January 26, 2024

Historical   awareness

All peoples compile their history, but historical awareness is another matter. It is the awareness that everything changes, that the world of the past is not ours, and vice versa. Until the 1700s, we Europeans also considered the Greeks and Romans as contemporaries. Then, with idealism, historicism spread—the idea of progress as the key to understanding reality. In recent decades, we have realized that the new is not always progress; it can also be regression (depending on the judgment parameters), but the idea of change remains.

In the Islamic world, however, this process has not occurred, at least not among the masses, and there is a dream of returning to the times of the caliphs.