From Herodotus to Universal History

We learn from Collingwood (1946) that before the rise of Greece, time was marked through theocratic history and myths, which were both forms of quasi-history. Herodotus’ humanistic turn in the fifth century BCE established history as a science that followed human actions, moving away from the metaphoric temporality of legends or gods. This differentiation has also been described as the contrast between ‘the achronic time of myth and the chronic time of history’. The modern understanding of history took further turns in the Renaissance and the Enlightenment traditions, which decisively shaped the perception of Islam and Muslim polities in Western imagination and discourse.

The humanistic turn established human agency as the driver of history and thus Greco-Roman historiography emphasized that historical events are caused by human agents. By the Dark Ages, Christian thought reclaimed a providential view of history as the unfolding of God's wisdom. Later on, Renaissance historians returned to the humanist tradition and postulated that the task of history is to recall and record the events of the past. With increased influence from philosophy, history started to be considered a form of knowledge rather than a concrete outline of events. Ibn Khaldun, who studied the formation of dynasties in the Maghreb of the fourteenth century and the transition from nomadic to sedentary societies, developed a critical method for the study of history.