Shadee Elmasry – Podcast Snippet w Jonathan Brown
![Shadee Elmasry](https://artwork.muslimcentral.com/shadee-elmasry-150x150.jpg)
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This is very important. One thing
is this notion of human nature is a fixed
phenomenon. So that human beings did this, how Greco Roman view of
history was cyclical, there is no change in history, just the Wheel
of Fortune goes round and round and round, sometimes you will read
some of the report, but humans are always the same. And that becomes
a very important way of thinking about history that allows Western
historians to go back and say, I know what happened in the past,
because people in the past were just like people now, if people
now are greedy bastards, who always just want whatever they
want, and trying to, you know, maximize their gain and all this
stuff like that. And they're cynical and nasty. That's what
people were in the past, that's very different from the way that
Christians thought about the time of Jesus or Muslims think about
the Companions, or the Prophet lays outside, we don't think about
the companions that like other people. Yeah. So
then the other thing discover, as I said before, his notion of the
of the historian as the detached analyst, so someone like Tacitus,
who's a historian, it dies around 130 of the common year or Polybius
image, and Olivia says that the job of historian is to be PSB,
ready to criticize his friends and praise his enemies. So you kind of
historian as the detached analyst. So this stuff is all discovered, a
couple of things come out of the Greco Roman tradition, one, the
idea that you go back and you discover these texts, and you
start to realize how much language has changed and how much texts
have been doctored to notion of historical distance, how we're
really just different from the past. Okay, three, the idea that
there's a fixed Human Nature doesn't change over time, and for
the notion of historian writing as a kind of detached, and sort of, I
don't want to say supercilious, but almost kind of haughty the
historian is writing, you know, you go and go into his history
section of a bookstore and pick up a book. It doesn't just talk about
the past and and matter of fact, it's always making these kinds of
quips and jokes and things like that. And this guy was so silly,
he did this supercilious attitude towards what you're saying that
happened in Europe seems to be it's almost like a divorced the
children of a divorce right? Where this massive break happens. And
everyone remembers that year as the year of the divorce,
everything is now judged now, from two years from the divorce three
years from the doors, everything's judged by that. And then whoever
the villain is of the divorce, usually, according to one SEC
report that I read is that usually each parent, each kid will assign
one of the parents as the villain and one as the victim, right?
Usually, like younger kids will make it black and white, that
there's one villain, there's one victim, then the villain.
Everything about the villain becomes mistrusted, if they see it
in someone else, so let's say someone villainized as the Mom,
let's say, right, so the mom was so bad ruin my dad. And now he's
has everything about his mom, let's say if she was into, like
beauty, and she was into whatever Pilates, pilates, it all those
things,
they actually start to mistrust anyone who has those qualities,
right. So what you're saying is actually seems like a very, but
this is at the at the civilizational level. So that
really starts in the you see this very clearly in the 1700s. Someone
like Voltaire died in 1778. This guy's hatred for the Catholic
Church was just epic. I mean, it made him mad, funny, though. I
mean, he would just like he would praise Islam and praise Jews who
hate groups. He didn't like Jews at all, for example, but he would
praise whoever, if it helped him make the Catholic Church look bad,
right. So he was just so for them, a lot of his anti slavery
discussions are not just because he thought slavery was wrong
inherently, it's because he wanted the Catholic Church was supporting
it. So that's definitely true. And you see, I mean, there's like a
lot of anti clericalism in the emergence of a modern view of the
world. Now you know, how we have the Hadith that you're going to
copy the people who go, who preceded you, and you're going to
copy them, even if they go down a little meaning the smallest detail
right? Now, what about the most massive things which are your way
of thinking, your way of viewing the world, your way of viewing
your Imams your way of viewing your past? Right? So we are now in
your notice in this in academia, we now have a lot of Muslims who
actually do their minds have adopted this framework of mistrust
of the past. Like we're in a modern times we have an identity
crisis, like we're not connected to the past, right?
They were just guys just like we're guys hungry to succeed,
whatever. Right? And so they've taken this on and it's now as in
the Arab world. Yeah, it's not just in the West it's in the Arab
world to Egyptians have this right. You see writers who have
this, who now view the prophets generation, Alia salatu, salam,
and this Harbin the next two in the next three, three, first three
generations
In the same way that you have now the Renaissance and Reformation
and Protestant Reformation and all these guys viewing and trying to
tear down, like we need to tear it down, right? That idea. You see
this now in Muslim intellectual, there's a book that came out in
1958 called a DUA, Allison and Muhammadiyah, by Mohammed Abu Raya
died around 1970. And he was a student of Rashid riddle. And that
book is like the most comprehensive and aggressive
attack on Hadith tradition. It's not irreverence, it's basically
you can imagine kind of a Neo and what hasn't lights? Yeah.
But the point is, he's his criticisms are very much the type
of criticism of Western historian you know, he says, The Companions
are like any other people.
You know, they were selfish and sensor and you know, self involved
and wanting to advance their own interests and unreliable.
But by the way, another thing I forgot to mention is another
element of the Greco Roman heritage that is revived. There's
two things is one is skepticism, literally, a philosophic
philosophy called skepticism, which is they got from a scholar
named sects Sextus empiricus, who lived died around 200 ad. And a
lot of the idea that human beings cannot so skeptics where they
believe that
right and wrong absolute right and wrong, absolute truth was simply
unknowable, it was unknowable. In fact, even sense perception was
not really reliable. And they use the example of a stick, you know,
when you put in the water and you look at the state appears to bend,
which of course, it's not really bad. So how how can we really even
trust sense perception? So what they said is, look
right and wrong, can't really know about so basically just behave
according to the custom of the city you live in. That's right and
wrong. And that has a big impact on your Western Europe after the
1500s because this idea of
let's not talk about God anymore. Let's not talk about metaphysics
anymore. Let's not talk about reality. We'll let's just study
the world around us. What's going on?