HISTORIOGRAPHY

AND
SRAH METHODOLOGY

A Comparison of History Writing in Islamic and Secular

Scholarship

Researched & Written by

SYED M. WAQAS

BAB-UL-ILM RESEARCH FOUNDATION

(BIRF INTERNATIONAL)
www.birf.weebly.com

Historiography and Srah Writing

The word history traces its root, like the titles of many other modern academic disciplines, in
the ancient Greek culture of learning. Etymologically speaking, the word in question, history,
derives its form and meaning from a Greek word histori, meaning a learning by
inquiry. Herodotus was the first writer to employ in his writings this particular term in the modern
sense, and it is why we credit him as the first methodological historian and thus the Father of
History.
Philosophy of history, an expression coined by Voltaire in 18th century, is generally given an
extraordinary emphasis in the modern analysis of history. The understanding of past underwent
a radical transformation during the Age of Reason and historians could no longer stand the
overpowering idea of breaking up with the ancient methodology of history writing. It has ever
since been construed by the historians as a scientific study of the past series of events.
With the birth of modern rationalism, precisely speaking, the knowledge of history has also been
rationalized. All these developments have amounted to a degree that it has brought about a major
shift in the history of history and this shift, by the way of concentrating on the point of its
systematization, has given birth to the institutionalization of history.
History is, generically, a form of the thought of what we understand as sciencethe realm of
science. Like other disciplines of science, it travels towards the unknown with the aid of what
is known. History has a two-way approach. Its primary function, with the help of available
evidence, develops questions on the probability and plausibility of past events and thereafter its
secondary function is to attempt to answer these questions using and interpreting that same
evidence. By history we understand not the events of past, but our own systematic knowledge of
the past events. Critically speaking, history is not a mere imitation of the record of human past; it
is rather a thought-process that brings us the realization that history is an end in itself and not
mere a means. To further elaborate, it can be stated in simple terms that history is the knowledge
not only of the past events that how they occurred, but also why they occurred. In addition to the
inquiry of human actions, the spirit of scientific history partly lies in the inquiry of the reasons
that ignited or motivated any subsequent human actions.
Hegel also used the expression philosophy of history; but his use of this particular expression
radically differed from that of Voltaire. He understood history in a universal sense calling
philosophy of history as the study of the world history.[1] In order to provide principles to the
threshold of his science of world history, Hegel expounded the famous hypothesis of history being
thesis, antithesis and synthesis. History is, therefore, harbored on the scientific formula of Hegel
in todays world.
Philosophy of history, in the modern sense, means to us a specialized kind of epistemology that
deals with historical knowledge. In other words, it is a theory of historical knowledge that assumes
that no other branch of knowledge, but that of historical knowledge itself, with all its peculiarities,
can alone touch on the problems, which arise during the study of a vanished or dead past.
Therefore, to the scientific study of history we call historiography. It is the consciousness of
the past events acquired by the historian through a proper channel of all-pervasive principles.
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Historiography and Srah Writing

Modern study of history does not endorse the idea of metaphysics being worthy of regarded as a
part of the study of history. In the opinion of modern historians, metaphysics is a subject of the
study of religion and pure philosophy. According to this particular interpretation of history,
therefore, any study of the past that involves metaphysical elements cannot be rendered as history,
but something similar to history. This interpretation of our evidence of the past is, in fact, a
secularized version of history understood by the modern scholarship as the only acceptable
channel to the study of our own past.
Conversely, Srah discipline stands on the principles that go against the touchstone of the secular
West from the very foundation. One will discover a gulf of difference in the understanding of
history by the historians of these two mutually distinct schools. The Srah methodology does not
distinguish between the secular and the sacred, for the very discipline of Srah owes its origin
to the sacred understanding of history. This is certainly not acceptable for the philosophers of
history in our times, for they owe the origin of their methodology to the secular thought developed
in skeptical circles of the West. Srah methodology of history cannot, however, be discarded in
total even if it is processed through the so-called higher criticism regulated in the Western
terms. Srah methodology of history owns the most crucial qualification to secure for itself the
status of history that historiography knows as evidence. Furthermore, this evidence has both of
its types at the backlash that are universally accepted as solid as well as sufficient proof for the
possibility of a past event. These two types of the evidence are the available historical materials
categorized as, (a) written sources, and (b) unbroken chain of oral testimonies.
I would like to quote a statement of an Orientalist in the context of the current discussion on
history. F.E. Peters, coming of a critical school of Orientalism, comments regarding the historicity
of the Prophet of Islam with a reference to that of the Christ, saying:
Muhammad would appear, at least in theory, to be a far more apposite subject for historical
inquiry than the founder of Christianity. The most abiding and forbidding obstacle to approaching
the historical Jesus is undoubtedly the fact that our principle sources, the documents included in
the New Testament, were all written on the hither side of Easter: that is, their authors viewed the
subject across the absolute conviction that Jesus was the Christ and Son of God, a conviction that
later rendered explicit in Christian dogma. There is, however, no Resurrection in the career of
Muhammad, no Paschal sunrise to cast its divinizing light on the Prophet of Islam. Muhammad is
thus a perfectly appropriate subject of history: a man born of woman (and man), who lived in a
known place in a roughly calculable time, who in the end died the death that is the lot of all mortals,
and whose career was reported by authorities who share the contemporary historians own
conviction that the Prophet was nothing more than a man. What is at stale in Islam, then, is not
dogma as it is in Christianity, but rather piety; obversely, it is the same sense of impropriety that a
pre-1850s Catholic might have felt in the presence of a positivist-historical study of Mary.
With Muslim piety and Christian dogma put aside, as the historian insists they must be, there
would seem at first glance to be sufficient historical evidence on Jesus and Muhammad from which
to at least attempt, as many have done, to take the measure of both the men and their milieu. Indeed,
in the view of one early biographers of Jesus, the available sources are even better for Muhammad
than for Jesus, since Islam was born in full view of history.[2]
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Historiography and Srah Writing

I strongly believe that the line of difference, inasmuch as the historicity is questioned, should be
drawn on the very basis expounded by F.E. Peters in the above paragraphs. According to the
standards of modern scientific history, when both of these remarkable men are compared and
contrasted, it is Prophet Muhammads lifethe life of a man who lived in a well-known space
and timethat would qualify to be rendered as historical, because it explicitly meets the demands
of the scientific history. On the other hand, the life of Jesus Christ, as found in the traditional
Christian documents, whereof the principal ones are the New Testament Gospels, would hold no
scientific appeal and would thus be regarded as a mere equivalent of a legend.[3] Apart from this
simple mention of the historical scholarship constructed on the comparison of these two figures
from whom claim the two largest religions of the world their respective origin, it lies beyond the
scope of the present work to conduct a detailed comparative analysis of the presentation of history
in both Islamic and Christian religions.
The modern study of history has opened up new vistas to look into the ancient world. Nevertheless,
the fundamental principle of historiography cannot be self-contradicting. It cannot, for instance,
deny the bearings of certain personalities and their teachings on human cultures. If the witness of
ancient scholarship for a certain event is available at every level of scientific inquiry, modern
historiography must not strip it of its status of being historical. One can deny the myth of Enuma
Elish and the legend of Achilles, but one cannot deny that a migration Makkah to Madinah took
place in the first quarter of 7th century, which changed the course of history. One cannot deny the
existence of a single man behind this whole historical activity, Prophet Muhammad, whose soultouching teachings and miraculous training transformed a whole polytheist nation into the
champions of monotheism within his own lifetime.
It is the exclusive honor of the Muslims that they have managed to investigate hundreds of
thousands high and low-profile lives in order to research only one life', the life of their Prophet.
No other nation, particularly a religious community, can in this regard compete with Muslims, for
they have developed a whole new discipline of research methodology within historical research;
to this discipline they name Asm al-Rijl, the Science of the Narrators. It is this discipline that
offers the raw material to the scientific discipline of Srah writing, which Muslims can deservedly
boast of.
END NOTES
[1] Collingwood, R.G., The Idea of History, Rawalpindi, Bilal & Company Publishers (A Reprint
of 1962 Edition), p.1
[2] Peters, F.E., The Quest of the Historical Muhammad, in Warraq, Ibn, (edit.), The Quest for
the Historical Muhammad, New York: Prometheus Books, 2000, p.445
[3] This is the predominant view of the Higher Critics. Of course, this particular view of Gospel
critics is also based on flawed approach, which does not carry weight within the broader spectrum
of true historical scholarship. The Gospels do establish the fundamental truth that Jesus is historical
and his life and teachings have left a mark on the world religions, cultures and above all history.