You will not brush it off by saying "historical consciousness"

The discipline of history has a peculiar feature. It is so affected by our present, by what we live through, that it is destined to be rewritten in every age and therefore to change. How can that be, you will ask. How can events that are over and done with, occurrences that belong to the past, lived experiences, change? What happens today, what we do, may perhaps determine the future, but how does it affect the past?

The crucial truth about historiography lies precisely in this question. Of course what changes is not the lived experiences that remain in the past but our present knowledge and perceptions of them. Do not suppose that this knowledge and perception change only when some document, or some piece of hidden information about an event, comes to light one day. Such information can of course change many people's view of past events, but it is not the only influence that changes historical knowledge.

The matter is, of course, entirely one of viewpoint, of our interests, our values, our feelings, our loves and hatreds, the ideologies we are under the influence of. These feelings and influences differentiate not only our view of history but even our view of today's events. We all live this experience when we look at how an event that happened today is reflected on different television channels in the evening. When the subject is history, a factor several times as large comes into play. Concerning events about which we will never again be able to find any new information, document or evidence, our insatiable, irreducible judicial appetite is at work, setting up courts today and never shrinking from passing definitive verdicts.

History is in fact the place where we project today's ideological conflicts and quarrels, the arsenal in which we fortify our present stance. A source that supplies everyone with the ammunition they want.

When this nature of history is known, one reaches one more level of awareness about the human being. For centuries what has been presented to us as history was only the narration of the successive life stories and wars of kings, one after another, like a film. This History is the history of states, palaces, kings. Let us admit that Marx's warning drawing attention to classes was an important contribution to the recognition that this way of writing history misses a great deal about humanity. From that time on, attention was paid to the fact that not only states or ruling classes but also subordinate classes and peoples have a history. However, through the "class" concept on which he built his understanding of history, Marx too was opening onto history a limited window that was not at all comprehensive. However much Marx may have said otherwise, history could not consist merely of classes and the history of class conflict.

The broader perspective that the Annales school of history put forward on history awakened us somewhat more to the fact that the whole history of humanity is too rich to be reduced to a single story. That is why it led to the production of different stories of humanity that look not only at kings, states, wars, classes. The cultural, economic and social history of peasants, the social and cultural history of cities, the history of the different cultural activities of different sections of society here, for example their weddings, marriages, relations with the state, the formation of leadership mechanisms within themselves, and so on. Some historiographies dwelt on the history of conceptions of cleanliness and dirt. The history of the toilet, the history of the bathhouse were written, for example, and many other things.

While all of this ensured that historical knowledge in our age diversified enormously without remaining within a narrow frame, it was in fact expected to develop also an important level of consciousness about how we look at history. Whatever you ask of history, it gives you its answer, but history is not made up of the questions you ask and the answers it gives you. Of course, as in other fields, the question you ask of history is the guide to the answer it gives us. If we lose for a moment our consciousness of the character of the question we ask, we run a great risk of staying within the limits of that question. For that reason one must be extremely careful that the questions we ask do not lead to a narrowing and generalizing perspective on history.

This is in fact a truth that those who take on a historicist mission should be the first to be informed of, especially about their own historical conditions. But as always, in this matter too the historicist approach, losing its own historical reality, absolutizes the answers it receives to the questions it asks, and universalizes particular cases in a different way.

For example, if you ask the question of the brothers' blood shed in Islamic history and line up the resulting data one after another, you may fall into the delusion that nothing but the shedding of brothers' blood was done there. Because for the moment you do not see the other lived experiences in between. Your question is clear and the list you have gathered contains only this subject. History may seem to you to consist of this. If you are a good historian, if you possess historical consciousness sufficiently, you never lose, even for a moment, the awareness that your research question keeps you there, and you assume in any case the excellent examples of brotherhood that were lived in the other areas of history.

If you write the history of betrayals, you may get the impression that there were never friendships or epic examples of loyalty in history. If you write the history of the intrigues in the harem, as in Muhteşem Yüzyıl (The Magnificent Century), you will fall into the illusion that the whole Ottoman state was governed from the harem. In any case, because of your viewpoint and the question you ask, you integrate every word, every event, every movement in the harem into the story as part of an intrigue. And there, in that magnificent century, you see none of the magnificent examples put forth in the name of the Ottomans across three continents in social life, architecture, economics, fair distribution, religious tolerance, scholarly and philosophical interest, and science and technology.

Yet the most important precaution that the Annales school of history, and later Foucault's historiography inspired by Nietzsche, proposed against this is to break up the whole, to diversify. For the historian's totalizing viewpoint kills the discipline of history, because it appropriates every event to the story produced by your viewpoint and makes it lose its own original meaning there.

For example, rewriting Islamic history with the minds that Ergün Yıldırım calls "fugitives" later began to find many customers. The approach that reduces the whole of Islamic history to nothing in a few sentences offers perfect examples in which we can see all the ailments of perception and observation with which historiography is afflicted.

A person who for years made a living from the Qur'an, in whose discourse you can easily read the claim that nobody but himself has understood the Qur'an, after the reactions that a few of his wild ideas received, gets up and says that the whole of Islamic history is a history of intolerance. Let him say it. But what was it that he has been doing to everyone for years? What were the sentences of condemnation he passed, again by reciting verses of the Qur'an, on those who did not understand the Qur'an as he does? Can you be tolerant while speaking so judgmentally? Can you be so exclusionary and complain about intolerance in Islamic history? Moreover, really, from where are you looking at that history and from where do you see it?

Let us continue.