last 20 years in the United States, I think the release of these Epstein e-mails was very interesting to see how elites – political, economic, educational elites – how strangely connected they are across the so-called spectrum in the United States; how all of them are connected through these very strange and disturbing interactions. I think that’s something that, I mean, who knows whether that’s going to become relevant, but I think it’s contributing to a general sense of disillusionment, political disillusionment. I wouldn’t be surprised.

Pieter Coppens

It’s a bit of a boring take, but I would tell the future people in the future that the kind of stuff we do actually matters. I think institutions like NIAS and also the humanities now in universities… I’m not sure how long it will survive. This whole idea that NIAS represents, like, okay: there’s a group of people that we have to just support with time and we have to cater them with certain things because their thought matters and all their idiosyncratic interests matter and there’s some kind of value to this. I think that was actually always a strong thing in our civilisation and I feel that’s disappearing.

I would want to say to the people in the future: there was a time that we had institutions like NIAS and it is worth to reinstall that and please choose a group from your society that is just incredibly smart to do things and to study things from which you don’t per se see the use right away, but that still has a certain value. That’s what I would want to tell the people in the future. Go search for what NIAS was and try to reinstall it. [laughing]

Annick van Rinsum

Because as I understood it, you also encouraged Ahmed to go here.

Pieter Coppens

Oh yes, absolutely.

Annick van Rinsum  

How dod this happen?

Pieter Coppens

Actually when I was a NIAS fellow, I invited him for a small seminar that I did here. I had a small budget, not from NIAS but I had a different scholarship, and I felt I wanted to invite some people whose work really inspires me and have two full days of discussion. Normally, at conferences, especially in the U.S., people give 10-minute papers and then there’s 5-minutes for questions. We from Europe fly all the way there to just give a 10 minute paper and it’s ridiculous. I felt like: I want to invite a small group of people whose work I really intimately know and who I also like as persons and I want to give everyone time; everyone gets a time slot of an hour for both a paper and discussion. That way I invited Ahmed and I wanted to have this NIAS slow science spirit. I think Ahmed really liked it here.

Ahmed El Shamsy

Even though it was boiling hot in June with no air conditioning here, but yes, I like the concept of these Institutes of Advanced Studies and I like the fact that it is in a real big city and I like that it’s close to other big cities. One can get to many interesting things in a very short period of time.

I have to say the Netherlands really is punching above its weight in terms of the importance of scholars here and the quality of scholars. So this is definitely a place I wanted to come to and I’m very much enjoying being in.

Annick van Rinsum

Thank you very much.