Enlightenment on the Eve of Revolution

The Egyptian and Syrian Debates

Elizabeth Suzanne Kassab

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780231549677
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy

During the two decades that preceded the 2011 revolutions in Egypt and Syria, animated debates took place in Cairo and Damascus on political and social goals for the future. Egyptian and Syrian intellectuals argued over the meaning of tanwir, Arabic for "enlightenment," and its significance for contemporary politics. They took up questions of human dignity, liberty, reason, tolerance, civil society, democracy, and violence. In Enlightenment on the Eve of Revolution, Elizabeth Suzanne Kassab offers a groundbreaking analysis of the tanwir debates and their import for the 2011 uprisings.

Kassab locates these debates in their local context as well as in broader contemporary political and intellectual Arab history. She argues that the enlightenment they advocated was a form of political humanism that demanded the right of free and public use of reason. By calling for the restoration of human dignity and seeking a moral compass in the wake of the destruction wrought by brutal regimes, they understood tanwir as a humanist ideal. Kassab connects their debates to the Arab uprisings, arguing that their demands bear a striking resemblance to what was voiced on the streets of Egypt and Syria in 2011. Enlightenment on the Eve of Revolution is the first book to document these debates for the Anglophone audience and to analyze their importance for contemporary Egyptian and Syrian intellectual life and politics.

PART I

Cairo

ONE

Secularist, Governmental, and Islamist Tanwir Debates in Egypt in the 1990s

After the assassination of President Anwar el-Sadat, Islamist terrorist attacks multiplied in Egypt, targeting Copts in various parts of the country; tourists (e.g., in Ras Burqa in 1985, Luxor in 1997, Taba in 2004, Sharm el-Sheikh in 2005, and Dahab in 2006); politicians (e.g., the attempted assassinations of Interior Minister Hassan al-Alfi and Information Minister Safwat el-Sherif in 1993); and intellectuals (e.g., the assassination of prominent secularist Farag Fuda in 1992, and the knife attack on eighty-two-year-old Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfuz in 1994). Islamist cultural hegemony also manifested itself in the censorship of cultural products and the condemnation of individual thinkers like Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd, which became a cause célèbre and to which we will return in chapter 2. In the face of this mounting violence and hegemony, anti-Islamist thinkers organized a number of societies and activities. Among them was the Society for Enlightenment (Jam‘iyyat al-Tanwir), founded in 1992, which published an irregular bulletin called Al-tanwir (The enlightenment). Its first issue contained articles by Saad Eddin Ibrahim, Rif‘at al-Said, Yunan Labib Rizk, and Farag Fuda (a founding member who was assassinated shortly after establishing the society, when leaving its office). Its first president was the prominent Egyptian poet Abd el-Mu‘ti al-Higazi. Moreover, the General Egyptian Book Organization (Al-Hay’a al-‘Amma al-Misriyya li al-Kitab) launched a set of publications that included a series on modern Egyptian historical figures, such as Mustafa Kamil (Ta’rikh al-misriyyin); a series on the history of Egypt during the nahda period; and a series on the nahda itself, with reprints of landmark nahda books such as Abd al-Rahman al-Kawakibi’s (1855–1902) famous 1902 book on despotism.1 This last series, headed by Gaber Asfour, was called Al-Muwajaha (The confrontation), with Al-tanwir as subtitle. Its explicit aim was to confront and address the issues of extremism, Shari‘a, and national unity. The 1990 Cairo International Book Fair was given the motto “Hundred years of tanwir.”2 A television program, Hiwar al-Tanwir (Enlightenment dialogue), was broadcast to present enlightened approaches to various societal and intellectual issues. In 1992 the al-Hilal magazine and publishing house commemorated its hundredth anniversary and “contribution to modernization and enlightenment” at the Cairo Opera in the presence of President Hosni Mubarak.3 In 1993 two panel discussions were organized to mark the centennial of Ali Pasha Mubarak (1824–1893), who is called Abu al-ta‘lim (the father of education) for having been the leading figure of educational reform during the nahda. In 1994 a three-day workshop was organized by the Committee on History and Thought (Lajnat al-Tarikh wa al-Fikr) of the Supreme Council of Culture (Al-Hay’a al-‘Ulya li al-Thaqafa) and directed by its secretary, Gaber Asfour, to discuss the enlightenment movement of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In an essay entitled “De la renaissance aux Lumières: Autour de quelques productions historiques récentes,” Ghislaine Alleaume reviewed the activities and publications of this tanwir campaign and made the following remarks: no real scholarly contributions were made, the move from nahda to tanwir was made in a fleeting way without ever clarifying the term tanwir, and Islamism dominated the discussions, as it dominated their reception in the press and the editorial work that ensued from it. She thought that the approach to the notion of tanwir was more political than conceptual.4 As we will see, these criticisms were also articulated in the deconstruction of the 1990s Egyptian tanwir debates.

In 2002 the same council convened another three-day conference to celebrate the two-hundredth anniversary of the birth of Rifa‘a al-Tahtawi (1801–1873), regarded as one of the nahda pioneers. Part of this enlightenment campaign was the revival of interest in the work of Ibn Rushd (Averroes) as an Arab-Islamic champion of rationality. In 1994 a conference on Averroes was organized by the Supreme Council of Culture, following the publication of a book on Averroes by the council in 1993, edited by Egyptian philosophy professor Atef al-Iraqi.5 The Islamists rejected this enlightenment campaign, labeling it “tanwir hukumi” (governmental enlightenment), and proposed instead their own “tanwir islami” (Islamic enlightenment).6

Before moving to the critical deconstruction of these governmental and Islamic tanwir discourses, let us review, as a sample of these discourses, the ideas of Gaber Asfour for the secularist discourse and those of Muhammad Imarah for the Islamist one—both are spokesmen of their respective camps. Both men base their arguments on a solid grasp of the modern Egyptian history of ideas and are established experts in their respective fields of literary critique and Islamic studies. But before entering the polemics between these two figures and the currents they represent, it is important to note that a discourse on enlightenment already existed in the 1970s. It was initiated by Mourad Wahba (born 1926), professor emeritus of philosophy at Ain Shams University in Cairo. This third discourse was eventually drawn into the 1990s debates, as its intellectual concerns coincided with those of the debates, but it remained to a large extent independent from the two camps. A look into this independent discourse complements our picture of the late twentieth-century Egyptian debate on tanwir. Let us take one book from each of these prolific writers as an anchor point to present the gist of their arguments, referring to their other writings when relevant. For Gaber Asfour we will focus on Hawamish ‘ala daftar al-tanwir (Marginalia on the notebook of tanwir) from 1994,7 and for Muhammad Imarah we will choose Al-Islam bayn al-tanwir wa al-tazwir (Islam between tanwir and falsification) from 1995.8 But we will start with Mourad Wahba’s Madkhal ila al-tanwir (Introduction to tanwir), published in 1994.9

Mourad Wahba’s Paradoxes

Underdevelopment in the third world in general and in the Islamic world in particular is one of the important reasons for Wahba’s interest in the question of tanwir. The backwardness of these societies is, according to him, caused by a lack of critical reason due to cultural taboos. These taboos come from dogmatic, fundamentalist modes of thinking that stem in turn from fundamentalist and particularist approaches to tradition and religion. Third world intellectuals, he thinks, have not had the audacity to confront and change these approaches. The mission of tanwir is to unveil the nature of these taboos and to explain how they hinder creative thought and culture in view of overcoming those hindrances. A shift away from dogmatism and an opening to universal human civilization are urgently needed. This can only be secured by secularism. For Wahba, secularism is the necessary condition for the possibility of using critical reason, hence for tanwir. Religious fundamentalism, by imposing dogmatic certainties and forbidding critique, creates societies of absolutes in which critical thinking is made impossible, and as a result advancement is hampered. In his mind, the advancement achieved in European societies was owed to a large extent to the possibility of exercising critical reason. This possibility was gained through religious reform that liberated the mind from religious authorities and through the Enlightenment, which established human reason as the sole authority for the human mind—a reason, however, that was well aware of its limits and its inability to establish dogmatic certainties. A major contribution to these transformations was the philosophy of Averroes, which was neglected and fought in the East but welcomed and explored by the West—what Wahba calls the “paradox of Averroes.”10 Hence Wahba is committed to reviving the rationalist, hermeneutic philosophy of Averroes in contemporary Arab thought. That philosophy could serve additionally as common ground for the Arab-Islamic world and the West, since Averroes himself belonged to both cultures. Contemporary Arab-Islamic culture has been dominated, according to Wahba, by the literalist, conformist, and dogmatic spirit of Ibn Taymiyya (1263–1328). This spirit has shaped the prevalent Islamic fundamentalist currents. Countering this spirit is the necessary and difficult task of any present-day tanwir. Enlightenment, secularism, Averroes, and cultural dialogue have been the leitmotifs of Wahba’s numerous writings, talks, interviews, regular press articles, frequent television appearances, academic conferences, and public debates.

Madkhal il al-tanwir is a collection of essays and conference papers written between 1975 and 1993 that document Wahba’s journey, of which he gives an overview in the introduction to the book. The journey started with a 1975 talk in Lahore in which he expressed concern about cultural problems caused by the absence of secularism and critical thinking.11 This visit eventually moved him to found the Afro-Asian Philosophy Association in 1978 to promote enlightenment. The association organized several conferences in collaboration with other associations and cultural centers, such as the 1989 Cairo conference Enlightenment and Culture, held in partnership with the Goethe Institute and the British Council in Cairo. This conference was meant to be a joint Arab-European reflection on “enlightenment as a civilizational phenomenon” both in the Arab world and Europe, and more particularly on the challenges of enlightenment in the two regions.12 Wahba ended his contribution to the conference by questioning the prevailing belief that Egypt has had a century of enlightenment, thus shedding doubt on the centennial claims made by the state.13 Madkhal ila al-tanwir also contains a critique of the centennial republication of some of the major nahda writings, such as Farah Antun’s (1874–1922) 1903 book on Averroes, Ibn Rushd wa Falsafatuhu (Ibn Rushd and his philosophy). The General Egyptian Council for Books published the book without the author’s introduction, in which he had called for separating state from religion, and without his heated debated with Muhammad Abduh (1849–1905).14 In this way, writes Wahba, the state aborted Antun’s enlightenment efforts.15 In 2012 Wahba wrote his own introduction and republished Antun’s book in its integral form.16

Another misperception propagated by the state and maintained by public opinion, Wahba claims, is the characterization of Rifa‘a al-Tahtawi as a tanwir figure. In a paper presented at a 1976 Tahtawi conference, Wahba argues that in presenting his French Enlightenment readings, Tahtawi had not captured the main tenets of those readings; namely, the idea of a secular social contract and that of natural religion. Rather, Tahtawi had chosen to present the ideas related to these tenets as rational equivalents of the Shari‘a precepts.17 It will be interesting to compare Wahba’s view on Tahtawi with Imarah’s, since Imarah also argues that Tahtawi remained committed to his Islam and did not advocate secularism, as secularist tanwiris claim. But Imarah’s point, contrary to Wahba’s, does not dispute Tahtawi’s tanwiri character. Rather, it shows, as we shall see, that the nahda tanwir remained anchored in Islam and did not take a secularist form; in other words, that tanwir was Islamist.

The most recent article in Madkhal is “Mufaraqat Ibn Rushd” (The paradox of Ibn Rushd) from 1993. It is a reprint of his contribution to the volume on Averroes, published by the Committee on Philosophy and Sociology of the Supreme Council of Culture as part of the tanwir campaign. It was, as mentioned above, edited by a member of that committee, Atef al-Iraqi, professor of Arab philosophy at Cairo University and himself a prolific writer on tanwir.18 It is after these Ibn Rushd publications and discussions that Mourad Wahba founded the Averroes Forum (Muntada Ibn Rushd) in 1994 and convened an international conference in Cairo on Averroes and the Enlightenment.19

Among the articles included in Madkhal is a 1991 piece, “Al-tanwir wa rajul al-shari‘” (Enlightenment and the man on the street). Back in 1983 Wahba had organized a conference on philosophy and the man on the street, which was strongly criticized by the press and some fellow philosophers, such as Zaki Naguib Mahmud, who thought that exposing philosophy to the “man on the street” was putting it in peril. Wahba remained convinced that philosophy, critical thinking, and creative culture had to be disseminated to the general public. In this piece Wahba saw the age of technology as a chance for disseminating enlightened modes of thinking to the masses, contrary to the pessimistic views of Charles-Marie Gustave Le Bon, José Ortega y Gasset, Martin Heidegger, and Wilhelm Reich on the masses. Wahba did acknowledge the dangers of manipulating the masses against enlightenment, as was the case in ancient Athens, when, as he describes it, public opinion about Socrates was influenced by charges of atheism and corrupt moral influence. Wahba believed modern technology could offer a chance to propagate a culture of creativity instead of conformist, rote-learning culture.20 Finally, Madkhal ila al-tanwir contains a survey of European Enlightenment figures and ideas. This period remains for Wahba the epitome of modern enlightenment without being limited to Europe geographically, ethnically, or culturally. Its ideals are for him universal, stemming from the human yearning for freedom and progress.21

For Wahba, tanwir as the autonomous use of critical reason is but one of the constituents of democracy. The other three are liberalism, social contract theory, and most important, secularism. Liberalism for him is the valuing of individual liberties, and social contract theory is the understanding of the body politic as based on a secular agreement among humans, not on divine rule. Secularism is the cornerstone of democracy, he insists. Secularism is first and foremost a mode of thinking that excludes absolutes (mutlaqat) and works with the relative as relative (al-nisbi bima huwa nisbi). It is the worldly, and thus inevitably, changing and relative approach to the world. It is also a principle that takes critical reason as its reference.22 When advised to use the word “rational” (‘aqlani) instead of “secular” (‘almani) to avoid criticism, Wahba retorts that he prefers “secular” because rationalism runs the danger of absolutism, since it is the natural tendency of reason to be tempted by absolute truth when not reined in by critique. As often stated in secularism debates in Egypt, the term secularism has a bad reputation because it is associated with atheism—anathema to Islam and society. People opt for the more cautious term civil (madani). Islamists use it to claim that they do not aim for theocratic rule and so avoid the accusation of fundamentalist extremism, and non-Islamists use it to avoid accusations of atheism—an accusation that can have fatal consequences, as shown by the assassination of committed secularists like Farag Fuda. Wahba thinks intellectuals have lacked the courage to be clear about their beliefs and have preferred to avoid confrontation with the Islamized public and religious authorities dominated by fundamentalists, thus blurring the central cause of secularism. He has consistently refused to make such compromises and remained clear in his secularist advocacy. He is the founder and head of the secular Egypt movement (Harakat Misr al-‘almaniyya), whose an online magazine, Majallat harakat misr al-‘almaniyya, publishes most of Wahba’s articles in addition to essays, book reviews, and interviews by others.23

As an outspoken secularist and an uncompromising critic of all forms of fundamentalism, Wahba has remained consistent in his positions.24 He has ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I. Cairo
• Part II. Damascus
• Conclusion: Tanwir as Political Humanism
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index