Central Asia Journal No. 67

A World History of Knowledge (I)§

Shuja ul Haq*

Every generation, scholars have arisen proclaiming that they have found a new key which unlocks the essence of the past in a way that no previous historical approach has ever done. Our own generation is no exception…    D. Cannadine

There is no objective history.                                  E. H. Carr

Abstract

While noting the current animosity to constructing a world history, an attempt towards it is motivated by the hypothesis that it would bring about a peaceful change in the present world order. The key idea is that the past is relative and not fixed and absolute, as assumed by the current modern and religious approaches (each holding its own view of the past as ‘real’ or ‘true’). Therefore, in so far as the present is the outcome of the past that we possess, if we can have a new past, a new present will come into being. It is further argued that this proposition logically follows from the theory of relativity. Furthermore, the project of world history of knowledge is seen as a prelude to a new history of Pakistan the people of which are currently undergoing an identity crisis caused by the failure of the attempts to define their past in parochial Islamic terms. Given the long history of the land stretching back to Indus civilization in the third millennium BCE, the need for new concepts to unify its various historical strands is underlined. Needless to say, the underlying assumption of this endeavour is that if we seek a new future for Pakistan, we must create a new past for it. Some new concepts central to the whole enterprise are introduced.

Prologue

World histories are notoriously difficult to write. Though many a scholar has tried his hand, none has succeeded so far in winning general acclaim or consensual acceptance. So why is one trying to do so? More so in view of the fact that as awareness of the role of history in the making of human individual and society steadily grew in the last century, so did the discipline of history, perhaps more than any other, fell under the sword of specialization and fragmented into so many branches that a reputed art historian, or religious historian, or family historian, or TV historian, would be excused if he did not know who was Oliver Cromwell, let alone any clue about the alchemical investigations of Newton. In the last quarter of the century, no wonder, there emerged a sort of general consensus that world history was a chimera and anyone thinking of even attempting to do so must be having delusions that he could be Alexander.
J. H. Plumb, a British historian of some repute, though assenting to the prevailing view that writing world history was doomed, nevertheless could not hold his disdain when it came to dealing with the archeological discoveries of the massive histories of ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia and Indus and the established historians’ dogmatic aversion to any attempt at making sense of those histories in a universal context. Placing the phenomenon in the context of general disillusion that followed the wars of the twentieth century, Plumb wrote:
The majority of historians have withdrawn from general culture in order to maintain, at a highly intellectual level, an academic discipline. They have left the meaning and purpose of history to trained philosophers and have spent their leisure hours tearing to shreds the scholarship of anyone foolish enough to attempt to give the story of mankind a meaning and a purpose – writers as diverse as H.G. Wells and Arnold Toynbee have been butchered with consummate skill….In consequence, an atmosphere of anarchic confusion pervades the attitude of Western man to his past.

Thus the very words ‘universal history’ even vaguely suggesting that humankind could be understood as a single unity became a hated phrase: as if whoever thought in terms of the whole was harbouring intentions to devour the whole. A historian, even before he utters the first word, is expected to make it clear which part of the whole he is going to talk about if he intends to be taken seriously.
One is aware of the enormous difficulties involved in developing a general picture of human history, though. There are many reasons on one’s part for entering into what seems to be a lion’s den, being aware that any one venturing into such endeavour must know before hand that he may not come out alive. To say that one was born to do so would be a cliché, though Toynbee who wrote a massive twelve volume world history of civilizations had the sagacity to say something like that and probably was never forgiven for it by his critics. But one thing one will nevertheless not hesitate to say without any qualms, that one has come to undertake the present task because, as Socrates  put it (in Plato’s words), ‘As it is, the lover of inquiry must follow his beloved wherever it may lead him.’
One considers it his good fortunate to have started at university with philosophy major and, secondly, immediate conversion to Marxism. The first granted the right to consider all disciplines that one could make sense of as falling under his jurisdiction while the second instilled the life-long belief that the unjust social order of the world was natural nor absolute and that it could be changed if we knew how to do it. Furthermore, it did not take long to realize that Marxism was grossly deficient as a knowledge of change. Thus the desire and legitimacy of change survived but the quest began for the right knowledge to change because the consciousness never ceased that one could never be oneself in a spiritless world.
To put it very briefly, what is being suggested is that once we have constructed the primary structure of world history of knowledge, the world would never appear same to anyone who looks at it from this edifice. A vain claim? By no means. For what is being proposed is that the fundamental error that Marxism, or for that matter any other modern theory of change, makes is that in the final analysis it believes that change would occur through power of the gun, or, physical force, be it of state or capital, whereas the truth might be, as our now forgotten ancestors believed, that change comes through the power of the pen. It is for this reason that one has chosen to write not a world history but a world history of knowledge to demonstrate that knowledge is intrinsic to human existence and, therefore, every human society, whether of primitive hunters’ or of moderns’, is knowledge society. What follows is that all change in human history has come through the power of knowledge. This is what philosophy teaches us, the philosophy which an ancient blessed man of knowledge articulated and practiced, aptly embodied in his famous dictum, knowledge is virtue.
The key insight relating to our times that Socrates’ teaching gives is that if the intellectual community has withdrawn from struggle for power after the demise of Soviet communism, the secret of its failure lies in the fact that what was wrong was not struggle for power but the power it was struggling for. Furthermore, if the power that we are seeking is the power of knowledge, then our immediate aim is not political but knowledge revolution. The driving force of this revolution is the intellectual community, the teachers, students, and researchers, of the school and the university.
I will start with a provisional definition of knowledge as a network of concepts and their relations that the human creates in his interaction with nature, and history of knowledge would be the evolution of this network and the transformations it has undergone. Knowledge is, in other words, articulated thought that mediates between or connects the human and nature. Its role in the life of homo sapiens can be understood through the analogy of a most modern tool, the computer. Just as computer performs according to the programme it is equipped with, so the human acts according to the network of concepts and their relations that ‘programmes’ him. What follows is that if we wish to change the world, which means both the individual and the society, we must examine the network or programme being employed and suggest a change there to effect a change in the world. Any one familiar with Socrates’ life would immediately recognize that this was the kind of work he was doing to the end of his life. ‘An unexamined life,’ he would say, ‘is not worth living.’
The immediate analogy that comes to mind for this way of bringing change in our world is that of architects. For just as an architect, or a team of architects puts everything on paper for what they seek to build, keeping in view what materials are available, the possibilities of their way of utilization and the environment where the new edifice is going to be raised, so the intellectual community must draw the blueprint of what it seeks to construct on paper. It should be noted that this method of effecting change corresponds with our profession. This was one of the crucial problems that took me away from Marxism. For it occurred to me that what was being asked from us as revolutionaries was to train in wielding the gun and eventually turn into politicians and administrators of a state. But I never thought that that was the right profession for me or for any person in the service of knowledge.
It is obvious that Marx was inspired from Plato’s model of the role of the intellectuals as rulers of state. But Plato’s was really a model for a city state in which he was raised and which disappeared soon after his death and, secondly, it is questionable if Socrates would have agreed to that model. For it is a peculiarly modern, Western understanding of Socrates’ thought which has made Plato the principle inheritor of his master’s legacy. It is well known that Socrates walked barefoot while Plato was an aristocrat from both his maternal and paternal lineage. The chief inheritor of the other now almost forgotten legacy of barefooted Socrates was Antisthenes who would have nothing to do with the state and who was associated with Socrates for much longer than Plato. It was this legacy which, chiefly in the form of stoicism, dominated the Greco-Roman intellectual world for the centuries to come. The role of the intellectual community in this tradition, self-conscious of its own distinctness and autonomy from political community, was much closer to Socrates’ way of life and thinking.
This obviously a complex subject must be left for the later time. For the moment what needs to be underlined is that Socrates in the fifth century BCE was not alone to have come to the insight that knowledge was the chief determinant in human society. In the closing centuries of the second millennium BCE a revolution was spreading around the world, in Egypt, Middle East, Iran, Greece, Rome, India and China, which was founded on the belief in the centrality of knowledge in human life. This was the age of great teachers whose names are associated with the civilizations that they helped to found and which have survived to this day.
This revolution around the first millennium BCE, a revolution in the network of concepts and their relations, it may be mentioned briefly, followed in the heels of the earlier knowledge revolution. Known as the Urban Revolution, in the fourth-third millennium BCE, it marks the beginning of civilization and which gave birth to the great ancient civilizations of Mesopotamia, Egypt, Indus and China. The Urban Revolution was the second phase of the Neolithic Revolution that began with the invention of agriculture some five to seven millennia earlier. Perhaps the chief mark of the Urban Revolution was the invention of writing, the watershed that by common convention allows us to call the earlier period as pre-history and the following one as history. In our structure of world history of knowledge we would designate the Urban Revolution as the First Knowledge Revolution (1KR), the first great change in the network of concepts and their relations that man creates in the process of his adaptation to nature, while that breaking out in the first millennium BCE we would call the Second Knowledge Revolution (2KR).
Ironically, the authority of the teachers, the founders of the 2KR, and with it the centrality of knowledge, both as the most precious human possession and the primary tool to effect adaptation through social, cultural change, was first time challenged in Europe with the so-called Enlightenment and its advent into modern age in the eighteenth century. It was then that the idea was introduced that the sole motors of change were wealth or capital and state or political power. With the expansion of the West around the globe this idea has become so well entrenched today, dogmatically followed by both modern Western university and today’s religious madrassa in our midst, that any suggestion that knowledge could be motor of change is likely to be immediately debunked as an idealist nonsense. But idealism and materialism are contraries, and one may ask what has made the materialist way of change so sacrosanct and self-evident that any suggestion to the contrary seems risible?
Probably the chief evidence for the prevailing materialist conception of change is common sense and our every day experience. The power of the capital and state has become so all pervasive that a hypothesis proposing that these mighty institutions can be overwhelmed by the power of knowledge seems contrary to common sense. But if there is anything that history teaches us by even a cursory look at it, it is that every meaningful change in human history has occurred by overturning what seems self-evident and defying what is common sense and based on everyday experience. The second lesson that history teaches us is that new ideas are seldom absolutely new. In most cases they have already been presented, though in rudimentary form, or they are resurrections of the ideas once presented or even wholly accepted but subsequently rejected and marginalized.
A quick look at the histories of religion, philosophy, science and art would illustrate the point. Take the idea of one, invisible God presented by Moses to Pharaoh, as narrated in the Bible and the Quran. In the dialogue between them the Pharaoh represents the given consensus according to which the ultimate deity that could not be represented through any physical image, or which was beyond sensory perception, defied common sense. The same idea was at the heart of the debate between Roman paganism and early Christianity and then between Muhammad and his pagan fellow Meccans. And yet it was this idea which became the founding stone of the Christian and Islamic civilizations that emerged at the ruins of Egyptian, Mesopotamian and Greco-Roman civilizations.
In philosophy, the atomist conception of the nature of reality was rejected by Democritus’ contemporaries but it was resurrected in the seventeenth century Europe to become the founding idea of modern science. In art, the cubist revolution of Picasso was directly influenced by the primitive African art forms long forgotten. At times a once widely respected idea but subsequently rejected in favour of its opposite idea is again resurrected but in a new dress whereby it is made to co-exist with its contrary. Newton’s particle theory of light was rejected in the mid nineteenth century for the wave nature of light. But it was again resurrected in 1900 by Max Planck who showed that light possessed both particle and wave properties. It laid the foundation of quantum theory which, along with the relativity theory in 1905, altered the whole landscape of scientific thinking.
The most powerful instance that proves the point in more than one ways, though, is that of the Copernican revolution that overturned the geocentric world system, thus laying the foundations of modern era. We know that the idea of the sun-centered world was not Copernicus’, but first proposed by Aristarchus of Samos, ‘the Copernicus of antiquity’, in the middle of the third century BCE. This ‘violation of common sense,’ as Kuhn points out, was rejected down the centuries, and also by Copernicus’ contemporaries, because it contradicted ‘the first and most fundamental suggestions provided by the senses about the structure of the universe.’
In short, what changed the world, not just the social but also physical, was new knowledge, embodied in a book, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres (1543) by Copernicus. It is also well known that what really completed the Copernican revolution was another book, Newton’s Principia Mathematica (1687), which was as revered by the nascent modern European community as the holy books of the past by their adherents. The modernity that these books created thus marks the third revolution in the network of concept and their relations (3rd Knowledge Revolution). This fact merely substantiates the pattern already set centuries ago, for all the civilizations which have survived to this day are ‘Book civilizations,’ associated with such teachers as Moses, Jesus, Muhammad, Zarathustra, the Indian Seers who ‘heard’ the Vedas, the Buddha, Lao Tzu and Confucius.

The Question of Historical Approach

It should be apparent that what is crucial is the key or the historical approach we employ not only to ‘unlock the essence of the past’ but also to unravel why the keys or approaches hitherto employed have failed. The first thing that must be made clear at the outset is that what we are aiming at for the moment is not the construction of world history of knowledge at large but its primary or essential structure. Once this is in place, which should not take the space of more than a small volume, a multi-volume filling can be undertaken through a collective effort.
Secondly, I have made clear in the foregoing the object of undertaking such a task. To put it in other words, it is to demonstrate that with the application of a new approach or perspective, we discern a pattern or structure in history that leads to a social order radically different from the one we are living in the now. The underlying assumption of what I am stating should be apparent, and which is that what we are presently, collectively and individually, is the outcome of the way we currently see our past, or the approach with which we see the past on the one hand and what we see in the past on the other. It should be further apparent that the key, approach, perspective or the apparatus, whatever it be called, and what is seen through that apparatus, or the key and what is found in the edifice after unlocking it, are intertwined and inseparable.
The point that I am trying to make needs a quick elucidation as it is central to the whole enterprise of the construction of world history of knowledge. Most importantly, it takes leave from our everyday, common sense notion of past which is taken as fixed, absolute and immutable and on which the whole given concept of history is based. It seems so self-evident that to suggest that that might not be the case would seem simply ludicrous. But what we are trying to argue is that this conception is as erroneous as the Newtonian conception of absolute time and space that once seemed so indisputable.
Now I am not saying that by changing the perspective we can change the dates of historical events or, say, change the outcome of those events, of wars, revolutions, rise and fall of empires and so forth. What I am saying is that the facts or events themselves do not constitute history. Rather, what matters is that what facts we choose and, secondly, how we understand, interpret, give meanings to them, or, in a word, relate them, and the picture that we make thereof is what we call past or history. What follows is that in order to construct a new future, we also construct a new past, the two enterprises being inseparable. We will see that the debunking of the age old belief that the past is fixed and absolute follows inevitably from the theory of relativity. For the moment, I would only reiterate that while our present world order is the direct outcome of the picture of our past that we currently possess (as we will illustrate shortly), we will inevitably be living, or leading to a different social order if we can draw a picture of the past different from the one that we now possess.
In this way, interestingly, constructing a new future presupposes constructing a new past, a praxis that connects us with time as a continuum, transcending its division into past and future, bringing both into an eternal, never ending present. Even more interestingly, a little reflection will show that human beings are engaged in this activity, that is, of changing their past, all the time, though unreflectively and unknowingly. We only have to do this most important work reflectively and the world would never be the same again. Needless to see, the implications of the realization of freedom to change the past are far reaching.
Our belief in the absoluteness of the past and openness of the future provides us with the most powerful evidence for the absoluteness of dualism, that is, that contraries cannot unite. But once we discover that openness of the future is meaningless without the openness of the past, for we cannot build a new future on an old past, any more than we can build a new building on the foundations of a ruined structure, the absoluteness of dualism will collapse and the unity of opposites realized. We will then see that past and future, old and new, the first and the last, finite and infinite, male and female, yin and yang (in the Chinese, Taoist terminology), linear and cyclical natures of time, are essentially one, just as mass and energy, particle and wave, are essentially one. This principle, that of unity of opposites, is actually the missing code required to decipher the language of the past, of the premodern civilizations, which has become incomprehensible to us with the global domination of the modern mind for which dualism is inherent in the nature of things. To this we will return in a later paper.
The third point that needs to be emphasized is that the essential historical structure and the consequent social structure is being proposed as a hypothesis, or, better to say, a succession of hypotheses. And a hypothesis, whether in the domain of social or natural sciences, as the history of science demonstrates, becomes a theory only when it wins the consensus of the scientific community. And, finally, a hypothesis cannot be viewed or tested from the yardstick of the reigning theory, that is, the current approach and reigning social structure, which it is aiming to overturn. Rather, what is to be looked at is, firstly, its critique of the existing theory, that is, the limitations and contradictions of it that it is pointing out. Secondly, its internal, logical consistency and, thirdly, its claim that it can explain larger span of phenomena or amount of facts hitherto left unexplained. The last but not least measure is its aesthetic appeal, for what we will attempt to show is that the disorder of the present world order corresponds to the crude nature of the prevailing dominant historical approach and the patchwork nature of what it shows us in the past.

A Prelude to History of Pakistan

I also see the proposed world history of knowledge serving an important function as a prelude to a new history of Pakistan. For if there is a test case which is crying for a new approach and a new vision of the past, it is this country. We are currently undergoing an acute crisis of identity, coming to a boil since the last thirty or so years. The controversial character of the Islamic identity that is emphasized in public discourse and taught in the history text books of our schools is more than evident.
The most glaring fact that our historians have conveniently and completely overlooked, or marginalized, or failed to come to terms with is that this land happens to be the seat of one of the first four most ancient civilizations mentioned above. And that is not all. In the closing centuries of the first millennium BCE, as the historical records of Ghandara and Taxila illustrate, in its northern part it also experienced a unique confluence of East and West when Greek culture, brought in the train of Alexander’s armies, came into fusion with Buddhist culture which had found its first flourishing there.
And finally, in the present territory of Pakistan, as part of India, Islam had been at home for nearly four centuries before its expansion to central India in the thirteenth century. It was thus Indianized in this long course of its interaction with the native Hindu civilization. When we look at this interaction what we immediately notice is that it was made possible largely by the Sufi dimension of Islamic culture which played the decisive role in the conversion of notable part of the local population. As I have tried to show elsewhere, the conversion was made possible because of the affinity between the pluralist visions of Hindu and Islamic spirituality, Sufism being the chief manifestation of the latter.
The importance of this fact comes to relief when we see it in the backdrop of Islamic presence in Spain from where it was ousted en masse after nearly five centuries of rule. Even though Sufism constituted a dominant aspect of Islamic culture there in the eleventh-twelfth centuries, it failed to strike a chord among the local inhabitants because of the underdeveloped local Christian tradition that remained deeply sectarian until its collapse at the hands of the forces of science and modernity. The interaction of Islam and its Sufi tradition with the native Indian spiritual culture also gave birth to Sikhism in the Punjab which holds an important place in the current family of world religions.
In short, the point I am trying to emphasize is that it is wrong to depict history of Pakistan from an exclusivist, settler, colonialist mindset which has become chief feature of the dominant culture in this country and which has played a decisive role in the tragic socio-political developments of the last few decades. And it is wrong chiefly because it is not historical, rather it is based on deliberate distortion of historical facts, a deeply entrenched tendency of our official history writers to which K. K. Aziz starkly drew attention in his The Murder of History in Pakistan. The madaris may have mushroomed in the last decades, but they are still fewer in relation to the schools, colleges and universities and the truth is that the mind of the latter, and consequently of the whole country, has been and is being shaped by the religious intelligentsia that run the madaris. And if one asks how on earth it was made possible, the answer is that the religious intelligentsia does not run only the madaris but also the mosques and their often noisy loudspeakers massing the sound waves of every corner.
The response of the modernist intelligentsia in this country to this state of affairs has been pathetic, to say the least. And their counterparts in India have been no better in their approach. Following the Western university’s apathy to religion blindly, they have been proudly brandishing their disdain of religion as an illusory phenomenon, being fully contended with the verdict of modernity that it an illusion or opium of the masses, as pronounced by Freud and Marx respectively. But if they ever free themselves for a while from the Western what I would describe as dogmatic approach to religion, and have a look into Durkheim’s The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, not a very welcoming book for the ruling hierarchy of the Western university, they might have a pause to think.
Emile Durkheim, by common consent one of three ‘founding fathers’ of sociology, along with Marx and Weber, turns the tables on modern social theorists, whether of Marxist or non-Marxist bent, who thrive on their ‘destructive’ criticism of religion, by taking note of a simple fact, established unequivocally by the rise of anthropology and ethnographic studies of the primitive societies in the latter part of the nineteenth and early twentieth century on which Durkheim drew. It is that religion is the oldest living institution of human society and ‘there is no known society without religion.’ From this fact Durkheim concluded a founding premise of sociology stating at the out set of his work, namely,
It is a basic postulate of sociology that a human institution cannot rest on error and falsehood or it could not endure.

And again, in the concluding pages, he reiterated:
Our entire study rests on this postulate: that this unanimous feeling of believers across time cannot be purely illusory.

Therefore,
It is indeed useful to know what a particular religion is about, yet it is far more important to discover what religion is in general. This is the problem that from time immemorial has piqued the curiosity of philosophers, and not without reason; it interests all humanity.   

Well before the publication of The Elementary Forms, in which ‘Durkheim the unbeliever produced one of the most provocative studies in religion,’ he had already come to the conclusion that religion held the key to understanding of contemporary society and its institutions.
Religion contains in itself from the very beginning…all the elements…which have given rise to the various manifestations of collective life. From myths and legends have issued forth science and poetry; from religious ornamentations and cult ceremonials have come the plastic arts; from ritual practice were born law and morals. One cannot understand our perception of the world,…of life, if one does not know the religious beliefs which are their primordial forms.

With this, and his emphasis that religion, since the earliest ages of human existence on the globe, had provided the very basis of social solidarity intrinsic to the very existence of human society, he struck deep at the founding beliefs of the prevailing modern methodology that religion is false knowledge inherently detrimental to human well being. His insight allows us to conclude that religion is the first and the oldest form of knowledge or of network of concepts and their relations that the human created in his interaction with nature.
But if for Durkheim, writing in the context of the early twentieth century Europe, religion in its traditional form was already a fact of the past, in the Islamic as well as in the non-Western world at large it still forms the warp and woof of society. Our uncritical copying of Western hostility to religion as a moribund phenomenon has allowed the religious intelligentsia to exercise a complete monopoly over it and a free reign to propagate and project an ossified view of it. The almost sick exclusivism that underlies such view has been chiefly responsible for surgical amputation of our pre- and non-Islamic past which in its turn has produced belligerent political climate making the possibility of peaceful co-existence with our neighbours almost unthinkable. Therefore it is apparent that if there is to be any hope for peace in this part of the world, the social scientific community of this country, and indeed of South Asia in general, must reconnect with their past, and with their people, by way of a new perspective towards religion.
We should also take note of the fact that Egyptian and Iranian historians have not abandoned their pre-Islamic past in the way we have and there is no reason whatsoever to consider us more pious than them. We must face it that we, the social scientific community of this country, have meekly surrendered to the protagonists of an ideology that by no stretch of imagination can be described as historical. The impoverishment of their stock of knowledge is too glaring to be looked at with awe. Indeed, one wonders, if the following admonition of the Quran is really meant for them:
And make not Allah, by your oaths, a hindrance to your being good, being mindful of Him and making peace between people.

In the name of our past what we have been fed is a distasteful patchwork of beliefs founded on a highly superficial, tendentious and self-motivated understanding of the Quran, the life and mission of the Prophet and subsequent history with disastrous consequences. Their artificial, shallow and parochial approach to the past has rendered us virtually past-less and rootless, turning us, the inheritors of one of the longest and most illustrious history, into ‘a people without history’ and a laughing stock of the world. Our present plight speaks a great deal about it, we only have to turn our ears to it.
In short, the point that I have tried to bring home is that Pakistan’s identity crisis is actually the crisis of the two historical approaches, that of religious, or traditional rooted in the madrassa on the one hand and of the modern, grounded in the Western university on the other which has been imbibed by the modernist intelligentsia of our university. I have argued that both are a historical. The first because it takes into account only one constituent, however important it be, namely, Islam, of our past and completely ignores the other aspects which include, above all, our history prior to the advent of Islam in this land that stretches back to over four and half thousand years, and those which contributed in the making of our people which make them distinct from any other nation such as Saudi Arabia, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, India, Bangaldesh and so forth.
The crisis of modern approach stems chiefly from the fact that while the primary constituent of not only the whole of premodern history but also of the large part of the present day non-Western world, of which Pakistan is a part, is religion, modern historiography insists on seeing it as largely a product of our ancestor’s hallucinatory perceptions. Having come to this conclusion, modern approach simply lacks the concepts or intellectual tools which could connect our past with our present, but also relate as diverse religious phenomena as Islam originating in Arabia in the 7th century AD and religion of Harappa culture of 25th century BCE. I believe it is basically this failure of modern historical perspective which has given a free reign to the religious historical perspective and which has rendered us a ‘people without history.’

References

Alhaq, S. A Forgotten Vision: A study of human spirituality in the light of the Islamic tradition. 2 vols. New Delhi: Vikas. 1997.
Aziz, K. K.. The Murder of History: A critique of history textbooks used in Pakistan. Lahore: Vanguard Books. 1993.
Aristotle. Metaphysics in The Basic Works of Aristotle. Ed. by R. McKeon. New York: The Modern Library. 2001.
Cannadine, D. (ed.) What is History Now?  New York: Palgrave. 2002.
Childe, G. [1942] What Happened in History. Penguin Books. 1964.
Durkheim, E. [1912]. The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Trans. C. Cosman. Abridged with an intro n notes by M. S. Cladis. Oxford Uni Press. 2001.
Eisenstadt, S.N., (Ed). The Origins and Diversity of Axial Age Civilizations. Albany: State University of New York Press. 1986.
J. H. Plumb, in his Introduction to Hawkes, J. The First Great Civilizations: Life in Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley and Egypt. Penguin Books. 1973.
Kuhn, T.S. The Copernican Revolution: Planetary Astronomy in the Development of Western Thought. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press. 1957.
Kuhn, T. S. [1962]. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. 3rd Ed. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. 1996.
Lao Tzu. Tao Te Ching. Translated by  D. C. Lau. Penguin Classics. 1963.
Plumb, J. H. The Death of the Past. New York: Palgrave (Org. pub. 1969). (2004).
Plato. Euthyphro, in Complete Works. Ed. J.M. Cooper. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co. 1997.
Quran. R.J. Evans in his Introduction to Carr E. H. [1961]. What is History? 2nd ed. London: Palgrave. 2001. 
Toynbee, A. J. A Study of History. Abridgement by D. C. Somervell. Oxford: Oxford University press. 1970.
Xenophon. Conversations of Socrates. Penguin. 1990.