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’—the dominant narrative of world history in which nations and peoples find their origins in 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.
