Tribal Warfare (Rethinking the Inquisition)

At the last MacArthur-sponsored forum on "The Future of Learning Institutions in a Digital Age," we talked about historian Pat Seed's digital projects that began in 1991 (the official birthyear of the internet). Her most recent on early Arabic maps of Africa made me rethink the religious-basis for early intraAfrican slavery . . . and that made me think about the religious persecutions in Europe. A new paradigm always generates new paradigms. The Inquisition as "tribal warfare."

I'll back up. Pat showed amazing maps she has digitized throughout the last part of our forum. What she pointed out is, first, how many of her Muslim and Arabic-speaking students could still recognize place names in these maps that go all the way back to the early 1300s. They were filling in information Web 2.0 style and reading the maps with huge excitement, personal and intellectual. The project is funded by a Digital Humanities grant from NEH and a superb project it is!

What also became clear is that intraAfrican warfare and slavery does not begin with colonialism but, in fact, predates it. Also the term "tribe" must be rethought in terms of the religious waves of migration, conversion, and resistance sweeping across Africa in the early modern period. And that realization made me think again about religious persecution and dissensions in Europe in the premodern and early modern period. Why don't we think about the Inquisition, for example, as "tribal warfare." What content and assumptions does the term "tribe" contain that "religion" does not (and vice versa)? Why these terminologies and what entangled histories are embedded in these histories?

I'd love to redo the entire intellectual map of the world, from the beginning of known history to the present, with Web 2.0 revisionings of paradigms, concepts, and information flows, including having contemporary students contributing. This isn't just Wikipedia but mapping the connections between and among ideas made possible by multilingual massive knowledge databases and analyses Wikipedia-style. Is that too much to ask of Web 3.0????