HF Forum Response_Coller

7/31/2019 HF Forum Response_Coller

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The great historian of the Soviet Union (and a fellow Melburnian), Sheila

Fitzpatrick once asked me whether I felt I belonged to an international

cosmopolitan community of historians. At the time I was not sure that I did, but

reading the responses of the four historians who have invested their time and

energy to respond to my book on this H-France forum, I feel very certain that Ido belong to such a community. I am very grateful to each of them, and to the

editors of H-France, for their generosity in offering me such an opportunity, and I

hope that I can respond in kind with what follows.

The Chateau de Vincennes, with its moat, drawbridge and looming stone

towers, is an odd fragment of a pre-revolutionary world sitting among apartment

blocks at the eastern edge of Paris. It certainly seems an unlikely place to go

looking for the history of Arabs in France. But there this story really began.

Trudging daily, over the course of several months, through leaves, mud and ice to

the rather infelicitously named SHAT (Service Historique de lArme de Terre), Isaw the first the edges of something greater than the sum of scattered fragments:a phenomenon that had its own historical contours, an emigration, a . Returning

to Australia, and combing through the mass of notes, files and documents I had

collected, I was confronted with the challenge of trying to talk about something

that had not previously been described. I felt a responsibility to these people

who had been written out of history, to get it right.

As a doctoral student who came to history from cultural studies, I became

quite aware of the hollowness of the grand statements I had once been so ready

to pronounce. In the most humbling moments - what one may call the loneliness

of the long distance historian one invokes ever more urgently that imagined

community of historians: those who have come before us and provided the tools,as well as those who will come after and build more securely upon our imperfect

beginnings. History does not really exist until it is shared. It must be debated,

argued over, rethought, pulled apart and put back together. An original and

unexamined subject is an irresistible opportunity, but it is also a danger: the

danger that one is arguing furiously only with oneself. In a sense I was fortunate

that during my doctoral research, a book called Le Paris Arabe was published,which both scooped my original subject, and set me free to speak about

something different: not so much an Arab presence in France, but a history of a

key period in French history from another perspective, that of its earliest

significant Arab population. I was fortunate to have had a publisher willing to

give me the scope and the breathing space to let this new project emerge more

fully from the old. It is one of the great and necessary rites of passage, therefore,

for this project to forge its own way into the world, and to be subject to the

unflinching gaze of sympathetic but incisive readers.

The four historians who reviewed the book for this forum have shown

great generosity in their judgements, and I thank them sincerely for their kind

words, while paying close attention to the important criticisms they have raised.

Each reviewer found different elements to praise, which is quite natural given

their different fields of interest, but in many ways the areas that they identified

as problems had some very significant areas of overlap. The book tries to do a

great deal perhaps too much and its argument is in places very dense. It dealswith a significant period of French history but also with key aspects of history in


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the Egyptian refugees in Marseille. As both Heuer and Sessions suggest, thismaterial deserves more than an anecdotal development, and should be part of a

greater attention to the role of gender, of marriage and the family, and the crucial

differences between those symbolical and practical arrangements among the

Arab community, the other groups around them, and the official French society

in which they functioned. Napoleonic changes in the law of marriage, inheritanceand divorce, the return of the church, and questions of licit and illicit sexuality

constitute an unsaid of the book, which needs careful historical analysis of the

kind Heuer has attempted to undertake, and I look forward to further dialogue

on this important subject.

Thirdly, but perhaps relatedly, is the question of Islam, which is certainly

foregrounded in the title, though I made clear in the introduction that I did not

intend to undertake at this point a study of Islam as a religion, but rather as a

transnational space like that of Europe against which it is contrasted. Thesespaces, and the changing relationship between them, are crucial to the

developments charted in the book, and if the subtitle presents a rather

provocative spur to thinking about such questions, I do not regret this in the

least. On the other hand, it is true that the question of Islam as a religion, and its

relationship to these developments, took a rather secondary position in the book,

in large part because the majority of the Arabs discussed here were Christian

(but originating from, and maintaining close links with an Islamicate society) but

also because of the near total absence of evidence regarding the religious

practice of those Muslims among the emigration. I have already written

elsewhere (in French) about this question, and developed at much greater length

a discussion of the meaning of this absence. But I agree wholeheartedly that it is

a subject deserving a far greater development, and my present projects will do

what they can to open up this space, which I find the most exciting andcompelling direction to emerge from the book.

Lastly, I was particularly engaged by the responses of Julia Landweber

and Jennifer Sessions on the question of identity and difference, both in the

present and in the past, and their rise to the challenges that the book threw out. I

made a deliberate choice to tell what is, for some perhaps unusually, a

chronological and narrative history. Many of the most powerful stories we

choose to tell in the world today are constructed in this way. I wanted to speak to

and within those narratives, to show that they can be told differently. The many

theoretical and political questions that arose were dealt with only in passing,

although they were the fruit of a great deal of struggle and questioning. As my

reviewers rightly observed, this is a book that does intend to speak to the great

challenges of multiculturalism facing almost all societies today, to the questions

of identity dogging politics and the social sciences, and the warmongering

rhetoric of irreducible cultural and religious difference attending the appalling

tragedies of the World Trade Centre and the Iraq war. The decision to undertake

the thesis was made in the the hills above Dharamsala in the days following

September 11 2001, and it is certainly a plea to think differently about our

common past, even as it tries to avoid simplistic resorts to the comparison

between republican and multicultural systems, the condemnation of Jacobin

centralisation or distasteful references to some putative systme anglo-saxon.

The book came out just as peoples across the Arab world were defying with themost extraordinary courage the stories they had been told by kleptocratic


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dictators and the democratic governments that coddled them. Egypt has

emerged once again as a crucial crossroads of the modern world, in ways many

of the Egyptians of early nineteenth century France would have understood and

celebrated. But these revolutions, sweeping form one Arab state to the next,

leaving not a single one untouched, demonstrated the power of an Arab identity

that the decades since 1967 had eclipsed, the spread of ideas, of technologies, ofrevolution through the Arabic language and through the shared forms of a

society shaped by Islam, but composed of many religions and confessions. In this

sense, I concur wholeheartedly with Jennifer Sessions whose groundbreaking

book on the French invasion of Algeria has just appeared that, while payingclose attention to the salutary intervention of Frederick Cooper and Rogers

Brubaker, identity cannot be so readily eliminated from our analyticalvocabulary. The term identification both by the state or other social

authorities, and voluntarily as an assertion of belonging by subjects themselves is indispensable, but it does not serve to describe what groups in diaspora or

the people on the streets of Cairo and Damascus today

are fighting for. I argued

in the book that identity must be understood as a projectrather than as a fixed or

stable category, something more than belonging, more than classification, more

even than privileges or rights aplace in which people can feel they quitenaturally move, in which they can respect others and be respected themselves.

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HF Forum Response_Coller