In Ibn al-Kalbi’s The Book of Idols, he describes what Islam often refers to as “the time of ignorance,” in a work of history that tries to document out what religion in the Arabian peninsula looked like before the rise of Islam. Al-Kalbi’s concern is to portray what Islam has moved away from, what it has “corrected,” in part to show the problems it is trying to solve. What seems of most concenr to Al-Kalbi in this excerpt? Are there other religions such as Christianity have looked at a particular time in history to highlight the problems they emphasize, or to suggest a time in which we can find examples of things when they were “correct”? How do religions use stories about the past to convey their teachings?
In Ibn al-Kalbi’s The Book of Idols, he describes what Islam often refers to as “the time of ignorance,” in a work of history that tries to document out what religion in the Arabian peninsula looked like before the rise of Islam. Al-Kalbi’s concern is to portray what Islam has moved away from, what it has … Read more
