ভূমিকা

Shiavault - a Vault of Shia Islamic Books Sociology of the Qur'an Part Ii What Is History? History may be defined in three ways. In fact, there are three closely connected disciplines related to history. Knowledge of the incidents, events, circumstances, and condi­tions of people living in the past in relation to the present conditions and circumstances.

All situations, conditions, events, and episodes which take place belong to the present, that is, the time during which they take shape, are judged, reported, and recorded as matters of the day by daily newspapers. However, as soon as their time elapses, they are merged with the past and become a part of history. Hence, history, in this sense, is the knowledge of the bygone incidents, events, conditions and circumstances of the people in the past.

Biographies, records of battles and conquests, and all such chronicles compiled in the past, or at the present, by all nations, come under this category. History in this sense is, firstly, the knowledge of the particular; that is, it is the knowledge of a sequence of personal and individual episodes, not the knowledge of a series of general laws and relation­ships. Secondly, it is a study of narratives and traditions, not a rational discipline.

Thirdly, it is the knowledge of `being,' not that of `becom­ing.' Fourthly, it is related to the past, not to the present. This type of history we shall term as `traditional history' (tdrthh naqlt). History is the knowledge of laws that appear to govern the life of the past, obtained through investigation and analysis of the past events. The stuff with which the traditional history is concerned, i.e. the events and incidents of the past, provides the rudimentary and basic material for this study.

For the study of history in this sense, such events and incidents are similar to the material gathered by a natural scientist for his laboratory analysis and investigation to discover certain general laws, through induction, regarding the nature and properties of his material and the causal relations governing its changes.

The historian,in this analytical endeavour, wishes to uncover the true nature of historical events and their causal relationship, and to discover the general and universal laws applicable to all similar events of the past and the present. We shall call history in this sense `scientific history'.