User:Atcovi/ENG225/History and the Victor - Discussion Board Two

As Winston Churchill famously said, "History is written by the victors". Or actually, he didn't, which is precisely what I want you to explore in in this week's discussion board.

Assignment
If you clicked on the link, you learned that this often misattributed quote was really said by, well, no one. Maybe Hermann Göring, Churchill's enemy, but even that is a stretch. The irony here is that the origin of the quote proves the quote. It doesn't really matter who said it if everyone remembers it as Churchill. Does history exist without our memory of it? Is our memory just as good a reality if the reality doesn't exist without the memory?

These are wild questions, I know. Let's connect this idea to your reading this week. This means whatever we write down as history BECOMES history. The story becomes the fact. And, building from last week, further proves my point about how important reading (and what we read) is.

Your reading began with the story of Odysseus and Polyphemus. Even if you haven't read the Odyssey before, you know Odysseus is the hero of the story. But the text asks you to reconsider the scene through the eye (haha, sorry, couldn't resist) of Polyphemus. Suddenly who is right an who is wrong is not so clear. It seems it depends on who is telling the story.

With all of this in mind, you have two questions this week:

Why is it important to carefully consider the author when reading a work of literature (or any text at all for that matter)? And when you consider the author, what questions should you ask yourself? If history is written by the victor, that means history is told and decided by a very limited perspective, right? How can we combat this? What should we do to get the widest perspectives possible? There is no length requirement as long as you fully address what's asked of you in this post.

Your response can be text, video, mixed-media, etc.

Initial post due Friday, Sept. 8 by 11:59PM

Response
The obvious answer, to me, is that considering who the author is and their personal bias (evident from their works in real life) will somewhat explain the direction their "studies" and "analyses" go. For example, reading about the Quran (for a first-timer) from the works of Ibn Warraq wouldn't be such a wise decision as the writing is obviously going to portray the Qur'an in a biased, negative manner. Ibn Warraq is a well-known critic of Islam, being the founder of the "Insitute of the Secularisation of Islam" society & even derives his pen name from 9th-century Arab atheist and vocal critic of religion, Abu Isa al-Warraq. A question I may ask myself for an author of a book studying religious text is: "What biases do they have?". Evidently, Ibn Warraq has quite a number of biases - though his biases don't make his works automatically unreliable.

History may be mainly dictated by the winners, but I reckon that minority viewpoints would still be alive. This does not automatically hold the winners as "liars" or put their works immediately in the "bias trash can", so to speak. I would recommend considering all types of perspectives and the biographies of these writers to determine who has more reliability. Here's an example of me accounting for various perspectives and determining which perspective is closer to reality.

Muhammad was described as similar to a "warlord" in the "Fragment on the Arab Conquest" - a group of notes detailing the battle of Yarmouk (636 AD) found in a Syriac Christian manuscript of the Gospel of Mark. Specifically, the fragments wrote "many villages were ravaged by the killing of [the Arabs of] Mūḥmd and many people were slain and [taken] prisoner from Galilee as far as Beth", portraying Muhammad as a blood-hungry warlord with no care for the people he ruled over.

When inspecting this piece of literature, we have to account for the bias of the writer. The writer is most likely someone who was a Christian who sided with the Byzantine Empire. The Byzantines, at the time of the writings, faced a crushing defeat at the Battle of Yarmouk - a battle during the Conquest of the Levant, a war triggered by the Arab Ghassanids killing of one of Muhammad's diplomats (leading to the Battle of Mu'tah in September 629). With this in mind, it is clear why the note was written in such a degrading tone.

Another interesting point to mention is the note has challenged Islamic historians' accounts of the death of Muhammad. The Islamic narrators account Muhammad's death as taking place before the battle of Yarmouk (636 AD vs. the death year written as 629 AD in Islamic accounts). We have two contradicting accounts of Muhammad's death in comparison to Islamic narrations and the Fragment of the Arab Conquest. In this case, we analyze the narrators and their biographies. In the Sira (Prophetic Biography), Islamic narrators include Urwa ibn al-Zubayr and Muhammad ibn Ishaq - regarded as widely known and acceptable authors in the sciences of Islamic narrations. In the Fragment on the Arab Conquest, we have no idea who the author is and their reliability. Therefore, in my opinion, analysis of Muhammad's death and even his character should be taken by the Islamic narrations over random "diary entries" found throughout history with no traceable authors - as at least we have considerable notes on who these narrators are and their reliability by other scholars.