We’ve been sold a story about the ancient world: Greece gave us democracy, Rome gave us law, and the West inherited the lot. It’s a neat, noble timeline. It is also a dangerous lie. In Classicism: How the West Invented the Ancient World, Marchella Ward reveals this specific version of history for what it really is: not a neutral record of facts, but the structural foundation for modern Islamophobia.
What links the genocides of the Palestinians in Gaza, the Uyghurs in East Turkestan, and Muslim populations in India? In a word, ‘classicism’ is the dominant narrative of world history, in which nations and peoples trace their origins to a pre-Islamic time. Muslims are, in this narrative, a people without ancient history: scandalous outsiders who threaten the myth of the nation.
Urgent, accessible, and unapologetic, Classicism demands a counter-narrative to the standard Western script. Ward finds the building blocks for this new history in Islamism, long positioned as the enemy, but here offering vital provocations towards a better world not just for Muslims but for all those living on the underside of colonial modernity.