DancesWithCamels

In Alan Bennett’s 2006 play, The History Boys, one of the students preparing for the Oxbridge entrance exam is asked by his teacher how he defines history. ‘Well,’ he replies, ‘its just one fucking thing after another.’

The definition is not entirely lost on the Middle East.

It is certainly not because history in this region suffers from any kind of tedium or irrelevance. Indeed history in the Middle East explains identities, justifies nations and binds contemporary politics in a far more profound way than it often does in the West. The statement is more applicable to the history as written by historians.

In a region in which history asserts itself with such force, and so willingly offers combatants another arena of war, what of the historian hopelessly recording yet another fucking thing? The historian, at the top of any kind of tower, who waves new archival evidence at the crowds below, is unlikely to convince them to lay down their weapons of dates and definitions. Even the revisionists, for all their redefinitions, reconstructions and reviews do not stand much of a chance when faced with the might of collective memory and denial. The problem is, people do not much appreciate being told their history, they generally already know it.

So what is the point of the history of historians? No one is listening anyway.

Firstly, the situation is not new, nor is it unique to the Middle East, no one ever really paid that much attention to history and historians know it. They are however unlikely (most of the time) to describe their own work as writing about ‘one fucking after another.’ The incredible discoveries and sophisticated analysis speak for themselves and do not require this writer’s defence. Moreover, historians are perfectly aware of the wars of history, the manipulations of its boundaries and the power of the memories it leaves behind.

However history as an academic pursuit also has an inherent value, even when it operates quietly and even when most people are unaware of its existence or uninterested in its findings. Free and vibrant historical studies are a mark of the freedom and vitality of our society. Put simply, imagine a society without historians, without a desire to continually re-explore the past and without the opportunity to debate conclusions freely. When tyrants and dictators have taken nations, the ‘freedom to history’ is one of the first to be stolen. History too is tortured, forced to conform only to become a slave to the regime. We may not realise it and we may not read it but history makes us free.