Time & Perspective Quote by Idries Shah

Idries Shah is taking aim at a modern reflex: treating the past as a court record instead of a conversation. The line reads like a corrective to the citation culture that loves to freeze a person at their most quotable moment and then prosecute them with it. Shah, steeped in Sufi teaching stories and parables, knows that some statements are tools, not confessions. A provocation can be a scalpel; an illustration can be a mirror. In both cases, the point is what the line does to the listener, not what it reveals about the speaker.

The intent is partly defensive, but not merely personal. Shah is arguing for a more literate sense of how ideas move: teachers, writers, and public thinkers often speak in staged extremes to expose assumptions, loosen dogmas, or test an audience. Strip away that performative context and you get a false portrait: a single sentence misread as a stable creed. His phrasing - “tragedies of modern times” - is deliberately heavy, because the stakes are heavy: when we collapse rhetoric into belief, we flatten intellectual life into “gotcha” archaeology.

The subtext is also a warning about our hunger for moral certainty. It’s comforting to believe every archived sentence is a transparent window into someone’s soul; it saves us the harder work of interpretation, chronology, and genre. Shah pushes back against that laziness. He’s not asking for amnesty from accountability. He’s asking for the basic fairness of reading: who was this for, in what situation, and to what end?