“The most important problem by far for us today is to create students who are capable of going back and of reading these texts in Arabic, of reading them in Persian, of reading them in Urdu, of reading them in Gujrati, of reading them in any language in which they have been written. More than ever today we must be able to publish authoritative documents based on primary sources. There is no point in us rereading and rereading and rereading third hand or fourth hand documents. We can only get tied up in other peoples’ interpretations, get further and further away from the original concept and thoroughly muddle and cloud what should be the truth.”
The profound wisdom of this farman has become more and more evident as the years have gone by and the academic world has become more aware of the biases and misrepresentations that are present in the books available on Islam. The matter becomes even more serious and urgent in the context of the esoteric interpretation of Islam. The following article is a humble attempt to demonstrate the wide gap between the primary sources and the ‘third hand or fourth hand documents’, as well as the great difference in the exoteric and esoteric representations of historical events and personalities.
