Shadee Elmasry – Podcast Snippet w Jonathan Brown

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?