One of the interesting questions I faced while delivering a lecture to my students at the university was: Can history end? And If so in what way? My answer was as follows: The end of history depends on the definition you give to the term history. So, first of all what does history mean to you? If you give the history the typical definition given by traditional historians that history is past human actions, then, of course, history has already finished. However, if you define history as the interaction between man and time, history cannot end unless one of its two elements vanish. My student then asked me what was the definition of history given by Francis Fukuyama in his well-known article The End of History published in the journal The National Interest in 1989. Indeed, in using the term “end of history”, Fukuyama was referring to the advent of the Capitalism as a signal of the end point of humanity's sociocultural evolution and the final form of human government. His argument came as a result of the collapse of Communism. In 1992, Fukuyama published his book The End of History and the Last Man which was an expansion of his already mentioned essay. Like in his essay, Fukuyama argues in his book that the advent of Western liberal democracy may signal the end point of humanity's sociocultural evolution. In this case, he went on, Western liberal democracy must be the final form of human government. He says: “What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.” However, it should be noted that the notion of the end of history was known long before Fukuyama. The best known propagator of this idea was the well-known economist Karl Marx. Marx believed that the direction of historical development was a purposeful one. Such historical development is determined by the interplay of material forces. When the communist utopia, he argued, managed to reach its final destination where it could resolve all contradictions then history will come to an end. Hence, Fukuyama who read a lot for Marx must have been influenced by such an argument. In spite of the fact that most scholars think that Marx borrowed the concept of history as a dialectical process with a beginning, a middle, and an end from his great German predecessor, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, we do not agree with such an argument. Indeed, Hegel believed that mankind has progressed through a series of primitive stages, which corresponded to concrete forms of social organization, such as tribal, slave-owning, theocratic, and finally democratic-egalitarian societies of consciousness until the present has been reached. However, such an idea of history's dialectical process with a beginning, a middle, and an end, as mentioned above, lies in the core of Christianity. In Christianity, the birth of Jesus marked the beginning of history, and his coming to advocate the city of God, to use saint Augustine's terminology, will be the end of history. Therefore, Derrida was right when criticizing Fukuyama's book as taking part in the intellectual branch of current Western hegemony and the spreading its “New Gospel”. “This end of history is essentially a Christian eschatology. It is consonant with the current discourse of the Pope on the European community: destined to become a Christian State or Super-State, this community would still belong therefore to some Holy Alliance.” Hence, in trying to find the source of Fukuyama's idea we should look toward Christianity. However, the other two monotheistic religions have a similar idea of history. In Judaism, history is a strait line that started with the birth of Adam and will end when the Jews will rule the earth. In Islam, history was initiated by the birth of Adam and history will continue until the coming of Jesus and the spread of Islam to all corners of earth. At that time, there will not be any conflicting Ideas, there will be only Islam. – SG The writer can be reached at [email protected]. His blog is: alabri3.blogspot.com __
