Description

Ahmad D. Azhar

The writer of this book has set himself a dual aim: to endeavour to reinfuse a sense of history into a people who, more than anything else, are known to history as perhaps its greatest devotees and who more than six hundred years ago, produced a historian of Ibn Khaldun’s calibre, and to endeavour to rouse the rational conscience of a West which has deliberately, at least insouciantly, or perhaps only ignorantly, forgotten history, forgotten the debt it owed to the Moorish teacher and civiliser of the “Dark” Europe, and which, taking a rather undue advantage of the present weak and ignorant East, today insists on identifying the values of the modern civilization with those of the prevalent Christianity.

This dual aim, the author is conscious, is hard to fulfil: on educating the West, attempts even by Western scholars have gone in vain: as for re-educating the East the Eastern mind is so used to the “history” taught to it by its Western masters that the historical truth – retold to be derided by its contented and complacent ignorance. The author lays no claim to originality, but he does claim a privilege: the West may, for a change, find itself more attracted to read something about itself from the pen of an Oriental. This book may go the way of its infinitely more illustrious Western predecessors, but it may at least excite more curiosity and may therefore die harder.

ISBN No. 969-432-176-X.    14 cm. x 21.5 cm. vi + 119 pp. (H.B)