Historiography and SĪrah Methodology
Researched & Written by,
Syed Muhammad Waqas
Syed Muhammad Waqas
The word “history” traces its root, like the titles of many other modern academic disciplines, in the ancient Greek culture of learning. Etymologically speaking, the word in question, history, derives its form and meaning from a Greek word historiā, meaning ‘a learning by inquiry’. Herodotus was the first writer to employ in his writings this particular term in the modern sense, and it is why we credit him as the first methodological historian and thus ‘the Father of History’.
“Philosophy of history”, an expression coined by Voltaire in 18th century, is generally given an extraordinary emphasis in the modern analysis of history. The understanding of ‘past’ underwent a radical transformation during the Age of Reason and historians could no longer stand the overpowering idea of breaking up with the ancient methodology of history writing. It has ever since been construed by the historians as a scientific study of the past series of events.
With the birth of modern rationalism, precisely speaking, the knowledge of history has also been rationalized. All these developments have amounted to a degree that it has brought about a major shift in the history of ‘history’ and this shift, by the way of concentrating on the point of its systematization, has given birth to the institutionalization of history.
History is, generically, a form of the thought of what we understand as ‘science’—the realm of science. Like other disciplines of science, it travels towards the unknown with the aid of what is known. History has a two-way approach. Its primary function, with the help of available evidence, develops questions on the probability and plausibility of past events and thereafter its secondary function is to attempt to answer these questions using and interpreting that same evidence. By history we understand not the events of past, but our own systematic knowledge of the past events. Critically speaking, history is not a mere imitation of the record of human past; it is rather a thought-process that brings us the realization that history is an ‘end’ in itself and not mere a ‘means’. To further elaborate, it can be stated in simple terms that history is the knowledge not only of the past events that how they occurred, but also why they occurred. In addition to the inquiry of human actions, the spirit of scientific history partly lies in the inquiry of the ‘reasons’ that ignited or motivated any subsequent human actions.
Hegel also used the expression ‘philosophy of history’; but his use of this particular expression radically differed from that of Voltaire. He understood history in a universal sense calling ‘philosophy of history’ as the ‘study of the world history’.[1] In order to provide principles to the threshold of his science of world history, Hegel expounded the famous hypothesis of history being ‘thesis, antithesis and synthesis’. History is, therefore, harbored on the scientific formula of Hegel in today’s world.
Philosophy of history, in the modern sense, means to us a ‘specialized’ kind of epistemology that deals with historical knowledge. In other words, it is a theory of historical knowledge that assumes that no other branch of knowledge, but that of historical knowledge itself, with all its peculiarities, can alone touch on the problems, which arise during the study of a ‘vanished’ or ‘dead’ past.
Therefore, to the scientific study of history we call ‘historiography’. It is the ‘consciousness’ of the past events acquired by the historian through a proper channel of all-pervasive principles.
Modern study of history does not endorse the idea of metaphysics being worthy of regarded as a part of the study of history. In the opinion of modern historians, metaphysics is a subject of the study of religion and pure philosophy. According to this particular interpretation of history, therefore, any study of the past that involves metaphysical elements cannot be rendered as history, but something similar to history. This interpretation of our evidence of the past is, in fact, a secularized version of history understood by the modern scholarship as the only ‘acceptable channel’ to the study of our own past.
Conversely, Sīrah discipline stands on the principles that go against the touchstone of the secular West from the very foundation. One will discover a gulf of difference in the understanding of history by the historians of these two mutually distinct schools. The Sīrah methodology does not distinguish between the ‘secular’ and the ‘sacred’, for the very discipline of Sīrah owes its origin to the sacred understanding of history. This is certainly not acceptable for the philosophers of history in our times, for they owe the origin of their methodology to the secular thought developed in skeptical circles of the West. Sīrah methodology of history cannot, however, be discarded in total even if it is processed through the so-called higher criticism regulated in the Western terms. Sīrah methodology of history owns the most crucial qualification to secure for itself the status of history that historiography knows as ‘evidence’. Furthermore, this evidence has both of its types at the backlash that are universally accepted as solid as well as sufficient proof for the possibility of a past event. These two types of the evidence are the available historical materials categorized as, (a) written sources, and (b) unbroken chain of oral testimonies.
I would like to quote a statement of an Orientalist in the context of the current discussion on history. F.E. Peters, coming of a critical school of Orientalism, comments regarding the historicity of the Prophet of Islam with a reference to that of the Christ, saying:
“Muhammad would appear, at least in theory, to be a far more apposite subject for historical inquiry than the founder of Christianity. The most abiding and forbidding obstacle to approaching the historical Jesus is undoubtedly the fact that our principle sources, the documents included in the New Testament, were all written on the hither side of Easter: that is, their authors viewed the subject across the absolute conviction that Jesus was the Christ and Son of God, a conviction that later rendered explicit in Christian dogma. There is, however, no Resurrection in the career of Muhammad, no Paschal sunrise to cast its divinizing light on the Prophet of Islam. Muhammad is thus a perfectly appropriate subject of history: a man born of woman (and man), who lived in a known place in a roughly calculable time, who in the end died the death that is the lot of all mortals, and whose career was reported by authorities who share the contemporary historian’s own conviction that the Prophet was nothing more than a man. What is at stale in Islam, then, is not dogma as it is in Christianity, but rather piety; obversely, it is the same sense of impropriety that a pre-1850s Catholic might have felt in the presence of a positivist-historical study of Mary.
“With Muslim piety and Christian dogma put aside, as the historian insists they must be, there would seem at first glance to be sufficient historical evidence on Jesus and Muhammad from which to at least attempt, as many have done, to take the measure of both the men and their milieu. Indeed, in the view of one early biographers of Jesus, the available sources are even better for Muhammad than for Jesus, since Islam was “born in full view of history.”[2]
I strongly believe that the line of difference, inasmuch as the historicity is questioned, should be drawn on the very basis expounded by F.E. Peters in the above paragraphs. According to the standards of modern scientific history, when both of these remarkable men are compared and contrasted, it is Prophet Muhammad’s life—the life of a man who lived in a well-known ‘space and time’—that would qualify to be rendered as ‘historical, because it explicitly meets the demands of the scientific history. On the other hand, the life of Jesus Christ, as found in the traditional Christian documents, whereof the principal ones are the New Testament Gospels, would hold no scientific appeal and would thus be regarded as a mere equivalent of a legend.[3] Apart from this simple mention of the historical scholarship constructed on the comparison of these two figures from whom claim the two largest religions of the world their respective origin, it lies beyond the scope of the present work to conduct a detailed comparative analysis of the presentation of history in both Islamic and Christian religions.
The modern study of history has opened up new vistas to look into the ancient world. Nevertheless, the fundamental principle of historiography cannot be ‘self-contradicting’. It cannot, for instance, deny the bearings of certain personalities and their teachings on human cultures. If the witness of ancient scholarship for a certain event is available at every level of scientific inquiry, modern historiography must not strip it of its status of being ‘historical’. One can deny the myth of Enuma Elish and the legend of Achilles, but one cannot deny that a migration Makkah to Madinah took place in the first quarter of 7th century, which changed the course of history. One cannot deny the existence of a single man behind this whole historical activity, Prophet Muhammad, whose soul-touching teachings and miraculous training transformed a whole polytheist nation into the champions of monotheism within his own lifetime.
It is the exclusive honor of the Muslims that they have managed to investigate hundreds of thousands high and low-profile lives in order to research only ‘one life', the life of their Prophet. No other nation, particularly a religious community, can in this regard compete with Muslims, for they have developed a whole new discipline of research methodology within historical research; to this discipline they name Asmā al-Rijāl, “the Science of the Narrators”. It is this discipline that offers the raw material to the scientific discipline of Sīrah writing, which Muslims can deservedly boast of.
[1] Collingwood, R.G., The Idea of History, Rawalpindi, Bilal & Company Publishers (A Reprint of 1962 Edition), p. 1
[2] Peters, F.E., “The Quest of the Historical Muhammad”, in Warraq, Ibn, (edit.), The Quest for the Historical Muhammad, New York: Prometheus Books, 2000, p.445
[3] This is the predominant view of the Higher Critics. Of course, this particular view of Gospel critics is also based on flawed approach, which does not carry weight within the broader spectrum of true historical scholarship. The Gospels do establish the fundamental truth that Jesus is historical and his life and teachings have left a mark on the world religions, cultures and above all history.
Syed M. Waqas
(DG Bab-ul-Ilm Research Foundation, International)
www.birf.weebly.com
“Philosophy of history”, an expression coined by Voltaire in 18th century, is generally given an extraordinary emphasis in the modern analysis of history. The understanding of ‘past’ underwent a radical transformation during the Age of Reason and historians could no longer stand the overpowering idea of breaking up with the ancient methodology of history writing. It has ever since been construed by the historians as a scientific study of the past series of events.
With the birth of modern rationalism, precisely speaking, the knowledge of history has also been rationalized. All these developments have amounted to a degree that it has brought about a major shift in the history of ‘history’ and this shift, by the way of concentrating on the point of its systematization, has given birth to the institutionalization of history.
History is, generically, a form of the thought of what we understand as ‘science’—the realm of science. Like other disciplines of science, it travels towards the unknown with the aid of what is known. History has a two-way approach. Its primary function, with the help of available evidence, develops questions on the probability and plausibility of past events and thereafter its secondary function is to attempt to answer these questions using and interpreting that same evidence. By history we understand not the events of past, but our own systematic knowledge of the past events. Critically speaking, history is not a mere imitation of the record of human past; it is rather a thought-process that brings us the realization that history is an ‘end’ in itself and not mere a ‘means’. To further elaborate, it can be stated in simple terms that history is the knowledge not only of the past events that how they occurred, but also why they occurred. In addition to the inquiry of human actions, the spirit of scientific history partly lies in the inquiry of the ‘reasons’ that ignited or motivated any subsequent human actions.
Hegel also used the expression ‘philosophy of history’; but his use of this particular expression radically differed from that of Voltaire. He understood history in a universal sense calling ‘philosophy of history’ as the ‘study of the world history’.[1] In order to provide principles to the threshold of his science of world history, Hegel expounded the famous hypothesis of history being ‘thesis, antithesis and synthesis’. History is, therefore, harbored on the scientific formula of Hegel in today’s world.
Philosophy of history, in the modern sense, means to us a ‘specialized’ kind of epistemology that deals with historical knowledge. In other words, it is a theory of historical knowledge that assumes that no other branch of knowledge, but that of historical knowledge itself, with all its peculiarities, can alone touch on the problems, which arise during the study of a ‘vanished’ or ‘dead’ past.
Therefore, to the scientific study of history we call ‘historiography’. It is the ‘consciousness’ of the past events acquired by the historian through a proper channel of all-pervasive principles.
Modern study of history does not endorse the idea of metaphysics being worthy of regarded as a part of the study of history. In the opinion of modern historians, metaphysics is a subject of the study of religion and pure philosophy. According to this particular interpretation of history, therefore, any study of the past that involves metaphysical elements cannot be rendered as history, but something similar to history. This interpretation of our evidence of the past is, in fact, a secularized version of history understood by the modern scholarship as the only ‘acceptable channel’ to the study of our own past.
Conversely, Sīrah discipline stands on the principles that go against the touchstone of the secular West from the very foundation. One will discover a gulf of difference in the understanding of history by the historians of these two mutually distinct schools. The Sīrah methodology does not distinguish between the ‘secular’ and the ‘sacred’, for the very discipline of Sīrah owes its origin to the sacred understanding of history. This is certainly not acceptable for the philosophers of history in our times, for they owe the origin of their methodology to the secular thought developed in skeptical circles of the West. Sīrah methodology of history cannot, however, be discarded in total even if it is processed through the so-called higher criticism regulated in the Western terms. Sīrah methodology of history owns the most crucial qualification to secure for itself the status of history that historiography knows as ‘evidence’. Furthermore, this evidence has both of its types at the backlash that are universally accepted as solid as well as sufficient proof for the possibility of a past event. These two types of the evidence are the available historical materials categorized as, (a) written sources, and (b) unbroken chain of oral testimonies.
I would like to quote a statement of an Orientalist in the context of the current discussion on history. F.E. Peters, coming of a critical school of Orientalism, comments regarding the historicity of the Prophet of Islam with a reference to that of the Christ, saying:
“Muhammad would appear, at least in theory, to be a far more apposite subject for historical inquiry than the founder of Christianity. The most abiding and forbidding obstacle to approaching the historical Jesus is undoubtedly the fact that our principle sources, the documents included in the New Testament, were all written on the hither side of Easter: that is, their authors viewed the subject across the absolute conviction that Jesus was the Christ and Son of God, a conviction that later rendered explicit in Christian dogma. There is, however, no Resurrection in the career of Muhammad, no Paschal sunrise to cast its divinizing light on the Prophet of Islam. Muhammad is thus a perfectly appropriate subject of history: a man born of woman (and man), who lived in a known place in a roughly calculable time, who in the end died the death that is the lot of all mortals, and whose career was reported by authorities who share the contemporary historian’s own conviction that the Prophet was nothing more than a man. What is at stale in Islam, then, is not dogma as it is in Christianity, but rather piety; obversely, it is the same sense of impropriety that a pre-1850s Catholic might have felt in the presence of a positivist-historical study of Mary.
“With Muslim piety and Christian dogma put aside, as the historian insists they must be, there would seem at first glance to be sufficient historical evidence on Jesus and Muhammad from which to at least attempt, as many have done, to take the measure of both the men and their milieu. Indeed, in the view of one early biographers of Jesus, the available sources are even better for Muhammad than for Jesus, since Islam was “born in full view of history.”[2]
I strongly believe that the line of difference, inasmuch as the historicity is questioned, should be drawn on the very basis expounded by F.E. Peters in the above paragraphs. According to the standards of modern scientific history, when both of these remarkable men are compared and contrasted, it is Prophet Muhammad’s life—the life of a man who lived in a well-known ‘space and time’—that would qualify to be rendered as ‘historical, because it explicitly meets the demands of the scientific history. On the other hand, the life of Jesus Christ, as found in the traditional Christian documents, whereof the principal ones are the New Testament Gospels, would hold no scientific appeal and would thus be regarded as a mere equivalent of a legend.[3] Apart from this simple mention of the historical scholarship constructed on the comparison of these two figures from whom claim the two largest religions of the world their respective origin, it lies beyond the scope of the present work to conduct a detailed comparative analysis of the presentation of history in both Islamic and Christian religions.
The modern study of history has opened up new vistas to look into the ancient world. Nevertheless, the fundamental principle of historiography cannot be ‘self-contradicting’. It cannot, for instance, deny the bearings of certain personalities and their teachings on human cultures. If the witness of ancient scholarship for a certain event is available at every level of scientific inquiry, modern historiography must not strip it of its status of being ‘historical’. One can deny the myth of Enuma Elish and the legend of Achilles, but one cannot deny that a migration Makkah to Madinah took place in the first quarter of 7th century, which changed the course of history. One cannot deny the existence of a single man behind this whole historical activity, Prophet Muhammad, whose soul-touching teachings and miraculous training transformed a whole polytheist nation into the champions of monotheism within his own lifetime.
It is the exclusive honor of the Muslims that they have managed to investigate hundreds of thousands high and low-profile lives in order to research only ‘one life', the life of their Prophet. No other nation, particularly a religious community, can in this regard compete with Muslims, for they have developed a whole new discipline of research methodology within historical research; to this discipline they name Asmā al-Rijāl, “the Science of the Narrators”. It is this discipline that offers the raw material to the scientific discipline of Sīrah writing, which Muslims can deservedly boast of.
[1] Collingwood, R.G., The Idea of History, Rawalpindi, Bilal & Company Publishers (A Reprint of 1962 Edition), p. 1
[2] Peters, F.E., “The Quest of the Historical Muhammad”, in Warraq, Ibn, (edit.), The Quest for the Historical Muhammad, New York: Prometheus Books, 2000, p.445
[3] This is the predominant view of the Higher Critics. Of course, this particular view of Gospel critics is also based on flawed approach, which does not carry weight within the broader spectrum of true historical scholarship. The Gospels do establish the fundamental truth that Jesus is historical and his life and teachings have left a mark on the world religions, cultures and above all history.
Syed M. Waqas
(DG Bab-ul-Ilm Research Foundation, International)
www.birf.weebly.com