In support of hybridity. A response to Stephennie Mulder, Ian Straughn and Ruth Young

Abstract

loom large in the history of the field of heritage in Europe and the United States, Atatürk, one might argue, couldn’t have cared less what European preservationists thought. He had his own agenda. It was a local one, to serve local interests. The point here is not that we shouldn’t critique the ‘authorized heritage discourse’ (AHD) as hegemonic heritage discourse that leads to a distorted and unequal allocation of heritage value and resources (we should), but that in making the AHD the main focus of our critique we also, perhaps ironically, risk according it more value than it actually possesses, certainly in local communities. One complement to a necessary critique of any hegemonic narrative is to build alternate narratives, and defining a notion of the ‘Islamic’ in heritage helps build and give depth, value and visibility to a local model for heritage preservation practices (Mahdy 2019). Yet it is important to clarify a still frequently misunderstood point: that in its current usage ‘Islamic’ does not only refer to spiritual practice or religious faith alone but to the long, 1,400-year history of the entirety of cultural production in the lands that fell under the rule of Muslim sovereigns. As Shahab Ahmed and Wendy M.K. Shaw have recently argued, in this context, heritage sites and objects that were created by Christians, Jews, Hindus and others can justifiably be called ‘Islamic’ (Ahmed 2015; Shaw 2019). Thus, as has recently been argued, the classical heritage of the Middle East and Europe was and continues to be claimed as a crucial factor in shaping Islamic heritage (Munawar 2019). And this troubling of the ‘Islamic’ also challenges the tidy orthodoxies we use to define the ‘West’ – since Islam always was, and continues to be, a vital shaping force in the history of the West – indeed, a critical part of the history of the European Renaissance in which Western heritage values ultimately find their roots (Trivellato 2010). As Ahmed puts it, ‘Islam contains multitudes’; it has always been a vast sea of competing, sometimes contradictory, discourses. Its long history equally embodies a range of complex traditions with respect to heritage preservation (Rico 2020a; Mulder 2017). To define a site as ‘Islamic’ is not to fix it, then, within the narrow limits of a spiritual tradition – in fact, that narrow view of Islam is one forged by the Western intellectual tradition, and one I am certain that Rico would agree we’d do well to stop reinforcing. It’s our notion of ‘Islamic’ that needs to be expanded, and in doing so, our understanding of Islamic heritage must expand along with it.