Some of my modern and "progressive" readers (and friends, too) have often charged me with being too "nostalgic", or nostalgically romantic about the past and have even accused me of being not enough "realistic", not adequately "progressive" and/or "Tarraqee pasand". I totally agree with them and fully accept that charge.
I have written many times that I do not see the past as a graveyard of superstitions, a mortuary of obscurantisms, a scrapyard full of irrational, unreasonable and junk ideas, values and virtues, or a vast, barren landscape completely devoid of truth, goodness and beauty.
I do not see the journey from the past to our present (which itself will become past as soon as I post this!) as "growing up" only, but essentially as growing old and decrepit: not Progress (with capital "P"), or not only as Progress, but also, and importantly so, as decline and degeneration. History, modern "scientific" historiography, for me is not about coming out of darkness of old cultures, customs and traditions and seeing the illuminating light of modernity, but essentially a cunning of time, a trickery of those who write and preach History and Progress; I see it as a totally ideological and even fraudulent project of knowledge production and consumption about the past that merely displaces our "simplistic outlook" and does not abolish it only to replace it with something better and sophisticated as it always loudly claims. What modern, reductionist historiography does is that it irresponsibly dirties the past wholesale, it violently murders all the other ways of understanding the past---myths, stories, collective memories, epic poems etc.---and sells its own ideological narratives, its own "myths", in the name of reason and science, or wrapped in scientism.
If we are told that there are "pathologies of irrationality", let it be known to all those ideologues of "History and Progress" that there are also much worse "pathologies of rationality"; after all, the twentieth century, a genocidal century of mass murders, pogroms, ethnic-cleansings and holocausts in which more than 100 million were butchered by the secular-modern men of reason, science, culture, civilization, history, progress, was a period of time that was called "the century of terror" by no-less a modern ideologue than the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm himself. Who would know better than Hobsbawm that there was a direct link between "scientific history" as taught at Sorbonne, Oxford and other modern citadels of knowledge production and the killing fields of Cambodia; that the road to the Siberian Gulags was paved with ideas of History and Progress propounded by the leading lights of Hegelian-Marxian worldview, Trotsky, Lenin and Stalin et.al; that the thousands of dead bodies floating down the Yangtze River in mid-twentieth century China were of those unfortunate "savage" a-/anti-historicals who resisted those Hegelian-Marxian notions of materialist and scientific history.
I would rather listen to my great grandmother's tales, poems and myths about our own past than to Hegel, Marx, Santayana inspired Eurocentric nonsense!
Modern history and history writing, because it is secular in nature through and through and, therefore, excludes by default "sacred history" and depreciates the cyclical nature of time and other modes of understanding the past that are part and parcel of all the traditional civilizations of humanity, it obscures the eternal in time; reductionist and ideological to the core, it also forces us to throw the baby with the dirty bath water, as if our own time is the final and absolute arbiter and model of perfection, goodness and beauty! Its cunning is thus: it throws its net on the past and what it catches in that net, it presents to us as the total and final story, the whole past, the entire narrative of time past! What it can't catch in its badly crafted net does not exist at all! This is its reductionism.
I stand totally opposed to the modern evolutionary understanding of our nature, of our time and society, and of reality itself; I stand on the side of the great, perennial spiritual traditions of humankind, all of which tell us that time degenerates and things, the essential things and values in life, decay and do not get better. True, there are "bursts" of "progress" what these traditions invariably call "renewal" or "tajdeed" and other similar expressions (because God has promised it!) but overall, there is decline and degeneration: entropy, in other words. I am in full agreement with what a contemporary Muslim sage has said about these two perspectives---the evolutionary/progressive and that of decline and degeneration (the religious)---what he calls secular Modernity and "Tradition" (the religious traditions of humankind): "Modernity is essentially evil and only accidentally good; Tradition is essentially good and only accidentally evil." (Seyyed Hossen Nasr, Knowledge and the Sacred).
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