Towards new formulation of history and science

Towards new formulation for history and science
(An article nominative to win Alukah's writer contest)

(1)

One of the smart and impressive sayings about history is: It is written by the victors, or biased, therefore it came as relative writings which vary from one point to another, making it somewhat liquefied and disturbing.

This does not deny that history is written by neutral historians. In spite of everything, there is a small amount of bias to or aversion from a position or sympathy with someone.

In the end, a historian is a human being who feels pain and constitutes a position in writing, no matter, the degree of objectivity and neutrality.

(2)

History includes the history of mankind since the recorded history, which is the birth of Christ (peace be upon him). Afterwards that concept extended to include the history before Christ himself, where he found that the recorded history has been effective since man's knowledge of painting and writing, which was seen on the papyri of ancient Egyptians for example, the writings of wise men, the statements of leaders, and the laws of the leaders in the civilizations that arose in Egypt, Iraq, China, and others.

(3)

History does not mean the events affecting humanity only such as long and short-term battles, or even natural or artificial disasters which remove countries from the map and replace them with other geographical areas; but is surpassed to the lives of people themselves and their good and bad deeds and the impact of these acts. In addition to the record of arts, literary and artistic schools, inventions, philosophical and scientific theories, humanities, and other branches of complex sciences.

(4)

Religion, as a reality, enters in the branches of history with a fundamental difference that can be added here which is: religion is part of history as well as an important narrator of history itself.

If a historian writes complete volumes about daily life and another historian writes in the same period from a different point of view, and then comes another writer —after many years—to read those volumes and extrapolates from them their own vision. Religion which means divine books has a super role in transferring one vision of history that is indisputable. Although divine books were distorted, the Qur'an remains as the only authentic book that does not follow human whims or biased or hydrophobic views but it is the only source which has not been affected by distortion which is dependable in forming a sharp and accurate vision that is away from uncertainty and confusion.

The Qur'an tells the story of creation, and the biography of prophets and messengers in human history, in addition to the difficulties and dilemmas they faced as well as the impact of faith in changing things for the better, and dozens of lessons learned from a bitter reality, thus the Qur'an narrates what was done and what will be. Narration here does not mean direct narrations but takes dozens of figures of speech, taking into account the human nature, which shies away from the direct preaching. Therefore, we find dozens of rhetorical and aesthetic pictures for one accident because the revealer of the Qur'an is the Lord of the Worlds. Allah (Glory be to Him) says: "Then We raised you up after your death, so that you might be grateful." [Surat Al Mulk: 14].

Thus, we have an honest perspective that monitors some historical events honestly —The Qur'an does not monitor all events— and with absolute accuracy, they are delivered effectively in a way reflects the event itself; which means: It is not just a dry narration of events.

(5)

Of that, we learn that history is narrated by more than one way and from different perspectives, but they support one vision and gain perfection, and comprehensiveness of understanding.

Here we came to point that I wanted to point out here, which is attached by our Islamic history that is full of events, characters, sermons, lessons, and turnings, have we benefited well from them?

Most likely, the benefits were few or almost non-existent and the reason is: history is a heavy subject and not easy to present. The simplest way is to present it academically which is done by most historians in their researches and books, but this form does not tempt the regular reader to follow-up; therefore it is necessary to find other attractive ways because a nation which does not benefit from its history will not have a proper status.

The western countries figure out that fact long time ago, therefore they pay a lot of money and effort to seek the help of writers and novelists in order to transfer history to the public and attract them to it.

The simplest example to bring the picture nearer is that those who are responsible for education (the National Union of Teachers) went to the Swedish writer "Selma Lagerlöf" and asked her to write an educational book for children talking about Sweden and geography.

Selma Lagerlöf was a prominent writer of magnificent literary style and a flowing human imagination; so they have done well when they resorted to her for that task.

Importantly, she has been reading and going in journeys for three years in order to write the first lines for her new narration which was called "The Wonderful Adventures of Nils ," and made the novel an exciting epic for Sweden and its habits, history, geography, and already the novel was published, achieved great success, and was translated into many languages.

What goes for geography applies to all other sciences, so they should be formulated in a simple way and attractive for young and old together.

Likewise, this even goes for philosophy that is difficult in nature. A writer called "Jostein Gaarder" summarized and simplified philosophy through an enjoyable novel that called "Sophie's World".

As for history itself, there are dozens of books that are difficult to restrict them here, but they demonstrate the interest of the Westerners to their history and sciences.

As for us, unfortunately, our experiences are few and incomplete.

The Prophet's biography was presented in a good series of fiction called "Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah .. and those with him" by "`Abdul-Hamid Gudah As-Sahhar" and for their magnitude, it took twenty parts.

Then, it came the attempt of "Georgie Zidane" to write a series of "the history of Islam," which was unsuccessful series and their harms were larger than its benefits, and the reason was the author was non-Muslim, then it follows the way of "inserting poison into honey," where they are flattening characters in an acceptable way that holds a lot of malicious slander, which makes me say with bitterness:
Why should we leave writing of history for non-Muslims to write our history? And whatever his genius is, he will not feel the beauty of our religion and the greatness of our history?!

We need a renaissance of new fiction, taken from history its favorite subject to present it by love and creativity for us and for the coming generations in order to resurrect the new world inside us, and to be a step forward in order to earn our present and our future here, and in the supreme counc