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Patricia Crone
Post-Colonialism in Tenth-Century Islam
Carl-Heinrich Becker, the scholar who is commemorated in these lectures, wrote about the Arabs as colonisers, comparing them with modern colonial powers such as the British, and he would probably have been interested in post-colonialism, too, if he had he lived to see it. In a way you could say that he did live to see it, for the term “post-colonialism” is often taken to refer to the culture of peoples affected by colonial government from the very moment they were conquered, not simply from their recovery of independence. But it was only after the collapse of the colonial empires, in the wake of the Second World War, that the concept of post-colonialism acquired prominence, and Becker died in 1935. Even if he had been familiar with the concept, moreover, the fact that he saw the parallel between the Arab and the modern European empires does not necessarily mean that he would have deemed it appropriate to analyse the result in terms of post-colonialism. The wisdom of applying a concept referring to a modern experience to the tenth-century Muslim world may well strike many readers of this paper as questionable, too.
Der Islam, Walter de Gruyter
Print ISSN: 0021-1818
Volume: 83, 06/2006
Pages: 2 - 38