Dr. Fathi Al-Miskini, thank you very much for accepting the invitation, and we look forward to having an entertaining intellectual and fruitful conversation with you.
In Hegel wa-nihāyat al-mītāfīzīqā (Hegel and the End of Metaphysics; Dar al-Janoub, 1997), you explained the importance of returning to Hegel. You also asked elsewhere: “Who is Hegel for us?” What is the relevance of Hegelianism for those who, as you put it, live in the “South of modernity”?
My encounter with Hegel began in 1986-1987, when I completed my first undergraduate thesis in French, entitled The Concept of the Subject and the Negative in the Phenomenology of the Spirit. My personal interest in Hegel – beyond my “academic” duty dictated by the university – stemmed from the need to develop a precise understanding of what it means to be “ourselves,” not just belong to a nation that imposes upon us a shared identity and strips us from the opportunity to discover the “self” through an individualistic experience. This means that my encounter with and interest in Hegel was not just an assignment that I had to complete and move on: I found in Hegel an intriguing claim that the “absolute” manifests in a “subject” similar to ours. Therefore, philosophy must “recognize and express truth not only as an essence, but also as a subject.” [1]
What does Hegel mean by this?
He means that God, for example, is not an “object” but a “subject” that we have to account for as a form of life, not a closed identity that lies beyond our perception or beyond our world; that the absolute or the sacred is not something with which we can enter into a “direct” relationship. No one has the right to claim a close relationship with God, with the absolute, or with truth. We need to listen to Hegel’s words for a moment. He says:
“[…] the living substance is the being that is in truth subject, or, what amounts to the same thing, it is in truth actual only insofar as it is the movement of self-positing, or, that it is the mediation of itself and its becoming-other-to-itself. As subject, it is pure, simple negativity, and, as a result, it is the estrangement of what is simple, or, it is the doubling which posits oppositions and which is again the negation of this indifferent diversity and its opposition. That is, it is only this self-restoring sameness, the reflective turn into itself in its otherness. The true is not an original unity as such, or, not an immediate unity as such. It is the coming-to-be of itself, the circle that presupposes its end as its goal and has its end for its beginning, and which is actual only through this accomplishment and its end.
The life of God and divine cognition might thus be expressed as a game love plays with itself. If this Idea lacks the seriousness, the suffering, the patience, and the labor of the negative, then it lowers itself into edification, even into triteness.” [2]
This is a philosophical lesson that “we” who inhabit the “South of modernity” – as a distinct metaphysical location, not as a colonial curse – desperately need to understand our world from within: from within ourselves, or from within the problems posed by our commitment to being ourselves and not the followers of an external “subject”. By “substance,” Hegel means everything that is not a subject. Substance is all that we treat as “subject”. God is substance insofar as we treat it as a “subject” that someone can appropriate for themselves. But for Hegel, what is “true” cannot just “be” substance; it must “become” subject. Hegel is the one who introduced the idea of becoming true. He understands this idea in the Christian context: as a kind of “suffering, patience, and negative labor”. This is not just a matter of sadness but must be interpreted in the light of the Christian conception of God: God who dies in agony on the cross. Hegel was the one who seriously investigated what it meant to include pain in what God is, and only translated this pain as an experience. Conceptually, The Phenomenology of Spirit is this pain as “conceptual history” of the absolute that wants to be among us and refuses to be presented to us as a “subject.” All this would be inconceivable without Abrahamic beliefs in general, who moved God from the realm of the “pagan substance” to the horizon of the “monotheistic subject” that speaks to us or wants to be among us.
According to Hegel, only the “modern” (i.e., Christian) man felt and embraced this truth from within, only because he is a subject and not just a “substance.” All previous human beings were “individuals,” but the subject is not an individual. Hegel’s subject can be God, the state, art, the sacred, the truth – and is therefore the contemplative quality of the concept as such. He who thinks conceptually is experiencing an absolute “subjectification”.
Therefore, what we love or believe in will only remain an “object” as long as we do not understand it as a “subject”. The subject is every growing, becoming being that derives its truth from its movement, that is, from all the potential it has. The subject is every substance that has discovered its way of becoming. The subject is the form of life that we become when we are no longer just substances and materials. Therefore, it is not enough just to “be” myself, I have to “become” myself. I don’t want to inherit myself; I want to discover it. This means that I am willing to treat myself, God, freedom, or love as an “experience” and not an “object.” Every subject is an experience that carries all we have of ourselves. Suddenly, experience becomes identity, a form of life where the distinction between “meaning” and “suffering” is inessential.
This is the context in which I have come to love Hegel as a “great philosopher” who teaches people how to become subjects. But that doesn’t mean that Hegel meant it. Perhaps he had another personal inner story. As Georges Bataille once said, Hegel didn’t know the ways in which he was right.
This is because we collide with Hegel in an era he did not address. This is what I referred to in my first philosophy lecture in 1991 under a title that annoyed my professors at the time, Thinking with Hegel Against Hegel; what I called the “South of Modernity.” They were intimidated and terrified of thinking “against” the West that Hegel addressed in The Phenomenology of Spirit as the “end of the history” of meaning for philosophers. I decided then that “thinking” was a form of “resistance” and not just “exclusion to ‘the Other’ and building traditions in our minds.” [3] This is a philosophical exercise that I have found to be very useful, in which Hegel – as the author of texts, not Hegel in the summaries of commentators – was the first great teacher to introduce “resistance”, the art of free contradiction, into the flesh of the concept. He who thinks resists and freely endures his own contradictions. Free contradiction is “love’s game with itself.”
What is “South of Modernity” and how is it resistance? Is it a resistance against “modernity”?
“South of Modernity” does not mean constructing a sad decolonial narrative in the art of antagonism that allows non-Western intellectuals to practice a metaphysical grudge against “modernity” as an epistemological “darkness” incapable of any kind of “forgiveness” towards the former colonizer who turned the land into a European colony. It rather means thinking from “another angle”, not from the angle of isolated “otherness.” “South” is an epistemological quality, not a geographical escape from the horizon of humanity. Hegel found a narrative suitable for a secular rewriting of the history of the Christian “soul.” We may also find narrative or conceptual lessons in this, because of our monotheistic alignment with Hegel, but this does not make him the only or “universal” model for non-Western thinking. This is what the writings of Frantz Fanon, Edward Said, and Samir Amin have taught us. I have found in the metaphor of the “South” a place of reflection that enables one to “think with Hegel” because it makes no sense to go beyond the horizon of humanity and “against Hegel”, and the “West” is also just a geographical metaphor that needs to be defined.
You have just referred to your first book, Falsafat alnwābt (The Philosophy of Emerging Philosophers; Dar al-Tali’a, 1997), and in that book you posed a very important question: “How do we resume the philosophical research that our predecessors embarked on, but especially within the problematic context of contemporary philosophy?” This question seems to drive all your work, whether in your own production or in translation. What do you mean by the condition of “universality” that has been lost with the readers of ancient philosophy? What is the difference between a reader of ancient philosophy and a philosopher? Please note that a new wave in the intellectual sphere is to lean towards “local” rather than “universal,” the universal being only a cover for “Western,” and this wave extends from conservative Arab intellectuals to post-colonial theorists.
Falsafat alnwābt was not my first book. It was published in Beirut in September 1997, preceded by Hegel wa-nihāyat al-mītāfīzīqā, which was published in Tunisia in March of the same year. What unites the two books, however, is the dual issue that dominated my research since 1990, when I started teaching at the University of Tunisia. The first expression of this dual issue was the publication of two articles that belonged to two opposing dimensions of problematization: Habermas vs. Heidegger or How to Talk about Philosophy? [4] and Gibran and Modernity or the Arab Version of Nihilism [5]. The “duality” of the problem that was calling me to philosophical reflection was a spiritual reality rather than an inessential inquiry. And I was wondering, what could be the nature of the relationship between what the two books published in 1997 separately indicate? I mean, how do we resume the Arab experience of philosophizing in an era dominated by the question of the end of Western metaphysics “Hegel’s era”? I was nevertheless aware that the first essay on Habermas and Heidegger is “colonialist” and the second essay on Gibran and Nietzsche is “de-colonialist.” This was not an inessential inquiry, but a metaphysical ordeal that imposes a “new sense of individualism” on those who feel it.
This “non-Western” concern or “Southern” sense of the importance of philosophy led me to this hypothesis: Our ancestors felt that the “philosopher” was an alien object in the narrative of religion (i.e., the interpretation of “humanity” as a general “inheritance” on earth) and gave philosophers the indigenous name of “alnwābt” (emerging). Hence, the resumption of philosophizing can only take place “with us” in the form of “alnwābt,” whether we understand this term the Farabi way, in a negative sense where religion considers philosophers as “thorns among the crops,” or the Ibn Bājja way, where the philosopher himself is a “monotheist” living in a religion that neither believes nor sees him.
But my “academic” training in Western philosophy – “academic” is a term that goes back to Plato – was teaching me something else: That philosophy is a discursive genre produced by the Greek to express their inner dialogue, not an alien object in the narrative of religion. The emergence of philosophers in the history of the West was therefore a natural and original event, so that the philosopher does not have to “justify” who he is. This is in contrast to the religious philosopher who finds himself thrown into a narrative that forces his thinking to become a form of timid metaphysical apology. It is as if philosophizing is a moral scandal that he has to disguise for fear of it turning into a political charge or religious blasphemy.
This problematic situation made me look at the “readers of ancient philosophy” of different approaches and interpretations, who dominated the intellectual sphere in the late 1980s, as if they had exempted themselves from the real battle, which is a “universal” battle, and instead replaced it with an internal war against their own thoughts.
However, in post-colonial debates, there is an unmistakable sensitization to the term “al-Kawnīyah” (universal). How do we deal with this sensitization?
“al-Kawnīyah” is derived from “al-Kawn” (universe) which, as we can see, is a literal translation of the Western term “universal” derived from “universe.” However, this literal meaning hides the fact that in the history of the term, it was also a Latin translation (“universum, universalis”, from “vertere” and “unum”, meaning “that which is directed completely, at once, towards something”) of a Greek word (“to katholou”) that the ancient Arabs recognized when reading Aristotle’s texts and translated it as “the whole” as opposed to “the partial” (“to kath’hekaston”). “The whole” is a philosophical discovery that Aristotle attributes to Socrates [6]. But for Cicero, the word “universum” and the plural “universa” meant “the totality of things” and thus the totality of the “universe.” “Universal”, then, does not equal the “whole,” it is not singular, but a direction towards the single entity that brings things together based on “coherence” and not on “exclusivity.” Here, we have to use “meaning” (the human effort of understanding as a “universal” aspect) and not “substance” (which claims to be “whole”).
This quick look at the history of the term in the various metaphysical languages of philosophy puts us squarely in front of the conceptual clash between two meanings that the “modern” Western speaker does not see or does not want to see, focusing instead on a single terminological choice: “the universal.” The first meaning is Latin, which proposes “the universal” derived from “the universe” on the one hand, and a Greek meaning that returns “universal” to “the whole” or “the totality of things” on the other hand. It is easy to see that neither Al-Farabi nor Ibn Sina knew the meaning of “universal” but only the meaning of “whole.”
The humor lies in the analogy imposed by “modernity” between the two meanings. We refer here to modernity politically, and not just a period of time. We have two examples of this interpretation. A classic example is the Platonic meaning of “example,” which Aristotle criticized: “No universal quality (καθόλου) is a substance (οὐσία)” [7]. Totality, then, is not substance. This means that what we claim to be “universal” does not mean that it is so in its “existence.” Totality is a nominal phenomenon, not an ontological fact. This debate may seem unnecessary, but Christianity has appropriated and politicized it. This is when it transformed “katholon, to katholou” (“whole” or “general” in the logical sense) or changed koinon (“common”) to “katholikos” (“universal” in the religious sense, not far from the Islamic meaning of “universal”), but it is not a term used by philosophy, [8] but an invention of the Church since the First Council of Nicaea in 325 AD based on the Creed “I believe in the one Church (unam), holy (sanctam), universal (catholicam) and apostolic (apostolicam).” The word “katholikos” is a compound of “kata” (for, by or on) and the adjective “holos” (meaning “plural”, “all,” or “total”).
We have to ask: When did the meaning of “dominance” enter the concept of “universal”? It is clear that the Greek logical term “to katholou” (“totality”) is what Al-Ghazali had in mind when he spoke of “logic” and dedicated his book Miʻyār al-ʻIlm (The Standard of Science) to it. Totality, then, is not in dispute and is the foundation of truth in science. This is something that cannot be challenged by any “decolonial” objection. But the problem begins when we realize that the Christian Church has transformed “to katholou” into “katholikos”, i.e., the “whole” into “holistic” or “universal,” through a new institution of truth unknown to Greek philosophers, the “universal church” (katholikê ekklêsia). Ignatius of Antioch, one of the Apostolic Church Fathers (35-107), says: “Wherever the bishop appears, there is the community, just as wherever Jesus Christ is, there is the universal Church.” [9] The Greek “universal” has been theologically appropriated and linguistically, semantically, and terminologically transformed since the second century AD into an ecclesiological “universal.” It is an adjective for church, not religion.
It is in this silent context that modernists came to the term “universal” as a position at the crossroads between the “totality” of science and the “universal” of the church. The conflict was at its height between the two interpretations: Is it a scientific or an ecclesiastical “totality”? Kant’s proposed solution was to revitalize another Greek phrase from the philosopher Diogenes the Cynic (421-323 BC) and later developed by the Stoics, namely “kosmopolitês,” a term made up of “kosmos” meaning “world” and “politês” meaning “citizen.” The meaning proposed by Kant and the Stoics is a combination of “kosmos” and “politês.” The meaning proposed by Kant and the Enlightenment is that “cosmopolitês” should only mean “citizenship of the world.” When asked, “Where do you come from?” Diogenes answered, “I am a citizen of the world (kosmopolitês).” In 1795, Kant proposed the invention of a “cosmopolitan right/law” (ius cosmopoliticum) that would regulate a kind of “cosmopolitan hospitality” among modernists.
This was the best of what was given to us by our modern notion of “universality,” which continued the European tradition of categorizing the study of philosophy as a literary genre that must be subsumed under the “Enlightenment” project as it manifested itself especially in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. But this kind of metaphysical and moral “universalism” was suddenly transformed since 1800 (with a sudden resurgence of the idea that the West is, in Edward Saeed’s words, undergoing an “imperial reality” rather than an “enlightenment period”) into a colonial force for dominating “non-Western” people who were excluded from modernity’s metaphysical or ethical agenda and treated as an “object” of modernity rather than “subject.” Here is where I became interested in Hegel as an “imperial” sign that infiltrated the body of the philosophical concept, and with it, philosophy lost all its Enlightenment innocence and turned into a narrative that was no longer “universal” but “universalist,” imposing the “universal” rather than producing it. Hegel was consistent when he defined philosophy in 1821 in the preface to Outlines of the Philosophy of Right (a book I translated in 1989 and am yet to publish): “To apprehend what is is the task of philosophy, because what is is reason. As for the individual, every one is a son of his time; so philosophy also is its time apprehended in thoughts.” [10]
Hegel has put us in a “universal” situation that requires us to think “universally.” The issue is the extent to which we are able to take Hegel seriously and not treat him as an academic subject. Western philosophers such as Nietzsche, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Bataille, Levinas, Derrida, Deleuze, Foucault, Habermas, and Butler have expressed this. Here, we find a clue that can help us define the “reader of ancient philosophy” as opposed to the “philosopher”: It is any writer who poses his or her problems in an isolated, “localized” form. The “philosopher” is the one who takes Hegel seriously – not the Hegel who established the discourse of the West’s “universal” hegemony, but the Hegel who, as George Bataille pointed out, “failed”. Hegel’s “failure” is more humorous than his speculative success and we interpret this failure as him not seeing us.
This metaphysical blindness to the “non-Western” should never become a “decolonial” excuse to get out of the pragmatism of “contemporary age” and into “other ages,” whether the ages of the Red Indians, the African “negros”, the developmental “followers,” the “Southern” poor, the Crusader “Others”, and so on. This is because the “local” is a narrative trick, not a concept: If we take Hegel seriously, that is if we take seriously the fact that the West has dominated the contemporary world because it has succeeded in inventing a grand narrative of our age and imposing it irrevocably on non-Western readers of their own sources, then we will feel that the “local” has been stolen from us and has become a stranger in its own house, having to rediscover itself in terms it has never used to talk to itself before. This is where philosophy can help us comprehend the situation: The Southern “local” has been undergoing subjectification and is forming its identity from the degree to which it is subject to the epistemological hegemony of the North.
That is why the guiding question in the introduction to my book Falsafat alnwābt is as follows: “What to do at the end of metaphysics?” I found it appropriate to try to draw an invisible and impossible line between two philosophical viewpoints in the introduction: Heidegger’s (who says in 1946 in Letter on Humanism: “We have not yet considered what an act is with sufficient decisiveness”) and Ibn Bājja’s (who says in 1138 in Tadbir al-Mutawhid (The Measure of the Unitarian): “As for those who express sincere opinions not found in their region nor adopted by their region’s opposites, they are called alnwābt”). Therefore, the big motivation for our generation to philosophize and not rely on reading ancient philosophy is: To question the possible relationship between the “crisis” of the West, which since the early nineteenth century has been rewriting its spiritual history and scrutinizing its tools under the rubric of “the end of metaphysics,” and the “resumption” of Arab philosophy after the “colonial” relationship that impacted the intellectual work that had been suspended since Ibn Khaldun. The West is going through a crisis, which has been clear since Romanticism, but we have no prospect of independence from it except by metaphysically and ethically crossing the horizon of the problems it has imposed on humanity. Since Islam is an integral part of the monotheistic narrative that views colonial modernity as the secularized and globalized culmination, we can never exempt ourselves from any metaphysical or ethical involvement in the same tradition. We are thus barred from any truly external “decolonial” refuge that would allow us to enjoy a “metaphysical distance” enjoyed, for example, by the philosophers of other traditions, such as African, Native American, or Buddhist philosophers.
The issue is: How do we construct “universality” without the dominance of a “universal” will? How do we distinguish between “universality” and “totality” – this is where we can benefit greatly from the writings of Emmanuel Levinas. We have to read the “universal” as “absolute” or “infinite.” Everything that people feel absolutely is universal, relative to the “universe” as it is realized by humans. This means that it is a form of “exteriority” that cannot be confined by any party to a closed “whole” that claims superiority over others in the name of a universal “concept.” We must see what is “universal” as “multiplicity without totality” (une multiplicité sans total), as Levinas puts it [11]. It is a multiplicity that has no place except in language: where no speaker can claim superiority. Levinas summarizes this kind of encounter with the Other in the “face-to-face” metaphor of discourse, where no one can treat the Other as an “object” of their consciousness. He emphasizes that “no concept can grasp the exteriority” [12] one encounters.
Let us turn to an issue related to the subject of identity as well: in your book al-Huwīyah wa-al-ḥurrīyah: Naḥwa Anwār jadīdah (Identity and Freedom: Towards a New Enlightenment; Jadawel, 2011), you presented the dichotomy of “Identity” (al-Huwīyah) versus “Freedom” (al-Ḥurrīyah), and “Individual Freedom” (al-Ḥayawī) versus “Shared Identity” (al-Ḥwwy). You showed that “Individual Freedom” precedes “Shared Identity,” and that freedom precedes identity. How does this correspond to the fact that the philosophers of identity – despite their differences – from Western majority put forth that an individual’s freedom (in your terms “al-Ḥayawī”) is incomprehensible unless you lived in the context of a shared identity (“traditions,” “heritage,” “sources for the self,” etc.). To paraphrase with wordplay, according to you, “Individual Freedom” cannot be understood without “Shared Identity.”
It should be noted here that there is a systemic dilemma underlying all attempts to reflect on our current understanding of ourselves, that is the use of Western “terms” in our contexts as if we were talking about “the same thing”. For instance, let us consider the term “identity” in two texts, a Western one written by Charles Taylor in his book The Sources of the Self on “The Making of the Modern Identity” (1989) [13], and an Arabic-Islamic text of the late Hasan Hanafi on “Identity” in his book Muqaddimah fī ʻilm al-istighrāb (Introduction in Occidentalism 1991) [14]. In his book, Hasan called for Eastern societies’ creativity against copying the Other and the possibility of viewing the Other as a subject of research rather than a source of knowledge. To explain what he called for, he coined the term “istighrāb” (Occidentalism) as the only form of resisting “westernization” [15], describing individuals with “no identity” [16], as we notice “how Eastern societies turn into the Other” [17]. Further, when reading and interpreting these two texts with the same mindset, we will understand that we do not discuss “the same thing”. Taylor’s problem lies in considering the European identity as a “history itself”, a history that takes place through the formation and emergence of the distinctive meaning of “esoteric” of the subject, which, according to him, is traced back from Plato and Augustine to modern philosophers such as Montaigne, Descartes, and Locke. The problem extends to the Protestant reform call to recognize the “ethical” value of the “ordinary life circle” centered around family and work, and to the 17th century modernists discovering what has been called the “voice of nature” which lies at the core of “consciousness,” thus building the positive image of the history of consciousness as “moral progress.”
However, when interpreting Hasan Hanafi’s book, we find Occidentalism in the face of Westernization: he presents a history of the Other as an opponent who has deprived us of our true identity, and we have to confront it, by turning it into a “subject” of observation rather than a “source” of knowledge. We do not find any “subjectification” of ourselves here, but rather a process of “positioning” the West as the “Other”. Hasan considers this procedure to be a condition for any recognition on the way to our “Eastern creativity”. Taylor was thinking “without considering the Other”, while Hasan is “being Occidentalist” (i.e. studying the West) “without considering his identity”.
If we reformulate the problem that concerned me, “Freedom before identity”, and examined the “dominant” objection that “Individual Freedom cannot be understood without Shared Identity,” we first notice that the vocabulary of the question has changed, as “before” identity does not indicate “without” identity. The phrase does not imply a refusal to be westernized at all (to reject or abandon identity) but rather a systematic order of priorities, namely, an evaluation of what Kant once referred to as the “interest of the mind” rather than the “realization of interests by mind” as perceived by scholars. In this context, “freedom” is understood as a “form of life” sought after by some people, a life that is “liveable”, as Judith Butler puts it, and does not impose a moral burden on the bodies of individuals. The philosophy at hand suggests that life is the starting point: life was the beginning followed by human practices such as fertility control, identification, shaping the realm of the mind, and reinterpreting Aristotle’s words. Since freedom is inherent to life, no one should have the authority to impose an identity before our existence is shaped with its anthropological significance. Everything that follows our existence is a driven tool of a shared identity not an original one. Life is free from predetermined purpose, and this is the pure essence of freedom: either it is present or absent. Pure freedom that cannot be compromised, regardless of anyone’ shared identity role.
In this context, we find that the Western “majority”, who are considered “intellectuals”, begin with an established shared identity standpoint of “majorities” or “minorities that face consequences of being marginalized due to factors such as “sect”, “race”, “color”, “gender”, “human sexuality” “language”, “culture”, “migration” or “borders” … etc. We are not “majority” or “minority”, as are the Amerindians, blacks, gays or foreigners. However, we struggle with a concerning Western “dominant” tendency towards our Eastern “originality”: we find ourselves immersed amid “a dominant majority” that is reluctant to evolve into a “civil society” founded on “universal” human and citizen rights. We remain a spiritual majority with numerous shared identities because it has succeeded in imposing an exciting interblending “majority” and “holiness”. Consequently, the concept of “identity” (majority) has been altered to become “dominant” policies through a daunting blending between identity and the dominant majority, between identity and politics, between identity and religion, and maybe between identity and God, etc. As a result, “identity” has been employed to regulate the boundaries of the dominant majority and has been wielded violently as a tool for expiation or deception which is potentially under the supervision of the States themselves.
An intimidating majority solely would convince “an individual” that they cannot live without identity. The majority perhaps has stolen the freedom possibilities from individuals and set an observed shared identity scope refined from every factor of objection. The majority, also known as “nation”, practice “objectification” of identity, is a highly risky behavior to assert the identity and speak on its behalf. This is done with strong anthropological motivations, specifically to deal with “being”, followed by the “sacred”, “truth”, “divinity” as an “object” possessed by an authority. Identity, however, is not a tangible “object” but rather the capacity to shape a sense of “self”. It is constantly in conflict with a specific type of “objectification”. This objectification may be an objectification of knowledge, power, religion, gender, etc. Therefore, it is not inherently obvious for an individual to be a “subject”, rather they have to become a subject to the extent that they are willing to face the challenge. An individual’s life form is not predetermined by external forces, it is what you plot within the narrative that you may never write. This implies that individuals do not have complete control over their identity or “who” might they become. Philosophy can assist in exploring the freedom of life rather than only defending a shared barrier imposed by the majority and established centuries ago. The freedom of life entails the individuals’ right to choose their path in life, free from any coercion on identity, whether from religion, the state, gender, or from the Other in general. Therefore, the true challenge lies in returning to the “human being”, emphasizing the reconnecting of individuals with their bodies and exceptional stories as a “moral wealth” that cannot be taken away by any dominant institution that fails to acknowledge their existence.
Our understanding of Secularism appears to be unusual. Secularism is usually seen as a form of identity and socio-political commitment, where “religious” individuals or “Islamists” are pitted against “Secular” individuals, with no unifying frameworks in between. However, the use of the term in the West, for example, is different. Whereas the opposition of “religious” individuals towards others impacts issues like intricate political decisions; most important of which, is the dispute concerning the optimal “benefits” for the “individual”, rather than affecting the context of the foundations of the organization of the modern state, the form and distribution of power, citizenship, or some implicit social axioms. It appears that we are referring to a “category mistake”, would you concur with this statement? How can we comprehend the distinction between the two forms of “Secularisms”?
This is an acceptable statement if the task of philosophy is to distinguish between “categories”.
Ryle stated in an article published in 1938, named “categories” that “we are in the dark about the nature of philosophical problems and methods if we are in the dark about types or categories” [18].
The problem is the use of certain terms without recognizing that they belong to a certain “category”. In the first chapter of his book The Concept of Mind (1949), titled Descartes’ Myth, Ryle referred to this usage as “category mistake” [19].
The task of philosophy in this context appears to involve distinguishing between “categories” that encompass the “concepts” we employ. Instead of focusing on the grammatical meaning of words, we focus on their “categorial” connotation, that is, the connotation one derives from a type of categorization at the level of issues or discourse.
Furthermore, Descartes’ mistake was that he defined the mind in terms of the mechanical model that became the standard of scientific knowledge in his time. The mind has become a “ghost in the machine”, not a physical one, but a machine.
If this “category mistake” was applied to Secularism, we would reach a similar conclusion: Secularism has shifted to a shared identity conflict between the “citizen” of the legal state and the “believer” of a dominant religion. In fact, the Western world has undergone what Taylor describes as a “secular age”, where a discussion occurs between “citizens”, some of whom are “religious” and others are “non-religious”. According to Habermas’s explanation, this implies that political conflict is essentially a conflict of “translation”; a translation of “religious contents” in the language of modern law and a translation of “legal terminology” in the language of religious expression, yet this translation does not affect the constitutional and civic status of a “citizen”.
ِAre we “citizens” or “followers”? The lexicon of the modern state has “unintentionally” led us to consider ourselves “individuals,” “persons,” and “citizens”. However, if we examine the matter closely, are we indeed citizens? This question arises when we take into consideration the “reality” of the human being, as individuals experience it and not as the state communicates it to them. I refer by this to the “de facto” government, that is, a state that exercised secular influence without any other moral commentary. The concept of “citizenship” was established in our administrative records by a powerful interpretation and founded “legally” based on “identity” or “nationality”, which are merely an administrative characterization imposed by the modern state’s logic and are not inherently constructed nor practiced. Instead, they are “granted” as identities to a governed population categorized under a legal title coined by modernists, starting with Hobbes, as “the people”. This term replaced the previous designation of “the mass of believers” in the state of religion.
If we considered the discussion between “secularists” and “religionists”, we would notice a foreign discussion. This refers to the discussion as a regional and rural phenomenon specific to the progression of European Christian society. This society was ready, in terms of its disputed structure between the “temporal” and the “spiritual” or between the institution of the “church” and the institution of “government”, to perceive the culturally, legally and morally enshrined distance between the territory of “religio” (religion) and the territory of “status rei publicae” (status of public affairs, i.e., form of government). Despite the emergence of the modern state after the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, it did not significantly change the essence of the dispute, rather it regulated it by establishing the principle of “cujus regio, ejus religio” (Whosever territory, his religion). The modern state has occupied the territory of religion and became one of its institutes as the only way out of Europe’s era of “war of religions.”
This indicates that the discussion of “intellectuals” on Secularism is a belated stance, and it is a rhetorical effect of a political dispute from centuries ago. Therefore, the engagement of “Muslims” in this discussion independently is a phenomenon that requires further examination. For instance, the discussion can be merely a broadening of the scope of epistemology for a colonial discussion, which we do not fully comprehend. This foreign discussion was imposed on Eastern societies just as the “epistemology of the north”. Nevertheless, the Islamic nation did not recognize the aforementioned structural and institutional separation between the church and the form of government. Accordingly, defending or criticizing Secularism is a regional and rural discussion specific to the Europeans, which may be a historical distraction from the main political issue Easterners face: we struggle from a different type of truth politics. On the one hand, Christianity separated between the spiritual and the temporal and compelled the ruler to adhere to its division of sovereignty and demanding that he recognize it as a territory that is “outside” their rule. As a result, the ruler has occupied this territory “legally” and founded it in the name of “secular age”. On the other hand, Islam was not “religio” in the Christian sense, rather it has an Arabic sense connotated to it. For Arabic, Islam is a form of an absolute “obedience” of a successive authority, where there is no separation between the spiritual and the temporal, and humans’ actions are politicized, not only in terms of “life” but also in relation to “death”. Hence, “Islamic secularization” has no meaning as it is a contradiction in words. However, the debate between Arab secularists and Islamists is external and quasi-colonial because it is the result of a situation of compulsion, and it only has “defensive” or “negotiating” benefits for the sake of improving the conditions of freedom. This is because arguing the gains of Western secularism against the backwardness of Islamists’ arguments about shared life is a colonialist victory over them, not a genuine disapproval of our political problem. This debate is a free establishment of the north epistemology without efforts of Eastern individuals’ mindset to liberate itself from within.
Instead of discussing Secularism, we should have centered our questions around “succession”: why was the idea of succession established as the essence of authority for individuals who believe in Monotheism? Is the belief of Trinity, up to this time, appropriate for conceptualizing freedom on earth? How is it that a group of people in this century effectively “succeed” in utilizing the tool of successive authority, establish it in our life, and confidently expect millions of Muslims to comply with their demands as if they possess a divine mandate? Why do we continue to avoid this confrontation with our sources of selves and compensate for it with delusional secular victories over sources of selves? It appears that every secular debate within our realm serves as a delay of fundamental questions regarding the truth politics that govern our society, and a substitution of these questions with a post-colonial examination of the Western debate on its own history once it was domesticated in Eastern societies and applied in a form of enlightenment.
We should defend “citizenship” as a characteristic that lies beyond the conflict between secularist and religious individuals. We can define citizenship as religion, rather than a creed that opposes another. Religion is no longer a realm for discussion regarding our new selves except in terms of memory politics, identity narratives, ways of living, or perceptions of good. These valuable lessons are provided by dominant philosophies. However, citizenship, as a public discussion concerning individuals’ “freedom” or “justice” in “civil society” rather than “society-majority” – which upholds a fair amount of the religion values even after being neglected-, is a non-narrative and not shared problem that cannot be resolved by a deceitful dependence on memory politics, identity narratives, ways of living, or perceptions of good. Citizenship is the free use of the morally and legally equal common bodies-individuals.
Your recent book al-Īmān al-Ḥurr aw mā baʻda al-millah (Believers Without Borders, 2019) serves as a prolonged answer to the question of the relationship between identity and religion, where you made a distinction between “free faith” and “freedom of belief”. How does the former differ from the latter?
The difference between a free faith, without any restrictive theological imposition on belief and without any preconceived limitation of what people can believe on their own, and allowing “Other” believers to exercise their “right” to believe what they want without any enforcement, in the name of “freedom of conscience”, are two quite different issues. The free believers shape their own beliefs and choose themselves, crafting a connection with their heritage or their innermost resources. This is why free believers firmly reject inheriting beliefs, as any belief that turned into religious “institution” ultimately leads to expiation, prosecution, banishment, and renouncing “others”. In my perspective, Sufis can be considered free believers because they are, incidentally, “regular believers”. A free believer is not a traditional nor an official or religious individual in the technical sense, rather, they are a “free listener” of a discourse that has lost its original meaning after being transformed into a “text” (in the modern sense), dictated to a specific form of authority, whether a “branch”, “sect”, “successive” or “state” authority. Therefore, the free believer consciously “distances” themselves from a “majority” because they have transitioned from being a “member” of a political or an interpretive majority to becoming an independent “individual”.
The act of “distancing” does not represent a shared opposition of any religious institution, rather, it hinders the “obedience” in a theological sense. Observing the new generations in the East and West, we notice that the overwhelming majority have embraced a form of “free faith” that is completely devoid of any consecrated theological content, without turning to other people or making a fuss about it. This faith is characterized by its authenticity based in large part on “love”: the love of freely belonging to some kind of source of self. Therefore, it is a love with no available object because the lover creates what they love every time. This refers to the original meaning of what is called “worship”: a special kind of love. I believe that allowing the new generations to choose their own way of loving the sources of selves is the only opportunity they have of not experiencing the shared suffocation and deciding to metaphysically “leave” for good. Religious obedience can no longer be imposed on anyone, only because the form of governance has irrevocably changed. Even nature, after the climate crisis, no longer accepts to be ruled by humans. In other words, to be “utilized” as our religious narrative says, as humans have done during the “successive” ages enacted by the one God.
“Freedom of belief”, nevertheless, indicates something else: It is a human rights gain of a political lexicon that founded itself on the premise of “natural law” and is thus semantically linked to the existence of the modern liberal state, which has taken over the territory of religion and turned it into one of its official institutions. Freedom of belief or freedom of conscience refers to the “right” of every “person” or “individual” to freely hold and practice the kind of beliefs they “want”. However, without recognizing the “individual,” it is only a stylistic variation to speak of “freedom of belief” in modern state constitutions, and this is what most countries, even Western ones, do. The heart of the matter is not the belief itself, but the freedom, as “Freedom” in this context, means that the individual retains the right to choose or change a belief, or disbelieving it. This concept soon clashes with the authority of the state itself, a state that has maintained a privileged relation to any belief. From a philosophical perspective, the concept of “freedom of belief” presents two main problems. Firstly, it questions whether the concept of “human being” has emerged yet, in other words, if it has been considered as the sole ontological and universal basis for what we call “human nature”, rather than merely seen as an “effect” of a divine will with “transcendent rights” that must be absolutely revered. Secondly, the “freedom” claimed by a believer could potentially threaten the spiritual authority that the current state relies on for its legitimacy.
Therefore, we now face two issues. The first one is that freedom of belief is not possible because the “human being” we refer to is not yet an “individual” and therefore his right is deferred to another generation. The second issue is that freedom of beliefs is forbidden because it is a dangerous freedom that changes individuals’ relation to belief and thus threatens the legitimacy of the state. The first problem is prominent in Arab and Islamic communities, whereas the second one is present even in Western countries. If we examine paragraph 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which was formulated in 1948, we find that it states:
“Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.”
If we read the Arabic translation adopted by, for example, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights for the “core international human rights treaties” in Arabic [20], we would notice the following changes:
A. “Everyone” has been translated as “li-Kull Shakhṣ” (for every person). We have to raise a question: What if the term “person” is not intended in the paragraph because it presupposes a culture-specific moral development? B. The term “conscience” has been translated as “al-Wijdān” (They say in Arabic “Wijdānu almarʼi: nafsuhu waquwaāhu albāṭinīyatu, wamā yataʼaththaru bihi min ladhdhatin aw alamin”). The English term, conscience, refers to the Christian connotation of the term, which we now refer to as moral “conscience” (al-Ḍamīr al-khuluqī). This concept is only present in Western culture and has no connotation outside of it. C. The distinction between “public” and “private” has been translated as “Amāma almlʼ aw ʻalá ḥiddat” (Infront of people or separately). The translation of these two words poses a serious interpretive issue, as there is a piercing difference between the lexicon of religion (where a distinction is made between what is said “Amāma almlʼ” and “ʻalá ḥiddat”) and the lexicon of the modern liberal state (which distinguishes between the “public” enacted by general laws for the citizens’ behavior and the “private” related to the private life of the “individual” in their own home or private space).
These quick observations make us question our culture’s ability to understand what Article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights refers to. From a philosophical perspective, I believe that the difficulty lies in the fact that Arabic culture is one that prefers to translate “the universal” as “al-ʻĀlamī”. We have to realize the metaphysical and political mistake that is being avoided, that “human rights” are not “universal” (i.e. derived from the “human nature” as an integral part of the nature of the “universe” in general), but “ʻĀlamīyah” (i.e. relative to the “world” as it exists today under the authority of a state that has no right to dictate to other states how they define “human” because of the modern principle of sovereignty. However, this state, due to its colonial power, can only encourage the adoption of a set of general principles and values without imposing them).
Compared to “freedom of belief,” which is applied anywhere only formally because it is a gain of “rights” that states often do not respect whenever it clashes with their legitimacy or power, the state is also involved in grounding itself on religion. On the contrary, “Free belief”, is a form of life that does not need any legal authorization to be embraced by anyone. It represents freedom of truth about being in the world as a private problem, not as public behavior under the state control. The state merely observes the world in a casual manner.
The reader notices in your writings a more sympathetic and analytical engagement with Arab literary authors (e.g., Darwish, Al-Mas’adi, and Gibran), in comparison to other Arab intellectuals and scholars who have taken on the task of exploring the issue of Arab modernity. It’s as if you find a sense of Arab modernity in these literary authors that you cannot find in others. Do you agree with this statement? And do you agree with the common view that Arab modernity has been only achieved through literature?
This statement assumes that modernity is equal to a level of poeticism that we are trying to reach. This alone represents a tricky and a more complex issue. Perhaps there has been a large generation of poets and authors who have had a strong desire to establish a sense of Arab modernity that aligns with Western modernity. However, we rarely recognize a significant change in the very notion of “the poet” or “the author” in our postcolonial context. We no longer heavily encounter the figure of the “traditional” poet or author, although it still occasionally appears without shame nor hesitation. There is a new destiny for poets that has begun to appear on the horizon.
The philosopher Alain Badiou, in his book What Does the Poem Think? [21], affirms that since the 18th century a type of “anti-philosophical” poet has emerged in the European tradition. At that time, philosophers became arrogant and transformed themselves into absolute figures with contemplative systems. Poets responded to this by initiating what Badiou called the “Age of Poets” with an anti-philosophical vision, in which thinking could occur without systemic concepts. This can be seen through the writings of poets (between 1870 and 1960) such as Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Baudelaire, and Céline.
This was not mirrored in the Arab world. It seems that our poets and authors, from Gibran to Darwish, did not suffer from the arrogance or pretentiousness of philosophers, since they were yet to appear. Therefore, their literary works cannot be read as “anti-philosophical.” In other words, we are yet to establish genres of discourse that compete over expressing the truth.
In the absence of philosophers, writers (a deliberate description, since it encompasses all the contributors in the literary genre) have become “poetic” heroes whose task is to guide a culture that has lost its unique ways of life and has consequently entered a painful stage of maintenance. This is because “non-Western” cultures have found themselves (even after independence) suffering from an internal colonial marginalization led by the Westernized elite. As a result, “writers” in general suffered from a simultaneously global and local dilemma: the language they write in is suffering from epistemological inadequacy and ethical inferiority compared to Western languages. On the one hand, they resemble smugglers because they are proficient readers of Western languages and have no source of identity other than works written in those languages. On the other hand, they are hybrid writers because they have lost their roots.
Thus, they find themselves in a battle of creativity on two fronts: against a persistent colonial model imposed by modern paradigms, and against the dying traditional conventions that are leaving behind a terrifying void. Under such circumstances, what can “poetry” be?
It is true that contemporary Arab poets with the ability to regain universal creativity (undamaged by translation) have emerged, such as Gibran and Darwish. But this does not mean that they have suddenly become “Western” writers or achieved “poetic modernity” as we understand it. They have simply made tremendous strides in preparing the field for a new encounter with ourselves and our own sources of self, thus opening the way for a powerful alternative or a brighter future.
Badiou’s book taps into an old Western tradition regarding the ongoing conflict or competition between the poet and the philosopher, as established by Plato. This conflict has become an integral part of the fate of both philosophy and poetry. Nietzsche seems to have summarized the matter with a bitter confession: “[…] and verily I am ashamed that I have still to be a poet!” Philosophy today, however, could criticize Badiou or Heidegger for burdening poets with tasks that fall outside their specialization, and that philosophers themselves seem to have failed to accomplish. These tasks include contemplating one’s being, or modern technological events. But thinking is not the task of poets. We must ask ourselves: Why did the Platonists, from Plato to Badiou, consider “thinking” to be the noblest and most virtuous of all human actions? This belief reflects a Greek notion of the distinction between contemplation and action dictated by the aristocratic form of government. In my opinion, attributing any connection with the “truth” to the task of “thinking” is in fact a cultural defect that is “Western” in nature, and not a universal requirement that every poet on earth must fulfill.
What we want to establish here is that the poet has his own unique destiny. Perhaps we can find an escape from colonial modernism through poetry, not through politics or the Western epistemological nonsense we continue to consume.
It is true that we do not yet have a “pure poet” nor a “pure philosopher.” The pure poet is the one who succeeds in keeping poetry within its own limits, without getting involved in foreign tasks. Our poets have understood existential commitment in terms of shared identity: commitment to the land, the people, or the nation as crucial issues that can be poeticized but are not strictly poetic. Perhaps the poet is still afraid of losing his sense of belonging, audience, or identity. However, just as it is not appropriate for the poet to become a philosopher, as Badiou wanted, it is also unnecessary for the poet to become a cultured intellectual that fights for a predetermined identity for his society. Poets have their own destiny. Any addition to their role related to establishing the identity of their community – like any addition related to philosophical tasks – is a metaphysical distortion of their unique destiny.
Our poets, however, have found themselves obliged to fill the gaps left by their predecessors. They are expected to assume the role of the prophet, philosopher, youth, and perhaps the symbolic, often unrealistic, leader. The Tunisian poet Mohamed Sghaier Ouled Ahmed referred to this with “the poetic leadership of the Tunisian revolution.” But the reality is that our poets have always been forced to compose their works under a terrible sense of shared identity, and they have rarely had the opportunity to experiment with their own independent selves.
Since modernity today is used to indicate a colonial “identity” for Westerners, and it no longer provides a suitable framework for universal experimentation, we must stop anticipating “Arab modernity” as if it were good news. Our poets have not achieved modernity, nor should they. This is a colonial dream implanted in the minds of the Westernized elite, and it is now time to liberate ourselves from it – not through ideological warfare, but through fighting an internal war with what’s dominating our being.
Poets should just “write.” “Writing” (since the second half of the 20th century) simply means the experimentation/ radical destruction of the possibility of being ourselves. This is an experiment with ambiguous outcomes – since there are no ready-made recipes for who we will be. No one owns a cheat sheet for shared identity that can compete with the rest of us when it comes to the level of belonging. Perhaps the poet’s only ethical shortcoming is that he still wants to be recognized as such. He still fears walking alone in the dark without a companion to tell his story to. What is frightening is that the energy of destruction, supposedly unique to poetry, has been stolen from poets. Perhaps it was stolen by modernity with its dominance over life, death, and uniqueness. But who really stole it are the “terrorists,” the group of nihilistic animals who want to change the world without the help of poets, without a vision nor plan, and without any red lines or regrets. Terrorism is nihilist poetry without poets, and terrorists are a group that claims to convey the wrath of the monotheistic God in an era of restricted speech. The abandonment of poetry in the construction of the future is like terrorism. The poet is the one who will never stop searching for the “last sky,” in Darwish’s terms, while terrorists seek to close the light on us without return.
Some Arab theorists note a disturbing slumber in what is now called “Arab thought,” accompanied by a wave of translation. Two decades ago, in your work entitled Identity and Time, you posed the question: Is there a contemporary Arab philosophy? Let me rephrase this question for you: What is the current state of Arab philosophy? How do you evaluate the current philosophical works? And is the increasing translation activity a positive or negative sign for Arab philosophy?
Let us go back to the things themselves, as Husserl used to say. Plato defined “thought” as the internal discourse regarding the things one examines (Theaetetus). He later defined it as the inner discourse that the soul silently conducts with itself (Sophist). What does it mean, then, to claim that “Arab thought” (and this is a term we must question) has fallen into a “disturbing slumber”?
In his famous lecture What Is Called Thinking? [22], Heidegger pointed out that the Greek verb “noeîn” did not originally mean thinking. Therefore, it was a later metaphysical decision that transformed “saying” (légein) into “logic” (Logik), which defined itself as the “essence of thinking”. To think meant to “apprehend” something in the literal sense, i.e., to grasp it, and not merely acknowledge its presence. Apprehending something means anticipating and capturing it, even preceding it to its own self, noticing it and notifying others of it. This idea, as Greek linguists have shown and as Heidegger mentions, can be encapsulated in a primitive metaphor of the hunter’s feeling that his prey is near and that he feels or perceives (wittern und Witterung) its presence. Heidegger therefore says that “noos” and “noûs” do not originally refer to what will later take shape as reason, “noos” means the sense that something possesses, which takes hold of its whole being [23].
So, we must ask ourselves: When did we begin to speak of thought as a shared or national substance? When did it become an entity to which we ascribe qualities such as Arab, Greek, or German? It is well known that “nationalism” is a modern political invention that emerged in the 18th century to legitimize the existence of the nation-state, where the concept of the people becomes the ethical core of belonging. This led to the construction of “national” identity which shares cultural characteristics such as language, religion, history, ethnicity, and so on. It is within this romantic context that terms such as the “German Ideal” were invented (the phrase appeared in an article attributed to Hegel, Schelling, and Holderlin, entitled The Oldest Systematic Program of German Idealism, circa 1795). And it is within this same context that a phrase such as “Arab thought” gets its connotations.
But who said that people think as a nation? And more importantly, who attached a national connotation to the concept of thought? Moreover, to what extent can we perceive thought as a substance and treat it as a subject that can then be compared to Kant’s notion of slumber?
In classical Arabic, we say that thinking (al-fikr) is an act of contemplation, using the mind to contemplate and reflect upon something. The Latin equivalent for the word is “pensare,” which originally means to “weigh” something on a scale, as mentioned in the book Al-Bahr Al-Muhit fi Usul Al-Fiqh by Al-Zarkashi, when he defines the concept of “qiyas” (measuring). He mentions: “Qīs alrʼy (assess opinions) and Imru’ al-Qais (Man of Qais), for he considered things based on his own opinions.” Then he continues to say: “[…] so the thinker says: I measured the thing as in I thought about it.”
However, this meaning is incomplete and has been introduced too late, and it does not reflect the original meaning. For example, let us consider the following Arabic phrase, “Mali fi al-amr fikr,” which means “This matter does not concern me.” What is noteworthy here is that “fikr” (thought) is not a substance or a subject that can fall into slumber. “Thought” here is therefore a lifestyle necessity that invites us to be indifferent or carefree.
The term “Arab thought” was used, for example, by Mohammed Arkoun in a book of the same name, published in French in 1975. However, he interchangeably uses the terms “Arab thought” and “Islamic intellect,” to the extent that he does not see any meaning for the concept of Arab thought independent of Islam. In the end, it is a Western or even colonial term that seeks to classify a type of culture attributed to certain societies, as if it were outside the scope of thinking as practiced by philosophers and scientists in the West, from Plato to Heidegger. In reality, there is no Islamic or Arab intellect, because the intellect is a concept, and thinking through concepts is not a national nor shared act. Therefore, the only gain from projects that criticize the Arab or Islamic thought is an indirect and temporary decolonial gain, i.e., a challenge to the dominance of Northern epistemology and an effort to be free from its claims and discourses. This does not mean, however, that we should subjectify non-Western thought, based on the idea that it possesses an identity outside the current global knowledge as it has been shaped through religions, sciences, philosophies, arts, forms of governance, and theories of love since the Neolithic era.
From here, we can reconsider the judgments against contemporary translation activity, claiming that it aims to fill what Arabic thought failed to do. It becomes clear to us now that there is no fundamental difference between those who think and those who translate. In both cases, they are engaged in a communicative use of discourse or language in a specific context of a certain kind of truth politics within a culture. And we practice this activity at a critical moment, namely, the decolonial moment: the moment when cultures reclaim their local role, reconsidering the colonial influences in their way of thinking.
Since colonization is not only military violence, but also a process of linguistic, ethical, and conceptual domination, all colonized nations end up speaking damaged languages distorted both semantically and metaphorically. Therefore, those who write in Arabic today are like translators; they write in a language that has been subjected to Western linguistic domination. This does not occur through translation as technical work, but through translation as a post-colonial practice that continues the process of colonization through conceptual and discursive subordination, different from simply speaking foreign languages. Colonialism has subjugated the will of people and languages, irreversibly depriving them of their precolonial discursive practices. Therefore, the liberation of people cannot be completed without the liberation of languages. We teach today with a form of Arabic that is theoretically and metaphorically a translated language and not an original one. We have completely lost classical Arabic, and we need to recover it in contexts that are still subject to Western languages and their discourses.
If we were to translate the phrase “I think, therefore I am” to classical Arabic it’d be rendered meaningless. Translators try in vain to accommodate and Arabize such concepts. Yet, they always fall outside the reach of our ancient senses. We do not mean by this that the existing translations for Western concepts are inaccurate or unfaithful. Rather, they are an effort spent on conceptual events that are yet to occur in our reality. We do not view the act of thinking as the only metaphysical principle that forms our certainty about ourselves, God, or the world. There are still strong and persistent narratives that attempt to undermine our minds. The metaphysical discovery of man that Westerners claim to have occurred in the seventeenth century with Descartes may not be a philosophical, spiritual, or ethical necessity for us. We are indifferent to this discovery, and we move on to care about something else.
Twenty years ago, I asked myself: Is there a contemporary Arab philosophy? At that time, I believed that we needed such an achievement. However, I am less optimistic today. Not because Arab thought has fallen into slumber, but because the demands of thought have changed dramatically. This is due to one important reason: The West itself is no longer the ultimate authority for those who engage in intellectual efforts. The phase of post-Westernism has indeed begun. Since Falsafat alnwābt, I have sensed a greater calling beyond the mere critique of shared philosophical identity that I referred to in my book Identity and Time. What I introduced was the construction of “conceptual fields of resistance” from a specific perspective that I had previously called “the South of modernity.” This perspective has evolved since my article Thinking with Hegel against Hegel published in 1991 and is now referred to in the West as the decolonial option.
It was a pleasure to speak with you, Dr. Fathi. It was an enlightening discussion on philosophical concepts, their history, and interpretation. I would like to conclude the conversation by asking about your current focus in translation and writing.
I finished translating Judith Butler’s book Gender Trouble some time ago, and I am currently working on writing an introduction for it. It has always been my habit to translate major books that can create a new world in the target language, rather than merely translating minor books that are closer to epistemological details than to established theories in the field. I have done this with Hegel, Habermas, Kant, and Nietzsche. I only translate what I see as part of the essence of the era, capturing the reality of a society, religion, generation, or large group and transforming it into a workshop of thought. In Judith Butler’s book, which I translated, I found a wonderful exercise in rethinking feminist issues by questioning the concept of “woman” itself, perceiving the liberation of women from the standard hierarchy based on the distinction between the sexes – male and female, which manifested in the patriarchal system and the network of sexual and political power that emerged from it – as a symbolic struggle that remains peripheral or flawed as long as the “subject” that is supposed to exist behind this distinction is not liberated. Gender identity is a performance and not an irrevocable stable, biological, or social essence. It is something we do rather than something we are. It is not something that simply happens but a role we play. It only seems natural to us because it conforms to the linguistic structure through which we express ourselves.
However, my translation workshop is always open, fueled by my fundamental philosophical stance, which is that our ancient language has returned to dictionaries, hidden from our sense of our new selves. It has left us somewhat alone. Therefore, everything we say today, whether intended or not, is essentially a form of translation, even if we continue to use formal Arabic without speaking it authentically or in our internal monologues. Suddenly we have become linguistic orphans, continuing to use our language but in its absence. This language of absence is the language of translation. Our language has become a technological language of absence in a world that only marginally communicates with us. The approach of the world has changed towards globalism and imposed on us the need to translate, which is to use words that only express our intended meanings through borrowed metaphors. Perhaps what we have lost is the ability of our ancient language to construct original metaphors, leaving us with a language that borrows new terms from Western languages in order to avoid death caused by the inability to express a reality that lies beyond its horizon.
But this is a reality that perhaps applies to all non-Western languages, and therefore it is not a cause for sadness. The appropriate remedy is to simply rethink translation: it is no longer an exchange of sentences between equal tongues, but rather an unequal struggle between dominant languages spoken by colonial modernists and dominated languages spoken with borrowed phrases constructed to serve a purpose, not arising from within. The options were two bad choices: between continuing to speak our ancient tongue, which speaks a language that no longer relates to our reality and has thus become a mere nostalgic tool for obsolete identities or trying to create a new language through translation. From the sea to the Gulf, all contemporary speakers of Modern Standard Arabic and its dialects are field translators, disconnected from the ancient language, and their speech has become a performance in the obligatory theatre of the modern world. I train my students to speak the language of our contemporary times in our tongue, not just to repeat what the West says in our language. That would only prolong our struggle with ourselves. Instead, we must practice speaking the language of today daily and become multilingual translators. There is no one today who is explicitly monolingual, not even the English speaker who sees no value in learning another language.
In this sense, I don’t really distinguish between translation and authorship. Most of what people call authorship is in fact an exercise of incidental and indirect “performance” translation. It is extremely rare to find a pure text written in Arabic without any trace of translation. It seems to me that contemporary Arabs have not yet begun the revolution of true authorship in the original sense. They are merely translators, whether directly or indirectly. By true authorship, I refer to the ability to create a spiritual, philosophical, poetic, political, or scientific work that does not owe its conceptual core to the Western canon. Since this is a hopeless situation, we have no choice but to push the boundaries of the translation paradigm to its limit: to become skilled translators to the extent required by the metaphysical time. A skilled translator is not someone who faithfully translates books from one language to another – that would constitute a procedural function that occurs under normal circumstances when we are dealing with two equal languages. Rather, a skilled translator is one who succeeds in speaking the language of today without significant hesitation. The requirement is not to express ideas the way English would do it – the dominant colonial language claiming universality – but the way any non-Western language would articulate it in an authentic, human way. It is a human act because it is a mere assimilation to life as we experience it, not as it is described by some reclusive ancient language. This means that translation is a performance: it is physical, gendered, sexual, political, economic, technical, and so on. These are all actions fueled by individual freedom that cannot be postponed to another generation.
I am currently in the process of compiling my thoughts to write a book that will discuss philosophy beyond the level we are accustomed to in our universities. The topic of this book will be poverty. My goal is to embarrass philosophers through addressing poverty, which is probably the focal ontological point buried beneath all their quotes about non-existence, nothingness, evil, fear, guilt, error, justice, power, and so on. What has troubled humanity throughout the ages is not the search for truth but survival, which means that the immortality of the body and not the soul is the focus of investigation. The soul serves as nothing more than a survival technique that we have forgotten the metaphor from which it was derived.
Elevating poverty to the status of a philosophical metaphysical question sheds new light, for example, on Nietzsche’s proclamation of the death of God. Suddenly it seems to us that Nietzsche was proclaiming his grief rather than his liberation. Nietzsche seems to be a sad theologian. That is why he still strives to renew his relationship with the Christian God and to transform himself into a post-Christian prophet. Nietzsche did not see the scene of the crime: pure poverty as a structure of being, not a temporary state of misery. In this sense, the proclamation of the death of God was a sad slogan, not a moral victory over anyone. The monotheistic God does not die for a simple reason: the continued existence of those who created him, i.e., the poor. Poverty is the spiritual horizon for all forms of divine invocation on earth. Poverty is what keeps the Christian God in a good metaphysical health.
[1] – G. W. FR. Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 2011), p. 13
[2] – Ibid., p. 14-15.
[3] – Fathi Al-Maskini, Falsafat alnwābt (Beirut: Dar Al-Tali’a, 1997), p. 32.
[4] – F. Al-Maskini, “Habermas vs. Heidegger or How to Talk about Philosophy?” in: Contemporary Arab Thought, Issue 84-85 (1991), pp. 21-25.
[5] – F. Al-Maskini, “Gibran and Modernity or The Arabic Version of Nihilism” in: Contemporary Arab Thought, Issue 88-89 (1991), pp. 120-128.
[6] – Aristotle, Metaphysics, A, 6, 986b 4-7; M, 4, 1078b 27-29; M, 9, 1086 2-4.
[7] – Ibid. Z, 13, 1038b 35.
[8] – Cf. Georges Mailhos, De la construction de l’uiversel, in: Horizons Maghrébins- Le droit à la mémoire/ Année 2007/ 56/ p. 162.
1. Ignace d’Antioche, Lettre aux Smyrniotes, VIII, 2.
[10] – Hegel, Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts (1821), Verlag von Felix Meiner, Leipzig 1911, p. 15: „Das was ist zu begreifen, ist die Aufgabe der Philosophie, denn das, was ist, ist die Vernunft. Was das Individuum betrifft, so ist ohnehin jedes ein Sohn seiner Zeit; so ist auch die Philosophie, ihre Zeit in Gedanken erlaßt. “
[11] – Emmanuel Levinas, Totalité et infini. Essai sur l’extériorité (Paris: Le Livre de Poche, 1990), p. 327.
[12] – Ibid., p. 329.
[13] – Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989).
[14] – Hassan Hanafi, Muqaddimah fī ʻilm al-istighrāb (Cairo: Al-Dar Al-Fanniyah lil-Nashr wal-Tawzi’, 1991).
[15] – Ibid., p. 22.
[16] – Ibid., p. 23.
[17] – Ibid., p. 25.
[18] – G. Ryle, “Categories”, in: Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, New Series, Vol. 38 (1937 – 1938), pp. 189.
[19] – G. Ryle, The Concept of Mind (London: Hutchinson University Library, 1949), p. 16.
[20] – United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Basic International Treaties on Human Rights (New York and Geneva: United Nations, 2006), p. 5.
[21] – A. Badiou, Que pense le poème? (Paris: Nous, 2016), p. 29.
[22] – M. Heidegger, Was heißt Denken, p. 210.
[23] – Ibib. P. 210: Daher bedeuten noos und noûs ursprünglich nicht das, was sich später als die Vernunft herausbildet; Noos bedeutet das Sinnen, das etwas im Sinn hat und sich zu Herzen nimmt.”
[24] – M. Arkoun, La Pensée arabe (Paris: PUF, 1975).
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