The pageant of all that has happened is, to begin with, a
blooming buzzing confusion. Historically, one aim of the chronicler
has been to slice up some of it, and dress it up into a narrative that will be
entertaining or edifying for the audience. More analytically-minded historians (such as Ibn Khaldun and
his successors) have set themselves an additional task: To make
sense of it.
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| ابن خلدون |
A wide-ranging comparative historian acknowledges the wealth
of data which confront the historiographer, but
The “intelligible fields of study”,
the comparable units of history,
remain inconveniently few for the application of the scientific technique.
-- Arnold Toynbee, A Study of
History (12 volumes; 1934-61; introduction, last paragraph)
One classic move is to organize the ever-mingling,
ever-onrushing flow of events into
coherent thematic chunks; as: the Dark Ages; the Renaissance; the
Reformation; the
Enlightenment. Others refer
to calendric stretches but, if so, normally must modify the defining termini a quo and ante quem to reflect
actual historical development:
thus, “the long nineteenth century” (which lasted into the Edwardian
autumn, and winked out forever at Sarajevo), and “the Sixties”, which in the good sense
began with JFK’s election, and
in the bad sense with his
assassination; and then petered
out ignobly in the early seventies.
Anyhow, huge subject, won’t treat it here, but merely serve
up a couple of quotes specifically related to Islamic historiography -- thus
posting at least a place-holder for the topic, in our wildly successful “Ontology
of …” series (soon to be featured on bubble-gum cards, suitable for trading).
“Classic” or “classical period” is
likewise a construct, all the more obviously so since it is being borrowed from one phenomenon, Greek and
Roman antiquity, and used to somehow periodize another quite different one,
Islam.
-- F. E. Peters, preface to A
Reader on Classical Islam (1994)
History is a seamless garment; periodization is a convenience of the
historian, not a fact of the historical process. By choosing carefully, one can slant history without any
resort to actual falsehood. For
example, a writer on relations between the United States and Japan can start
with Hiroshima, or he can start with Pearl Harbor.
-- Bernard Lewis, “In Defense of
History” (1997/1999), reprinted in From Babel to Dragomans (2004), p. 389
He goes on to make an exact parallel with the historiography
of the Crusades, of intense current relevance, but too hot to handle in this
space; consult the (excellent)
original article.
The essential human unit
in which man’s nature is fully realised is not the individual, [n]or a voluntary association which
can be dissolved or altered or abandoned at will, but the nation.
--Isaiah Berlin, “Nationalism”,
repr. in Against the Current (1979), p. 342
(Cf. individual vs. group selection in Darwinism.)
[Afternote] We sometimes also find explanatory periodization,
not by historians, but by the people themselves:
The Aztecs … sought relief … from
the oppressive idea of eternity, by breaking it up into distinct cycles … each
of several thousand years’ duration.
There were four of these cycles;
and at the end of each, by the agency of the elements, the human family
was swept from the earth, and the sun blotted out from the heavens, to be again
rekindled.
-- William Prescott, History of
the Conquest of Mexico (1843), p. 53
~
Glanced at above is the internal
ontology of historiography -- its structure and staffage. There is also the matter of its external ontology -- how it fits in with
other disciplines.
“History is an art, like the other
sciences,” a felicitious paradoxical epigram crafted by Veronica Wedgwood.
--John Lukacs, The Future of
History (2011), p. 81
.
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