Intellectuals and Civil Society in the Middle East by Mohammed A. Bamyeh

Author:Mohammed A. Bamyeh [Bamyeh, Mohammed A.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction, History, Middle East
ISBN: 9780857732583
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2012-07-10T04:00:00+00:00

‘Abd al-Ghani al-Nabulusi, the Public Intellectual

In addition to the measured and staid form of his scholarship on the ‘unity of being’, Nabulusi also wrote a host of treatises on topics of much more immediate currency to the people of Damascus, Syria, and beyond. These are the treatises that cover practices such as smoking, tomb visitation, and listening to music. Some of these works are more on the order of polemics aimed at particular individuals and classes of people, who are often not named but are clearly adversaries. They are the kinds of works that one might expect to come out of the heat of a social and cultural battle. In fact, they are the product of a ‘culture war’ that took place in the Ottoman Empire during the late seventeenth century.

Nabulusi’s most heated polemical works came during a cultural struggle that raged throughout the Ottoman world and pitted an austere, literalist, and reformist interpretation of Islam against prevailing ideas and practices, particularly those associated with popular Sufi orders and the ideas of Ibn Arabi. The Kadizadelis, as the reformists are generally known, were most active in Istanbul but it was not long before the movement had become widespread in Damascus.24 Nabulusi expended great efforts to defend many traditional practices that came under attack by the Kadizadelis. Idah al-dalalat fi-sama‘ al-alat and al-‘Uqud al-lu’lu’iyah defended music and dance; Kashf al-nur ‘an ashab al-qubur and Hawd al-mawrud fi ziyarat al-Shaykh Yusuf wa-al-Shaykh Mahmud the practice of tomb visitation; al-Sulh bayn al-ikhwan fi hukm ibahat al-dukhan smoking; and Ghayat al-matlub fi mahabbat al-mahbub homoeroticism. In general, these works expound what we today would consider ‘liberal’ approaches to religion and life. Nabulusi was a man who was both pious and engaged in the world, with a seemingly equal love of God and life. But, as with the culture wars that rage in our world today, issues as seemingly trivial as smoking or drinking coffee or visiting tombs could enrage and engage. More salient for our purposes here, is that someone like Nabulusi, who could at once be so immersed in seemingly esoteric philosophical disputes could in the next instance write a polemic, publicly deriding his opponents on quotidian affairs like smoking, drinking, and gazing at beautiful boys. This exemplifies a strategy of public intellectual activity, which saw a seamless continuity between philosophical sophistication and ordinary life.

To provide a sense of how heated were those public debates, I would like to quote briefly from one of his most vociferous attacks on an unnamed member of the Kadizadeli camp. In addition to their attacks on Ibn Arabi and popular Sufi practices, the seventeenth-century puritans were much less tolerant of non-Muslims than had been the common practice. One indication of this intolerance was the view that non-Muslim ‘people of the book’, namely Christians and Jews, had no chance to making it to paradise in the hereafter. Nabulusi’s rebuttal was titled al-Qawl al-sadid fi jawaz khulf al-wa‘id wa-al-radd ala al-Rumi al-anid (‘The Correct Teaching Concerning the Possibility that God will not [Punish Christians and Jews]: A Rebuttal of the Stubborn Turk’).

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