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How Islamic History Was Frozen and Forgotten | Imam Tom Weekly
Have you ever wondered why so many are familiar with Plato and Freud—but not with Al-Ghazali, Ibn Taymiyya, or Imam Al-Shafi’i?
In this episode of Imam Tom Weekly, we delve into the Refrigerator Theory—a concept explaining how Islamic history and thought were preserved yet sidelined, leading to a collective amnesia about our rich heritage.
This transcript was auto-generated using AI and may contain misspellings.
Many of our Muslim youth and hey let's be honest even our Muslim adults are very ignorant about Islamic history and Islamic thought and the paragons of
Islamic thought, the thinkers. Let's even go beyond thinkers because they weren't just thinkers like the worshippers, the servants of Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala that carried this deen forth and it's a shame because we'll know people like
Plato and Aristotle and Nietzsche and Freud and all these western thinkers even to greater or lesser extents being familiar with their thoughts but we're largely ignorant of our own history and this is a big problem. Part of it is what
historians call the refrigerator theory so the way in which Islamic history is taught that Islam is taught as basically being like a refrigerator for the classical tradition so the Greeks and the Romans they had their things and
then the Muslims they took it and they put it in the fridge and handed it back to the Europeans once the Renaissance happened. That's not true like the Islamic civilizations that sprung up after the time the Prophet Muhammad (ﷺ) they had a ton of contributions and we're not just
talking about normal golden age nonsense where we're talking about technological innovations and things of that nature that affect the dunya. We're also talking about theology, morality and moral theory and things that are actually going to
get you into Jannah and not just make your life on earth more pleasurable or more convenient or easier. So what this comes back to is the need to write our own history right? Muslims absolutely need to engage in our own history and
write our own history that if we study our history that's written by orientalists or written by other folks that they're not going to do it justice and there's so many biases in the discipline of history that prevent many
of these things from coming to light whether it's the historical critical that is basically like historical materialism 2.0 updated that dominates most of the way in which history is studied and taught or if it just comes
to us having the wrong compass and looking for the wrong things thinking that the golden age is really material progress and not the time of the salaf. So we absolutely have to engage with our own tradition and this will
require us taking ownership of the scholarship that's a major mistake that we do most of the young Muslims in the West their STEM majors or they're going into medicine you know doctor lawyer engineers we don't have very many
English majors we don't have very many history majors we don't have very many political science majors and we need them we need them badly because we're not going to be an autonomous self-sufficient community if we don't
have them and surely many of us are reckoning with this in the last decade when we've seen certain challenges come to the Muslim community such as the way in which sexuality is taught in schools and Muslims were not happy rightfully so
and we wanted to do something only to find that there were no Muslims writing curriculum and no Muslims in that space that we had to borrow from other communities which is okay but it's not optimal and then now with the way that
Palestine is taught and we know that there are multiple organizations that are have an Israeli bias and they very much attempt to influence the way in which Palestine is talked about in textbooks in history textbooks and we
don't have any Muslim organizations that are pushing back or doing the opposite work there are a couple organizations but they're mostly led by non-Muslims so this is something that we have to take very very seriously we have to take our
own history into our own hands reacquaint ourselves with our own history and teach it

















































