A NEW PERIODIZATION | 87A related issue is the study of intellectual systems over long periods, which
also provokes charges of “teleolog y,” especially if some later phase is presented
as “orthodox” or “classical.” That constructs popularly viewed as orthodox/
classical do exist, it would be fatuous to deny. Part of the historian’s job is to
trace what produced such consensus and the sense of identity that derives
from it. At the same time, though, one has to be careful about viewing cul-
tural constructs at a given point in time mainly as “tendencies” on the way to
a “classical crystallization” visible only to us, retrospectively. Just one exam-
ple: ninth- and tenth- century Arabic philosophy has often been studied as a
phase on the way to the formation of Latin scholastic philosophy and then
the Renaissance. This is a particularly shameless teleolog y because it validates
one culture only in terms of another. In the present book, Arabic philosophy
is acknowledged to have had its own independent story right down to the
present day. Among my objectives is to describe the formation of what
came—and in different ways continues—to be regarded as a distinctively “Is-
lamic” spectrum of ways of thinking. Therefore, in selecting my ninth- and
tenth- century materials, I have an eye to what proved durable and influential.
That is indeed “teleological,” but it allows that there are various possible out-
comes, not just one, namely Latin Europe. (Of course, “The Golden Age of
Baghdad” may also turn out to be Euro- teleological, if it is used as a yardstick
by which to “prove” that Muslims then spent the whole Second Millennium
“declining.”)
Finally, some reflections on the First Millennium in contemporary usage.
So far the concept has not attracted narrative historians. Its debut may have
been in 1985 in Paul Veyne’s Histoire de la vie privée 1: De l’Empire romain à
l’a n mil; but the millennial aspect of this enterprise was so underwhelming
that the English translation was titled From pagan Rome to Byzantium. The
First Millennium mainly attracts archaeologists and historians interested in
the material culture and economy of the Latin and Germanic worlds. They
do not want to tie their subject down chronologically because they have so
much difficulty dating their materials; they are also not usually prime sus-
pects for promoting a Christian or Muslim interpretation of history. The
proceedings of the Bradford University First Millennium Symposium, also
held in 1985, provocatively proposed termini that have absolutely nothing to
do with each other (wide distribution of Arretine/Samian pottery; adoption
of Romanesque architecture), proclaimed the autonomy of material evi-
dence from written sources, and accepted labels like “Roman,” “German,”
“Saxon,” or “medieval” only as necessary “myths” to ease communication
with the outside world.^107 Such communication was achieved more success-
fully by Klaus Randsborg’s The first millennium AD in Europe and the Medi-
107 R. Reece, “How to study the millennium,” in R. F. J. Jones and others (eds), First Millennium
papers: Western Europe in the First Millennium AD (Oxford 1988) 3–9.