"The History of Muslims"

History is not a stage on which what happened in the past is conveyed to the present as it was. Knowledge of history is always knowledge that passes through the filter of what we experience today, that is even recalled anew with today's interests and experiences, and sometimes reconstructed at the moment it is recalled. That is why there is no fixed knowledge of history, nor is there a field of knowledge independent of the influence of the current moment.

If we approach historical knowledge without looking at who is recalling an event that took place in history and why, why they are bringing it up today and what they intend by it, we cannot go beyond being ordinary, junk consumers of the agenda.

In fact, in this respect knowledge of history is a much more intricate kind of knowledge than is supposed. Consuming that knowledge without questioning how and what is recalled or made to be recalled from the past to the present can sometimes have a poisonous side.

"They define 'history' as 'repetition'; if lessons had ever been learned, would it repeat?" These lines are Mehmet Akif Ersoy's famous lines about history. Had lessons been learned, history would not repeat itself. But the fact is that history is always repeating. So it is a certain truth that people have a defect, an infirmity, regarding learning lessons.

We can see that countless parallels of what is happening today have certainly occurred in history. That is why our turning to history regarding the problems we live through today takes place sometimes in search of consolation, sometimes in search of a way, sometimes in search of a shared experience.

We do not usually return empty-handed from history, but what we bring with us sometimes cuts us off from our own reality; while seeking consolation, we get stuck on examples that are in no way compatible with our reality. We try to settle accounts for conflicts lived in the past among people living today, and produce or perpetuate a blood feud and a vendetta that can in no way be resolved.

There is a history of the Age of Happiness (Asr-ı Saadet) that forms a model for us. That history itself is of course a guide for us. The Qur'an tells us that in the life of our Prophet there is an Uswa hasana, that is, a good example, a model. The way that experience was recorded is very different from that of any other historical chronicler's experience. First of all, an important part of the historical knowledge of that experience has been recorded by the Holy Qur'an, not a single letter of which has been corrupted. The remaining part has been recorded by a critical system of transmission secured through a tremendous process of jarh and ta'dil (a criticism in which data for and against narrations are evaluated). Even so, it is not that there are no disputes.

For the periods after that there is a field of countless experiences that Muslims have produced over 1,400 years. Personally, when I was translating into Turkish Ira Lapidus's book A History of Islamic Societies, published in 2 volumes by İletişim Yayınları, I remember what a dizziness I experienced before this history, filled with experiences both different and similar displayed in every part of the world within these 1,400 years. Lapidus was writing not as a simple chronicler and not so much the history of Islam as the cultural and sociological history of Muslims, who manifest themselves in different ways in every society and culture.

Setting aside the history of humanity, the experiences that Muslims have produced within this history themselves display, for Muslims today, undoubtedly full and indispensable examples from which lessons must be drawn. In this Ramadan I said to myself that one needs to read a bit of history too. So I took down from the shelf the 5-volume book Müslümanların Tarihi (The History of Muslims) by Prof. Dr. İhsan Süreyya Sırma, published some time ago through the meticulous work of Beyan Yayınları.

Professor İhsan has a distinctive historical method, style and narration. I remember with what excitement, sharing them with friends, we read, in my İmam Hatip years in the early eighties, books such as İslami Tebliğin Mekke Dönemi ve İşkence, Medine Dönemi ve Cihad and later Örnek Halifeler Dönemi, which came out under Beyan Yayınları's Küçük Kitaplar series (truly, what a beautiful series that was), and how we were carried away by his narration. These books, while undoubtedly greatly increasing interest in Islamic history and the Sira among young generations, also made Islamic history considerably more current, narrating it not as an event that was lived and finished and left in the past, but as scenes that are still being lived today and continue to affect us. With a narration that makes its readers part of that history, Professor İhsan reflected in his narration the tremendous excitement he holds for history. Still teaching at Siirt University these days, Professor İhsan continues the same excitement for history today in a way that puts the young to shame.

Turning to the history of Muslims rather than to the history of Islam is, first of all, a much healthier understanding of history. Because Islam has no way of manifesting itself in history other than through the practice and experiences of Muslims. And these manifestations cannot be identified with Islam itself.

Muslims have tried to determine, influence and build the realities they lived with what they understood from Islam. That is, they put forth an interpretation. In doing so they both hit the mark and made mistakes, were influenced both by their own cultures and by their political, geographical and cultural conditions, and left a vast historical legacy distinguished by its diversity and its mosaic quality.

When you read this legacy, you see the victories as well as the defeats, the weaknesses as well as the betrayals, the heroisms as well as the banalizations, the extraordinary exaltations. In short, you will have read the history of the concrete human being, in flesh and bone.

There is a distinct pleasure in looking at the history of Muslims through Professor İhsan's eyes. In this history you read of many events that recur in tragic forms because lessons have not been learned. One of the cases recalled in my last piece in relation to the Qatar crisis was the boycott and embargo applied to Muslims in Mecca, and the system of protection in Mecca. If you like, you can read how the Muslims, who could never unite because of local tribal power struggles in the face of the alliances the Crusaders formed against Muslims, let Jerusalem fall to the Crusaders' occupation, and see its astonishing similarities with the present. And again how Nureddin Zengi and Saladin Ayyubi struggled on the same ground to free Jerusalem from occupation...

In short, The History of Muslims is full of lessons that will shed light on what we are living through.