ABSTRACT
The notion that history is scientific and progressive is very much a response to the discourse of modernity. Modernity is generally taken to be characterised by a commitment to empiricism as the best means of verifying knowledge about the world; beliefs in human intentionality, secularism, and progress; the idea that scientific and technological development is the best solution to problems; and the desire to improve society. Writing in the twelfth century, slightly earlier than Ibn al-Athir, Anna Comnena, the daughter of the Byzantine Emperor Alexius, also wrote a multivolume history that dealt in part with the crusades. In the early modern period under the Ming dynasty, the protocols or rules of writing history were becoming more standardised and began to resemble very much the historical method of today’s academic historians. Naima’s history is, on the surface, typical of Islamic annalistic chronicles.
