Salman Sayyid: In general Muslims are more literate in their canonical heritage than their history. It is the recovery of Muslims as world-makers and history-makers that is crucial to this task of Muslim autonomy. In practical terms it means challenging Eurocentric historiography and learning the history of Muslim agency. It means changing the frame of reference bequeathed to us by the colonial order and internalized by the Westoxicated, and presented as the truth. It means that those who support Muslim autonomy have to work with a purpose to articulate a counter-narrative rather than being apologists for Eurocentrism.
It is important to understand the role of history in the formation of political agency. Imagine a person without a memory—to what extent would they be a person? Imagine the loss of memory is not just forgetting their name, failing to recognize faces of people close to them, but even forgetting how to speak, forgetting what words mean. We would wonder whether such a person could function independently–even if physically they had no other impairment. Memory is not just about the past: it is rather the possibility of being able to act in the past, by orienting oneself to the future.
For Muslims the challenge of historiography is two-fold: Islamicate history has been replaced by nationalist historiography. It is becoming more and more difficult to tell the history of the Ummah and as a consequence it becomes difficult to project the Ummah into the future.
The second problem is to do with the nature of Eurocentric world history, which determines the direction of travel and destination of all societies. The closer the society is to becoming Westernized, the more it is considered to be progressive, modern, i.e., on the right side of history. Given that Europe/Christendom is in many ways invented by being contrasted with the Islamicate, the price for Muslims to become part of history’s stream is to become ex-Muslims. Thus Muslims are stripped of their history, and destined to become like people without memories, unable to act in present or project themselves into the future. More here.