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Mohammed Hashas - AlJazeeraTalk - Oujda, Morocco
 History teaches. History lives. These have been my beliefs since I started to reason with things, with ideas, with people, and with history itself. Nothing should be soon put on shelves for memoriam or decoration only. It should serve as a way of teaching. Old stuff comes to hand one day. One could keep a flower to remember a precious person, or keep score transcripts to remember school glorious days, or keep books for research and leisure reading, etc. So many people keep tokens to remind them of certain stages of time in their life, and by implication one might think that such a token is preserved for its didactic value. However, this is not always the case. One hardly goes beyond the superficial significance of objects, be they mere objects or events when it comes to history.
When no reasonably telling and profound link is made between a particular event in the past with one’s presence in the world, history for such person is dumb, dull, and useless, while it should be looked at quite the opposite way. When one turns his back to his history, not much should be expected from him. One should avail himself of his personal past as well as that of his people, and world history at large. One is never able to start from scratch.
If he does, he may be repetitive of what has already been achieved or gone through, which means that nothing particular or new could emerge from such denial. If ancestors and civilizations denied history achievements and started on a personal/local level, humanity would not have achieved much.
This does not mean that history has to be idealized and preserved the way it was first recorded. Reading history this way in a different era is a distortion, a misreading. Past records and events must be preserved, yes, but must also be acclimatized to the contemporary/present needs. Good history evolves this way, and a good student of history looks at it from these lances, otherwise he would live a past in the present – which is abnormal, odd. T.S. Eliot wrote in ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, 1921, that however man, artist, or poet, tries to be very innovative and creative, he is a prisoner of his past, and through his past he builds his present, and influences his future – that if there is something called the present ! It is better to call it ‘around the present,’ since the moment when you speak about something, it is no longer the ‘present,’ it shifts to be a ‘past,’ or ‘around the present.’
In crude terms, history - be it personal history that is related to one’s life and experiences, or to society or world history which is the heritage of a community – is a bank for learning, for stimulation, and is a virtual space in our memories which we recall for (self-)correction, (self-)criticism, and (self-) empowerment. I take it that any event, any accident or incident, and any experience should be turned into ‘good’ though it might have caused negative side-effects in the past. These side-effects or aftermaths of the past are potentially apt to be a good material for a better future. That is why I believe that one’s history is always a pillar in the construction of one’s (firm) identity, and that there is no place for the argument that some history, some past, is a burden, a hindrance. It is such a past that is pushing such a man this way to lead a better life, by avoiding particular past experiences. This means that the past is always there though one tries to escape it, so better face it!
My point: where does the Arab-Islamic world stand when it comes to history? What does this world do with its past? Do we chant Francis Fukuyama’s theory of ‘The End of History and the Last Man’ too? Like Professor Mehdi Elmandjra I would say: one cannot do without a mirror when driving a car. Though you could see what is before you, you need to look behind to avoid accidents, to move forward safe. More to come later in ‘Constructing History – deconstructing histories!’
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