Western Influence On Islam

Current misconceptions of Muslim countries today in the West stem from the West’s belittling perceptions and depictions of “the East.” Many scholars’ writings, such as George Hegel, wrote problematic cultural representations of Islamic history based upon fictional, Western images of the “Orient.” Despite Fernand Braudel’s attempts in writing an improved history on Islamic civilization, he still suffers from a significant Hegelian slant that includes Orientalism and Idealism. In contrast, Richard Eaton proposes a new method and vision of studying Islamic history, which consists of using social history and viewing the Muslim world as a global civilization, hence stripping away the European stereotypes of Islam from Braudel’s work and the ongoing …show more content…
He explains that previous Western historians tended to rely solely on traditional Muslim texts that were written by Muslim scribes heavily influenced by political leaders. Therefore, previous Western scholarship on Islam tended to portray it as a “tradition”, unaffected by “historical process.” Conversely, recent historians have begun to view the rise of Islam with social history and an empirical view. Rather than simply using traditional Islamic texts, scholars searched for any sort of contemporary source or artifact outside the Muslim body such as non-Islamic written texts, tax registers or archeological data. Scholars working with these sources find that they can compare, contrast or synthesize these works to renovate former, oversimplified understandings of early Islamic history. These findings revise the received wisdom regarding issues like early Muslim conquests. Older speculations pictured the invasions as a “random or unorganized influx of ragtag hordes pushed out … by population pressure” but recent studies suggests that early Muslim invaders had in fact used well planned and thought-out military tactics with a central headquarter in Medina. Therefore, social history displays a more accurate description of