What Is Islamic History? Muslims, Non-Muslims and the History of Everyone Else

Abstract This is a work of historical criticism, not a research article or a book review. It re-examines what we mean by ‘Islamic’ when we speak about the discipline of ‘Islamic history’, the standard term for the history of the lands where Muslims were politically and, in some senses, culturally dominant, especially during the Middle Ages. It investigates the consequences of this implicitly religious label for who is included in the grand narrative (Muslims, chiefly Sunnīs) and who is not (non-Muslims and Muslim minorities). It then proposes an alternative approach that favours geography and political periodisation as ways of organising how we think about the past in a more neutral fashion.