Beyond Essentialism

In Middle-Eastern and Central-Asian historiography the main criteria anchoring the narratives of Orientalists, nationalists, Islamicists, or Stalinists are their exclusive approaches to history from an elitist perspective. By assigning the agency in history to an elite that in its multiplicity could be clerics, secular intelligentsia, colonialist and social or political institutions, they not only deny the agency of subaltern and its autonomous consciousness but also by adopting an...
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In Middle-Eastern and Central-Asian historiography the main criteria anchoring the narratives of Orientalists, nationalists, Islamicists, or Stalinists are their exclusive approaches to history from an elitist perspective. By assigning the agency in history to an elite that in its multiplicity could be clerics, secular intelligentsia, colonialist and social or political institutions, they not only deny the agency of subaltern and its autonomous consciousness but also by adopting an essentialist approach they dehistoricize the process of social and cultural changes. The essentialism as a methodology enforces its authority more than in other spheres in the historiography of modernization and modern nation-state building in the Middle East and Central Asia. Here the narratives of reception and rejection of modernity both by native and non-native historians are exclusively dominated by essentialism. The three fundamental expressions of essentialism, which separately or concurrently present themselves in the Middle-Eastern or Central-Asian historiography, are over-generalization, Eurocentrism and reductionism.