The Holocaust (or Shoah) is considered to have been one of the most horrific crimes of human history, perhaps even the most evil act to have ever been carried out (or allowed to be carried out) by humanity, resulting in the horrible deaths of some six million innocent and harmless Jews. There is a critical Holocaust bibliography which encompasses thousands of individual titles, and some authors have attained a celebrity status through their Holocaust-centric works. For example, we have the likes of Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi in the West, and the novels of Yehiel De-Nur are quite popular in Israel.

The Holocaust: A Symbol of Modernity

Within this secondary literature, one of the more intellectually stimulating aspects is that of the scholars who assert that the Holocaust, far from being a “barbarian exception” in the “civilized world of Europe,” was encapsulating the essence of modernity. Through its industrial productivism, bureaucratic rationalism, and scientific materialism, human beings were being morphed into pure statistics and made disposable for ideological reasons (such as biological purism). We find some of the most respected Jewish thinkers among the writers who make a link between the Holocaust and modernity, for example, Zygmunt Bauman, Hannah Arendt, and the authors associated with the Frankfurt School.

Others were far more cynical, saying the problem that Europeans have with Nazi violence is that the Nazis had done to the Europeans what Europeans used to do to the non-Europeans within their colonies. This is the view of Aimé Césaire, a “decolonial” Black writer; and also Simone Weil, a Jewish convert to (heretical) Christianity. Among the comparisons provided by those who favor this thinking is the Herero and Nama genocide (1904–1908). The Germans had attempted to perpetrate—through various different means, including concentration-extermination camps—what is often considered to have been the last century’s first genocide in one of their rare few colonies, located in modern-day Namibia. The authors also mention the air campaign that Churchill had green-lighted in 1920, where the British employed chemical warfare (poison gas) to brutalize a revolt in Iraq.

In his book The Origins of Nazi Violence (2003), Italian thinker Enzo Traverso has fused together these two different approaches, namely:

1. the Holocaust concentration-extermination camps as the apex of European liberal modernity; and
2. the Holocaust as a typically European colonial overseas act that had now been carried out on European lands.

The Holocaust is thus not only a “problem” for the Jews. It is an issue relating to our collective humanity, and it invites us towards thinking much deeper about modernity.

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Revisionism: From the Holocaust to Islamic Studies

Yet, for some reason, there have also been individuals who have denied the Holocaust or at least some aspects of it. Deborah Lipstadt has documented some of these “cases” in her work, Denying the Holocaust (1993).

David Irving is among the authors that she highlights. He is a British historian who first rose to prominence in 1977 with his book, Hitler’s War, in which he argued that Hitler was not an expansionist but, rather, that the German invasion of the Soviet Union was a “preventive war” that was necessary to avert what was an impending Soviet attack. Irving, of course, finds himself in perpetual legal trouble for his controversial positions.

Another author that she mentions is the late Robert Faurisson from France, who began his intellectual career as a literary critic before switching to World War II history and, more specifically, the Holocaust.

Their arguments center around things like denying the existence of gas chambers, questioning the number of deaths as being greatly exaggerated, or asserting that the conditions within the concentration camps were far less severe than is claimed.

There have been many rebuttals and counter-rebuttals written. What I wish to explore however, is how, in the same way that the Holocaust was a personification of Western modernity, Holocaust denial or historical revisionism is also inherently modernist. What I mean by this is that it employs the historical-critical methods—approaches of perpetual methodological skepticism—to remain in a constant refutational epistemology.

Put more simply, there is a modernist tendency to look into minor factual errors or missing pieces of data in order to discredit wider meta-narratives; to undermine “historical truths” for the sake of sounding “intellectual” and “subversive.”

This isn’t limited to the Holocaust either. At the beginning of the last century, there was the popular tradition called the “Christ myth theory,” which asserted that Jesus (peace be upon him) either never existed or, if he did, he was some sort of synthesis of older pagan myths that had simply coalesced into a single figure. While it has lost a lot of steam, it is nonetheless still being proposed by a few writers even today, including Robert Price and Richard Carrier in the United States.

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This kind of historical revisionism has also been applied to Islamic Studies, beginning with the Orientalists during European colonialism but revamped by Patricia Crone and Michael Cook in Hagarism: The Making of the Islamic World, published in 1977. The authors argued that Islam did not originate in Makkah and aggrandized the influences of Christianity and Judaism. They have of course been thoroughly refuted, including by Robert Hoyland, a former student of Crone, who, in his Seeing Islam as Others Saw It (1997) included hundreds of early non-Islamic sources and demonstrated that they generally agree with the early Islamic narrative. Likewise, Mikhail D. Bukharin demolishes the claim that Makkah wasn’t an “important city” that “couldn’t have seen the emergence of Islam” in his chapter within the edited collection The Qurʼān in Context (BRILL, 2010), “Mecca On The Caravan Routes In Pre-Islamic Antiquity.”

All other forms of “Qur’an skepticism” (John Wansbrough, etc.) and “Hadith skepticism” (Joseph Schacht, etc.) have also been refuted exhaustively, not only by Muslim scholars like Muhammad Mustafa al-Azami and Muhammad Mohar Ali (originally from India and Bangladesh respectively, then both active in Saudi Arabia later on) but also Western academics such as the late Harald Motzki.

In the introduction to his book The Biography of Muhammad: Nature and Authenticity (2010), German scholar Gregor Schoeler discusses the revisionists at length within the specific context of “Sira skepticism” and how a “paradigm shift” (his expression) has delegitimized such revisionism, to the extent that “a few years ago, Crone and Cook themselves publicly repudiated the central hypothesis advanced in Hagarism” (p.13). Scholer later also speaks of “epigraphical, papyrological and numismatical findings challenging the neo-sceptical paradigm” (p.14), providing numerous concrete examples in each of these respective fields.

We also actually find an Israeli-Jew archaeologist among these revisionists, Yehuda Nevo, who has his own obvious ideological biases beyond mere “academic skepticism.”

My main point here would thus be the following:

When applied to history, the modernist epistemology, which centered around a perpetual “Cartesian doubt” (a form of performative skepticism), can undermine historical tragedies such as the Holocaust but also religious truths that are dear to many.

If we disallow “historical revisionism” in one instance, in order to remain intellectually coherent, should we not also resist it in other instances, despite our personal biases and subjectivities?

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