Pascal Buresi

The research I conduct at the CNRS and the teaching I offer at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (particularly in Lyon centre of the EHESS) extend and renew my previous studies and the European research programme I led, entitled “Imperial authority and Government in Medieval Western Islam”. My experience of research and teaching led me to bring language and religion closer together around the question of power, in a peripheral space of the Islamic Empire: the Maghreb, whose history raises precisely central questions about the evolution of religion, the Arabic language, powers and political practices in Islam.
The renewal of studies on the Islamic Middle Ages requires the re-historicisation of the Arabic language, a reasoned comparison avoiding the traps of Orientalism and an attention not to the norm, but to the transgression, particularly significant in societies where innovation must be hidden behind the veil of tradition to be validated. Indeed, once the grammatical rules of “classical Arabic” had been elaborated, gradually emerged the belief in the anhistoricity of this language, which is still diverse; this led to serious misinterpretation and it is still a barrier to historical studies. The converging work of codicologists, manuscript specialists and linguists reveals the diversity of Arabic languages, despite the existence of a practically unchanging reference model at the heart of Islamic hermeneutics. The notion of the ‘Middle Arabic’, developed since the end of the nineteenth century by some linguists, reflects the vitality of a classical Arab whose very existence is thus called into question. The weight of tradition in the religious and linguistic fields makes innovation and neologism suspect respectively. The studies of 19th and early 20th century scholars, focusing on the norm, inevitably tended to reinforce at the same time essentialist prejudices and theological approaches that assimilated origins (tirelessly reconstructed) to an impassable norm and any evolution to a loss. Yet the creativity of the poet-embroiderers has never been interrupted; it uses linguistic devices that allow it never to appear as an innovation, but more surely as a respect for an unchanging tradition. The invention of new nominal or verbal forms most often appears in pragmatic medieval texts as the revelation of an original meaning present at the heart of the trilitary nucleus. However, either the term has already been used several centuries ago and its meaning has inevitably evolved, or a new form has just been created and we are witnessing a lexical genesis that deserves particular attention.
Arabic language and literature, Muslim religion and dogma, political authority and the exercise of power, positive law and divine law, thus constitute the four disciplinary fields that I am working simultaneously as a historian of the Maghreb chancelleries to try to understand the functioning of Islamic powers in the Middle Ages. This is the challenge: to re-contextualise the ideological history of the Maghreb, understood in the broadest sense (political, religious, legal), not only in a chronological continuum from the Arab conquest of the seventh century to the fifteenth century, but also in a synchrony that extends from India to the Atlantic. Indeed, scholars, armies and texts circulated throughout the medieval Muslim world: movement of Arab tribes from the East, pilgrimage and quest for knowledge by Western scholars, exile of Andalusian scholars before Iberian Christian troops. While the reference model of authority is eastern and Arab, regional developments and new political and ideological formations determine this model back.
The need for a parallel re-historicisation of language and religion is particularly acute at the beginning of the 21st century. It is not only scientifically, but also politically, that it is time to promote the issue of the historicity of Islam and the Arabic language, which is closely linked to it.