HGP193. Christianity
in History
By Ahmad D. Azhar
14 cm. x 21.5 cm.---Pages 125.
The writer of this book has set himself a dual aim: to endeavour to
reinfuse a sense of history into a people who, more than anything else,
are known to history as perhaps its greatest devotees and who more than
six hundred years ago, produced a historian of Ibn Khaldun's calibre, and
to endeavour to rouse the rational conscience of a West which has deliberately,
at least insouciantly, or perhaps only ignorantly, forgotten history, forgotten
the debt it owed to the Moorish teacher and civiliser of the "Dark" Europe,
and which, taking a rather undue advantage of the present weak and ignorant
East, today insists on identifying the values of the modern civilization
with those of the prevalent Christianity.
This dual aim, the author is conscious, is hard to fulfil: on educating
the West, attempts even by Western scholars have gone in vain: as for re-educating
the East the Eastern mind is so used to the "history" taught to it by its
Western masters that the historical truth -- retold to be derided by its
contented and complacent ignorance. The author lays no claim to originality,
but he does claim a privilege: the West may, for a change, find itself
more attracted to read something about itself from the pen of an Oriental.
This book may go the way of its infinitely more illustrious Western predecessors,
but it may at least excite more curiosity and may therefore die harder.
ISBN NO. 969-432-176-X.