Geçmiş

(İng. past)

Göndermeler

Mesnevi'den

Beyin ve gönül olmadan düşünceyle doluydular; ordusuz ve savaşsız zafere erdiler. O apaçık görme, onlara göre düşüncedir; yoksa uzak olanlara göre görmektir. Düşünce, geçmiş ve gelecekten olur. Bu ikisinden kurtulunca güçlük çözülür. Her nitelikliyi niteliksizken görmüşlerdir. Madenden önce gerçeği ve sahteyi görmüşlerdir.

Geçmiş ve gelecek sana göredir; her ikisi bir şeydir, sanırsın ki ikidir.

Diğer

Both orientalism and Western civilization begin in the textualist position that civilizations have essences, and that these essences are best seen in the Great Books they have produced. (Who decides what's a Great Book, or what connection it might have to the lived lives of men and women in particular places and times is never satisfactorily explained.) The textualist position foreshortens history, annihilates change, and levels difference the better to represent an image of the past in dramatic form – either as tragedy, as in the case of Islamic civilization, or as triumph, as in the case of the rise of the West. In either case, it is a story whose rhythms are guided by the ineluctable working out of civilizational essences allegedly encoded in foundation texts. Thus we get the history of the West as the story of freedom and rationality, or the history of the East (pick an East, any East) as the story of despotism and cultural stasis.