Race in the Islamicate Middle East: Reflections after Heng

Abstract

When we go looking for the present in the past we always find it, a reflection of our own desire that speaks to the time and place we began our search. This problem is well known to historians of premodern science, the term itself in its singular representing a stumbling block to understanding how scholars, practitioners, and their societies classified and pursued knowledge of the natural world. In order to avoid the teleology of shearing all knowledge and practice from whatever does not lead to the science of the twentieth century, such historians turn science into natural philosophy or employ it in the plural, sciences, as discrete bodies of knowledge lacking a unifying method, some mathematical, some drawing on empirical observation, some rooted in the occult.2 This attention to terminology plays a small if initial role in how these historians hope to describe past attempts to understand and intervene in the natural world. Without such attention to the words we use, they argue, we risk misreading the past out of a desire to find there our present moment and our present understandings. To be sure, there are continuities across time, but these must be held in balance with the contingencies of past contexts. With race, we face a similar challenge with another term that gained its current significance in the nineteenth century, but which can plausibly be translated from concepts found in languages around the Mediterranean from antiquity until the present