Sarah Griswold's "Resurrecting the Past"

Sarah Griswold is Associate Professor of History at Oklahoma State University. She has published articles in the Journal of the Western Society for French History, War & Society, and the Journal of the History of Collections.

Griswold applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Resurrecting the Past: France's Forgotten Heritage Mandate, and reported the following:

From page 99:

...the latter dynasty having displaced the Umayyads, moved the seat of Islamic power to Baghdad, and encouraged a historicization of their predecessors as despotic and decadent. German scholar Julius Wellhausen’s Das arabische Reich und sein Sturz (1902) most influentially chipped away at the old paradigm, his book asserting the bias of Abbasid historiographers. Meanwhile, the Jesuit priest Henri Lammens, a historian of early Islam at the Université. Saint-Joseph in Beirut, became a leading public apologist for reinterpreting the Umayyads, doing so on either side of World War I; his La Syrie (1921)—written at the behest of the French High Commission—repositioned the long-discredited Umayyads as both Syria’s best Islamic legacy and Islam’s apogee, characterizing the religion as in moral, political, and cultural decline ever after.

It was thus amid this broader reformulation of the Umayyads that work at the Great Umayyad Mosque took shape, the site becoming a showpiece of the French regime’s focus on the Islamic past, and for multiple reasons. For one, it remained geographically axial and religiously dynamic in present-day Damascus. Built from 706 to 715, the Great Mosque continued to anchor the old city in the 1920s.

Does the Page 99 Test work in the case of Resurrecting the Past? I think so: oui. Page 99 drops readers into my 300-page book, which focuses broadly on heritage work in the French mandate for Syria and Lebanon, a regime set up after WWI. The page distills a critical shift that the book traces from the Christian preservation projects that anchored France’s initial claims in the Levant to projects about the Islamic past that seemed more politically serviceable by the late 1920s. The page, moreover, is neatly half text, half image--a layout that, if not all that common in the book, is still telling about its methods and arguments.

The text alludes to how French officials in Damascus had started to rethink what heritage should mean in a mandate setting that no longer felt "controlled" or practicable in the long-term. The image—a 1931 aerial photograph taken by France's aviation forces—shows Damascus' Great Umayyad Mosque, whose rediscovered 8th-century mosaics were suddenly being hailed by French heritage specialists as proof of earlier Christian and Islamic coexistence. The glittering tiles, French officials suggested, showed historical cooperation—and, by implication, justified French involvement in Syria and Lebanon.

It's also noteworthy that my page 99 suggests how images work in Resurrecting the Past. The book depends on images because the mandate’s heritage work did also. And this particular photograph illustrates a point that I make throughout the book: that heritage was produced through a dialectic relationship between representation and materiality.

Here we get a classic “view from above" of the Mosque that was shot by French military photographers and appeared in magazines back in France. The image is a reminder that the French wanted to frame how the Mosque was presented to French publics back home. But the Mosque is also, very clearly in its own right, a massive structure anchored in the heart of Damascus, and those properties gave the site qualities that often eluded French attempts at control.

You can see here, all on page 99, how real materiality and representational framing both defined heritage-making.

Learn more about Resurrecting the Past at the Cornell University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue