How can one who does not know the human being know history?

Questions are the guide to answers. Provided other conditions are also met, good questions lead to correct answers. Bad and wrong questions, on the other hand, have no chance of leading you to the truth, whatever factor you call to your aid. Yet all questions, right or wrong, while taking you to a certain place, at the same time take you away from many other places. If you think the question you are stuck on will give you all the secrets of the world, you become the captive of that question.

Whatever you ask of history in particular, it gives you its answer; but if you regard the whole of history as nothing more than the questions you asked and the answers it gave you, the place you end up will be one of the narrowest cellars of reality.

Many philosophers have seen historical consciousness as a preparation for the place that the very question they put to history will lead them to. Historical consciousness has been reduced to a consciousness of the direction and the totality attributed to history. If you are a Marxist, your historical consciousness means holding a view in which history is reduced to the history of classes. From a Hegelian standpoint, historical consciousness is the interpretation of a transcendent journey attributed to Geist. This Geist can have histories written that also feed the cult of a state, a leader, a nation, to whoever manages to keep it in hand. Historical consciousness is not to lose touch with reality, not to become alienated from the human nature of history, and to know that what cannot happen today could not have happened in the past either. It is also to be aware, when we turn to history to ask about a particular subject, that history does not consist of this event alone. In the end this event is only one of billions of occurrences that took place at the same time in the same period or at other times. History may not fit the totality you produce in your mind; such totalities constrain history and take you away from historical reality. As in our knowledge of the history of today.

It can be said that the first person to display historical consciousness at the highest level was Ibn Khaldun. His famous aphoristic saying, "the past resembles the present more than water resembles water," in fact lays out the heart of the matter. Historical consciousness is never to forget that the directions and totalities we attribute to history may be products of our own minds, and that they may be garments offered to historical reality. Sometimes these garments may look very elegant on reality, but that does not mean they are the only garments that can be put on it.

A history of intolerance can also be written for Islamic history: a history of ruthless power struggles, of people betraying one another, of corruption, of treachery. Once you put up this heading, you will find plenty of examples to fill it. But if you stay under this heading and bury and ignore, under it, all the friendship, loyalty, companionship, self-sacrifice, freedom, emancipation, sheltering of the oppressed, standing against the tyrant, the epic examples of devotion in the struggles waged on this path, and the excellent human relations throughout Islamic history, the first thing you will have sacrificed is historical consciousness. If you like, try writing the history of science and technology in the world. Fuat Sezgin did something exceptional in this field; does not an entirely different history of Islamic science and civilization, one worthy of being written in letters of gold, emerge from it? And what kind of history do you write when, writing the history of universities, you do not merely omit the fact that the first three universities in the world were founded by Muslims? If you wish to see, you can also view and write today's Western civilization as a decline in every respect, but if you do not wish to see, there is really nothing that can be done.

What those who hold forth about Islamic history these days are displaying is nothing other than a complete lack of historical consciousness and of responsibility. If orientalists were to write a wholesale, malevolent Islamic history built on bad examples, we would not mind, but that our own theologians or our fugitives are doing it

strikes one as very strange.

I do not know where or how he said it. In fact it does not matter, the person does not matter either, but as an example of the expression of the fugitive discourse in particular, which has been finding many customers lately, a WhatsApp message quoted from a theologian landed on my phone:

"For 1400 years Muslims have been able neither to develop an ideal electoral system, nor to show an example of ideal governance, nor to put forward an ideal model of state. The power struggle began on the very day the Prophet Muhammad died, and the people closest to him throttled one another for power. Since that day oppression, blood, suffering and tears have never ceased in the lands where Muslims have ruled? Brothers' blood flowed in streams among the Companions. Three of the first 4 caliphs were killed by assassination. They savagely murdered even the Prophet's grandson for the sake of power. The sharia that could not bring them peace! Will it bring it to you today? If you tried to count the bloody power wars in the history of Muslims, pages would not suffice. Even so, some people still have the nerve, without shame, to utter delusions like sharia, caliphate and Islamic state. What kind of daydreaming is this? Do you never read history? The sharia, caliphate and Islamic state you dream of were never established in any period of history, and cannot be; there is no point in daydreaming, appreciate the value of constitutional guarantee and sit where you are sitting."

Which of these statements will you pick up and which will you strike at? To say that for 1400 years Muslims have produced no ideal example of governance or ideal model of state is, first of all, to presuppose an ideal model where human beings are present, and is yet another example of missing history and the human being once again.

The ideal state model was put forward by Plato, then Farabi, who followed him. Both are, as the name says, "ideal." Too ideal to be real. Islam, however, is a religion that is never detached from realities. Read, if you like, "Din Budur" (This Is the Religion), the handbook of Sayyid Qutb, who is criticized for having designed the most ideal Islamic state. Did Islam promise you a rose garden without thorns? Did it promise, or does it promise, a perfect utopia that will last forever in this world? An earthly paradise where nobody dies and everybody joins hands with everybody in unity?

To have lived for so long in atmospheres where the Islamic sciences are taught and yet not to have grasped this most basic truth... That Muslims too are human, not angels; that in the places where they rule, it is not angels or "ideal" people but people with their ambitions, their suppositions, their subjectivities, their historicities who live; that wherever there are human beings, power struggles, ambitions, Satan, the self, and hence struggles cannot be absent; in short, without understanding the human being himself, how will you understand Islamic history?

It is clear: you had a bad experience inside the house, you built dreams, you assumed superhuman heroes, you hoped for paradisiacal utopias, but what you found were people of flesh and bone, with their calculations, walking about the marketplace among believers and, when the occasion arose, capable of quarreling for their interests.

On one side, reading the history of power struggles in Islamic history and carrying disappointments from it to the present; on the other, experiencing disappointments because one cannot find the ideal in the Muslims one sees today.

Let an ordinary person do this, and we would understand. But what is this about a historian, and a theologian especially, doing it? How can one who does not know the human being know his history?