İslamî yahut Seküler Tarih: Tarif Khalidi ve Thomas Bauer’in Müslüman Tarih Yazımı Kategorilerinin Yeniden Değerlendirilmesi

Abstract

The growing acceptance to challenge long-held notions have led to many new insights and opened up ways to access the Islamic scholarly tradition anew. This applies especially when it comes to the categories of Islamic and Secular. The present paper focuses on the works by Tarif Khalidi, a historian of Palestinian origin, and Thomas Bauer, a German scholar specializing in Arabic language and literature, and tries to achieve three objectives. First, applying the concept of cultural ambiguity to the formative period and observing it in its formative stages. Second, showing how and when a secular approach to history became the norm. Third, demonstrating how Muslim scholars demarcated a sharʿī realm in which the subject matters of the different sciences were in one way or another dealing with the revelation. This self-imposed boundary opened up a space for other discourses with their epistemologies based on reason and empirical knowledge. From a very early stage, history was to be found in this non-sharʿī realm of secular sciences.