How a Culture Sees History Matters

Printer-friendly versionSend to friendPDF version Dr. Laina Farhat-Holzman How a culture looks upon its own history, as well as world history, can tell us much about their values. United States. Our founding fathers recognized that participatory governance was a radical idea – and that the elites in Europe watched and worried. Monarchs and the aristocracy had good reason to worry when shortly after the United States won its freedom from Britain, the French Revolution erupted. It was much more violent than ours, and European monarchies retrenched and suppressed not only revolutionary attempts, but even reform. In our new country, the educated class learned history as their British forebears had: beginning with Greece and Rome, then Christianity and Medieval and Renaissance Europe, and finally the emergence of nation states with their own histories. It was knowledge of Greece and Rome that gave our founding fathers the concept of republics and democracies from which they organized our own special republican values, which have over time extended participatory rights to all adult citizens. No, they did not know much about the histories of India, China, Japan, or even those of the new world empires, the Aztecs and Incas. That knowledge had to wait until the 20th century, when two world wars made such knowledge important. But history for us was always essential and was open to enlargement as we evolved. In the 1920s, H. G. Wells, better known to us as a writer of science fiction, wrote a popular two-volume History of the World, which was widely read. World History has benefited enormously as a result. However, Americans in general are more interested in tomorrow than in yesterday, with a couple of exceptions:

• Some believe that the political arrangements made by the founding fathers should be encased in amber – never to be changed. These are the “strict constructionists” on the Supreme Court, for example, who look for the “intentions” of the founding fathers in evaluating legal cases. Should we abide by their intentions in regard to women and Blacks?
• The losers of the Civil War are also keen on history, doing passionate reenactments (in the hope of a different outcome, perhaps?).

The Muslim World. Arabs led Islam into nations with long, long histories. They encountered Egypt, which was already thousands of years old and the Greek, Roman, and Persian worlds with a thousand years of history well known to their educated citizens. The Arabs determined early to declare all history before Islam’s emergence in the 7th century AD a time of “Jahilia” (ignorance.) While this ignorance was certainly true for the Arabs before Islam, it was not true for their conquered peoples. Today there are serious ramifications of this Arab-Muslim policy in such countries as Pakistan (once part of India’s long history) and Indonesia, with layers of history before Islam. But even Saudi Arabia has conflict between true believers and archaeologists who are finding very ancient Arabian sites. Iran. As the current Iranian revolution roils, the issue of history resurfaces. Under the 50-year Pahlavi rule that preceded the Islamic Revolution, historic knowledge was an important element in dragging a feudal country into the 20th century. The first Pahlavi shah changed the calendar from the Islamic one that began year one from Mohammad’s mission to the much older recognition of 2500 years of Persian identity. He also encouraged the elite to name their children for the ancient heroes and heroines of the epic poem of Iran, the Shah Nameh, rather than Muslim names from Arab history. The Islamic Revolution changed the calendar back to Islamic reckoning, and Ayatollah Khomeini even tried (unsuccessfully) to wipe out every evidence of Iran’s existence before Islam. He frowned on the celebration of Persian New Year, which is obviously ancient and obviously Zoroastrian. Even today, the government makes every effort to sabotage Zoroastrian archeological sites. This is like the Afghan Taliban destroying world heritage Buddhist sculptures. Perhaps Iranians can retrieve their history and their souls while they are fighting for freedom. Those who do not learn from history are condemned to repeat it. FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor Dr. Laina Farhat-Holzman is an historian, lecturer, and author who also writes for the Santa Cruz Sentinel. You may contact her at Lfarhat102@aol.com or http://www.globalthink.net/.