From: Tagi@cup.portal.com (Tagi Mordred Nagashiva)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.indian
Subject: Re: Fundamentalism: Essential to Islam
Date: Wed, 30 Sep 92 12:19:29 PDT
Organization: The Portal System (TM)
  <1992Sep28.135643.28115@cc.uow.edu.au>

9209.30 e.v.

This issue is far from clear.  I quote from an American historian's 
perspective on history:


"For the Muslim, meaning came to events not from what man achieved, but
from what God intended.  History was not a process but a fulfillment.
In India..., Muslim history became official history, written to
celebrate the good ruler.  As one of the great Muslim historians of
India wrote in the mid-fourteenth century:

   History is the knowledge of the annals and traditions of prophets,
   caliphs, sultans, and of the great men of religion and of government.
   Pursuit of the study of history is particular to the great ones of
   religion and of government who are famous for the excellence of their
   qualities or who have become famous among mankind for their great
   deeds.  Low fellows, rascals, unfit people of unknown stock and mean
   natures, of no lineage and low lineage, loiterers and bazaar loafers -
   all these have no connection with history.

"Naturally enough, Muslim history became the history only of Muslims,
of the greatest of their propets, holy men, and rulers.  Everywhere it
went, Islam brought this Muslim way of filtering the past.

"A peculiar genre of Arabic literature, the so-called 'battle-day'
literature, reaches back before Muhammad.  Islam gave a special
significance to biography, making all later lives only footnotes to the
life of the Prophet.  Because in Muslim institutions there could be no
novelty, but only the fulfillment of the Koran, Muslim biographies could
not have the dignity of new knowledge.  History, in the Muslim phrase,
became mereley a 'conversational science' helpful for political wisdom
and social skill, a source for illustrations but not for demonstrations.
The historian appropriately called himself a compiler of the stories of
Muslim crusades and successes.

"Since Muhammad himself was the climax of history, there was, of course,
no place for the idea of progress.  'History,' a branch of eschatology,
told how all men journeyed toward their Judgement Day.  The emphasis on
biography increased the temptations of official chroniclers to sycophancy.
Their records of events became as suspect as they were fulsome.  The
biographical dictionary, a characteristic and original creation of the
Islamic community, focused on the individual yet did not produce
individualism.  The historical literature of Islam became an instrument
of faith, not an opener of vistas."

_The Discoverers: A History of Man's Search to Know His World and Himself_,
pages 559-60, Random House, 1983.


Therefore, Muslim exhortations regarding the bloodthirstiness of the
Prophet may well have been stories which pleased those who wrote them.
There is little in Islamic history, TOLD by Muslims before the 14th
Century (and arguably afterward), which is not suspect.  Take care what
you assume to be 'factual'.


Thyagi
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Blessed be the Lord Allah and his Prophet, Muhammed, peace be upon him.