The ‘post-modern condition’ that Jean-François Lyotard discussed in his famous essay of that name in 1979 is often associated with the imagery of fragments and ruins. With Derrida, every discourse is a bricolage, the deployment of concepts from ruined heritage.Footnote ¹ ‘At the end of my painful reconstruction, I had before me a kind of lesser library, a symbol of the greater, vanished one: a library made up of fragments, quotations, unfinished sentences, amputated stumps of books’, the monk Adso ponders at the end of Umberto Eco's post-modern credo, The Name of the Rose (1980), a novel that pays homage to Wittgenstein as the great philosopher of insufficiency.Footnote ²

The post-modern landscape is ruinous, but in relation to what? In its most tangible sense, this relates to Europe before the twentieth-century catastrophes, but in a conceptual sense to how some parts of Europe had believed themselves to be well beyond them. The powers that emerged victorious out of the world wars could still claim that modernity had meant progress in terms of economic and technological advancement, even if it may have sounded increasingly hollow in the shadow of nuclear armament. Morally and politically, however, at least two of them, Britain and France, already began to lose the global high ground in the post-war decades, leaving them in doubt about their superiority.

For large parts of the world, and indeed for large parts of Europe itself, the experience of modernity had been considerably more ambiguous. The Viennese thinkers that many Anglo-American postmodernists became fond of citing in the 1970s had been living in the ruins of a collapsing imperial modernity more than fifty years before.Footnote ³ In his novel A Mind at Peace, published in 1949 but set ten years earlier, the Turkish author Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar lets his protagonist ponder the decaying urban fabric of Ottoman Istanbul at the same time as the radio announces the German attack on Poland: a subtle dig at the notion that the cure for the alleged sickness of his country would be found in Europe.Footnote ⁴

In short, the ruins were already there for everyone to behold – the colonial powers Britain and France were simply the stragglers, who refused to admit it until the wave of decolonization swept over the world in the 1950s and 1960s. The 1970s saw disillusionment spread to the United States: the oil crisis, the withdrawal from Vietnam, and eventually the Iranian revolution all seemed to spell the rapid end of the self-proclaimed Western order, and in 1977 Edward Said put a horrendous bill on its table with his postcolonial manifesto Orientalism. This is not to say that radical modernity in its Russian or Chinese incarnation fared better: what was breaking down was not the modern way of life in itself, but the illusion of an underlying grand-scale order or logic.Footnote ⁵ Perhaps we had never been modern.Footnote ⁶ Or perhaps modernity had actually been about impermanence, dissonance, and fragmentation all along, and showed no regard for fixed concepts of culture or civilization.Footnote ⁷

In this context, it should be noted that the 1970s is also the decade when the term Late Antiquity enters scholarly discourse. Unlike Said and Lyotard, Peter Brown did not set out to make a statement about his own age when he wrote The World of Late Antiquity (1971), but the stated purpose of the book to take the reader into a world ‘caught between the regretful contemplation of ancient ruins and the excited acclamation of new growth’Footnote ⁸ chimes with the way Marshall Berman described a decade where people could no longer ‘afford to annihilate the past and present in order to create a new world ex nihilo; they had to learn to come to terms with the world they had, and work from there’.Footnote ⁹ Brown himself credits Henri-Irénée Marrou (1904–1977) with first using the term antiquitité tardive and underlines how Marrou's interpretations of the age of St Augustine mirrored the Christian humanist's own convictions and experiences of having lived through the mental and physical shock of the Second World War.Footnote ¹⁰ This is not to imply that ‘Late Antiquity’ is a mere projection of the post-modern mind, or that the fifth century carries a striking resemblance to the twentieth.Footnote ¹¹ Rather, the simultaneous appearance of Late Antiquity and post-modernity appears a logical consequence of how two interlocked readings of modernity and antiquity as closed and impenetrable paradigms were no longer capable of supporting and sustaining each other.Footnote ¹²

Post-colonial studies often problematize modern constructions of Antiquity on the basis of how they narrate its origins: for instance, how the classical or Graeco-Roman Mediterranean has been excised from of its larger Near Eastern context under the auspices of whiteness.Footnote ¹³ Martin Bernal was correct at least in highlighting how late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century scholarship on Ancient Greece paralleled the emerging Orientalist discourse and the nascent racial and colonial theories that would underpin it.Footnote ¹⁴ But how does not equal why: if the Modern or Western construction of Antiquity is Orientalist simply because it is Modern or Western, nothing has been explained at all, except a certain positional relativity in time and space. Of more interest is the question how much a desire to be at once modern and Western would have necessitated the construction of a classical Antiquity that was independent and autochthonous.Footnote ¹⁵ If Graeco-Roman antiquity had been inherently different from and superior to its wider historical and geographical context, nineteenth-century Europeans had found a secret refuge from the confusing realities of the growing globalization which it had unleashed upon itself, an esoteric mission which the heartless reason of an emerging secularism seemed to deny it. Like impossible bottles, which display ship models larger than the opening they would have to fit through, Antiquity and Modernity served as sealed, transparent containers for historical processes that appeared inexplicably large and created out of nothing (cf. fig. 1).

Fig. 1.

The ‘impossible bottles’: by sealing off Classical Antiquity at the beginning and the end, it becomes possible to narrate the story of the Modern West as a similarly airtight phenomenon – but the absence of Byzantium leaves no historical interface for contextualizing the rise of Islam. The only connection between the two bottles consists in a transfer of a secret knowledge or esoteric wisdom that appears to stand outside of history itself. Peter Brown's The World of Late Antiquity (1971) might be called the first concerted effort to uncork the first (ancient) bottle, but also needs to be read against the uncorking of the second (modern) one. Drawing by the author.

Of course, this illusion presumed that the bottles were closed not only at the bottom, but also at the neck. An ancient period with an unclear ending somewhere in the Middle East and the Middle Ages would be as embarrassing to the classicist's model of history as one with multiple origins in Egypt, Syria, Anatolia, or Mesopotamia. Classicism, but also Orientalism in the sense that Said and later post-colonial theorists have discussed, could only come into being if the intersectionality of the Byzantine Empire was ignored.Footnote ¹⁶ It was similarly vital to exclude its global entanglements from an exclusively Western European mission to the world.Footnote ¹⁷ Detached from the messy realities of a Near Eastern medieval empire, continuity between classical Antiquity and the modern West became a hermetic phenomenon in the truest sense of the word – from one airtight bottle to the other.Footnote ¹⁸

The consequences can be very clearly observed in the history of religions. The Graeco-Roman paradigm cannot ignore Judaism and Christianity: at least part of their history either takes place inside the bottle or at an observable distance, tentatively redeemable by it.Footnote ¹⁹ Islam, which appear after it was sealed, does not: hence it must appear as a product of the Orient itself, creative or destructive, frightening or enticing, admirable or despicable, but essentially different.Footnote ²⁰

Here, the term Late Antiquity makes a palpable difference. Revisionist scholarship on Islam has its breakthrough in the late 1970s, and it is worth noting how Patricia Crone questions traditional Islamic historiography on the grounds that it contains no traces of ‘the colorful world described by historians of late antiquity’.Footnote ²¹ If there had been no closed antiquity in the sense that some Europeans imagined, in the same sense as there had been no closed modernity, and Islam appears in a world where the Byzantine and Sasanian empires hold sway, ‘caught between the regretful contemplation of ancient ruins and the excited acclamation of new growth’, then Christianity and Islam can both be understood in terms of bricolage. The Princeton series in Studies of Late Antiquity and Early Islam that began to appear in 1981 has come to constitute the core in a fertile field of research that with time has mitigated the wildest revisionism but still firmly entrenched Islam in a context where it becomes more than a matter of revelation, conviction, and violence.

The need to render fragile all things solid (fragiliser), is how Peter Brown himself describes the impact of Michel Foucault, whose lectures he attended at Berkeley in 1980.Footnote ²² But vulnerability entails other challenges. A few years ago, in a lecture in Uppsala, one of the main initiators and editors of the Princeton series, Averil Cameron, warned that Islamic studies have now appropriated the term Late Antiquity to the point where Byzantium becomes relegated to the margins of a field which its scholars had fought dearly against the classicists to claim.Footnote ²³ It is a valid concern for what is still, by and large, an ‘excluded middle’ in the minds of the general public; but it is also interesting in consideration of the contested role that Islam holds within the post-modern paradigm. The 1970s was a major turning-point in the history of the modern Middle East, when Islamic movements began to fill the power vacuum of the crumbling socialist and nationalist endeavors of modernity; and Foucault has often be criticized for his writings from revolutionary Iran, in which he gravely misjudged the intentions of Khomeini.Footnote ²⁴ To many of its critics ever since, the post-modern shift has become associated with the idea of freedom from the confines of one world order merely at the cost of vulnerability and potential submission to another.Footnote ²⁵ Would it be logical to conclude that the world of Late Antiquity is becoming conquered by Islam, once again, as a consequence of post-modern relativism?

Part of this is related to another trend that becomes apparent in the 1970s: the rise of (post-colonial) ethnic identity culture and memory as an alternative to globalized modernity.Footnote ²⁶ Whereas it can both deepen and diversify our understanding of the past by highlighting forgotten or suppressed histories, a too strong emphasis on their untouchability runs the risk of replacing two impossible bottles with an entire museum of them, inherently fragile in their attempts to tell airtight histories.Footnote ²⁷ I have previously argued that this is where Byzantine history may offer a certain remedy, because the concept constantly challenges our efforts to delimit it.Footnote ²⁸ Rather than allowing it to get pushed to the margins by stronger, identity-based narratives, its scholars should become more assertive in securing its place in a global perspective, even on the impossible premises of speaking for something that Greeks, Turks, icon painters, mosque architects, Viking re-enactors, self-proclaimed defenders of the Western order, and Vladimir Putin may all seem to claim for themselves.

Another responsibility lies on the scholars of Islam to remain sensitive to how their subject stands in a constant dialectic with the non-Muslim world. Here, Late Antiquity is one concept that can offer more than a self-constituting framework for approaching the religious realities – but it presumes, of course, that it is acknowledged as something beyond its decorative setting. The bricolage is not just a heap of stones: the spolia keep telling their own stories, over and over again.Footnote ²⁹