قراءة هشام جعيط لـ التاريخ الإسلامي

The Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies published the book Hichem Djaits Reading of Islamic History, written by Afaf Messi. The book presents a contemporary approach to Islamic history by one of the most important Tunisian historians and thinkers in the modern era, according to strict scientific methods, with the aim of ridding it of the myths and superstitions that have afflicted it, and in order to reach knowledge of historical events as they actually occurred, not as historians have depicted them. Hisham Jaait is considered one of the few historians who sought to re-read Islamic history in its various stages, by relying on what historical knowledge has reached in Western schools, and using a set of approaches that help to re-understand the history recorded in ancient heritage books so that today’s historian stays away from sanctification and rumination, focusing on criticism and trying to understand. With Jait, history writing has witnessed very important methodological and cognitive developments in contemporary times. He elevated Arab-Islamic history from the traditional field that relied on repeating and sanctifying what was reported in traditional books, to the field of academic renewal that is concerned with questioning historical sources through the use of critical questioning, which is the basis of all renewed historical studies, and the starting point that enables the historian to reread history with the aim of liberating himself from the authority of the past and its strict rulings. Among the most important topics addressed in this book are: the transformations of reading the Prophet’s biography from the ideological approach to the critical approach, the impact of the debate between religion and politics on strife in early Islam, and the topic of the dialectic of the self and the other in Hisham Jaait’s reading of Islamic history.