Micro-narrative and the Historiography of the Modern Middle East

Abstract

Most recent scholarship on the early-20th-century Eastern Arab World (Mashriq) has been preoccupied with locating the words and actions of historical actors into one or more of three overarching and interconnected (post-colonial) themes: colonialism, nationalism, and modernity. As a result, historians have produced very few micro-narratives whose protagonists are individuals from the region and which take as their starting point the prosaic concerns of daily life. What explains this historiographical trend? The relative scarcity of micro-narratives is due to a number of factors, including challenges in using particular genres of Arabic source-materials, as well as the impact of Edward Said’s Orientalism generally and post-colonial concerns about narrative as a mode of representation in particular. Two fragments from the life-story of an early-20th-century Arab soldier are introduced in order to show how these factors play out in the crafting of a micro-narrative.