Challenging the Rationalist Readings of Iranian Islamic Historiographic works: Applying the Summary Interpretation to the Re-reading of al-Badʿ va al-Târikh

Document Type : Research Paper

Authors

1 null

2 PhD Student of the History, Shiraz University

Abstract

Al-Badʿ va al-Târikh have been written in the formation period of Islamic Civilization by Maqdasi and reflects the discursive struggles of scholars of his era. At the same time, contemporary scholars have described it as an example of rational-philosophical attitude to history in the tradition of Islamic historiography. This paper is an attempt to historically criticize al-Badʿ va al-Târikh and to re-think it according to the theoretical foundations of the social and cultural determination of knowledge, as well as the use of the summary interpretation as a method for reading and criticizing texts, which makes this paper a case study in the field of "hermeneutical sociology of knowledge" applied to the criticism of historical texts. According to a reading of al-Badʿ va al-Târikh based on this framework, the spread of Islamic humanism in the fourth century A.H., which had been accompanied by cosmopolitanism, a kind of secularism, and individualism, as a part of the influential components of the historical context of this period, but rejected as heretic, as Joel Craemer deals with the matter, had created a background on which Maqdasi wrote his book as a discursive act towards the domination/exclusion conditions. In the various chapters of the book, he shows his negative reaction to these conditions and a way out of it by returning to the traditional Shari'a and orthodox interpretation of it as the only valuable framework for organizing the lives of Muslims. Therefore, contrary to the rational readings of this work, the past retelling and the narrative of events in this work have been formulated and represented in a controversial and normative way, which must be considered in the historical criticism of its accounts.

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References

−    Meiland, Jack w. (2010), ‘Historical Knowledge,’ in A Companion to Epistemology, Wiley-Blackwell.
−    McCullagh, C. Behan (1998), The Truth of History, New York and Londan, Routledge.
−    McCullagh, C. Behan (1991), ‘Can Our Understanding of Old Texts be Objective?,’ History and Theory, Vol. 30, No. 3. pp. 302-323.
−    Al-Azmeh, Aziz, (2007), The Times of History: Universal Topics in Islamic Historiography, Budapest: Central European University Press.
−    Khalidi, Tarif, ‘Mu’tazilite Historiography: Maqdisī's Kitāb al-Bad’ wa al-Ta’rīkh,’ Journal of Near Eastern Studues, Vol. 35, No. 1 (Jan., 1976), pp.1-12.

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History

  • Receive Date: 28 July 2017
  • Revise Date: 11 August 2017
  • Accept Date: 27 August 2017

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