Dr Muhammad Maroof Shah
Modern historiography is based on very different presuppositions or world-view as compared to traditional/medieval historiography. They are almost incomparable. Modern man is predisposed to believe in the autonomy of Nature and refuses on principle to see it as a symbol of something else, as ayat of God, as demanding an explanation in terms of hierarchy of existence, as having anything to do with teleology and he thus refuses to acknowledge any metaphysical significance of the universe. Even many modern theologians concede this. The medieval world view is condemned for its credulity towards the notions of miracles, fairies, djinns, spirits, magic, angels etc. Modern rationalism rejects suprasensible and suprarational phenomena on a priori grounds. Premodern man could not write history objectively according to these modernist rationalist historians because he believed in miracles, “myths” and “legends” connected with supernatural happenings or performances of saints or miracle workers. Their logic is simple. Since miracles are inadmissible on naturalist rationalist assumptions so they could not happen and if some one (like medieval man and historian ) reported repeatedly about such things, and wrote whole chronicles and histories based on them or presented them as indubitable historical, facts, he is considered as deluded, subjectivist, credulous and naïve recorder of events who did not know how to doubt (evidence of the senses). Thus medieval historians are supposed to have universally succumbed to the temptation of writing exaggerated, fanciful, incredible stories and legends. They are supposed to be too pious and devoted believers to have perceived the objective, unadorned, unembellished historical facts or narratives. They are supposed to have let their imagination run wild and having no sense of the facts, down to earth realities. Thus almost all of our medieval historians are discredited on very spurious grounds, as will be argued later. Middle ages are considered to be dark not only in the Europe but everywhere by Post-enlightenment modernist rationalist historians (except a few important dissident figures) The light of Reason was yet to illumine the foggy, cloudy traditional atmosphere where myths, legends, mystery cults, the “mad” people and the occult sciences were important. The age of Faith, as Will Durant characterizes middle ages, was the age of gullible credulous and superstitious men who believed in the miracles and the like. The whole world was pir waer. And then the modern man was born and everything that smacked of the supernatural or supersensible, intuitive, the mad or irrational was banished. They only accepted miracle was science and the only praiseworthy miracle. worker was scientist. So good-bye to the age of miracles, spirits, djinns, fairies, angels, magic, the like and hurrah for the dawn of glorious age of reason. As miracles become incredible the whole edifice of Christianity got problematized by modern rationalist critique of history. Theology had to be reconstructed and reinterpreted and even transformed into its exact antithesis – secular theology. Modern man found it hard to believe in the literal truth of miracles of Jesus as modern scientistic rationalism became fashionable. And this transformed the whole Christian religious tradition. No history could be considered modern or timely that did not reject the literal truth of miracles. This forms the context of modern historiography and its treatment of hagiological literature. Modern Kashmiri historians, generally speaking, uncritically accepted this context and saw medieval Kashmir from this particular perspective. This results in gross distortion of traditional history and nothing short of crude caricature of traditional ethos. What becomes of the traditional history at the hands of our historians due to this rationalist modernist perspective will be discussed in this paper.
Traditional religions and civilizations are inconceivable without taking into consideration the notion of hierarchy of existence. And this can be understood or appreciated only when distinction between Nature and supernature, rational and prara-rational, scientific and mystical realms is no longer respected and one term privileged and the other silenced as in modernist humanist discourse Miracles form the important constituent of traditional religions, Islam included. Premodern pre-Renaissance world may be defined with respect to its credulity towards miracles. Kashmir and Persia are classic examples of traditional weltanschauung and Kashmir still retains that very unfashionable and anachronistic (to modernist sensibilities) ambience and identity as land of Pirs or land of miracle workers (two terms are almost synonymous for a traditional Kashmiri). It is only at the great cost of ruthless marginilization/suppression of the Realm of Unreason, the intuitive, the mystical, the “mad,” that modern scientific worldview has come to dominate. And it has penetrated very deep into historiography and our view of history. History has to be distorted to appropriate or append traditional world history in modern secular scientific paradigm. To make really objective study of history of traditional premodern world of which medieval Kashmir embodied important elements, miracles have to be reckoned with seriously and not to be explained away, demythologized, marginalized or just ignored as if they are nothing but fairy tales, legendry mythological accretions around some spiritual truth, having at best some social role and thus their cognitivity and objective validity is sacrificed or rejected. This is what some modern Kashmiri historians like Ishaq Khan, A. Q. Rifiqi, G.M.D Sofi and have done to Kashmir history, especially its mystic pararational occult traditions, its cult of Pirs or its defining identity Pir-waer. If one is faithful to modern secular thought, as they are like most modern historians, one has to marginalize historical evidence of miracles and deny their literal historical truth and appropriate them in some functionalist perspective and that is what they have done. Popular belief in miracles/karamaat has been seen mostly as a problem and hardly approached with empathy. The terms miracles and legends are used interchangeably by many historians. This approach is here criticized on traditional religious, parapsychological and postmodern grounds.
The very title of Ishaq Khan’s eighth chapter in Kashmir’s Transition to Islam as “The Societal Dimensions of Miracles and Legends.” speaks of the author’s modernist intention. It is entitled It emphasizes societal dimension and is either silent over or suppresses their literal historical cognitive phenomenological truth. It also brackets miracles with legends and negative connotations (in terms of cognitive validity) of the term legend are thus implicitly appended to miracles also. Khan seeks to “establish a purely historical view of the supposedly supernatural phenomena.”(1) However the author is cautious, unlike G.M.D Sofi in Kashir, not to dismiss the occurrence of miracles purely on the basis of reason to avoid committing “violence upon the forces of a strong tradition.”(2)
To me it is not just committing violence upon tradition but also upon latest developments in sciences like parapsychology. In fact modern reason has been violent as postmodern critique of Enlightenment reason shows. Khan repeats modernist Muslim apologia regarding very unambiguous reference to miracles in Quran and Prophetic traditions. Taking recourse to the thesis of exaggeration in the narration of miraculous experience in hagiographical literature, as Khan does, will not solve the problem. The author wants to be agnostic with respect to historian’s onus to authenticate existence of miracles. He says, “It is outside the domain of history to determine which of the miracles that are said to have occurred is true or false.”(3)
Dr. Mohammad Maroof Shah is an author and Columnist, interested in the the interface of philos¬ophy, literature, religion and mysticism
