ABSTRACT
Every writer concerned with history, politics and, especially, philosophy has a topic of particular interest. For example, the eminent historian Arnold Toynbee devoted much of his life to the study of why civilizations rise and fall. An exponent of the theory of cycles, he believed the universal driving force of progress to be the response to challenges. The eleventh-century Islamic theologian, mystic and philosopher Abu Hamid Muhammad alGhazali, known as hujjat al-Islam (the proof of Islam), journeyed across the Muslim world driven by the desire to find out whether the human senses could attain knowledge of the existence of God. Meanwhile, Nietzsche’s world outlook was pervaded by his ‘caste of masters’ theory, the belief in an everprogressing elite up to the level of ‘superman’, and Karl Marx, who was and remains a philosopher before being a theoretician of economics, politics and sociology, had an all-encompassing philosophy based on his view of the dynamics of history, which stemmed from his basic ideas on the relation of matter (the infrastructure) to ideas (the superstructure).
