LAHORE: “History is always changing, including the things that we think don’t change, including religion. Religion also keeps changing. I mean people were not practising the same religion in Al-Andalus in the ninth century as they were practising in the 10th or 15th century.”

This was stated by Spanish scholar Eduardo Manzano Moreno who was a part of session, Retrieving the Past, what constitutes historical methodologies and what the historical sources a historian must obtain to proffer rigorous insights? The session was moderated by BBC journalist Mishal Husain and had Aysha Jalal and Diana Darke as other participants.

Darke agreed with Moreno and talked about her own experiences in architecture saying that buildings never lied and they had history written over them for the eye that could read minutely.

She said the concept Romanesque was invented in the 19th century by a pair of French art historians and her book Islamesque: The Forgotten Craftsmen Who Built Europe’s Medieval Monuments, was aimed at tracking every single element of the so-called Romanesque and show that it entered Europe through the Islamic world and there it was more accurate to call it Islameque which meant complete overturning of European art history. “I am sure it is very very unpopular among European art historians,” she added.

Mr Moreno said his latest book was on caliphate of Cordoba. In The Court of the Caliphate of al-Andalus; Four Years in Umayyad Córdoba, he tried to show the extent of things that people knew about the Muslims in Spain. He said the historians had changed completely the Islamic period in Spain and the country had invested a lot of money to change its history as thousands of Arab manuscripts had been edited.

Ayesha Jalal said her new book was based on Urdu sources and thereby expanding the colonial archive which had restricted understanding of Islam primarily notions of theology and jurisprudence. She said she wanted to look at literature and was particularly interested in the question of history. “In the South Asian intellectual history, we have categories and instead of engaging with the actual thought, we attempted to work with categories, traditional, classical, modern and fundamental. When you read them on your own terms, you find that there is much greater fluidity and cross fertilization of ideas.” Jalal said she questioned the notion of eastern and western knowledge which was an accumulative effort.

She said Urdu authors had used the words like open minded, Roshan Khayal, Azad Khayal but never used the term liberalism in the language that adopted so many English words. She said these people were open-minded and she was seeing closing of the space now in the post-colonial world. She said the hyphen in post-colonialism meant continuity of colonialism but now we even can’t blame the colonial masters because there is an elite that had persisted with colonial ideas.

Diana Darke said she would not have written anything about architecture if the fire at Notre-Dame Cathedral had not occurred because the Islamic influences in European cathedrals had Islamic influences and I thought other people also knew about them but the fire made it very clear that everybody just assumed that it was only European genius which had produced these remarkable buildings which annoyed her. “Out of anger I put out that tweet that the origin of all gothic cathedrals is still standing on the hilltop is war-torn Syria, a church called Qalb Lozeh which is still there in a village in Idlib province.”

Talking about her other book ‘Stealing from Saracens’ she said “saracens” comes from the Arabic verb “saraqa,” meaning to steal and she said Saracens were called as looters and thieves, leading to a double pun in the title of the book. She asked whether it was not crazy that “we are calling people thieves when we stole things from them”.

Eduardo Manzano Moreno said his interest in history started as the history of Spain was not very well-known and there was also a lot of mystification about it along with romantic ideas. “The amount of nonsense we have is phenomenal. History of the people and civilization without mystery had to be recuperated.” He said there was a lot of misunderstanding about the Islamic period and he was trying to get answers for it.

Published in Dawn, February 22nd, 2025