The history of Muslim rhetoric contains doctrines that have been shaped by their own time—an era which is naturally very different from the one in which we now live. What a thousand years ago was called "good" or "excellent" (jayyid) poetry or prose may today stir neither the mind nor the heart. Likewise, what we today consider poetry—regardless of whether it is beautiful or not—might well have not been regarded as poetry at all from the perspective of earlier generations. Faced with such a gap between the past and the contemporary, what is to be done? This divergence exists not only in the realm of literary creation but also in the domain of literary theory and criticism.
Nevertheless, when we look closely at the teachings of the tradition, we sometimes encounter ideas and doctrines that make it hard to believe that they date back, for instance, seven or eight hundred years. It is as if the temporal distance between us and the past suddenly, for a moment, disappears, and the past and the present meet. Reinhart Koselleck has a thought-provoking term for such a situation. He argues that the existence of modern concepts in the past is possible. He refers to this phenomenon as the "Gleichzeitigkeit des Ungleichzeitigen" (the contemporaneity of the non-contemporaneous). According to the English translator of Koselleck's work—Futures Past—Koselleck, in developing this idea, was influenced by Heidegger's conception of time as elaborated in Being and Time (Sein und Zeit