It is well known among people that we read history to benefit from its sermons and lessons and to be able to compare our circumstances with those of our ancestors. So we gain more insight and experience in what we should do, and what we must leave, and this famous belief is undoubtedly true. A few people have always been benefited from it throughout the course of time. However, there are other important benefits to understanding history and being aware of its data, in matters of education, creativity, innovation, anticipating the future, and deepening the understanding of science.
Lessons From History
Nobody can deny that all great nations use history as a tool for guidance and a tool for teaching. And it takes from the achievements of parents and grandparents, and from the lives of great people - the catalysts for transcendence, generosity, integrity, and that if they are free from exaggeration, intimidation, and biased reading.
Teachers, educators, and preachers differ widely in employing what is considered a cognitive and ethical interest. Some use it to teach young people to submit to society and adapt to current circumstances, and few use historical conclusions to awaken awareness, support critical sense, and stimulate access to something new. This type of education is so insignificant that when we read history we do not expect it to help us understand our reality and develop this reality.
1. Personal Growth and Appreciation
Many of our youth are preoccupied with satisfying urgent desires or overwhelmed with the concerns of securing the necessary needs, and some of them are confused about their affairs and their future! Among the tasks of history, when properly taught, is to help young people disengage from reality and save them from being lost in its data.
2. Learn from The Past
History is now studied as a series of events of history through a coherent narrative that links contemporaries with their ancestors and sheds light on a series of positive and negative developments that made the difference between one stage and the other, and between other generations and generations.
Generations like the present one require that we study the philosophy and jurisprudence of history, ask questions about the causes of its facts and events, search for its causes, introductions, and roots, and discover the laws of God Almighty in meeting a man. And embrace the nature of the human psyche in its acceptance and management. When studied in this way, history improves the level of insight of the learners and enables them to possess the tools with which to criticize the reality in which they live, rather than being swept away by its great currents without any resentment. Or opposed.
3. Building One’s Identity
Criticism of reality helps us to crystallize the features of identity that distinguish us from others and paves the way for developing this reality and removing it from the context of the implications and blind transformations that globalization creates with its tremendous potential.
4. Gaining a Career and Track a New Path
The concern that prevails in schools and universities today is preparing their graduates for the job market. This means helping them to devote their minds and energies, and to adapt their attitudes to what helps them earn a living. Or in other words, it means preparing them to be a valid nail in the great machine run by businessmen, and this trend in education is required and positive. But we must be on the same awareness of the negative effects. For this, education helps in preparing young people for life.
When we prepare generations to adapt to the labor market, by indoctrinating them with the information that makes them as technical and executive as they are now, we are making them the people who are incapable of contributing to stopping the degradation of their societies.
Social development takes place in an unconscious way, and one of the tasks of intellectuals, at all levels, is to help the nation overcome the major crises it is exposed to through the accumulation of errors and small and large sins for successive generations. Freedom from submission to brute forces, from blind imitation of parents and grandparents, and only if they accept this as a means of adapting to reality, and a means of rationalizing and improving it as well.
5. The Lessons of Morals and Values
Young people must be taught the historical role that science played in building the ummah and building the Islamic civilization, in addition to explaining the role of science in the formation of great men throughout Islamic history. Young people must be informed about the history of the major reform movements, and the factors and causes that help the emergence of great ideas of a miraculous nature if we want history and science to contribute to the renewal of the nation and push it forward.
Seeking Clarity in History
There are clear gaps in our cognitive construction that are not mistaken by the eyes of the critic, and these gaps are many. Perhaps the most important of them include neglecting the history of science, neglecting to discover the purposes of the legislation, in addition to the apparent failure to recognize the laws of God Almighty in creation, and the failure to know the nature of things, especially nature and humanity.
The humanities and the pure sciences are also offered to young people amputated from their historical dimension. So it looks as if it was formed from the beginning in the image it is now. Learners do not know the history of its emergence or the phases it went through, just as they do not know anything of value about the great scientists who left their mark on it. And for this, you do not feel that what we offer in schools and universities builds systematic minds, or builds personalities with intellectual and cognitive independence, and so on. Except because they feel the scantiness and ambiguity of what they receive.
In fact, we cannot fully understand any science, unless we understand its history, its formation map, and its transformations. And it is unfortunate that we do not make much effort to explain how the new descended from the old, and we do not have any university, college, or institute that offers something distinct in the history of any learnings from science. The cognitive and social renewal will be difficult without knowing the previous stages of our science and our conditions.
If you wish to know how we can make the present better, check out this incredible blog on Upskilling from Lessons by History
Conclusion
By reading the history of science, we learn about the motives of Ijtihad, its environments, and the obstacles that face it. We also develop our sense of comparison, gain more mental flexibility, and more able to see things from different angles. A popular saying goes like, “If you want to know the future, see the past, for history repeats itself.”
Knowing the past enables us to discover the norms that embody the relationship between what has passed and what is to come, and through this and that we discover new horizons for development and open new fields for practice, and the time has come to work on remedy some of what has passed, and work to employ history in changing the quality of life For hundreds of millions of Muslims.
Read more about the benefits of learning history
Written By - Belal Hassan
Edited By - Neha Kundu
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