The National Language Promotion Department has given us a brilliant Urdu translation of Hegel’s classic ‘The Philosophy of History’ done by Dr. Iqbal Afaqi, a renowned philosopher in today’s Pakistan, and Nasim Ahmad.
This classic contains Hegel’s lectures exceptionally enlightening and realistic showing picture of the relation and interaction of various intellectual forces at work during the most fascinating era of modern philosophy.
When Nasim Ahmad, who initially started translating the book fell ill, Dr. Iqbal Afaqi was assigned the responsibility of completing the translation work.
Creative uniqueness of Dr. Iqbal Afaqi’s translation can be witnessed on every page. He has a beautiful blooming style of writing. His ready scholarship infuses life into otherwise a dry subject of philosophy, makes it a delightful reading.
While translating philosophical texts Dr. Iqbal Afaqi draws on his own experience. Being a prominent philosopher himself, he understands the philosophical texts, technical terminology, the terms invented by Hegel, the different uses of one and the same word in different contexts, the new meanings Hegel gave to old terms and the new sense he gave to ordinary words.
Dr. Iqbal Afaqi has not only an excellent command over both languages involved, but also is well informed about the philosopher he dealt with.
This labour of translation by so competent an authority as Dr. Iqbal Afaqi has done much toward making Hegel's philosophy accessible to the Urdu-speaking public.
This Urdu translation will prove particularly useful to a student of Hegel's philosophy. It states the meaning of the original more adequately than the renderings found in other languages and will continue to be the best exposition of Hegel's Logic in Urdu.
Hegel wrote his classic as an overview to a series of lectures on the philosophy of history, a new notion in the early nineteenth century. Through this work, he fashioned the history of philosophy as a scientific learning. He disclosed philosophical theory as neither a coincidence nor a non-natural theory, but as a prototype of its age, shaped by its past history and modern-day state of affairs, and serving as an ideal for the future.
Hegel argues that all of history is caused and guided by a rational process, and God's ostensibly indecipherable plan is rendered comprehensible through philosophy. The notion that reason rules the world, he says, is both essential to the practice of philosophic history and a conclusion drawn from that practice.
“The Philosophy of History” is Hegel's account about the unfolding of God in history. The world is God's creation, but that understanding is not at first readily apparent. Man is a slave to nature, his self-centeredness and his physical paraphernalia. Only through the conflicts in history does man recognize his spiritual aspect.