Most reference works on history start from the existence today of nearly two hundred states ranging from the minuscule to the massive. Those works then tread backwards building up "unitary histories" for each state. We shall call this the encyclopedic view of history, which is characterized by categorizations.
In some cases it is plausible. There is China, where characters existed before the first millennium BCE and where unbroken cultural continuities can be discerned since pre-history. Unlike European pre-historical cultures such as Urn-field or Hallstatt, which leap across modern boundaries, no Chinese pre-historical culture is known outside of China.
The histories of independent states in the Western Hemisphere go no further back than the 18th century (in the case of the USA) and their histories as colonies to the end of 15th century at the earliest. There are also small or insular states that evince cultural, ethnic, and linguistic uniformities or continuities. Unitary histories in these cases are unavoidable. The antipodes to these categories are Sub-Saharan states that have few or no historical continuities.
In cases, then, such as China, the countries of the Western Hemisphere, and small nations, it is possible to start from the present and go back stepping on the same historical terrain, which would not be the case of Sub-Saharan Africa where before the 19th the historical record is patchy. But the case of Africa is not unique.
From unity to diversity and from diversity to unity
There is a certain incongruity to stringing a necklace with individual beads called Etruscans, Latins, Greeks, Goths, Lombards, Arabs, Normans, and so on, and coming up with "Italy". The problem is compounded in the case of a huge crossroads such as "Iran" formed by Elamites, Medes, Persians, Kurds, Armenians, Greeks, Arabs, Turks, Mongols, Afghans, just to mention some general categories, some of which, Turks especially, could be multiply subdivided. In the appropriate circumstances (not being in the Western Hemisphere or not being small or insular), most states, above certain demographic and territorial dimensions, are not historical "units" at all but pre-historical and historical "conglomerates". The very idea of an unitary "history of India" is incompatible with a commonsensical view of its history.
Confusingly, in retracing the course of time one often comes up not to diversity but to uniformity, not to differences but to similarities, although (and this is another potential source of confusion) such similarities or congruences are cultural in character and eventually have fragmenting or divisive political consequences. Thus, if you start from modern Morocco, Algeria, or Tunisia you will reach a time when these three countries could best be considered not as different entities but as parts of a region called the Maghreb with, at the very least, the same language and the same religion. Consequently, dynasties tended to overlap from any one of these countries into its neighbor or neighbors, and even into Spain, which then was Muslim and indisputably part of the Maghreb ("west" in Arabic).
Another example of the same historical circumstances as in the Maghreb is provided by Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, whose histories were indissoluble in the past and their combined territories went by names, such as Transoxiana , Murranawarh, Sogdiana , and Western Turkestan, which do not apply exclusively to either country. Eastern Persia, still today known as Khurasan , and southern Kazakhstan, were also part of the same general cultural region. Unlike the Maghreb, however, there does not exist one unequivocal historical appelation for this vast cultural region, perhaps the closest to a general political label being Khwarizm , the Turkic version of the Persian-Greek Chorasmia.
A crucial influence for cultural sameness in both the Maghreb and Khwarizm was Sunni Islam. Shia Islam was an early manifestation of Islam in the Near East. Its spread, except to Persia, where it sunk deep roots, was precarious or restricted. In the Maghreb, the use of Arabic displaced Berber. In Khwarizm, except Khurasan, Turkic was imposed on Persian and Persian-related tongues and Turks as a people mixed with Sogdians and other descendants of Indo-Iranians.
But cultural sameness did not make for political unity. The Maghreb was unified under the Almohads for barely over half a century. Only under the Persianized Turk Timur (Tamerlane) were Western Turkestan and Khurasan part of one empire, which lasted less than fifty years. Why were Arab-speaking Berbers, the base population of the Maghreb, and Persianized Muslim Turks incapable of creating one state? Persians rejected Turkic assimilation. If anything it was Turks who learned from Persians. Turks invaded Khurasan from the steppes of Central Asia 1,500 years after the foundation of the antecessor of all Persian states, the Achemenid Empire . ( Media , incidentally, could also stake a claim to that eminence but it was more oriented to Mesopotamia and Anatolia than to the rest of Iran.) There still remained the rest of Khwarizm, Western Turkestan proper, and here attempts at political unification also failed.
In the case of the Maghreb there were no ancient, cultural resistances such as those offered by Persians to Turks. The Berbers did not have a strong native cultural identity. They were first Romanized and later Christianized. Just as easily they shed their previous veneers for Islam and, what is more surprising, their own language for Arabic. It must be pointed out that Arabization was not just an imposition of Arab conquerors but significantly the consequence of Arabs settling, literally in hordes, extensive portions of the Maghreb.
We shall shortly discuss the failure of political unification in the Magrheb and in Western Turkestan. At this point, we need these cases to argue for what we call historical realism as opposed to the encyclopedic view of history.
The "encyclopedia approach" to historical unity and diversity
What is the encyclopedic approach to the contrasting historical processes from (a) multiplicity to unification, as in the cases of Italy and Iran, and (b) from cultural and linguistic affinities and similarities to political division, as from the Maghreb to Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia, and from Western Turkestan to, at least, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan? The standard encyclopedic approach tries to make the rational best of these complexities but cannot escape the flaw of inconsistency.
Concerning Iran it belittles the significance of the discontinuities introduced into Persian cultural traditions by the onset of Arabic Islam and by the intrusions of steppes peoples in two large waves: first, the permanent one of the Turks, and then the destructive if less consequential one of the Mongols. Islamized Mongol khans were superseded by Persianized Turks who participated in the consolidation of modern Iran. The enyclopedia approach asks us to assume that across the shattering historical impacts of Arabs, Turks, and Mongols, the history of Iran remained one unbroken sequence from Media to the present.
Anatolia is another crossroads where peoples and their cultural influences have come and gone in succession over millennia. Central Anatolia was first hazily a land called Hatti. After that it was either fully or partially occupied by Assyrians, Hittites (Indo-Europeans who adopted the name of the people they conquered), Aramaeans , Medes and Persians, Greeks, Romans, Seljuks , Mongols, and Ottomans. For some reason, one encyclopedic version of the history of Anatolia as such ends with the Seljuks ( Encyclopedia Britannica ). It is not explained why Anatolia has a history proper to itself under Greek, Roman, and Byzantine empires but not under the Ottoman Empire. It could be that the name Anatolia became irrelevant under the Ottomans. But the name Iran did not exist at all in the time of the Achaemenids and these form a part of the same encyclopedic history of Iran. In historical logic, Anatolian history should persist under the Ottomans and then, because of political force majeure, merge with that of Turkey, which was an imposition on lands that had not been until then fully settled by Turks.
The same encyclopedia approach to the Maghreb is to have a history of North Africa from Antiquity to the 1950s, when the Maghrebian states became independent, and at the same time to have separate histories for each of these states from the 19th century (when they became European dependencies) to the present. But why not extend, say, the history of Morocco back to Antiquity when it is more than likely that its inhabitants, the Mauri, were the ancestors of modern Moroccans? The encyclopedic point of view seems to be that categories simplify the work of historiography, but it does not reflect historical reality.
Religion and governance under Christianity and under Islam
Let us now return to the question of why the Maghreb and Western Turkestan broke up into different nations despite sharing religion, languages, and common ethnic backgrounds. The process has to do with the relation between religion and governance.
In Europe, the formation of nations was a political process grounded on ethnic, linguistic, geographical, cultural, and other circumstances. Christianity, the religion adopted by nearly the totality of Europeans (there are pockets of Islam in the Balkans), was appealed to for purposes of dynastic legitimation. Thus were anointed the Merovingians, the Carolingians, and the Holy Roman emperors, the latter two by the popes themselves. Until the Reformation, Christianity in most of Europe meant Roman Catholicism. In Russia and the Balkans the dominant Christian tradition was Eastern Othodoxy, mainly Greek and Russian. Rome was recognized as the first among patriarchates, as the see of all other sees, between the time of the legalization of Christianity by Constantine the Great to 1054, the year usually chosen as signalling the definitive break between Catholic Rome and Orthodox Constantinople. Rome was embedded in Italy, a fragmented country that showed as much recalcitrance to foreign imposition as it did to unification. If only through inertia, Italian disunion favored the political independence of the papacy. European dynasties and fledgling nations could not permit any individual one of them to dominate Rome. Hence, although governance and religion in Europe were hardly separate, they were likewise hardly consubstantial.
Like Judaism, even more than Judaism, Islam was and is the religion of the book. This book is of course the Koran . Muhammad, the founder of Islam, sang the praises of one God, but unlike Jesus, he did not choose a disciple and instructed him to found a church. The New Testament expressly identifies Peter as the vicar of Christ, who himself was God as a human being. As Peter died in Rome and Rome was the center of the western world, so Rome and Peter's successors derived their authority from political circumstances and from words in the fundamental source of Christian doctrine. Neither the successors of Peter, the popes, nor Rome accepted, in principle and usually in practice (until the unification of Italy), any authority below that of God. Christian tradition accomodates the separation between church and state. Through history this separation has been, like all things historical, relative, but the tradition has on the whole held true.
There is no evidence in the book of Islam that Muhammad chose a successor or that he intended creating an unitary Muslim church. There is however the strong presumption that for Muhammad religion and rulership were inseparable: the Koran being the word of God, it had to be upheld; the upholder, there not being onelegitimate Islamic religious succession, was whoever held power; and whoever held power had no authority other than that which he derived from religion. The political sanction of Muhemmadanism was not unlike the Chinese "mandate of heaven", formulated by Mencius in the 4th century BCE, whereby the ruler was eo ipso divinely chosen to rule.
The successorship of Muhammad, or the caliphate, was not decreed the way Christ decreed Peter to be his successor. The caliphate was a matter of practical necessity if Islam was not to be sucked back into the quicksand of superstition and polytheism from which, as if by miracle, it had emerged. The caliphate was created by those close to Muhammad but not by Muhammad himself. It did not come with rules of succession.
Shia
The caliphs upheld and spread Islam, but their ascendancy over the faithful was personal. The fourth caliph, Ali, broke with incipient convention by saying he had been chosen by Muhammad himself as successor, and this despite the existence of the previous three "elective caliphs". Nevertheless, his claim was heeded by many, especially among those recalcitrant to strong centralizing authority, and thus the first and most important and durable schism within Islam was born, the shi-at-Ali or the party of Ali (Shiism). Sunni Islam, which was and is most of the Islamic world, adheres and adhered to the tradition of the elective caliphs.
Ali's dissent did not prosper politically. Shiism became a sort of "official" opposition within Islam in the sense that if you weren't Sunni you were most likely Shia. This opposition sometimes became terroristic as with the opposition of the Ismailites to the Abbasids and to the Seljuks. It gained power under the Fatimids and in our times in theocratic Iran.
The Sunni caliphal tradition in time acquired some remote resemblance to the papacy in the matter of religious prestige. But as it had no basis in the Koran , it could barely legitimate itself, let alone extend a legitimating brief beyond the confines of its rule, which under the Abbasid caliphs was the city of Baghdad , and this only through the forebearance of Persian Buyids and Turkic Seljuks. When Mustasim II, the last caliph of Baghdad, sought to resist the Mongols, he was captured, wrapped in rugs, and trampled to death by ponies.
In sum, power in Islam, as everywhere, emanated from the sword (the mouth of the rifle, as Mao put it), but legitimacy emanated from the kutba, the mention of the ruler in the Friday prayer at the mosque. Political ambition being the driving force it is, unity under Islam, in regions such as the Maghreb, was elusive. Any one who was victorious in war or who could ignore the order of a theoretically superior authority could have his name or his family's name mentioned in the kutba. With some variations, the same thing applied in Anatolia, in the Near East, and in Western Turkestan.
The Maghreb, except Morocco next door to Spain, fell under Ottoman political influence. Before this, Maghrebian dynasties, ruling over varying extensions of territory, were numerous, the really important ones amounting to around ten. Morocco was formed as a separate political and territorial entity by the 16th century, in part because it had to bear the brunt of Christian aggression. But Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya, whose formal allegiance was to far-away Istanbul, did not acquire national contours and characteristics until the course of the 19th century.
Western Turkestan, where Islam became predominant by the end of the 8th century, over time had so many dynasties and ruling clans that it is impossible to discern among them even the stumps of today's states. Timur's empire, based in Samarkand (Uzbekistan), extended as far as the reach of its leader's primitive armies (they did not possess artillery). Everywhere from Smyrna to Delhi, Timur's name was said over and over in the kutbas. Once Timur died, his empire crumbled and the Muslim dynasties of yore, some Mongol, most of them Turkic, were reborn.
Ottoman power made empire possible. Some historians argue that the Ottomans contemned the caliphate and only adopted it casually, as one jewel among their many treasures which they used to enhance the splendor of their crown. It is more likely that the Ottomans revived the caliphal tradition with their conquest of Mameluke Egypt, where it had been languishing, and that this contributed to the expansion and the prestige of the Ottoman Empire. The sultans became caliphs, hence the lieutenants or successors of Muhammad, with the military power to impose both political and religious authority.
It was in opposition to this huge and powerful empire that Persia re-constituted its nationhood. In doing so, it espoused fully the Shiite tradition. For both Sunni Ottoman Turks and Shia Persians, religion and government were inseparable. To proceed backwards from the contemporary histories of Turkey and Iran in search of unitary political histories for each of these states is in the nature of a mare's nest. France was transformed by its revolution but in the late 19th century much of France still identified with certain basic features of its ancien régime. Kemal Ataturk wrenched Turkey from its Ottoman past, not quite as violently as the Seljuks had wrested Anatolia from the Byzantines, but emphatically enough to undermine a caliphal tradition of nearly 1,300 years.
The Ottoman quasi-reconstitution of the original Islamic empire, that of the elective caliphs and the Umayyads, was not the birth of an unitary state. Even at the height of its power the Ottoman Empire was constituted by autonomous and semi-autonomous dependencies. The sultans were satisfied with the formal obeisance of its multi-ethnic subjects, with the remittances of "tax farmers", and with the official primacy of Islam. Local dynasties still proliferated, even in the Balkans, where the Montenegrins, for instance, had their own de facto bishop-rulers of Cetinje the Ottomans did not strenously try to suppress. The point is that the Ottoman Empire, not unlike the also extremely multi-ethnic Habsburg Empire, had only a façade of unity. When it dissolved, its national core was reduced to Istanbul and patches of Anatolia. Austria was even smaller but when it ruled an empire it tended historically towards bureaucratic centralization which the Ottomans lacked.
The inconsistency of the encyclopedic approach to Islamic political history
So how is the political fragility and multiplicity of Islam dealt with encyclopedically? In the unitary history of Egypt, to a great degree, as that of India, a concoction, Ottoman suzerainty is like an intruder not quite sure of its place, or like an insubstantial subsection in an unbroken treatise from the Pre-Dynastic Scorpion King to president Hosni Mubarak. Unitary Iranian history too is a concoction. Within it, Ilkanid Persia , an offshoot of the Mongol Empire , seems like a hiatus in the uninterrupted basic historical line from Achemenids to Ayatollahs, two terminuses which themselves are extremely different. From the encyclopedic perspective, Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco are welded into North Africa and the Central Asia republics of the former USSR into Western Turkestan.
The inconsistency of the encyclopedic method glosses over the fact that "unitary histories" more often than not are agglomerations of many dynastic and local histories in the political tradition of Islam. To give a succinct, but eloquently typical example: the dissolution of somewhat ramshackle Ilkhanid Persia resulted in the fragmentation of Persia into domains controlled by Jelairs, Kerts, Karakoyunlu, Muzaffarids, and Sarbedarians. The Jelairs were Mongols who rivalled in western Persia with the Karakoyunlu Turks. The Arab Muzaffarids occupied central and southern Persia. And the Kerts were Persians who ruled in Herat and warred with the Sarbedarians of Khurasan. There was no Persian history as such, there had not been since the fall of the Sasanid Empire in the 7th century, over 600 hundred years before.
Timur stormed in from Samarkand and put down all these "Persian" dynasties and clans, in some instances through some of the goriest events of which there is notice in history. When Timurid power waned, the Jelairs and the Karakoyunlu rose again. These were swept away by the Akkoyunlu Turks, allies of Timur based in Diyarbakir, in modern eastern Turkey. In the east, Persia was invaded by the Shaybanids and their Uzbek hordes. The Safavids staged a Turco-Persian revival precariously reuniting the country, which did not become relatively cohesive again until it had to face the real menace of Ottoman absorption in the 17th century.
All of these dynastic or clannic names refer, then, to spheres of political power, hardly to Iran itself. To reflect this reality of extreme disunity--at a time when European nations had either achieved or espoused the project of political unification--the encyclopedic approach asssumes or implies that all these power groups were actually contending among each other to achieve the unity of Persia. Since it is much too obvious that the national unity of Persia was not a priority among the dynasties and power groups that fought for its spoils, the encyclopedic perspective includes brief separate articles on Jelairs, Karakoyunlu, and so on, as sort of "sidebars", more for the sake of thoroughness that to remit an accurate portrayal of historical reality.
Historical realism
Historical realism modifies the encyclopedic approach in important ways, amounting to a different method of historiographical representation. Inevitably, it has to work back from existing states. However, it only reaches as far as back as the time when each state was recognizably constituted, which could have been either with a permanent political center or a territorial core and generally with both. As a case in point, Paris became the definitive political fulcrum of France when the Carolingians, whose original capital was Aix-la-Chapelle (Aachen), declined.
Spain was essentially formed when Castile absorbed León, which was the basis on which later its crown was joined to that of Aragón. Before the definitive union of Castile and León, the history of Christian Spain is that of the different kingdoms of Asturias , León , Castile , Aragón , and Navarre . León superseded Asturias, but once the Christians had completely ejected the Moors from León, the Christian frontline and center of political power moved to Castile, although the city of León, with its gem-like, symmetrical Gothic cathedal, remained the traditional capital of the kings of Castile.
Similarly, Persia starts to take on its recognizably modern shape with the Safavids who defeated the Akkoyunlu and the Shaybanids. Before this time, historical realism perceives a sequence of empires, dynasties, and other power groups that dominated the country as whole or in fragments. This entails that for historical realism the antecessors of modern Iran are not "sidebars" but full, independent historical entities. For periods such as post-Ilkhanid or post-Timurid Persia there would not appear to be any sort of unity for the country as a whole. Jelairs, Muzaffarids, and Kerts--Mongols, Arabs, and Persians respectively--possessed their restricted spheres of influence, which by no stretch of political or military ambition could have embraced Persia as a whole. The Shaybanids who ruled Khurasan had little in common with the Akkoyunlu who ruled western Persia.
Nevertheless, modern Iran still includes the heartland of the Achaemenid Empire and the language that is spoken there today can be traced directly to the Old Persian that was spoken in Persia 3,500 years ago. To re-introduce a sense of the "integrity" of Iranian history, based on the territorial form of modern Iran and on linguistic continuity, historical realism posits the concept of "predominant political influences". During some eras, the predominant power is only one, as in the cases of the Achaemenid Empire, Parthia , or the Sasanid Empire. During other centuries, the chronology of Iran must include different independent centers of political power ultimately related to each other by geography and contemporaneity, in the sense, for instance, that Jelairs and Karakoyunlu fought against each other or allied against Timur because they had contiguous political bases and coveted the same territories during the same period of time. The same framework is also used for regions such as Maghreb and Western Turkestan.
Regions and peoples
Historical realism recognizes the need for some thorough regional, rather than national or dynastic, histories, as in the cases of Mesopotamia , Maghreb , and Tarim Basin . It also admits geopolitical descriptions, not political histories, of regions which share common historical processes. These are the cases, among others, of Balkans and Eastern Europe , Anatolia , and Transoxiana , whose detailed history would either be too complex or superfluous.
Outside of existing states and of historical regions, history presents other commonalities. One is that of peoples about whom there are historical notices or other sources of schematic or inferable knowledge. Some of these peoples, like the Scythians , have left archaeological sites; others, like the Tokharians , of whom practically there is nothing but an ancient Greek mention, must be the subject of speculative correlations, the one chosen here for Tokharians being that because they were at some unspecific point in time in some general area they can be presumed to have been the founders of Kushana , itself a kingdom or empire known only by indirection, through coins and the interpretations of snippets of text, or from artistic remains and presumed artistic influences. For other peoples, such as Germans or Slavs , historical references are abundant, even to fully-fledged historical accounts and chronicles, but the information is disperse and lacking in precision, requiring therefore interpretation and "restoration". Nevertheless, peoples in any of these categories, even though their direct or specific relation to existing states is sometimes tenuous--Germans imply Germany, but which Germans precisely?--are a necessary part of historical realism.
There is one category of peoples which cannot be disputed but which lends itself to controversy. Historical languages had pre-historical antecessors, which obviously were spoken by peoples. Historical languages are associated to historical states. But it is very difficult to associate pre-historical languages to specific states, or even to peoples in the vaguest sense of that term for that matter. But historical realism must recognize a generally accepted classification of the main language families of the world. These can be presented in the form of the names of peoples: Afro-Asiatics , Balts , Bantus (as the main group of the Niger-Congo family of languages), Indo-Europeans, and so on. But was there ever a people who could be called Indo-European?
Comparative linguistics and paleolinguistics claim that, yes, there was a proto-Indo-European language which was spoken by a people. Common sense leads to the conclusion that if we start from a modern language and we proceed backwards there will come a point when darkness ensues. But nihil ex nihilo est and so in the darkness of pre-history there had to have been ancestors of present day languages among which there existed an originary form of Indo-European, the granddaddy (in very general terms) of European, of Iranian, and of Indian languages (above a linguistic divide in the Indian subcontinent).
The controversial aspect of this seemingly innocuous argument is that Nazi eugenic quackery was based on a proposed linguistics category, "Aryan", to which certain racial and ethnic properties were ascribed. Therefore, it could seem that to include in a work of historical reference a term such as Indo-Aryans would be to follow a bad Nazi example. The proponent of "Aryan" as the name for European languages, Max Müller, was appalled at the 19th-century racist use of the term "Aryan" and argued that to derive "Aryans" from "Aryan" was like saying that a dictionary was "long-headed".
Whatever the Nazis said, the inferable fact remains that if there did exist an early Indo-European language, then some people with certain characteristics must have spoken it. The Nazi lie lay in inventing traits for "Aryans", such as that they were racially "pure" and "superior". When the historically realistic perspective uses Indo-Iranians or Caucasians --another linguistic category to which, this time in America, racial characteristics were arbitrarily attached--what is meant is a people about which all that can be said is that they spoke a certain tongue at some place and at some time in pre-history.
The more pertinent question is: why does a realistic historical perspective bother with linguistic categories at all? The answer is that no historical reference work ever stops at the edge of history. It cannot. History is the daughter of pre-history. Normally, pre-history is associated with archaeology. But it has long been accepted as at least a possibility that languages--living, classical, obsolete, or archaic--are the equivalent of the largest, the most inexhaustible (although also perhaps the most potentially misleading) archaeological dig in history. Hence, through the study of languages we can say that southern Xinjiang province in China was settled by peoples who spoke languages related to Latvian and Lithuanian; that reindeer-herding Lapplanders or Sami are distant cousins of Hungarians (who got their name from a tribe of Turks); that Arabs and Hebrews wandered together in the distant past, perhaps speaking the same or mutually comprehensible languages; and, of course, the discovery that got the archaeo-linguistic ball rolling, that Sanskrit, Ancient Persian, and Classical Greek are branches of the same trunk.
History contains many indisputable facts. But facts do not necessarily lead to other facts. Logic is unavoidable; otherwise we would be knocking into walls or calling out to people we confuse for others. But premises are not always incontestable. Hence, we have syllogisms or deductions which are formally impeccable, but whose truth-value is below absolute standards. These are interpretations. If on certain issues there is no interpretation "worthier" than another, then decisions are made in what essentially constitutes a coin-toss. Some historians look askance at such a reasoning, but they know that is the way it is. The coin-toss is the most controversial aspect of historiography. It is sometimes also the most attention-grabbing.
Historical realism, to close, is a method of interpreting and narrating history. It is different from the encyclopedic approach. The phrase might even seem redundant in the sense that all historiography must be assumed to be "realistic" as a commitment to facts. We have tried in this essay to give historical realism some meaning and contents. Under whatever name, the purpose is to inform as accurately and handily as possible. |