Archaeology, Politics and Islamicate Cultural Heritage in Europe - David J. Govantes-Edwards
14. Islamicate Archaeology and its Counter-Narratives
Archaeology, Politics and Islamicate Cultural Heritage in Europe - David J. Govantes-Edwards
Philip Wood [+]
Aga Khan University
Philip Wood is Associate Professor of History at Aga Khan University, Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilisations. He completed his Oxford DPhil in 2007 with Professor Averil Cameron and has previously taught at Oxford, Cambridge and SOAS. He has published three books with OUP on late antique Syria and Iraq and is working on a fourth book on the early Abbasid Jazira (750-850), focussing on the works of the patriarch of Antioch, Dionysius of Tel-Mahre (818-45). He also publishes on contemporary issues of social integration and religious education.
Description
This paper argues that the history and archaeology of Muslims in Europe has often been caught between the urge to exclude Muslims from nationalist historiography and the wish to generate apologetic histories that celebrate this history. I advocate use of Marshall Hodgson’s coinage ‘Islamicate’ as a starting point of differentiating for differentiating between forms cultural change that result of textual traditions that are applied in practice and those that stem from the dissemination of practices within the shared networks of Muslim polities.