Chapter 7*

The Claims of Authenticity, Modernity, and the “New Partisans of the Heritage”:

Arab Political Thought in the 1980s

Dicussions of Arab political thought after in the later part of the twentieth century tends

to dwell on the dramatic resurgence of Islamic and Islamist discourses. John Donohue attempted

to quantify the preoccupations of this period through a content analysis of popular and

intellectual Arabic reviews between 1945 and found an increasing interest in authenticity and

increasing prominence granted to Islam in discussions of identity (1983, 50-51). To some extent

that trend can be attributed to the Islamist concerns that come to the forefront during that period.

Many Islamists attributed the 1967 defeat to a lack of authenticity in the sense that the nationalist

projects of the first half of the century drew explicitly on Western, secular traditions and models.

Islamicization is put forth as a means of returning to more authentic roots and offering salvation

from the present crisis. At the same time, the intellectual project of the Islamic resurgence did

not go unchallenged. Certainly secularists launched a critique of the rise of Islamist thought and

practice.

However, in the period that follows, beginning in the 1970s, but gaining fuller expression

in the 1980s, one finds increased reference to authenticity (asala)—and, in particular, in relation

to the heritage (turath) by intellectuals who did not come from the Islamist trend. This turn was

in also in many respects a reaction and response to Islamist challenge and the pressures it created

to address nativist and essentialist claims regarding the heritage and to stave off criticisms of

* What follows is a draft of a chapter of a book manuscript, tentatively entitled Arab Political Thought in the
Modern Age. I have done my best to add or delete passages that refer to or rely upon other parts of the manuscript so
that it better stands alone. However, the draft remains rough and should not be quoted without the author‘s
permission. Comments and feedback are welcomed to browerm@wfu.edu.

1
inauthenticity being launched against those outside of Islamist circles, but it was also a response

to a more general sense of crisis that pervades post 1967 Arab political thought. Intellectuals

who wish to counter this trend of crisis commonly must also face the issues of ―mu’asara‖

(contemporaneity), ―hadatha‖ (modernity) and ―asala‖ (authenticity)–that is, the basic problem

of how to catch up or rebuild Arab thought while still maintaining an ―authentic‖ connection

between self, community and tradition. In fact, ―crisis,‖ ―contemporaneity,‖ and ―authenticity‖

are concepts that commonly occur together in academic discourse. However, it is possible to

detect a more particular change between the 1970s and the 1980s, as shift from the tendency of

secular intellectuals to use the concept of turath in a negative sense, almost as the equivalent of

an ―atavism‖ from which the Arab region remains to be liberated, to a more neutral or even

positive sense, as something that might—even must—be engaged as part of a process of re-

actualization. A central concern of Arab political thought in the 1980s lies in the endeavor to

critically evaluate the heritage, adapt it to modern reality, and render it meaningful for the

present, which is dominated by the hegemony of European modernity. This thought is born of

the tension between the claims of authenticity and modernity—the desires for progress and for

identity-- and the efforts to bridge these concerns. The aim of this chapter is to document,

assess, and explain this shift in thinking, as well as to examine its legacy for the political thought

that follows.

In revisiting these debates it is easy to judge them as outdated or surpassed, particularly

when viewed from the perspective of the present. However, it is important to underscore the

significance of the questions that they addressed in their own time and, as I suggest in the

conclusion, not to underestimate the extent to which these shifts in thinking proved important in

framing debates in Arab political thought after the 1980s. One should also note certain

2
similarities between this debate taking place in Arabic and the preoccupations of political theory

in English speaking contexts during the same period. Recall that in the 1980s, ―communitarians‖

like Charles Taylor, Alasdair MacIntyre, and Michael Sandel were challenging the predominance

of liberal theory. Against liberal notions of the unencumbered self, communitarians were

positing a socially situated self, whose sense of identity remained bound up with certain values,

beliefs, and practices. Against the liberal emphasis on rights, communitarians were asserting the

priority of the good. According to Günter Lenz and Antje Dallmann (2007, 5): ―In the 1980s,

political theory in the West was characterized by a paradigm change from redistribution, a

politics of structural difference, to recognition, a politics of cultural difference that focused on

multiculturalist and feminist claims and notions of cultural group identities.‖ William Galston‘s

assessment of ―Political Theory in the 1980s‖ led him to conclude with a call for theorists both to

―try harder to take real political controversies as their point of departure‖ and to ―become more

empirically aware‖ in doing so (1993, 40–41).

Consciousness of the Crisis: Asala and Turath in the 1970s

One of the practical outcomes of the Arab nationalist movement has been the

establishment of a strong tradition in convening regional conferences—usually organized by

some organization or individuals with Arab nationalist sympathies. These conferences are

generally conducted solely in Arabic and although the composition of the participants tend to be

influenced by where the meeting is held, the organizers usually explicitly attempt to draw from

across the Arab region. Typically, a number of participants present papers that are commented

upon and the conference proceedings are published. While often suffering from the intellectual

thinness or unevenness of conference contributions, these meeting are notable not only because

they bring together Arab intellectuals across national lines, but also due to their attempt to be

3
topical—even trendy. Often it is at such conferences that intellectual trends are debated for the

first time.†

One of the first of what would become many such intellectual conferences in the region

held to engage the questions of heritage, authenticity and modernity was convened by the Arab

League Educational, Cultural, and Scientific Organization and held in Cairo in October 1971

under the title of ―Authenticity and Renewal in Contemporary Arab Culture‖ (Boullata 1990,

13). The conference explicitly sought to resume the questions raised by the Arab renaissance

(nahda) of the nineteenth century regarding the place of the Arab-Islamic self within the context

of ―belonging‖ to the spirit of modernity and to a particular nation or community. ―Authenticity,‖

here, was understood as the opposite of ―imitation,‖ with different thinkers placing various

emphases on whether the texts, ideas, and practices threatening authenticity are those containing

foreign or native cultural elements. In his contribution to the conference, which was published in

the journal al-Adab (1971), the Egyptian literary critic Shukri Ayyad argues that the term

―asala‖ was seldom used in Arabic literatures until the 1950s when it came signify, on the one

hand, ―individuality, invention and liberation from tradition,‖ and, on the other hand, ―the

continuous preservation of original ancestral elements in one‘s culture.‖ The two aspects are

united in a notion of ―personality‖ that suggests that individual innovation can only be

understood through the collective personality in which that individual is incorporated (Boullata

1990, pp. 14-15).‡

† See Browers 2006 in regard to early debates in Arabic over the concept of civil society and its relationship to post-
1989 debates over democratization, and Browers 2009 in regard to the idea of cooperation between Islamists and
leftists in the Arab region.
‡
Rich discussions of the contemporaneity-authenticity tension in Islamic thought and its
comparison to similar tensions in Western political thought can be found in Lee (1997) and
Salvatore (1997).

4
 A second conference on ―The Crisis of Civilizational Development in the Arab Nation‖

was organized by the University of Kuwait‘s alumni association and held shortly after the 1973

October war in which Egypt scored a partial victory against Israel and during a time when an

Arab oil embargo seemed to be successfully wielded to resist the foreign policies of various

western countries. The papers delivered and discussed at the conference were published in the

magazines al-Adab and al-Ma‘irfa. The dominating theme in this context was the problems with

Arab fixation on the heritage. An overwhelming majority of the papers, from liberal

philosophers (such as Zaki Najib Mahmud [1905-1993] and Fuad Zakariyya [1927-2010], to

Marxist intellectuals (such as Mahmud Amin al-Alim [1922-2009]), to literary critics (such as

Adonis and Muhammad Nuwaihi [1917-1980]), called for something akin to the liberation of

Arab thought from the burdens of the past in order to launch a process of civilizational progress

and creativity.

One also sees in this period a number of thinkers engaged in attempts to plant their own

ideological and political roots in social and revolutionary movements in Islam, or tried to find in

the history of Islam since its earliest stages a left and a right that represented well defined class

interests. There were pioneering attempts in the 1970s by some Marxists, like the Lebanese

Husayn Muruwa (1910-1987) and the Syrian Tayyib Tizini (b. 1936), to interpret and explain

trends in Islamic thought and philosophy by relating them to their social and political roots. After

the 1967, when other Marxists were arguing that Arab intellectuals must overcome their heritage

in order to confront the backwardness that contributed to their defeat, Murawah argued that the

June defeat was merely military, not cultural. A decade later he published a massive study of the

heritage based on the principle that understanding the Arab-Islamic cultural tradition in light of

historical materialism will reveal its dynamic power to change and develop Arab society. Tizini

5
began a similarly ambitious attempt, but rather than reading the heritage through the lens of

historical materialism, he attempted to uncover the roots of a materialist philosophical tradition

within Islamic history, with aim of not only uncovering its revolutionary potential and but also

with connecting Arab culture with a universal philosophical tradition (1971, 1976).

Although Tizini influenced the work of the two intellectuals I will focus on in the

remainder of this chapter, Muhammad ‗Abid al-Jabri and Hasan Hanafi, each of these thinkers

departs substantially from the Marxist perspective, ultimately arguing that the relevant issue is

not an issue of class, but a matter of culture and intellect. Elizabeth Suzanne Kassab (2010)

characterizes this shift as an ―intellectualization of the malaise.‖ Kassab seems to agree with the

assessment of the Lebanese Marxist philosopher Mahdi Amil (1936-1987), who a few months

after the 1974 conference in Kuwait critically reviewed and analyzed the contributions to the

meeting in a book, entitled ―The Crisis of Arab Civilization or the Crisis of the Arab

Bourgeoisie? (1974). Amil took the conference participants to task for analyzing concreted

political issues at an ideational level, while remaining unconnected the actual material,

socioeconomic and political factors that account for the current crisis and Arab

underdevelopment. He faults them with obscuring, under the false problematics of tradition

versus modernity (and the Arab world versus the West), the real conflict of the Arab world with

imperialist capitalist domination.

While they do not deny links between material conditions and thought, Hanafi and Jabri

seem to suggest that certain intellectual issues gain a life of their own, beyond the circumstances

out of which they emerged. One important difference between the 1970s and the 1980s was the

lesson offered by the success of the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran, which challenged both the

supposedly revolutionary Arab nationalist regimes but also the conservative Arab monarchies,

6
such as Saudi Arabia and Iran, which claimed to rule in the name of Islam. At considerable part

of the reason for the change in thinking was the Iranian revolutions revelation of the

revolutionary potential of Islam in overthrowing an existing secular, Western-orientated

authoritarian state and replacing it with an Islamic republic. While in some respects, the lines

between secular and religious political visions remained and, in some cases, deepened after the

Iranian revolution, the voices of those seeking to tie together the strands of Islamic and Arab

nationalist thought that had separated and frayed under the post-independence states also began

to assert themselves. Mona Abaza has noted how, in the 1980s, in the wake of the Arab defeats

and inspired by the triumph of the Islamic revolution in Iran, a number of Arab intellectuals on

the left began to think it necessary ―to revolutionize Islam as a prolongation of a nationalist

project‖ (2002, 22). I focus on Jabri and Hanafi here for their attempts to more seriously engage

the Islamist challenge, while remaining faithful to a progressive and revolutionary ethos. In this

sense, their works offer at least an implicit critique of those liberal and leftist intellectuals, such

as Sadiq Jalal al-Azm, Abdullah Laroui, Adonis (Ali Ahmed Said) and Fuad Zakariyya, who

consider the Islamic tradition a hindrance to progress and modernity and reject its role in any

truly enlightened political project.

Heritage and the Formation of Arab Reason: Muhammad „Abid al-Jabri

Mohammed Abed al-Jabri (1936-2010) was born in Morocco. Outside of one year in

Damascus, Syria spent acquiring a certificate in secondary education, he received his entire

education in that country. His 1970 dissertation on Ibn Khaldun constituted the first doctorate

awarded by the University of Mohammed V in Rabat after independence. Jabri became an

assistant professor at the University of Rabat after receiving his diploma in 1967 and continued

to teach there after receiving his doctorate and until his retirement in 2002. By his own

7
admission, he was really only ever comfortable writing in Arabic, unlike so many other

Moroccan intellectuals of his generation who were educated or wrote in French. Throughout his

life, Jabri maintained two primary interests: education and politics. Early in his career he worked

as a primary school teacher and headmaster at various schools, school inspector, educational

director for philosophy teachers, and wrote and published educational books. He worked at or

wrote for various newspapers, including al-Alam (1957 and 1958), Aqlam (1964-1983), al-

Muharrir (1965-1981), the weekly Palestine (1968), and the magazine Fikr wa naqd, to name

just a few. Beginning in 1959 onwards, he worked with the Moroccan opposition politician

Mehdi Ben Barka in the socialist Union Nationale des Forces Populaires (UNFP) and edited the

opposition paper, al-Tahrir, where he published a daily column. Jabri was arrested along with

other UNFP members when the Union clashed with the government in 1963.

It is largely through the work of this Moroccan intellectual, writing in Arabic from the

farthest corner of the Arab region that idea that Arab intellectuals have inherited a distinctive

character in regard to relating structures of understanding gained fresh momentum. Jabri‘s

thought revisits themes that emerged during the nahda, but with a strong sense of the limitations

of the answers provided during that intellectual movement. Jabri suggests that Arab thought has

remained circular since the nahda, with the new continually being read in reference to a past

model (namudhaj). The question of the nahda—―Why did the Muslims fall behind while others

advanced?‖ (limadha ta’akhkhara al-muslimun wa li-madha taqaddama ghayruhum?)§--

engenders a further query: ―How do we catch up/stand up?‖ (kayfa nanhadu?) (Jabri 1985, 35).

But Jabri finds the question itself insufficient for distinguishing for the task at hand because it

fails to distinguish between renewal (tajdid) and imitation (taqlid) while at the same time

§ The question recalls the title of a 1930 book by the Lebanese Druze notable.
8
erecting a false problematique (ishkaliyya), limiting the choice to either a return (to the teachings

and principles of Islam) or emulation (of western ideas and experiences) (41-42). That is, it sets

up two models: the salafiyya (literally, followers of the ancestors—that is, followers of the

prophet and his companions) and European modernity (hadatha) (59). Arab reason, he argues,

has passively surrendered to either one model or the other and remains depended upon and

subservient to both. Yet, both are poorly understood and neither has succeeded in providing a

universal value for Arab-Islamic civilization.

Jabri‘s aim is to deconstruct the clash that between those who exalt the glory of the

Islamic past and those who seek to imitate Western modernity. Modernization and revolutionary

change need not be opposed to authenticity. Other movements have looked to past models in

order to offer a critique of present circumstances without generating a new order that was viewed

as antithetical to tradition. The European Reformation revisited the works of Greek and Roman

philosophy in order to legitimize their critique of and instigate progress within medieval Europe.

But in this and other successful cases the change came from within the tradition itself, rather than

from without. The problem in Arab political thought is that the colonialism and western cultural

hegemony has contributed to a reactionaryism where the heritage acts as a basis of self-

affirmation—a repository of all that is to be protected as the very identity of the cultural self in

times of threat from an invading, foreign ―other‖—rather itself than an instigator and inspiration

for progress, change, development and modernization. According to Jabri, the task at hand for

Arab intellectuals is to enact the liberation of Arab consciousness from its traditional ties with

the Islamic heritage through its scientific historicization of our understanding of it and a rational

relativization of its influence on the present while at the same time retaining a cautious attitude

toward ideas emerging from the West and are part and parcel of foreign domination.

9
 The concept of modernity that Jabri seems to arrive at is similar to, and perhaps better

explained by, the Egyptian intellectual Tariq al-Bishri. In a critical study of western discourse on

the concept of modernity, Bishri identifies what he sees as a tendency of that which is foreign in

origin (al-wafid) to suppress the Arab-Islamic heritage and to divide society against itself. Bishri

prefers the term ―al-mu‘asira‖ (literally ―contemporaenity‖), to the word more commonly used

for modernity—―al-hadatha‖--since the former refers to a period of time occupied by all, as

opposed to a cultural value from which some can be excluded and which is, he argues, most

commonly used to differentiate Western from Eastern—and especially, Islamic—societies.

However, according to Bishri, the notion of modernity in general has been used to divide

societies against themselves by uniting some sectors of society with the West and its interests

under the guise of modernity while excluding and depicting as alien and unnatural those

traditional people who not only are the preservers of the heritage and the land, but also represent

those forces from which resistance to western powers and foreign incursions is most likely to

arise (1983, 12).

Throughout the 1980s, Jabri continues to wrestle with the question of how to instigate a

process of modernization that can take root in the Arab region. His 1980 work, Nahnu wa al-

turath (The Heritage and Us), engages the question of the Arab relationship to their intellectual

tradition and introduces ideas that develop into a series of books focused on a critique al-‘aql al-

‘arabi, variously rendered ―the Arab intellect,‖ ―the Arab mind,‖ ―Arab reason,‖ or ―Arab

reasoning‖ in English language works that discuss this body of work. From the perspective of

Western political thought, this rendering seems to suggest problematic essentializations and

invite uncharitable comparisons with Raphael Patel‘s 1973 work, The Arab Mind, which has

been rightly criticized for its use of cultural psychology to lay out a whole host of racist

10
stereotypes about Arab behaviors. Jabri is hardly immune to similar lines of critique, although he

avoids psychologism in favour of epistemology. Nonetheless, it is the case that his ideas from

this period spread and are widely discussed (as well as criticized) throughout the Arab region.

The series he launched to illustrate and argue for his project, entitled Naqd al-‘aql al-‘arabi

(Critique of Arab Reason), spans four books: Takwin al-‘aql al-‘arabi (The Formation of Arab

Reason) in 1984, Bunyat al-‘aql al-‘arabi (The Structure of Arab Reason) in 1986, al-‘Aql al-

siyasi al-‘arabi (Arab Political Reasoning) in 1990, al-‘Aql al-akhlaqi al-‘arabi (Arab Moral

Reasoning) in 2001. The first two works analyze the development of philosophical, religious,

political and ethical patterns of thought over time, while the latter two books deal specifically

with the impact of Arab reason on political and ethical thought in the region. The conclusion of

each study is that ―Arab reason‖ needs to be revived in the present.

By ―Arab reason‖ Jabri means the cultural-specific epistemological presuppositions

(1984, 15). Both thought and politics practiced ―indirectly.‖ In this manner, Islamists narrow an

explicit political concern of the present, such as the issue of the form that governing is to take

(nizam al-hukm), to a question of the rightful system of government within Islam (nizam al-hukm

fi al-islam). They treat the past as both sacred and transcendental, as they attempt to extract

ready-made solutions from it to deal with contemporary problems. Jabri goes so far as to assert

that Arabs cannot be certain that the Islamic heritage is authentic, since it was laid down by those

who lived during the age of recording (―asr al-tadwin), the period in the eighth century, after the

death of the prophet Muhammad, during which various elements of Islamic culture were written

down. According to Jabri, the framework of reference for Arab-Islamic civilization does not

consist of some transcendent, absolute truth, but, in fact, represents the outcome of the first act of

independent opinion (ra’y) (1984, 64-65). It is necessary that the Arabs appropriate (imtilak)

11
their history in order to lay the foundations for a new creative age ('asr tadwin jadid) (1986, 555-

573).

The other side of this coin is that Arab reason does not have direct access to European

modernity. Expecting the Arabs to assimilate European liberalism is tantamount to asking them

to incorporate into their consciousness a legacy that is foreign to them in regard to the themes

that it raises, the problems that it poses, and the languages in which it is expressed; a legacy

which not only does not belong to their history but has often acted as a tool for oppressing and

suppressing aspects of Arab-Islamic civilization. A nation only can experience the universal

attributes of the human legacy within its own tradition and not outside of it. Jabri‘s critique the

nahda mirrors his critique of Islam, for in its imitation of European thought, which resulted, in

his view, in their failure both to move beyond premade patterns and to produce indigenous Arab

thought. ―Arab modernity‖ must be ―conditioned by the circumstances within which it manifests

itself‖ (pp. 2–3). So long as the approach to addressing question is closed in itself, the basic

condition for a modern political discourse to unfold in addressing the needs of contemporary

society is derailed. The political question is removed from its history, thus losing its object and

objective (1982, 56-61). Jabri bemoans, in particular, the lack of a tradition of autonomous

political discourse in the Arab context. Jabri coins the expression ―resigned reason‖ (al-‘aql al-

mustaqil) to designate what he sees as the conventional ways of thinking in the Arab world that

hinder independent thought and preclude interrogation of central cultural issues.

The alternative to imitation and circumlocution, in Jabri‘s view is, is a form of critical

reasoning that at once mounts a challenge to Islamist interpretations of the heritage and draws

upon the rational, intellectual tradition in Islamic thought. Nelly Lahoud notes that the project of

intellectuals like Jabir—as well as Muhammad Wazidi, Khalid al-‗Abud, and Taha ‗Abd al-

12
Rahman—―advocate[s] a stronger focus on the philosophical component of the tradition (turath

falsafi)‖ (2005, 33). Here too, Jabri finds the path constricted from the start, as he highlights the

absence of an ―ancient‖ epoch at the structure of Arab intellectual history. Put succinctly, Jabri

points out that Arabs retain a Western point of reference in discussing Arab-Islamic history,

which begins in the middle thus negating its formative period. Arab consciousness of its own

history is displaced by the dominant intellectual tradition, which links is heights to a classical

Greco-Roman and Enlightenment periods, while downgrading its Middle Ages, which

corresponds to the formative and middle periods of Arab-Islamic civilization (1984, 43).

In Jabri‘s retelling of the formative period, there are three systems of knowledge that

form the basis of Arab reason. The first is based on the art of rhetoric (al-nizam al-bayani),

which explains the unknown in terms of the known. This is the traditional field of religious

scholars who rely upon analogical reasoning for explicating the truths contained within the

Qur‘an. Jabri places Sayyid Qutb in the bayan tradition (and ultimately dismisses him as such).

The second is a system of illumination (nizam al-‘irfan), a neo-Platonist form of knowledge that

was mainly developed by various Shi‗i sects (e.g., Ismai‗ilis, Ikhwan al-Safa, etc.) and which

offers an esoteric approach to knowledge. Where Jabri considers the first system indigenous to

Arab reason, the second he characterizes as foreign (dakhil). The third is the system of proof (al-

nizam al-burhani), which he associates with Greek thought and scientific methods of

demonstrating truth. The decline (inhitat) of Arab reason is attributed to the assimilation of the

first two systems—the esoteric and foreign come to be taken as the dominant stance in Islamic

societies. (347-348). In one of many culturist arguments that appear in Jabri‘s writings, he

associates Arab and Persian cultures to the first two intellectual currents, respectively: the

rationalist current of the Mu‗tazila‘s trend of the former and the gnostic or illuminationist current

13
of the latter. A tension between the two currents culminates in the latter joining forces with the

literalist jurists, led by Ibn Hanbal, in order to stage an intellectual coup against the Mu‗tazilas,

let by the Caliph al-Mutawakkil (r. 8470861) to change the religious policy and show more favor

toward the jurists. The third, rationalist current, endures through the philosophers, beginning

with Abu Nasr al-Farabi (870-950), but remains on the margins of religious and political life.

Jabri‘s centering of the problematic on divide between a Sunni caliphate state seeking to

defend a rational but conservative ideology and a Shi‗i oppositional movement that holds an

irrational but revolutionary ideology offers a hardly veiled analogy for his own time. His project

of intellectual emancipation, for all its talk of universality, reveals its particularism as an

expression of contemporary Arab nationalist thought, distinct not only from the Iranian project,

but also from Islamist politics in both its statist and revolutionary forms. As Ibrahim Abu-Rabi‗

rightly describes Jabri‘s project as on based on the belief that ―it is possible to utilize philosophy

as a method of reviving the grand Arab nationalist project, in both the Maghreb and the Mashriq,

to be anchored in the grand environment of Arab rationalism that existed before Islam‖ (2004,

259).

In his attempt to retrieve demonstrative reasoning from within the Arab philosophical

tradition, Jabri traces the contemporary problematique to the problem that al-Farabi and other

philosophers faced in trying to bring together religion and philosophy. Farabi attempted to

demonstrate the mutual permutation of Greek and Islamic culture, but met with resistance from

religious scholars (1980, 70). The next major philosopher, Ibn Sina (Avicenna, 980-1037) is

criticized by Jabri for allegedly developing Farabi‘s thought in the direction of Gnosticism.

Rather than taking up the political project of Farabi, Arab philosophy in the hands of Ibn Sina

regresses from an open rationalism to a lethal non-rationalism, later further propagated by the

14
theologian al-Ghazali (1058-1111). This trend among the philosophers has led, in Jabri‘s view,

to a tragic impasse for rationalism in the Muslim East (Mashriq) (39, 11). As a result, it is only in

the Muslim West (Maghrib), by which Jabri means chiefly Morocco and Spain, that Farabi‘s

rationalism endured, retained first by Ibn Bajja and then by Ibn Rushd (Averroes, 1126-1198).

It is Ibn Rushd who truly emerges as the hero in Jabri‘s account. For it is with Ibn Rushd

that Jabri locates the crucial rupture with the illuminative, obsurantist stream of thought, which

Jabri associates with the East, Iran, and Sufism (1980, 52). Jabri credit Ibn Rushd with not only

exemplifying this rupture through his critique of Ibn Sina‘s writings, but also with pointing the

way forward through his intellectual approach with his ―others,‖ the Ancient Greeks. Jabri calls

for revival of the ―Rushdian spirit‖ which he encapsulates in Ibn Rushd‘s claim ―philosophy (al-

hikma) is the companion (sahiba) and milk-sister (al-ukht al-radhi‘a) of religion (al-shari‘a).‖

On this basis, Jabri argues that reasoning understands its own incapacity to provide ethical

guidance, and thus refers us to religion, but that religion itself points back to reason as the way to

develop adequate ways and means of enacting ethical principles in historical settings. The

restoration of rational and critical reasoning that grants religion and philosophy each an

independent role in the common cause of the pursuit of truth (1980, 213-214). Truth emanates

for one source, but it is apprehended at different levels and in different modes. Jabri (1984)

identifies this ―double truth‖ as the postulate that lies at the foundation of modernity. Intellectual

energy should be expended in the present to reinvest the rationalist, realist, and critical aspects of

the Islamic tradition in the manner of Ibn Rushd. This approach—which he variously

characterizes his approach as ―scientific,‖ ―objective,‖ ―critical,‖ and ―rational‖--will allow the

turath to achieve contemporaneity with present circumstance so that its positive aspects can be

harnessed for contemporary aspirations.

15
From Doctrine to Revolution: Hasan Hanafi‟s Phenomenological Reading of the Heritage

As in the case of Jabri, the starting point for the Egyptian Philosopher Hasan Hanafi

(born 1935) is the necessity of dealing with contemporary problems of Arab political, social, and

intellectual development. However, he approaches the task in a different manner and, to some

extent, with distinct aims from Jabri. Where Jabri seeks an ―objective‖ reassessment of the

heritage to restore its rational trends and transformative possibilities, Hanafi seeks to refashion

the heritage into a revolutionary ideology.

Like Jabri, Hasan Hanafi‘s political activism began early on, in Egypt‘s fight against

British colonialism. But whereas Jabri fought for independence and against the Moroccan

monarchy with the socialist UNFP, Hanafi reports that he was briefly associated with the Muslim

Brotherhood in the wake of the 1951 clashes between Egyptians and the British over the Suez

Canal. After acquiring a diploma in philosophy from Cairo University in 1956, Hanafi left for

Paris for to spend the next decade pursuing a doctorate in philosophy from the Sorbonne.

Influenced by the thinking of the Catholic reformer Jean Guitton and the phenomenologist Paul

Ricouer, among others, Hanafi returned to Egypt a left-wing phenomenologist. Hanafi has held

various academic and intellectual positions, including Secretary-General of the Egyptian society

for philology, vice-president of the Arab society for philosophy, and has been chairperson of the

philosophy faculty at Cairo University since 1988 and has spoken out on many contemporary

political topics and reportedly run afoul of the Egyptian government for his political activities

and writings, in the early 1970s and immediately following the Iranian revolution. He has also

attracted considerable hostility of Islamic and Islamists groups, including one attack, in May by

the Front of al-Azhar ‗ulama for, among other things, his approach to interpreting the religious

heritage.

16
 Although he has been on the faculty at Cairo University since his return from Paris and

chairperson of the philosophy department since 1988, Hanafi has spent much time teaching at

universities throughout the world, including four years at Temple University in the United States

between 1971 to 1975, where he claims to have begun work on the book The Heritage and

Renewal (Turath wa al-tajdid), published until 1980. In one account Hanafi‘s provides, he

suggest that like Sayyid Qutb, whose experience in America contributed to his development of

an Islamist sentiment, Hanafi‘s four years in America initiated a shift in his academic and

political focus toward what he calls ―revolutionary religion,‖ a concept that acquired additional

impetus after the revolution in Iran. However, many aspects of Hanafi‘s biography seem to have

been reinterpreted in light of the various political projects in which he has been invested.

Outside of his early and brief engagement with the Brotherhood he has remained outside of any

established political groups. Few Islamists recognize him as one of their own and he is more

likely to be found in the company of leftists and Arab nationalists. Hanafi crosses intellectual,

geographical and sectarian boundaries with relative frequency and ease.

Between 1979 and 1980, Hanafi edited, wrote the introduction to and supervised the

translation into Arabic of two books by Imam Khomeini: Wilayat-i faqih (translated as ―Islamic

Government‖ {al-Hukuma al-islamiyya}, rather than the more literal—and distinctly Shi‗i—

―guardianship of the jurist‖) and Jihad al-nafs, aw jihad al-akbar (Struggle with the Self, or the

Greatest Jihad). In his introduction to Khomeini‘s Islamic Government, Hanafi characterizes the

Iranian revolution as not exclusively a Shi‗i revolution but as embodying a broader revival of

Islam in the tradition of Afghani, Mawdudi, and Qutb—a revolutionary Islam that affirms the

necessity of Islamic government in the contemporary age as a means of confronting imperialism

17
and Zionism and for overcoming the exploitation and oppression of Muslims throughout the

world.

In 1981, Hanafi issued the first and only issue of a journal, called al-Yasar al-islami

(Islamic Left), in an effort to fuse leftist and Islamist ideologies and as the first step in launching

and Islamic left movement to bring about a revolution. Hanafi characterized his movement as a

combination of Islamic and Nasirist elements: ―Islam is in the heart of the masses and Nasserism

is in their need. Islam without Nasserism falls into formalism, as in the case of Islamic groups.

Nasserism without Islam will fall into secularism and will always be threatened by an Islamic

movement‖ (1982, 74). Hanafi praises Qutb for his intellectual efforts at forging a dynamic

Islamism in the 1930s, 1940s and early 1950s, when he aimed not at textual hermeneutics but in

freeing the subject‘s own creativity. Hanafi maintains that had Qutb not been imprisoned and

tortured under the Nasir regime—the circumstances that Hanafi argues account for Qutb‘s

conservative turn—he would have lived out his life according to its more natural course,

continuing to develop and carry on a form of scientific socialism that corresponded with his

Islamic faith. In fact, Hanafi further speculates that, had he lived, Qutb would have become

―one of the pillars of the Islam Left in Egypt‖ (1980, 219). As it was, Hanafi maintains, Qutb fell

into a ―prison psychopathy‖ (1982, 60), particularly as he increasingly centers his notion of

Islamic politics on a defense the concept of God‘s sovereignty (hakimiyya). In Hanafi‘s view,

this focus is not only unnecessary and unproductive, but it runs the risk of erasing human

agency:

There is no doubt that if we wanted to get into a bidding competition in regard

to belief and defending Allah, razing [the edifice of] reason and cancelling out
the human being, we would say that Allah rules over the mind and that the
mind is the object that is governed; that Allah is the creator of it, the possessor
of all things, the ruler of all things. But where can the danger be? What is the
situation in which we find ourselves? Is Allah in danger? Or is reason? Do we

18
 defend Allah‘s hakimiyya or the hakimiyya of reason? Are we defenders of Allah
or are we human beings defending human rights? It may be that the human
being, in the presence of this bidding competition, will keep silent in fear of the
coercion of the masses, the weight of history, and the attack of the rulers.
However, defending the rule of reason is the task of our generation, defending the
rights of the people (al-nas) and employing their minds. (Hanafi 1988-1989, vol.
3, 438; cite and trans. Akhavi 1997, 388).**

At the same time Hanafi was attempting to establish this fusion of Islamism and Nasism that he

termed an Islamic left and launching his call to action in Egypt, he was also adamant in his

conviction that that action needed theory and determined to provide that theory. As part of his

―consciousness raising,‖ he also produced a comprehensive interpretation of religion and

philosophy, entitled The Heritage and Renewal (1980), which aimed at the radical reconstruction

of religious thought in relation to particular, concrete, historical existence—an approach he

characterizes as ―phenomenological,‖ thus, drawing upon his philosophical training in European

philosophy. This reading offers an ―anthropocentric,‖ as opposed to ―theocentric,‖ view of Islam,

in which human beings and their needs form the center of the interpretation. Hanafi seeks to

reconstruct ―Islamic culture at the level of consciousness in order to discover subjectivity.

Instead of being theocentric, it becomes anthropocentric. [It] provides the method for analyzing

lived experiences and describing the process of linguistic pseudo-morphology‖ (1980, 231).

Through this study, Hanafi seeks to contribute to a revolutionary religious consciousness capable

of confronting modern conditions of inequality, poverty, underdevelopment, domination,

westernization, and alienation. Despite Hanafi‘s self-description, I situate this intellectual outside

of Islamist due to the instrumentalism in his view of religion. He treats the Islamic heritage as

something that provides the ―psychological storehouse‖ of the masses, which can be harnassed as

**Akhavi (1997) offers an excellent comparison of Qutb and Hanafi..

19
the basis for the renewal of the dynamic aspects of Islamic civilization and can be put into the

service of addressing the needs of the present age.

Hanafi‘s project, like Jabri‘s, further encompasses an explicit critique of the West. He

sounds very much like Jabri in his call for renewal of the heritage, which is put forth as an

alternative to modernization understood as westernization, a sort of ―modernization from

within‖—that is, a way of moving forward by retaining the national, cultural and religious

specificities (khususiyya). However, authenticity, in the sense Hanafi understands it, lies in the

Islamic heritage, which is embedded in the hearts and minds of the masses, and stands in contrast

to the imported political and cultural ideas of western intellectuals and ideologies. This does not

mean that Hanafi rejects western thought completely. Rather he aims to encourage Muslims to

be critical producers rather than merely critical consumers. In a 1981 work, entitled Introduction

to the Science of Occidentalism [Muqaddima fi ‘ilm al-istighrab], Hanafi argues that so long as

Arabs consider the West as just a source of knowledge and not as itself an object of inquiry they

will continue to be dominated by its influence. European civilization created a philosophy and

methodology of history that determines the direction of civilization (from West to East) and

eclipses the discourses of other civilizations in the process. Hanafi makes particular reference to

Hegel‘s Philosophy of History where in a narrative of human progress toward freedom, the

history of the world is said to travel from East to West and Europe is understood as the end of

history. Western influence is not to be rejected, but cognitively domesticated. Under the heading

―Inheritance and Renewal,‖ which refers to the Arab-Islamic heritage, the western heritage and

the current social and political reality, Hanafi introduces the idea of ―Occidentalism‖ [istighrab],

which he hails as a new Islamic social

20
science constructed to provide an answer to Eurocentrism and Western domination (Hanafi

1981b, p. 22).

Thus, Hanafi‘s study of the Arab-Islamic heritage is complemented with a corresponding

investigation of the Western cultural heritage, a project whose purpose is to counter Orientalism,

as indicted by Said. Hanafi defines Occidentalism as the exploration of Western civilization by

social scientists from the Orient with the aim of rising from being an object of Orientalism to

devising it as a subject of their own. The contents and structures of European consciousness

must be ―relativized,‖ he argues, in order to curtail their influence, while emphasizing the

content and structures of one‘s own heritage. Hanafi believes this will serve to restore European

thought‘s historical dimension–that is, it will refute its claim to universality and dominance, and

thus returns Europe and its culture to what he terms its ―natural size‖ (Hanafi 1981b, pp. 152-3).

Hanafi argues that European consciousness should not be considered as the only route to

civilization, but as merely one of a number of parallel periods and ways in history, including

Egypt, China and other civilizations of the ancient Orient.

At the end of the 1980s, Hanafi published two multi-volume works. The first consisted

of eight volumes covering Religion and Revolution in Egypt and aimed at reconstructing Islam‘s

revolutionary role in the Egyptian political struggles from the ―Free Officers‖ revolution of 1952

to the assassination of Sadat in 1981. A five volume work, entitled From Doctrine to

Revolution, was intended to flesh out the arguments first put forth in Heritage and Renewal. The

aim of these long and somewhat repetitive works is to contribute toward a revolutionary religious

consciousness aimed at facing modern conditions of inequality, poverty, underdevelopment,

domination, westernization, and alienation. His interpretation of Qur‘anic passages asserts the

necessity of advancing social justice and achieving an egalitarian society. Hanafi argues that

21
there is no single interpretation, nor is any one interpretation right or wrong. Rather, in Hanafi‘s

view, the validity of an interpretation lies in its power. This is seen in a dialectical method

commonly used by Hanafi to resolve conflicting interpretations in the religious heritage, aptly

summed up by Esposito and Voll: ―the line of argument starts from a description of an apparent

clash or contradiction between two positions or concepts. Hanafi then posits a third alternative

that resolves the contradictions and does so in a way that creates an imperative for human

action.‖ (2001, 85). The ―power‖ of this interpretation lies not only in its resolution of the

conflict, but also for the way in which it provides a basis for social action that addresses the

needs of contemporary life. Hanafi baldly announces that interpretation is an ―ideological

weapon‖ and puts forth his own ―thematic interpretation‖ as a means of finding a scriptural basis

for sociopolitical activism.

Dialogue, Critique and Remaining Questions

In 1989 Hanafi and Jabiri began a public exchange that was published under the title

Hiwar al-maghrib al-mashriq, which can be translated variously as ―East-West Dialogue,‖

―Eastern Arab-Western Arab Dialogue,‖ and with Hanafi representing the former where Jabri

represented the latter. Jabri, for his part, has critized Hanafi along the lines of his critique of

―Eastern (Mashriqi)‖ philosophy of Ibn Sina and al-Ghazali: for its focus on a more mystical,

illuminationist. Hanafi returns the criticism by suggesting that Jabri is dominated by the

―Occidental.‖ Part of their debate centered on the figure of Ibn Rushd. Where Jabri emphasizes

the independence of Ibn Rushd rationalism from religion, Hanafi focuses on the Islamic

character of Ibn Rushd‘s rationalism as it develops within Islamic jurisprudence. What is

interesting, however, is that despite the two thinkers‘ many differences, the two thinkers came

together on the issue of secularism. ―Islam,‖ Jabri argues, ―is not a church that we can separate

22
from the state‖ (1990, 40). While at first glance this position might be seen to echo those

Islamists who maintain Islam is both a religion and a state (Islam din wa dawla), it is quite clear

that Jabiri means something else. Jabiri is arguing that it is a historical fact that Islam formed

Arabs into a religion and a state. But it is also a fact, he maintains, that that state and its form

was not designated in the text of the Qur‘an or the accounts (hadith) of the prophet. Rather, the

form of the state was a decision made by Muslims. It is not a religious state that the imperative

of the Islamic heritage. What Jabiri means in asserting that ―Islam is not a church that we can

separate from the state,‖ is that just as historically the Arab constituted the ―matter of Islam,‖ so

to Islam is part of the ―spirit‖ of the Arab. As such, Islam becomes a basis for the Arab

community: ―the spiritual Islam for the Arab Muslims and the civilizational Islam for all

Arabs—Muslims or non-Muslim‖ (45-46).

This is an argument one finds throughout al-Jabiri‘s works. He views efforts to position

one‘s self and one‘s opponents under the banner of ―secularism‖ or ―Islamism‖ as a way of

avoiding other, more pressing concerns. The question of secularism in the Arab world is a false

issue, in the sense that it expresses real needs by reference to categories which do not correspond

to them: the need for independence within a single national identity, the need for a democracy

which protects the rights of minorities, and the need for the rational practice of political action.

All are objective--even reasonable and necessary--needs in the Arab world. However, they lose

their justification and necessity when expressed through the use of ambiguous slogans like

―secularism‖ (al-Jabiri 1996a, p. 113).

The development over time from a decidedly secular perspective to a reconsidered

position that either places greater emphasis on Islamic authenticity as a necessary component of

a national awakening (Jabri) or attempts to locate within Islam a leftist revolutionary project

23
(Hanafi) is what I have termed elsewhere a ―retreat from secularism‖ (2009). In Arab political

thought that follows it, this line of thinking has been roundly criticized.

The French-Syrian philosopher and literatry critic, Georges Tarabishi (1993) bemoans the

emergence of these ―new partisans of the heritage‖ (turathiyyun judud) for ―massacring the

heritage‖ and substituting a general willingness to understand ―the other‖ with a call that goes

beyond the dictates of independence from ―the other‖ to a more destructive position that entails

declaring war on all ―others.‖ Analyzing this ―fixation‖ on the turath from a pyschoanlytic

perspective, Tarabishi attributes to Arab intellectuals a ―collective neurosis‖ (1991). He argues

that the 1967 defeat was experienced as psychological trauma that unleashed powerful feelings

of guilt on the part of secular Arab intellectuals. These feelings were then directed against the

nahda and the revolutionary ideologies the emerged out of that period. The nahda is seen as a

betrayal of tradition and the defeat as punishment for the betrayal. The result is a form of

traumatic regression on the part of arab intellectuals as they attempt to escape reality and the

actual challenges it poses by taking up intellectual reexaminations of the turath, engage in a

―family‖ reflux in the form of a defense of that tradition, and take up some form of ego centrality

to compensate for the narcissistic would, by not only casting themselves and their heritage as not

only the victim, but central, even superior. Thus, Hasan Hanafi is deluded into thinking he can

replace Eurocentrism with Islamocentrism—or Orientalism with Occidentalism (Tarabishi

2005).

The Syrian philosopher Sadiq Jalal al-‗Azm has similary criticized what he characterizes

as a ―revisionist Arab line of political thought‖ and associates with a reaction to the Iranian

revolution. He argues that Hanafi‘s line of thinking constitutes a form of ―orientalism in

reverse.‖ According to ‗Azm (1981) the central thesis of these reverse-orientalists is: ―The

24
national salvation so eagerly sought by the Arabs since the Napoleonic occupation of Egypt is to

be found neither in secular nationalism (be it radical, conservative or liberal) nor in revolutionary

communism, socialism or what have you, but in a return to the authenticity of what they call

‗popular political Islam‘.‖ This trend proves ―no less, reactionary, mystifying, ahistorical and

anti-humanist than…Orientalism proper,‖ ‗Azm argues, but only reverses the point of reference

from the West to Islam.

The debate is important, but it has seen its low points. Tarabishi (1996) accused Jabri of

developing an essentialist approach to Arab reason that encourages cultural isolationism, opposes

universal values, and, thereby, serves the interests of Islamists. Supporters of Jabri responded by

accusing Tarabishi of representing ―the patronizing Western viewpoint,‖ and Jabri joined the

fray at a particularly low point to assert that Tarabishi had no standing to speak on the Arab-

Islamic tradition because he is a Christian.††

While in many respects Arab political thought has moved beyond these questions of

heritage, modernity and authenticity, may of the same questions continue to be posed in different

forms and the weight of the retreat from secularism into an intellectualism of crises hangs upon

the present. Have Jabri and Hanafi contributed toward progress beyond the secular-Islamic

dichotomy in productive fashion, that overcomes the talking past and irreconcilability of

positions? Or have they merely relegated ―secularism‖ to a growing category of silences, of

loaded terms that cannot be productively engage in intellectual debates because they threaten

fragile unities and threaten to end the discussion? Has the path to being able to approach Arab-

Islamic and Western political traditions been facilitated through variety of interpretative

†† The debate is recounted in al-Jadid 3:17 (1997).

25
approaches employed during this period, or has it become wrought with more pitfalls due to the

further accumulation of culturalist modes of argumentation?

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