Contemporary Arab Thought: Cultural Critique in Comparative Perspective by Elizabeth Kassab

Author:Elizabeth Kassab [Kassab, Elizabeth]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Philosophy/Eastern/General
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2010-05-31T22:00:00+00:00

Critique of the Conciliatory and Unitary Pattern of Thinking: Muhammad Jaber al-Ansari, Hisham Sharabi, and Nadeem Naimy

Muhammad Jaber al-Ansari

The heightened polarization between the secularist-liberal and religious-conservative positions as well as the attempts at reconciling them has been the object of an extensive study first presented as a doctoral dissertation in the Arabic department of the American University of Beirut in 1979, but not published until some two decades later, in 1996, because of the author’s concerns about the possible reactions to what he saw as sensitive intellectual, religious, and political issues, as the publisher explains in the 1999 second edition.67 The author is Bahraini intellectual and political activist Muhammad Jaber al-Ansari, who has held numerous academic positions and public offices in Bahraini administrations and continues to serve in these areas in various capacities in the Persian Gulf region. He writes extensively both in the academic field and in the press, mainly on matters pertaining to Arab thought and Arab politics. In his 668-page-long work, he closely examines the conciliatory pattern of thought (al-tawfiqiyya) that many contemporary thinkers—including Sharabi, al-Azmeh, Laroui, and al-Azm—have regarded as one of the main causes of the absence of a real liberating and changing force in modern Arab thought. He analyzes the strengths and weaknesses of this pattern and follows its developments since the rise of the Arab Islamic civilization in the seventh century.

Al-Ansari observes that this civilization was shaped by the absorption of a number of cultures that came under Islamic rule as a result of rapidly expanding conquests. The Islamic ruling forces assimilated these cultures—including the Near Eastern, Christian and non-Christian, Syriac, Greek, Hellenic, Roman, Persian, and Indian—as part of a new, original, and dynamic civilization. This civilization’s theoreticians came to see it as a “middle” (wasatiyya) community (or nation), capable of absorbing foreign elements and destined to incorporate, reform, and complete the preceding monotheistic messages, namely Judaism and Christianity. At the same time, however, this emerging Arab Islamic civilization was based on a totalistic system (nizam shumuli) that clearly demarcated itself from other worldviews and creeds; in other words, it was a system characterized by a distinct and comprehensive set of values, conceptions, and regulations for individual, social, and political life. The assimilation was accordingly strongly oriented toward a principle of unity that safeguarded that system—a principle that Adonis, al-Khatibi, Bennis, Sharabi, and others have criticized, as noted earlier. It was meant to produce unified notions of God, community, creed, rule, state, and law, steering toward a unified, final, eternal, and fixed doctrine. Plurality and multiplicity were perceived as a threat, an intolerable blasphemy in the form of polytheism, a heresy or deviation from the right path regarding the doctrine, and a danger of civil war for the state and the community.

According to al-Ansari, this concern for unity and unification also determined which aspects of those foreign cultures were integrated. Persian Manicheanism, for instance, was rejected, whereas Aristotelian and Neoplatonic philosophies were welcomed. Aristotle’s logical principle of non-contradiction as well as the Neoplatonic

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