I have been getting some comments on my previous post to the effect of: How dare you repeat claims of racism without proving them yourself, de novo? The answer to that question is that having read the blog posts so accused and having read the arguments that bear out those claims, I find them convincing. I’ve read the claims, I’ve read the evidence presented for those claims, and I’ve accepted it. It is worth mentioning that racism or no racism isn’t the central point of that post, but rather the question of how scholars grapple with the work of those so credibly accused; but I did have to repeat those claims in order to be able to illustrate the example. I did not think that I needed to re-prove the claims, however, when they have been proven elsewhere.
I bring this up not because I’m particularly interested in carrying on that conversation per se but because it gets to a larger question that is present, in varying degrees, in how we think about writing and sourcing both for the public at large and for academic audiences. The question is this: How do we decide when to accept work that has been done before us and when to reject and redo it?
For me, the most recent manifestation of this question came when I was invited by the editor of a magazine aimed at a general audience with an interest in the Middle Ages to write a shorter version of the chapter I’m currently working on for my second book project. One of the works that I am analyzing in the chapter is a graphic novel loosely based on the life of Samuel ibn Naghrīla that leverages his biography in the service of modern political commitments that are laid particularly clear when one learns that its author was devotee of Jewish Defense League founder Meir Kahane.
The editor wasn’t comfortable with my citing a peer-reviewed journal article that gave a biographical sketch of the author and delineated his political leanings and instead wanted me to do original biographical research on the author before assuming a political affiliation that even his obituaries acknowledge. But in order to be able to move the state of knowledge forward, there are certain things that we read, assess, accept, and build upon. Time runs short and the work is unending. If I first have to rewrite a history of the JDL when the work has already been done in a satisfactory way, I’m not going to move forward and write the history of how JDL members and aficionados refashioned the Middle Ages in their own image.
And in fact, I ended up not publishing the piece in that magazine because I wanted to spend my sabbatical going forwards rather than redoing work that had already been done to acceptable standards. (There were a number of other editorial disagreements that led to the decision, but this is the one that’s relevant here.) Is the lay reading public interested in the Middle Ages served by backing me into a corner, so that I have to choose going backwards or going nowhere at all?
One of my senior colleagues has a beautiful way of phrasing this: We have to trust our craft. We have the tools to assess what is presented to us, both primary and secondary sources; and we can exercise our judgment about when those secondary sources present a questionable narrative that requires reevaluation and when we can use it as part of the foundations for our further work. It’s a bit of a facile example, but I don’t re-prove that medieval Hebrew poetry adapted its meters and rhyme schemes from Arabic poetry every time that I write about that body of poetry. I’ve read close to a millennium of scholarship (because medieval grammarians and historians wrote about this before their modern heirs did) on the topic and it’s good. I can run with it. I’ve been training to read text since I was 18 years old; by this point I trust my own judgment about what to rely on and what to revisit and the methodological tools that help me make those decisions.
And this all ultimately gets back to the subject of my last post, the question of not discarding earlier generations’ scholarship because we now reject their racism, sexism, etc. within scholarship rather than within writing for a general audience. While revisiting and interrogating the foundations of the field is an intellectually invigorating prospect, it’s not practical to reproduce 200 years worth of scholarship that was produced under conditions much more conducive to humanistic inquiry, much better funded, and (at least in the case of my field), before two centuries of modern warfare and political turmoil destroyed many of the manuscripts upon which our forebearers relied. And while digital technologies and increasing possibilities for academic collaboration means that recreating reference works might not take as long as it did in the 19th-century, those are still incredibly labor-intensive, time-intensive projects that require knowledge of the field cultivated over a long period of time. Furthermore, redoing everything already done forecloses the possibility of working on the materials that are still emerging. If I’m re-editing or re-translating the Nafḥ al-Ṭibb (which sorely needs it, to be quite honest), that means that I’m not working on, say, the manuscripts newly made available from the Timbuktu cache or the works of poetics that have been languishing, rediscovered but unpublished for 75 years. (I’m suddenly reminded of an admonition from one of my undergraduate professors of Arabic literature: Do your work carefully because it will be a minimum of 80 years before someone comes along and even thinks about redoing it.) Whether it is scholars or lay readers who would like us to reinvent the world anew every time we sit down to write, that is not the way that scholarship works.
While a field like Egyptology might change and update its understanding of certain symbols through both reflection upon its field’s foundations and as more texts are discovered, it’s never going to go back and re-solve hieroglyphic writing from scratch. Nor can we separate the foundations of our own personal knowledge from those of our fields. Those of us who learned languages from books of grammar written by Victorian Orientalists will never be able to go back and re-learn those languages in some other way even if we wanted to. While it might be an interesting intellectual exercise to think through whether we could teach or learn Arabic as the medieval Arab grammarians did, there are a number of insurmountable practical, methodological, and theoretical barriers to such a project. And so we are ourselves already implicated in the history of scholarship by virtue of having become scholars.
In a certain respect it’s kind of cool that the general public might imagine that scholars create everything for ourselves every time we sit down to do work (and it’s aspirational to think about it ourselves): in that image, the myth of the lone genius inheres in each of us. But it can also lead to devastating disappointment when they realize that part of what we do is assess earlier work and choose to build upon it and are never lone geniuses. Making clear our intellectual lineages and how me make those kinds of judgment calls must, then, be a part of how we present our work to the public (and to our students). If just linking to a peer-reviewed article isn’t enough to clarify to lay readers what the process of scholarship is and why that article is a sound foundation, then perhaps public writing could include a kind of scholarly “how I got the story” sidebar of the kind that newspapers sometimes write in order to explain their process to their readers; in scholarly writing, we spell out our methodologies and commitments. There’s not just one right possibility, not one right way of grappling with earlier scholarship, and not one right way of presenting it to the public; but what is clear is that there is still quite a lot of work to be done on all fronts. And that is pretty exciting.
May this be a year of thoughtful methodologies and much productivity for everyone!
