The Venture of Islam, Volume 1: The Classical Age of Islam

"This was perhaps the most influential book for my own work. It’s a groundbreaking study of the whole history of the Islamic world. Marshall Hodgson didn’t live very long, and it was published after his death—but he became a very influential historian of the Islamic world. One of the things that the book does is it connects different parts of the Islamic world. He connects the Middle East with Iran and Central Asia and also with South and Southeast Asia. He looks at Islamic civilization as a whole, with a world history perspective. He coined the term ‘Islamicate’ to describe things that are influenced by Islam as a culture but are not religious. He spoke of the ‘Islamicate world.’ His book is still so influential. For me, it was inspiring because he takes Shiism very seriously. Iran is a central node in his book. He also sees 1500 as a strong break between the early Muslim empires and the early modern Muslim empires. Most accounts of Islam don’t devote much time to Shiism. Historically, it was seen as a sect. The early Orientalists, writers who wrote about Islam and Islamic history—perhaps influenced by engagement with the Sunni Ottoman Empire—gave us an account of Islam which was the Sunni view. Then they said, ‘There’s also the Shia view’ and devoted perhaps a few pages to it. Marshall Hodgson really put that relationship between Sunnism and various forms of Shiism as one of the main themes of the book and places Iran at the heart of wider Islamic history. Yes. It was put together after his death, so it doesn’t really have footnotes. The footnotes that it does have are often just sideswipes against colleagues he didn’t like. So the book is infamous in many ways. I went in the opposite direction in my book, referencing extensively. Since the 1960s there has been an explosion in scholarship on various aspects of Middle Eastern and Islamic history. I really tried to draw on all these subfields for the book. I also wanted to do justice to all these scholars who’ve written about specific people or places or ideas or movements. There have been many critics of Marshall Hodgson. The book is now 50 years old and there have been a lot of developments, both historically and in the literature. But, overall, his book was an inspiration for me. I read it as a student. It’s one of the earliest global histories and it places the Islamic world, from North Africa all the way to Indonesia, at the heart of global history. If you think about it, that does make sense. It’s a central, vast area of the world that is influenced by Islam in one way or another, and that is central to the making of the modern world. It is an amazing book, but it’s probably not bedtime reading. It’s three volumes, and they’re all pretty big. You will probably fall asleep, but that’s not what we mean by bedtime reading. It’s pretty well written for an academic history book."