ISLAMIC & WESTERN HISTORIOGRAPHY

426 ISLAMIC STUDIES, 25:4 (1986)
In this way, the old unity of the Biblical world-view of medieval Christianity
was exploded. The medieval church, proceeding from Old Testament tradition
and following Jewish models, had regarded the history of the world as an
e:tclusive history of salvation, in whch the prechristian epoch had been
included (since the time of Paulus ~rosius,[~I early 5th cent.) in Daniel's
vision of the four kingdoms. When the old attitudes lost vogue. one of the
factors which contributed to the 18th century Enlightenment was an enthusiasm
for Chinese culture and political wisdom which ran parallel with the
assimilating Chinese styles (Chinoiserie) in the fine arts. Only thee did it
gradually become possible to grasp the world-wide repercussions of events,
such as the migration of the Huns or the wars waged by the Sassanids on two
fronts against the Romans and the Byzantines, and against the Central Asian
nomads or to see the vast extent of the Manichaen missionary activity, or to
realize that there was real world history that had actually existed before the
18th and the 19th centuries.
Only a cursory reference to these well-known facts is needed here in
order to explain how it was that from the Renaissance onwards Western
Europeans moved to a broader intellectual outlook. The lslamic peoples, on
the other hand, were not able to look back in this way at the plainly visible,
but no longer consciously perceived multiple roots of their cultures and (like
the Oriental Christians) they thus had no chance of broadening their horizons.
On the other hand. neither lslam nor Oriental Christianity experienced confessionsl
rifts which might have followed from such a development. Whatever
one may think about the Enlightenment and its forliis and consequences, we
Europeans owe to it our present ability to look at other religions rationally and
objectively. or at least attempt to do so according to our way of thinking.
Thanks to it, the translations of the Qur'in must no longer have to be prefaced
with a "Refutation of the Prophet of ~alsehood".~~ lil Today. no Western
European can retreat from the state which has been reached, since it has been
proved that the substance of Christianity could hold its ground in the face of
the Enlightenment and can ultimately overcome rationalism as an ideology and
since the earlier controversies over scientific discoveries have to a great extent
disappeared.23 Only when Western Europeans, after the Enlightenment, had
divorced their culture from religion could they offer their culture together with
their technology to other cultural groups though they frequently met with
rebuffs stemming from religious or ideological antipathies. (We shall say
nothing here about the "good" or "evil" of the divorce or the offer).
A thoroughly Christian picture of history had been drawn by the meagre
Western European Chronicles of the early Middle Ages, which were far inferior
to conteiiiporary lslaiiiic ones, and also by the Western European historio-