Thoughts on Islamic History

As Islamic History Month draws to a close, I want to talk about history in general a little bit. My novel that just released "Under the Full and Crescent Moon" is a work of fiction inspired by history and I do have some credentials on the subject.

The bare minimum in fact. While my main university degree is in something completely different, I ended up, due to various events, with a minor in Classical Studies, or Classical Greek History. As a part of that minor I contributed enough to my Professor's work on the use of numbers by Ancient Greek Historians that I got a shout out in her book Quantifying Mentalities, something that I'm just really proud of.

The one thing I learned

The one thing that I learned that's stuck with me about history is that our vision of history as something as solid as a history text book, or as well preserved as a pristine artifact in a museum... is just not true.

The only history we have access to is one created by humans and just like everything else created by humans it is imperfect, flawed, fluid, impermanent.

Different generations of human historians use different methodologies and have access to different technologies and that makes a massive difference to what we believe happened.

Even the historians with the best of intentions have biases. And those biases inform which sources they believe to be more reliable, which historical figures they trust more. And the sad fact is that there are a lot of historians who don't have the best of intentions. I mean just look at Zionist historians. And they're not the only ones who twist evidence to fit a reality they already believe in.

It's not worth disunity

That's not to say that human history is worthless, it's not. It's just that we need to keep in mind that it is not perfect. A lot of strife in Muslim communities is justified by the different perspectives we have on history when it comes to what happened after the Prophet Muhammad PBUH, passed away. And while I believe we should discuss them with vigor and passion I think a lot of problems that we have with sectarian strife can be avoided if we just recognized the imperfection of our histories and be able to look past the billions of dollars that are spent to cause division between us which prevents us from uniting to defend humanity in places like Palestine and Sudan from villains such as Israel and the UAE.

All opinions in my own, in the end only God knows best.