History, Hegemony and the Civilizations That Outlive Empires

مقتطف إضافي من الخلاصة المتاحة عبر المصدر

There are moments when the decline of a power can be measured in statistics, military setbacks or shifting alliances. And there are moments when something deeper seems to be happening — something we recognize before we can fully measure it: an entire historical order begins to lose the confidence, coherence and authority that once allowed it to shape the world in its own image. For those of us who grew up in societies that experienced colonialism not as an abstraction in a history book but as a memory still carried by families, cities and generations, this question is inevitably more than academic. We have seen the extraordinary power of the West, learned from its knowledge, encountered its institutions and contradictions, and watched its promises of universality collide, too often, with the realities of power. Today, as the Middle East is again shaken by war, Gaza devastated, Iran confronted, American power tested and the international order increasingly contested, we find ourselves returning to a thinker who understood that civilizations cannot ultimately be measured by the weapons they possess or the wealth they accumulate. Long before “multipolarity” became the vocabulary of contemporary geopolitics, Malek Bennabi had offered another way of reading history: through man, time, ideas, moral energy and the mysterious moment when a society acquires the capacity to enter history — or begins to lose it. Perhaps this is why Bennabi speaks so directly to our present. Not because he predicted it. But because he gave us a language with which to think about it.

In a timely and readable recent book titled “Why History Matters”1, Dr Yakoob Ahmed engages themes from theology and civilization to imagination and storytelling with a view to reviving historical consciousness as both…