EDITORIAL

Abstract

Once again it is our pleasure to have the “Guiding Light” from Abdul
Hm-d AbiiSulaymh under a specific title. He has arranged relevant verses
from the Qur’an and the sayings of the Prophet to discuss the civilizational
value of cleanliness. This approach has been appreciated by our readership.
In this issue of AJISS, Ghulam-Haider Aasi sketches the relatively
unknown contribution of Muslim scholars to the history of religions and their
role as the true founders of this discipline. It is important for present-day
Muslim historians and social scientists to realize how their predecessors
conceived the reality of sociohistorical phenomenon, a view which was based
upon religious ideas and practices. The history of humanity for Muslim scholars
was the history of ideas and values, for they saw religion as the core and
basis of all human culture and civilization and all other branches of knowledge
as being directly related to and dependent upon the science of religion. In
his brief paper, Aasi has brought to our attention an unexplored legacy which,
if mentioned at all, is only done so casually and very briefly by the Western
scholars of Islam. This unique and volumnious literature, Aasi says, still awaits
its readers, analysts, critics, and translators.
Khalid Blankinship, writing on the periodization of history, shows how
the supposedly “world” history taught in the West has a strong Eurocentric
bias, which is reflected in the currently acceptable division of history into
ancient, medieval, and modem times based on what was happening in the
West (i.e., Europe) at that time. He shows through his analysis of this three part
periodization of history how the narrow parochial origins of the Western
vision of history goes back to the idea that only Western European civilization
is worthy of study. He also shows the limitations of the traditional Muslim
historians, who tended to be largely isolationist in their accounts, and of
the assimilating Muslim modernizers, who have accepted the subordination
of their history and ideas to materialist viewpoints of the West.
Blankinship argues that in light of the universality of tawhid, based on
his assertion that the history of humanity is essentially a quest to know God,
all human traditions contain elements that are more or less close to Islam
and therefore worthy of study. He demonstrates that from an Islamic point
of view, history is the universal property of everyone. As an alternative to
the current Eumcentric periodhation, Blankinship postulates dividmg historical
eras based on the approximate date of 600 CE, which he claims is a watershed ...