Framing la longue durée and the complexity of the Palestinian heritage and Palestine’s cultures. The medieval presents itself as a difference to us in a complex and stratified corpus and competing traditions in terms of languages, genres, religious/ethnic affiliations, ideological/political genealogies, regimes of knowledge. and canonised literary systems. In this chapter, I shall show why it is necessity to de-theologise the historiography of inheritance to which the Palestinian history and its cultural heritage has been subjected. This, I propose to be undertaken by defining its parameters on a small scale. I shall begin with defining a set of concepts such as middle ages, corpus, tradition, and minor literature that I think will be operational in defining and mapping the immediate object of our investigation first, and thereafter framing the Palestinian medieval history and heritage as a privileged site of contested theologised narratives.
This chapter shall also deal with the issue of why it is theoretically common sense to subject the various competing modern historiographies that have for instance as an object of study the history of Palestine in the “Middle Ages” to the scrutinizing gaze of double critique. Originally, a peripheral theory of the post-colonial, Khatibi’s double critique, as a theory of de-colonization, is used by the present author as a theory that relentlessly seek to debunk any theology of inheritance that inhabit the soul and body of Palestine’s history and cultures. To de-theologise historiography means in the words of Foucault that “What is found at the historical beginning of things is not the inviolable identity of their origin, it is the dissension of other things. It is disparity.” (Foucault 2004, 74)