12
Yasmeen Daifallah
University of Massachusetts, Amherst
In a comment on the Egyptian Revolution nearly a year after the ouster of Husni Mubarak on February 11, 2011, Egyptian philosopher Hassan Hanafi (b. 1935) lamented, “Egypt is now living a state of ‘war of all against all;’ no one is defending the revolution that was led by the Egyptian youth, and every party is concerned with its own self-interest. We now speak against one another more than we do against Israel!”1 Hanafi’s comment came at a time when Egypt was under the rule of the Security Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF),2 and when Islamist groups (both the Muslim Brotherhood and the salafi groups to their right) had largely withdrawn their support for the “revolutionary youth” who continued to oppose military rule as well as the violations of human and civil rights that took place under its auspices. At the heart of the apparently waning promise of the Egyptian uprisings, Hanafi argues, was the lack of an adequate theoretical foundation, and the persistence of ideas and practices that sustained the ancien regime. “In the January Revolution [of 2011], the people ‘wanted to bring down the regime,’ and have indeed done so. But this is not enough; we have brought down the regime in Egypt, but have we expunged it from our minds, our souls, and our consciousness, or does it keep returning to us in new forms?”3
Hanafi avers that the persistent autocracy, the disunity of the opposition, and the reactionary thought predominant among both the corrupt elite and the conservative Islamists are in large part a result of the lingering influence of problematic aspects of the Islamic cultural inheritance (al-mawruth al-thaqafi). “There is” Hanafi declares, “something in our cultural heritage that requires re-examination.”4 This chapter demonstrates that what Hanafi means by re-examining the Islamic heritage is its re-evaluation on the basis of the current condition of Arab society. Such re-examination is necessary for understanding the specific constitutive relationship between that heritage and the current condition, as well as for discerning the ways it could be mobilized to bring about genuine social and political change. In Hanafi’s estimation, the absence of a thoroughgoing engagement with Islamic cultural heritage, including the major fields of Islamic knowledge and their articulations in popular culture, has caused the various attempts at social and political change in modern Arab history since the late nineteenth century and up until the present to falter. “We should not be in awe of intellectual icons like Taha Husayn and Ahmed Lutfi al-Sayyid who, despite their intellectual stature, did not offer a project synthesizing the old and the new, and are therefore partially responsible for the emergence of the Islamic fundamentalist movement (al-haraka al-salafiyya).”5 This entwinement of cultural and political change is a theme that runs throughout Hanafi’s work, as it does the works of many Arab intellectuals who came of age in the 1950s and 1960s.
Hanafi has dedicated his intellectual career to theorizing and enacting a “synthetical project” whose achievement he considers to have eluded the earlier generation of Arab intellectuals. After graduating with a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from Cairo University, he spent ten years pursuing a doctorate in philosophy at the Sorbonne, where he worked on developing “an Islamic method for philosophical investigation.”6 Deeply influenced by Husserl’s phenomenology and the synthesis of phenomenology and hermeneutics by his adviser Paul Ricoeur, Hanafi’s dissertation attempts to develop “a general method dealing at one and the same time with consciousness and tradition,” which would take “hermeneutics as its point of application.”7 Completed in 1966, Hanafi’s thesis comprised a three-pronged critique of extant approaches to the Islamic tradition in the European as well as the Muslim worlds, an elaboration of the argument that “a hermeneutics grounded in phenomenology was the most effective tool for the generic study of religions,”8 and an application of this method to the New Testament. Returning to Egypt in the late 1960s, Hanafi published a series of articles in Arabic-language journals where he criticizes existing popular and academic understandings of the Islamic tradition, advancing a new mode of reading of that tradition that reflected the experience of modern-day Muslims and responded to their needs.9
In 1980 Hanafi launched his Heritage and Renewal Project (HRP). This project had three stated objectives: to reinterpret the Islamic disciplines in light of the present needs of Arab societies; to establish a new discipline, “Occidentalism,” that takes Western knowledge as its object of analysis and critique and designates the Arab self as the subject who carries out that critique; and to investigate the current social, economic, and political condition of Arab societies. Over the course of two decades, from 1980 to 2009, Hanafi managed to fulfill the first aim of the HRP and to publish an introductory volume to Occidentalism in 1992.10 The first part of this chapter situates Hanafi’s work – especially the HRP – within the broader debate about the continued relevance of the intellectual Islamic tradition (turath) amongst Arab thinkers during the late 1970s and early 1980s, in order to examine the specific ways in which he tries to make an intervention in these debates. As in his more recent commentaries on the Egyptian uprising and the Arab Spring more generally, Hanafi has long identified the social and political problems besetting Arab societies as signs of the failure of Arab intellectuals, secular and Islamist alike, to initiate a cultural renewal capable of genuinely transforming mass consciousness, that is, the way ordinary people understand and act upon their world. The second part traces Hanafi’s diagnosis of the problem of Arab consciousness, evaluating his claim about the persistent influence of ancient modes of experience that ostensibly extend into the present. The third and final section elaborates Hanafi’s attempt to reinterpret the Islamic disciplines, with a discussion of its implications for developing a new understanding of politics and the political subject.
The Context of Hanafi’s Intervention
Hanafi’s critical engagement with the Islamic cultural heritage (al-turath al-islami) should be understood in two registers. First, it should be analyzed in relation to late-nineteenth-century reinterpretations of the Islamic tradition that sought to render it more relevant to the times. This intellectual trend, usually referred to as Islamic reformism or modernism, mobilized religious texts (the Qurʾan, the prophetic tradition, and Islamic jurisprudence and philosophy) to engage in the cultural, social, and political critique of increasingly westernized Muslim societies of the time, as well as of Orientalist scholarship.11 In this view, it is not surprising that Hanafi situates his project as a continuation of the efforts of these earlier reformers who, like him, faced the dual challenge of taqlid, the emulation of consensual precedent in Islamic jurisprudence, and taghrib, the understanding of westernization as the sole route to modernity.12 As Hanafi puts it: “the Reformist project remains the only refuge for any political trend which determines [sic] to be authentic. As all other secular ideologies fail to take hold.”13 Indeed, like Jamal al-Din al-Afghani (1838–97) and Muhammad ʿAbduh (1849–1905), Hanafi invokes the right of the present generation to practice ijtihad, defined by the modernists to mean reasoning independent of precedent, in order to effect tajdid, the renewal of Islamic knowledge and norms to ensure their adherence to the conceptual and institutional boundaries laid down in the Qurʾan and the Sunna, as well as their responsiveness to the needs of the moral community.14 In this view, Hanafi’s engagement with tradition, like that of his turn-of-the-century reformist counterparts, could be considered in light of Alasdair MacIntyre’s definition of “tradition”:
An argument extended through time in which certain fundamental agreements are defined and redefined in terms of two kinds of conflict: those with critics and enemies external to the tradition who reject all or at least key parts of those fundamental agreements, and those internal, interpretive debates through which the meaning and rationale of fundamental agreements come to be expressed and by whose progress a tradition is constituted.15
Hanafi critiques groups that are both “external” and “internal” to the Islamic tradition. On the one hand, Hanafi defines his project as a response to secularists who declare the irrelevance of turath and Western Orientalists who misrepresent it, and on the other, against Islamists and traditionalist scholars whose interpretation of that tradition Hanafi considers errant or outdated respectively.
But Hanafi’s engagement with tradition should also be understood in a second register, that of intellectual debates since the early 1970s about “heritage and modernity” (al-turath wa-l-hadatha).16 Besides denoting a “tradition” within which fundamental and meaningful agreements are continually being reinterpreted, turath also served as an ideological construct that could be mobilized to revive or reconstruct an indigenous identity perceived to be under threat. The Moroccan philosopher Muhammad ʿAbid al-Jabiri (1936–2010) captures this sense of turath best, defining it as “the epistemological and ideological entailments, and the rational bases and the affective charge, of Arab Islamic culture … [it is] the living presence of that past in the consciousness (waʿi) and inner worlds (nufus)” of present day Arabs.17 Joseph Massad conveys a similar understanding of turath as “first and foremost a product of twentieth century modernity where, or more precisely, when it is located as an epistemological anchor of the present in the past.”18 This dual understanding of turath as both an interpretive endeavor as well as an ideological construct about the persistence of the past in the present informs the concept of “subject” used throughout this chapter. The subject in this view is neither a liberal self unencumbered by its tradition, social, cultural, or political contexts nor one whose interiority is expressed in the aesthetic or psychological register. Rather, the (Arab) subject refers to modern Arab thinkers’ articulations of a self conditioned by its geographical, historical, and religio-cultural context. Coming of intellectual age during a post-independence period dominated by Arab nationalist discourses, thinkers such as Hanafi and al-Jabiri among others considered “Arab” history and culture the most significant determinant of the cultural and political subjectivity of the inhabitants of Arab countries.
For Hanafi, then, turath not only signified the “civilizational documents of knowledge, culture and intellectual that are said to have been passed down from the Arabs of the past to the Arabs of the present,” but also a way of positioning oneself along a spectrum of orientations towards the question of modernity.19 If partisans of turath were typically understood as either skeptical of Western modernity or as putting forward a syncretic modernity that brought together elements of turath and elements of Western modernity, partisans of modernity implied the futility of such approaches since modernity historically emerged in the Western world and its genealogy was constitutive of its essence.20 To Arab intellectuals such as Hanafi and al-Jabiri, this binary between an obsolete turath and an imported modernity was unproductive. The violent but decisive incorporation of Arab societies into the colonial order since the late eighteenth century meant that such a choice no longer existed, if it ever did. The question for these thinkers was one of possibility and effectiveness: given the current composition of the Arab subject, and the ultimate objective of achieving a modern national community, how can we emancipate our societies from social, economic, and political oppression without remaining materially and culturally dependent on the West?21 Hanafi is unsatisfied with the way Arab ideologies on the left and the right have responded to this question and, indeed, to the entire complex of political, socioeconomic, and cultural problems which he would later refer to as the “Arab crisis.”22 Such a critique of Arab intellectuals dovetails with earlier works by the Moroccan historian ʿAbdallah Laroui and the Syrian Marxist Sadiq Jalal al-ʿAzm.23
If some Arab intellectuals in the late 1960s and early 1970s advocated a Marxist understanding of history as the remedy for Arab ideology’s ahistoricity and eclecticism, a mood of disillusionment with both Right and Left alike pervades the writings of others during the late 1970s and early 1980s. The death of Gamal Abdel Nasser in 1970, the apparent eclipse of radical Arab nationalism signaled by Sadat’s “open-door policy” (infitah) and his rapprochement with the United States in the mid 1970s, the marked rise of Islamist and increased visibility of Islamist social and political movements – all marked the end of an era for a generation of Arab intellectuals. The wide-ranging critique of multiple ideological currents (nationalism, Marxism, Islamic reformism, and liberalism) issued by this generation stemmed from a sense that all these projects had failed to fulfill the postcolonial promise of genuine cultural and political independence, and of a more just and equitable society. For some, including al-Jabiri, the problem was conceptual: those ideological projects failed because of their incoherence, their mimicry of and dependence on European political thought, and, relatedly, their incapacity to adequately comprehend and analyze the social, political, and cultural realities of Arab society, past and present, on their own terms, that is, as distinct from the history of Europe.24 For others, including Hanafi, the problem with modern Arab thought was political as well as conceptual. On the political front, both reformist and revolutionary ideologies failed to penetrate mass consciousness. Even those that succeeded to some extent – Jamal al-Din al-Afghani’s Pan-Islamism or Nasser’s Arab Nationalism – lacked the power to achieve any lasting impact. Either they gave way to intellectual moderation, as in the case of Muhammad ʿAbduh’s deviation from his mentor when he called for “evolution, not revolution,”25 or else turned despotic upon assuming political power, as with the 1952 Egyptian Free Officers’ coup and similar experiences in Syria and Iraq under the Baʿth.26
On the conceptual front, Hanafi conceives modern Arab thought to have suffered from the inability of Arab intellectuals to arrive at an adequate and realistic understanding of the cultural reality of postcolonial Arab society. Secularists failed to appreciate the potential held by revolutionizing the Islamic tradition as a means to transform Arab society; the secular elite formed a “self-enclosed” group that distanced itself from that tradition and its mass appeal.27 Islamists, on the other hand, conceived of authenticity as a “return to origins,” without regard for historical change or the indelible effects of colonial modernity on Muslim societies. Hanafi rationalizes the Islamist position as one that “projects the deficiencies of the present on the past to compensate for our generation’s own deficiency through escaping to a [now glorified] past.”28 In Min al-aqida ila al-thawra (From Doctrine to Revolution), Hanafi explains:
The masses are faithful (muʾmina), heritage-infused (turathiyya), but they are also in a condition of occupation, oppression, poverty, disunity, retardation, alienation and apathy. Various methods of social change, using the new, the old, and blends of the new and the old have been tried to remedy this situation. The result, however, was the formation of self-enclosed and angry Islamic groups, and of self-enclosed secular secret societies.29
Cognizant of the fact that both positions were in large part themselves a result of colonial modernity – secularism resulting from the cultural alienation of the European-educated elite, Islamism understood as the alienation of the masses from that elite and their failed modernization projects – Hanafi is concerned by the lack of “historical consciousness” on both sides, a concept indebted to German Idealism (particularly its Hegelian and Fichtean variants) that indexes the inability to conceive of the present as one “stage” in a historical process.30 This concern remains evident in Hanafi’s recent lamentation that “the [Muslim] self still suffers from the absence of historical consciousness; it is unable to answer the question, in which historical epoch does it live?”31 By failing to acknowledge the reality of historical change or to offer a compelling theory of social change, Islamists and secularists alike have failed to establish a horizon of political possibility.32
For Hanafi’s generation, a compelling ideological formulation had to take into account the lessons of the turn in critical thought initiated by the 1967 Six-Day War, the ascendancy of Islamic social and political movements, and the increasing Islamization of public space in the late 1970s and early 1980s’ “Islamic revival.”33 Hanafi, al-Jabiri, and other intellectuals concluded that any attempt at sociopolitical change calling for a “rupture” with the Islamic tradition, whether in theological or cultural terms, was bound to fail. To be effective, intellectual discourse had to be critical of tradition while also paying allegiance to it, to re-examine the historical rationale of traditional Islamic knowledge, to relativize its value for the present, but also to commit to its preservation. This generation of Arab intellectuals, sometimes referred to as al-turathiyyun al-judud or neotraditionalists, rose to the double challenge of both historicizing and preserving turath.34 While the Moroccan philosopher Muhammad Arkoun (1928–2010) uses deconstruction in his examination of foundational Islamic texts, and al-Jabiri employs Foucauldian archaeology to critically study the Islamic disciplines, Hanafi adapts phenomenology for their examination.
Hanafi’s earliest use of the phenomenological method can be found in a series of articles he wrote between 1969 and 1971, and which were later republished as Contemporary Issues I and II.35 As Kersten points out, these articles constitute the “hinge between the Sorbonne theses and Hanafi’s future HRP.”36 If Kersten focuses on how these articles presage Hanafi’s concern with restoring the intellectual independence of the developing world, and on the specific cultural and social problems arising from Western cultural impact, one may also add that these articles mark Hanafi’s application of the phenomenological concept of consciousness to the examination of Arab society, politics, and, more importantly for the purposes of this chapter, to Islamic knowledge. In what follows, I analyze how Hanafi mobilizes the concepts of turath and consciousness to situate his intervention in the broader intellectual debate about the relevance of the Islamic past that animated Arab intellectual production in the 1980s and 1990s. I then reconstruct Hanafi’s critique of contemporary Arab consciousness, offering a few examples of his reinterpretation of Islamic theology, before evaluating the extent to which HRP delivers on its promise of offering a transformational discourse for the modern Arab subject.
Turath as Critique of Arab Ideology
First published in 1980, Hanafi’s introduction to HRP performs two interrelated objectives: to establish the continuing influence of the Islamic heritage on contemporary conceptions of social and political reality, and to prove that this is a major cause of the contemporary “Arab crisis.”37 Hanafi redefines turath as a component of the Arab present as much as of its past, with “consciousness” as the kernel that is both preserved and subject to reinterpretation. While Hanafi tells us that such redefinitions structure the theoretical framework for his investigation of turath, a close reading of his work suggests that he also uses them to critique contemporary Arab ideology while carving out a distinct space for his own political theoretical intervention.
In the true spirit of a manifesto, Hanafi begins with a dramatic set of assertions about how turath, as embodied in the hegemonic positions within the Islamic disciplines, has come to produce a set of attitudes and behaviors that are still widely observable in contemporary Arab society. In one instance, he offers a striking claim about how the historical discipline of Islamic theology or ʿilm usul al-din (the foundations of Islamic dogma) has produced an apathetic and ahistorical subject:
We still moan under the fatalism we inherited from the salaf, and explain our failures by positing, “caution never prevents fate.” We exhaust our minds personifying the divine, finding in this a consolation for our unawareness of our present condition, its origin and its future. We submit our reason to the text … and sever the relationship between our reasoning capacity and the analysis of our immediate reality, forgetting that that reality was the original source of the [revealed] text. We accept our leaders by appointment, and obey them submissively because of weakness or fear, then find in turath what justifies this situation. We rob nature of its independence and its laws, regard it as the source of evil and doom, and charge all naturalist inclinations [within turath] with materialism and atheism … all this is part of the psychological legacy (al-mawruth al-nafsi) of Islamic theology.38
Though Hanafi’s attack on the Islamist position may resemble that of Arab secularists, it should also be read as a critique of the secular view of the relationship between historical text and contemporary context. In positing, “reality was the original source of the [revealed] text,” Hanafi hints at the “proper” relationship between any text, including revelation, and its historical context.39 This relationship features a dynamic interaction between the text and its human interpreter such that the latter’s historical condition is continuously brought to bear on textual meanings, rather than the total break with the past often advocated by secular Arab intellectuals. As Hanafi puts it elsewhere, “the text does not have an objective meaning that could be uncovered through historical knowledge or linguistic rules.”40 While they may have an objective existence, textual meanings are subjectively derived. “The interpreter,” Hanafi adds, “recreates [the text] by accommodating it to his own use.”41 Lest this be taken as an instrumentalist act of interpretation, Hanafi clarifies that “every interpretation expresses the psychological and socio-political position of the interpreter … a certain Zeitgeist, the Weltanschauung of a special community in time and in space.”42
Hanafi’s figuration of turath as a living presence in contemporary reality is an attempt to position himself on a continuum between two extreme positions: the Islamist claim that overcoming the problems of the Arab condition could only occur “through returning to the [ways of the] past,” and the “secularist” claim that turath is no longer suited to the needs of the present and therefore that a rupture with it is the only way forward.43 The former valorizes “the past” even though that past has given rise to a problematic present, while the latter ignores the possibilities that human interpretive capacities could bring to historical texts. By contrast, Hanafi posits his own conception of turath: a corpus of inherited texts that should be continuously interpreted in accordance with the needs of the present. This position abides by the instructiveness of the Islamic tradition and its sources in public life – and, thus, is not secular – while remaining attentive to changing times, which puts him/his stance at odds with traditionalist hermeneutics. Hanafi’s sole criteria for distinguishing “secular” from “non-secular” positions seems to be the extent to which a given position or thinker declares their allegiance to the Islamic tradition, and not their method of doing so. Even if Hanafi considers himself non-secular, some commentators have argued that his hermeneutics – to say nothing of Islamism or political Islam – is underpinned by secular pre-suppositions about the historicity of divine revelation and the role of the human interpreter.44
Consciousness as the Kernel of Turath
Hanafi’s conceptualization of “psychological repository” and “historical consciousness” as the vehicles through which turath persists in colonial modernity marks his second attempt to critique major currents of contemporary Arab ideology. If Hanafi once depicted turath as historically specific knowledge that requires creative interpretation in order to address contemporary reality, here he posits an understanding of turath as a stable presence within the subject’s consciousness that remains unaffected by historical change. The former could be thought of as Hanafi’s argument about what turath should be, the latter about what it actually is.45 In both explications of the term, however, Hanafi uses turath to clarify his intervention in the Arab ideological arena.
The collective consciousness of the masses is understood to be the kernel where inherited traditions (in both popular and intellectual forms) dwell. Hanafi’s explication of the expression “psychological repository of the masses” is one example of how he situates himself on the Islamist-secular continuum. As in later formulations of the “Islamic Left,” Hanafi combines leftist language with Islamic terminology to de-polarize these two camps.46 Hanafi’s use of the term “masses” (jamahir), therefore, carries a distinctly progressive flavor due to its association with Arab nationalist and Marxist discourses. Likewise, his usage of the term “psychological” (nafsi) suggests attunement to the discourse of modern social science. In a swift move, however, Hanafi supplements the intuitive connotations of these terms with a classical elaboration: “Psychology” does not refer to modern psychological understandings of human behavior. Rather, the word is derived from the term “nafs,” a classical Arabic term that implies the self or the soul, which Hanafi identifies as “connoting the inner world of the self which contains the locus of, and motivation for, human behavior.”47 Hanafi adds, though, that in his usage “nafs” has the same meaning as both waʿi, the term used by the Arab left to refer to the Marxist notion of “consciousness,” and shuʿur, which Hanafi later uses as a translation of the phenomenological conception of consciousness.48
In similar fashion, Hanafi claims that jamahir (the masses) was “a term used in our ancient heritage in a purely epistemological sense to imply the public (al-ʿamma), as juxtaposed to the class of philosophers or men of knowledge (al-khassa).” But this “purely epistemological” distinction between the ʿamma and the khassa seems to have been distorted by historical and contemporary delineations of the masses as “superficial, unable to comprehend abstract or theoretical knowledge except when expressed through metaphor or allegory, and unable to establish the verity of propositions [made by authority] because of their tendency to blind obedience and uncritical imitation or taqlid.”49 After this summary critique of such distortion of “the masses,” Hanafi asserts that his employment of the term carries a positive connotation. He supplements the ancient epistemological distinction between the ʿamma and the khassa with a “purely practical” understanding of the masses as representing “the capacity for honest self-expression, intuitive recognition [of truth], and spontaneous sensibility.” Conceived this way, Hanafi concludes, “the masses represent history, both theoretically and practically.”50 Note here how Hanafi’s use of “the masses” blends his construction of its traditionalist usage with the tropes of “spontaneity,” “intuition,” and the masses’ historical role in effecting social change, all of which bear the unmistakable mark of nationalism and Marxism (or the “progressive” camp) in modern Arab discourse. This “blended” definition of “psyche” and “masses,” in which Hanafi mobilizes ideological terms drawn from the discourses of the secular left as well as the Islamist right, underscores his attempt to appeal to as well as distinguish himself from the two “poles” of the Arab debate as he construes them. Understood as a repository housed in the psyche of the Arab masses, Hanafi portrays turath as constitutive both of the Arab masses and of their conception of the world, as well as the resource these masses might mobilize to initiate historical change.
Hanafi’s use of the term “psychological repository of the masses” also shows how he wishes to position himself in relation to both Islamist and secular understandings of the relationship between turath and the present. This formulation of turath, he indicates, is meant to oppose the views that turath consists in “a material body of works to be found in libraries,” or in an “independent body of theory featuring a set of truths” that ought to be protected from attack or forgetfulness.51 While Hanafi does not identify his interlocutors, this critique presents a clear rejection of the Islamist view of turath.52 Turath, Hanafi asserts, is not an ideal-type phenomenon, whereby certain ideational constructs are valorized and understood to be “autonomous from the context in which [they] originally emerged.”53 Rather, turath is a set of conceptions about the natural and social worlds grounded in the contexts in which they were produced or received. But Hanafi’s critique is also directed at the “secular” view that strips down turath to its sheer materiality as a historical corpus expressing the time-bound ideological formulations of the Arab ruling elite at a particular stage in Arab-Islamic socioeconomic history. Neither “ideal” nor “material” formulations of turath manage to capture the character of its impact on the formation of contemporary Arab subjects. The only way this impact could be properly understood, Hanafi contends, is through the deployment of the concept of “consciousness,” which, in the case of the Arab society, represents the psychological repository of turath as well as the specific components of the present that the subject inhabits.
Whereas Leftist mobilizations of “consciousness” relied on the broad currency of its Marxist and Nationalist usage among Arab intellectuals and political actors since the 1950s, Hanafi elaborates a new conception of the term.54 As with his earlier mobilizations of turath and “the psychological repository of the masses,” Hanafi juxtaposes his definition of consciousness to leftist and “idealist” (read Islamist) usages of the term. In this context, he defines “consciousness” as the realm that unites both ideational and “infrastructural” aspects of the subject’s existence. Hanafi faults the Arab Left for reducing consciousness to a reflection of social and economic arrangements, without accounting for conscious content that pre-dates these arrangements and orients the subject towards them. Though he gives no further account of the leftist understanding of consciousness, one could assume that Hanafi discounts this depiction of pre-existing attitudes as residues of a pre-capitalist or traditional order of things that will eventually wither once industrialization is achieved. Instead, Hanafi posits the longevity of consciousness beyond radical social and economic change in a manner that is unaccounted for by the Left.
Likewise, Hanafi criticizes ideologies that consider ideational change as sufficient to accomplish social and political change, precisely because such accounts neglect the impact of social and political arrangements on human consciousness. Instead of privileging one or the other, a balanced understanding of human consciousness should account for the interplay between long-standing psychological orientations – themselves a product of a complex of received and acquired traditions – and a specific social, economic, and political context. An understanding of the human condition in history is therefore impossible without the examination of human consciousness, its constituent parts, and the relationship of these parts to each other. A comprehension of the “structure of consciousness” amounts to a comprehension of reality itself in Hanafi’s scheme, for “reality without consciousness is but a void.” Despite this dialectical formulation of consciousness as a relationship between ideational and material aspects of the subject’s existence, Hanafi’s subsequent analysis of the Islamic disciplines ends up privileging one and ignoring the other: while he emphasizes the influence of turath on the formation of social and political reality in modern Muslim societies, Hanafi barely considers that reality to have had any effect on the way turath has been interpreted and appropriated by contemporary Muslims.55
Hanafi’s non-dialectical account of consciousness may in part be attributed to his critique of Arab intellectuals’ treatment of turath. In this view, we could understand Hanafi’s failure to account for the effect of historical context on turath as an indictment of the inability of Muslim intellectuals to fruitfully engage the Islamic tradition. Put differently, the intellectual’s failure to render turath relevant in the present effectively produced its inert status within Arab collective consciousness. Indeed, this enduring inability of Arab consciousness to reinterpret tradition, whether among the intellectuals or the masses, finds ample justification in Hanafi’s examination of the Islamic disciplines and their presumed effect on contemporary consciousness. The inability to interpret turath, in some sense, is itself an effect of turath. The circularity of this argument finds partial relief in Hanafi’s narration of Islamic political and intellectual history. Hanafi explains how problematic understandings of authority and human agency came to assume prominence in the Islamic tradition, while other more empowering and emancipatory possibilities were relegated to oblivion. Unsurprisingly, the role of the modern scholar for Hanafi is to issue a reversal in this order of things through a thoroughgoing re-interpretation of turath’s foundational texts. In the next section, I adumbrate Hanafi’s phenomenological critique of contemporary Arab consciousness before turning to his re-interpretive endeavor.
Turath as Problem and Solution: Hanafi’s Critique of the Political Subject
In his account of the effect of turath on contemporary Arab consciousness, Hanafi argues that, in its current form, this tradition has produced an atrophy of human agency and rational thought in contemporary Arab society. Unlike earlier authors such as Laroui and al-ʿAzm, however, he locates the solution to these maladies, themselves a product of turath, within turath itself. Though Hanafi does not explicitly consider this formulation of turath as both problem and solution to be a paradox, his project is oriented towards unraveling the contradiction. Hanafi’s extensive examination of the various fields of Islamic knowledge is based on the premise that the hegemonic positions within these fields of knowledge have produced problematic dispositions in modern Arab consciousness.56 Hanafi’s “renewal” (tajdid) of these hegemonic positions proposes to transform such dispositions by altering their cultural roots. In other words, Hanafi locates the problem with turath to be its widespread understanding as a static “repository” of socio-political attitudes in mass consciousness, finding the proper solution to be a change in the substance, not the existence, of that “repository.” In both formulations, the modern subject that Hanafi seeks to produce is neither entirely produced through tradition nor autonomous of it. Rather, his is a subject as firmly rooted in tradition as it is produced by its immediate historical context. Hanafi envisions a dynamic interaction between two components of the subject’s existence – its inherited tradition and its social and political context. For Hanafi, the post-colonial subject suffers an “estrangement from the past and the present,” where the past is perceived as backward and traditional, and the present as slavish and inauthentic.57 The unity, or “homogeneity in time” that Hanafi hopes to produce in the modern Arab subject, is a pre-condition for a people’s (shaʿb) establishment of a “natural path for their development” whereby the relationship between the past, present, and future is comprehensible and clear.58 Hanafi adopts this modernist understanding of time in order to displace what he sees as the fragmentary effects of conceiving modernity as a necessary rupture with a traditional past, and of the present and future as radically discontinuous with that past.59
Hanafi’s definition of turath takes a more concrete turn when he embarks upon its re-examination in his multi-volume HRP. Here, he conceives of turath as a set of rational (ʿaqliyya) and transmitted (naqliyya) disciplines that have historically constituted the core of Islamic knowledge. Hanafi is mainly concerned with reconstructing the rational disciplines including dialectical theology (ʿilm al-kalam), philosophy (ʿulum al-hikma), Islamic legal theory (ʿilm usul al-fiqh), and mysticism (ʿulum al-tasawwuf).60 Each of these disciplines is germane to turath through its historical role in interpreting Islamic “revelation” as found in the Qurʾan and the prophetic tradition (al-sunna): theology through interpreting revelation’s meaning with regards to divinity and its relationship to the human and natural worlds; philosophy through converting these meanings into a worldview; jurisprudence through combining a knowledge of “revelation” and “reality” as the basis for “deducing particular judgments”; and mysticism as a method of interpreting the text that, as opposed to the other disciplines, relies on intuition, not reason.61 The objective of HRP is to reconstruct the rational Islamic disciplines through three distinct steps: recovering “how each of these disciplines was initially extracted from revelation” and theorizing that process of transformation from revealed data to a discipline to serve as a model for contemporary reconstruction; assessing the positive and negative aspects within each discipline through an examination of the genesis and development of each discipline and the purpose it was meant to serve in its historical context; and finally, reconstructing that discipline as an expression of revelation in view of the needs of the present.62
For Hanafi, the methodology best suited for the study of turath is phenomenological hermeneutics, a mode of interpretation in which human consciousness plays a central role. In Hanafi’s phenomenological scheme, a critical assessment of turath should entail an examination of what medieval Islamic texts had to tell us about the worldview of their original authors, followed by a reconstruction of these texts based on the worldview of the contemporary scholar or interpreter. The contemporary scholar would analyze the structure of these ancient texts to detect what Hanafi calls their underlying “structure of consciousness,” then move on to compare that structure of consciousness to his or her own experience of reality, and offer a re-reading of the text in question to reflect this modern-day understanding.63 One of Hanafi’s recurring examples of a “structure of consciousness” that is pervasive in Islamic theology, jurisprudence, mysticism, and philosophy is what he calls “the binary conception of the world.” In an essay written earlier in his career, Hanafi defined this conception as one that organizes the subject’s understanding of the world around the binary division between “God and the world, this world and the hereafter, good and evil, angels and demons, permitted and prohibited acts, etc.”64 This binary understanding, he added, is at the heart of many of the ailments of the contemporary “Egyptian personality,” including its fatalism, apathy, and submissiveness.65 Hanafi does not offer any historical or conceptual analysis of how this medieval binary worldview gets translated into modern-day ideas and practices in the social and political worlds. In a “leap” characteristic of his writing, he simply asserts this relationship and moves on to parse out its implications for contemporary Arab societies.66 The implications of this vertical distinction between the realm of divinity and the realm of human life, Hanafi tells us, is that the Egyptian subject has a sense that the divine is an all-powerful entity who resides at the top of a hierarchical structure, whose will is the only force determining every aspect of that structure’s operation. This overpowering sense of a divine presence that wills every thing, being, and action into existence leads to the “atrophy of human action, and its relegation to the realm of worship rather than the realm of reality.” It also leads to a resignation from worldly affairs, and, ultimately, to a severance of any relationship between revelation and lived reality.67
Two decades later, Hanafi returns to examining the nature and influence of the “binary conception of the world” on contemporary Arab consciousness in his reinterpretation of Islamic theology in From Doctrine to Revolution. In this work, Hanafi highlights the centrality of such a binary to the entire corpus of Islamic theology across its various historical stages:
The various terms [of Islamic theology] imply a particular mental division that in its turn conveys a particular kind of religious experience. This experience is sometimes expressed in the language of existence as in the division between the imperative (wajib) [the divine] and the possible (mumkin) [creation], and at others in the language of logic as with affirmation (al-ithbat) and negation (al-nafy), and still at others in the language of metaphysics as with the conception of unity (al-wihda) and plurality (al-kathra) … The truth however is that all these categorizations refer to the vertical character [of human experience], whereby being is itself polarized between two poles: the positive and the negative, being and nothingness, the one and the many … all of which are meant to express the concepts of divinity (al-ilahiyyat) in the language of pure reason.68
The “vertical religious experience” that underlies the various categories of Islamic theology and philosophy is, as Hanafi later explains, characterized by a conception of the divine as distinct from and presiding over the world, and as the entity in relation to which all human thought and action becomes intelligible.69 According to the dominant position within Islamic theology,70 he adds, natural and human phenomena are to be understood through how they relate to the realm of divinity. In that view,
God is in relationship with nature when in the form of a miracle … with [human] freedom in the form of [divine] will … with [human] reason in the form of revelation, sacred law (sharʿ), and transmitted knowledge (naql) … with the identification of good and evil through His creation of all things including human action … As such, God, through His attributes and actions, is conceived [by ancient theologians] as in relationship with all human problems.71
Hanafi finds this view of divine will as the mediator between human action and its effect, and between human reason and its exercise of judgment, as deeply problematic due to its denigration of human agency. The real significance of this vertical or binary conception of the world is in the effect it has on contemporary Arab consciousness. In that regard, Hanafi posits that it is
responsible for the eradication of our capacity for conducting scientific analysis of [natural and social] phenomena … of life, freedom, politics or ethics. It does this through eradicating the independence of these phenomena and by tying them to another cause, Allah … who always serves as their First Cause … this in its turn results in the alienation of the human being who conceives of the ways of the world as always controlled by a personalized transcendent Subject, and not by the actual conditions of the world.72
Through another “leap” between different historical periods and modes of human experience, Hanafi argues that the binary structure underlying medieval theological and philosophical concepts produces the incapacity of present-day Arabs to conceive of natural and social phenomena as immanent to the natural and human worlds. The subsequent inability to develop a proper or “scientific” understanding of the patterns that guide natural and human activity is but a symptom of this malady.
Written in the late 1980s, Hanafi’s critique is reminiscent of the earlier, less philosophically informed but just as vehement critique of “tradition” by Sadiq Jalal al-ʿAzm. In the immediate aftermath of the Arab defeat during the Six-Day War, al-ʿAzm asserts, “the Arab mind is not yet familiar with the explanation of events according to the modern scientific method.”73 Like Hanafi, al-ʿAzm attributes this problem to “the influence of mythological or traditionally religious thinking that explains events, in the end, by recourse to divine will … and that sees in the course of history a premeditated plan for the path of events”.74 If al-ʿAzm recommends the secularization of Arab society as the antidote to its “enchanted” understanding of the world, Hanafi, writing in the increasingly Islamized intellectual atmosphere of the 1980s, thinks otherwise. Only through a return to and renewal (tajdid) of the “tradition” that al-ʿAzm condemns could contemporary Arab consciousness be modernized, where modernization is understood as the reinterpretation of tradition in accordance with present-day experiences, and animated by emancipatory objectives.
Hanafi attempts to subvert the binary and hierarchical conception of the world salient in both medieval and contemporary Arab consciousness through recourse to medieval consciousness itself. In this context, he gives an account of another way of relating to revelation that was both truer and better suited to contemporary needs. This alternative relationship is a “horizontal” one: it features the continuous human reinterpretation of revelation to bring it to bear on an ever-changing human condition. This relationship is better because it re-establishes the dynamic relationship between revelation (represented by thought) and human action in history. “The text is not a product of history or a mere reflection of it,” Hanafi writes. Rather, “the text is what determines history and imposes itself upon it. The text has an independence from history, and history is but its carrier.”75 Bearing in mind Hanafi’s earlier words about the inseparability of text and context, or of the text and the act of its interpretation, we realize that Hanafi’s emphasis on the role of the text in history is simultaneously an assertion about the role of human agency in history.76 This relationship between thought and agency restores the much needed and often missing theoretical bases for human action whose absence we saw Hanafi lament in his commentaries on the Egyptian Revolution. But the horizontal relationship between revelation and reality, or between text and context, is not only the better one; it is also the position best suited for the gradualism with which the Qurʾan was initially revealed (asbab al-nuzul), and the repeated overriding of some its verses by later ones more suited to the condition of the early Islamic community (al-nasikh wa-l-mansukh).77 This original relationship had an interactive and dialectic character, whereby “the descent of every verse [of the Qurʾan] corresponded to a rationale in lived reality,” and once that reality superseded that rationale or need, “the verse was oftentimes replaced with another better-suited to reality’s change or progress.”78
Having established the primacy of his horizontal interpretive method, Hanafi moves on to deploy it in examining Islamic theology. He displaces major theological positions as irrelevant to the needs of present-day consciousness, and replaces them with others better fitted to the contemporary zeitgeist. In response to the salient Ashʿarite notion of divine mediation of human judgment and will, Hanafi posits an anthropocentric notion of human agency, for which he finds equally strong roots in the Islamic tradition. Hanafi’s reconstruction of agency comes in the broader context of his renewal of Islamic theology as a discipline primarily concerned with the human being and human action in history, and not, as is traditionally understood, with divine essence and attributes or the religious temporality of genesis and the end of days.
Renewal: Reconstructing the Subject of Turath
In his reconstruction of Islamic theology, From Doctrine to Revolution, Hanafi intends to recover the “original” horizontal relationship between the divine and the human subject, to valorize this understanding as more befitting of both the divine qasd (intention) and the spirit of the present time.79 But Hanafi also recovers the “human” in theology on a more overarching level by reconstructing Islamic theology as itself a study about human consciousness. Instead of being an examination of the essence (dhat), attributes (sifat), and actions (afʿal) of the divine, Hanafi interprets theology as reflecting consciousness’s yearning for perfection and for a relationship between the immanent and transcendent aspects of life. His renewal of theology not only recovers the activity of human consciousness in theology, but also tries to reconstruct theology as itself a study of the human condition, starting with the exercise of renaming its various components. Hanafi uses renaming as itself a form of renewal (tajdid) through the corrective criticism of Islamic theology to bring it in line with the intent of revelation80 – to provide guidance for humanity across time and space – as well as “the spirit of the time.”81 Accordingly, Hanafi reconstructs the two major components of theology, the study of divinity (al-ilahiyyat) and the study of oral traditions about prophethood and the Day of Judgment (al-samʿiyyat), as “the human” and “history” respectively. The study of the human is in turn divided into two main categories: the first, traditionally called “monotheism,” comprising an examination of “divine essence and attributes,” is reconstructed as the “ideal human being,” and specifically as the human experience of the divine and the “attributes” of the human subject who embodies perfection; the second, traditionally the study of “divine justice” through an examination of the human ability to “create acts” and to judge right from wrong (rebuke and approbation), Hanafi views as the study of the “actual human being,” his “freedom” and “reason”.82
Hanafi’s reconstruction of oral traditions, which he considers representative of the ancient conception of “history,” attempts to reinscribe the human subject as the primary agent of historical change. He reconfigures the study of prophecy and the Day of Judgment as the “general history” of humanity. General history also comprises “the trajectories of different peoples, the rise and fall of nations, etc.” as spelled out in revealed texts.83 Hanafi posits an intimate relationship between “general history” and “actual or particular history,” the latter pertaining to the realm of “faith, deeds, and the imamate (political rule),” or, in Hanafi’s parlance, “theory, practice, and political rule and revolution”.84 This relationship entails the fusion of the two “histories” within individual consciousness when general history is transmitted via revelation into “the consciousness of the individual, thus making it historical, and deeming individual consciousness responsible for human history, and for pushing it towards its ultimate end and goal in Judgment Day.”85
It is in this broader context that Hanafi reconfigures the theological understanding of human judgment and will. Hanafi observes that the dominant theological position on human judgment and will, that of the Ashʿarite school, is one that conceives of divine will as a precondition for human thought and behavior. In his reconstruction, Hanafi de-centers this understanding and replaces it with the Muʿtazilite position on the “creation of acts” (khalq al-afʿal) and “rebuke and approbation” (al-husn wa-l-qubh). The Muʿtazilite position conceives of the human subject as divinely endowed with the ability to distinguish between the rightful and wrongful paths and to act upon its judgments, and therefore to bear responsibility for its thoughts and actions before God. For the Muʿtazilites, the human subject’s ability to “create acts” in accordance with human judgment is a corollary of the conception of the divine as just; divine justice implies that God could not hold His creations responsible for their choices if He did not create within them the ability to decide right from wrong and to act accordingly. As a result, human injustice cannot be attributed to divine will.86 Juxtaposing the Muʿtazilite position to its Ashʿarite counterpart, Hanafi writes, “proving that the human being is the creator of his acts represents the highest level of progress attained by humanity thought. By virtue of this principle, the human being becomes a true actor, not merely a veil or mask behind which lies the real actor and where the human being is merely a metaphorical one.”87 Hanafi reconstructs the Muʿtazilite position regarding the “creation of acts” as “human freedom,” and judgment of the “good” (al-husn) and the “bad” (al-qubh) as “human reason.” These two principles are organically connected – human beings “create acts” that reflect their moral judgments and for which they then bear responsibility. Thus Hanafi argues that the relationship between “freedom” and “reason” is complementary, since “human freedom cannot exist except on the basis of the human capacity to judge right from wrong … so that this freedom would not be subject to whim or an expression of impulse.”88 For Hanafi as for the Muʿtazilites, the subject’s freedom consists in its ability to act according to reasoned judgments, or judgments that emanate from the inherent human capacity to recognize truth from error.89
While Hanafi casts his anthropocentric reconstruction of the theological principal of divine justice as faithful to the Muʿtazilite position, other Arab intellectuals would argue that such reinterpretations impose on medieval texts semantic and conceptual possibilities that they simply could not hold. For example, Al-Jabiri critiques the recent “re-discovery” of the Muʿtazilite tradition by Arab intellectuals in the 1970s and 1980s, and their attempt to consider it an example of an “Islamic rationalism” that presaged modern rationalism, issuing a caution to those who consider the Muʿtazilite tradition to assign human reason and free will the central place in determining the human condition. For the Muʿtazilites as well as for the Ashʿarites, al-Jabiri contends in his Critique of Arab Reason, human will and judgment are ultimately divine endowments. The difference between the two positions is that the Ashʿarites understood the divine intervention that endows the human subject with the ability to judge and to act to be constant; it is expressed in every thought and action. The Muʿtazilites, on the other hand, believe that will and judgment have been bestowed upon the human subject at the moment of the subject’s creation.90 For both interpretations, however, the ultimate purpose of vesting the human subject with will and judgment is so that the subject may know the divine and act according to that knowledge, or else bear the consequences. In both cases, neither will nor reason is understood as having origins in the subject or serving its own purposes. Rather, these capacities originate in divine will and are meant to fulfill a divinely ordained purpose (to know God, to command good and forbid evil [al-amr bi-l-maʿruf wa-l-nahy ʿan al-munkar], etc.).
Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd charges Hanafi with precisely this kind of historically uninformed “semantic transformation” (al-tahwil al-dalali): “the meanings of the original texts and ideas are transposed from their original contexts into contemporary ones. This is done, not through investing the original semantic potential of the text, but through the mediation of the scholars’ ‘consciousness’.”91 In Abu Zayd critique of Hanafi, it is the phenomenological approach to the text that emerges as culprit: its inattentiveness to the historical, social, and political contexts in which ideas are expressed leads to the superimposition of improbable contemporary meanings on historical texts. Whereas al-Jabiri would describe such readings of turath as characteristic of an “Arab reader burdened with his present,” seeking in historical texts salvation from his woes,92 Abu Zayd finds in them an expression of “ideological bias” to marginalized traditions (the Muʿtazilite, in this case) against hegemonic ones (the Ashʿarite).93
Critiques of ahistoricism notwithstanding, Hanafi’s reconstruction of the theological principles of will and judgment is characteristic of the intense re-engagement with the Islamic intellectual tradition that pervaded the Arab intellectual scene in the 1980s and 1990s. Perceiving themselves to be heirs to the late-nineteenth century Islamic reformism of Jamal al-Din al-Afghani (1838–97) and Muhammad ʿAbduh (1849–1905), Arab intellectuals of this generation have tried to break what they see as the Islamist monopoly on religious discourse by mobilizing “religion” in the service of “progressive” causes. For some, including al-Jabiri, Arab unity was the political project that bore the most potential for attaining progressive ends.94 For others, such as Salim al-ʿAwwa, it was the development of a discourse of modern citizenship that was simultaneously faithful to the Islamic tradition and in line with a modern understanding of politics.95 For Hanafi, meanwhile, such causes included radical reforms to rectify the remarkable inequality in Arab societies and the development of a revolutionary political discourse that institutes genuine political liberty and equality, a position he articulated in his short-lived ideological formulation of the “Islamic Left.”96
Conclusion
Throughout the Arab world, Islamic reformism and Islamic modernism, secular nationalism, and what would come to be referred to as political Islam or “Islamic fundamentalism” had varying effects on the intellectual culture of the interwar period as well as post-colonial attempts at nation-building. Several decades later, the concerns of that earlier period have had audible reverberations in Arab thought. As with their turn-of-the-century counterparts, the “neotraditionalists” (al-turathiyyun al-judud) of the late twentieth century are concerned with “authenticating” their ideas through reference to the Islamic intellectual tradition.97 Bearing the imprint of the postwar nationalism in which they reached intellectual maturity, this generation of intellectuals was largely shaped by the “radical” leftist discourse of 1950s and 1960s, with its emphasis on Arab unity and socioeconomic transformation. These intellectuals attempted to put European concepts and methodologies in the service of formulating an indigenous modernity. By deploying European philosophy to revisit the Islamic intellectual tradition, Hanafi and his generation attempt to take the problem of tradition and modernity to a new plane, to create a new “problem-space,” where the Arab cultural and political future is no longer articulated in terms of the retrieval of an inherited past, the unconditional embracement of Western epistemologies and norms, or an apologetic blend of both.98 Rather, these intellectuals are concerned with the problem of the conditions of possibility for producing cultural and political independence and modernity, which entails, among other things, democratic politics, building an egalitarian society, a rationalist epistemology, and a culturally free and creative public space in postcolonial society. Hanafi’s HRP, much like the writings of al-Jabiri, takes the constitution of the subject by turath as a starting point whose effects should neither be overlooked nor uncritically accepted, but rather considered as a subject of careful analysis to discern the future possibilities that such constitution makes possible. Rather than insisting on a choice between East and West, their project is to orient the Arab subject towards its constitutive past(s), its crisis-ridden present, and its prospective future.
Modernity for these intellectuals, therefore, is not simply conceived as an adherence to a set of principles and the revocation of others, but as a particular relationship to time. The goal for Hanafi is neither to deny turath nor to slavishly adopt Western cultural and political forms. Rather, it is to produce a “proper” disposition of the subject vis-à-vis the past that simultaneously provides a sense of continuity, resulting in a sense of wholeness or homogeneity through time, as well as an awareness of the radical historical and experiential difference between past and present. Hanafi pursues this double mission by mobilizing the concept of consciousness and highlighting its existential and hermeneutical dimensions. For Hanafi and other intellectuals of his generation, modernity does not mark an end to tradition, but its continuation by other means. Tradition is marked as the “past” whose relevance can still be felt, but which needs to be continuously reinterpreted in order for it to guide a fundamentally different “present.” Far from having a “neutral” starting point, such examinations are informed by the modernist commitments of their authors. What distinguishes Hanafi’s project from earlier examinations of turath, though, is its systematic and sustained consideration of turath’s intellectual corpus, its attempt to understand turath on its own historical and experiential terms before seeking to adapt its concepts, methods, or substance to present social and political reality.
1Al-Ahram, April 11, 2012. Hanafi made his comment at a panel discussion of his work, “Heritage and Renewal: A 50-year Journey,” organized by the Egyptian Public Book Organization in April 2012. http://gate.ahram.org.eg/UI/Front/Inner.aspx?NewsContentID=195386, accessed on July 9, 2014.
2SCAF assumed its role as the sole executive authority in Egypt during the period from Mubarak’s ouster in February 2011 until the election of Muhammad Morsi to the presidency in June 2012.
3Al-Ahram, “Heritage and Renewal.”
4Ibid.
5Ibid.
6For an in-depth account of Hanafi’s intellectual formation during his time in Paris, see Kersten (2011: 127–76).
7Ibid., 120.
8Ibid., 128.
9These articles were later published in two volumes as Hanafi (1981; 1982).
10Hanafi (1992a).
11See, for example, Hourani (1983 [1962]: 103–60); Euben (1999: 93–113); Haj (2009: 67–108); Rahman (1982: 43–83); Saeed (2013: 27–41).
12I borrow this formulation of the Islamic reformist resistance to both taqlid and taghrib from Samira Haj’s (2009: 77–86) discussion of Muhammad Abduh’s reformist project. It is important to note that the pejorative use of the concept of taqlid is also a product of Islamic reformism itself. As Wael Hallaq (2004: 27) notes, taqlid was traditionally understood as an “authorizing tool … whose function was the defense of the legal school as a methodological and interpretive entity that was constituted of identifiable theoretical and substantive principles.” Hallaq further explains that, through taqlid, the various legal schools in the Islamic tradition distinguished themselves through their “consistency in identifying a body of doctrine that was formed of the totality of the founder’s opinions, substantive principles, and legal methodology, be they genuinely his or merely attributed to him.” In this context, the practice of ijtihad was understood as the role of legal specialists, fuqaha, in “elaborating on the legal significance of revealed texts” or, as Hallaq (2007, 12:168) puts it elsewhere, ijtihad was the continued hermeneutic activity entailed in bringing legal principles to bear on specific life situations since the “fiqh was no more than a juristic guide that directed the judge on the ground to resolve a situation in due consideration of the unique facts involved therein.”
13Hanafi (1982b: 57).
14Hanafi (1992b: 21–22). On the modernist usage of ijtihad, see Haj (2009: 7–9); Voll (1983: 32–45); Zaman (2012: 75–107).
15MacIntyre (1988: 12).
16For an account of the widespread use of “turath” in Arab intellectual circles in the early 1970s, see Boullata (1990).
17Al-Jabiri (2006 [1991]: 24).
18Massad (2007: 17).
19Ibid.
20For a categorization of Arab intellectuals according to their position vis-à-vis turath, see Hanafi (1992: 27–34); al-Jabiri( 2006 [1980]: 16–22).
21For a succinct account of this binary and its critique, see al-Jabiri (1985: 40–57).
22Hanafi (2008).
23Laroui (1967); Al-ʿAzm (1968). Laroui and al-ʿAzm are discussed in the chapters in this volume by Aboul-Ela and Weiss, respectively. On Laroui, see Kassab (2010: 48–115).
24Al-Jabiri (1982b).
25Hanafi (1982: 68).
26Hanafi (1982b: 70) refers to the Free Officer’s overturning of the Egyptian Monarchy in 1952 as a revolution, not a coup.
27Hanafi (1992a: 30). Elsewhere, Hanafi (Hanafi and al-Jabiri [1990: 23]) argues that one of the main reasons for the secular elite’s estrangement from turath is its association with political oppression through the mobilization of turath as a legitimating discourse by contemporary Arab regimes.
28Hanafi (1992a), 27.
29Hanafi (1998: 1:70).
30Hanafi (1989: 207–26); Kersten (2011: 105–25).
31“Tajdid al-turath al-thaqafi” (“The Renewal of Cultural Heritage”), al-Tajdid al-ʿarabi, September 16, 2013, www.arabrenewal.info/2010-06-11–14-11–19/46766.html, accessed on April 15, 2014.
32For Hanafi as for many of his generation, the conception of the intellectual was that of a member of a vanguard actively engaged in educating society and guiding it towards social and political revolution. For an elaborate depiction of the role of the intellectual in instituting cultural and political change, see Laroui (1976).
33Abu Rabiʿ (2004); Kassab (2000). See, too, the chapter on women’s rights and Islamist discourse by McLarney in this volume.
34Flores (1988: 27) translates al-turathiyyun al-judud as “new partisans of the heritage.” I have chosen to translate it as “neo-traditionalists” to connote the same sense: a declared allegiance to turath, or the tradition of Islamic knowledge in which these authors partake. It is worth mentioning that Flores uses this expression – which he notes is used in Egypt to refer to Hanafi, Tariq al-Bishri, and Muhammad ʿImara, among others – to refer to thinkers who “used to hold secularist views and now subscribe to political Islam.” This characterization reduces Hanafi’s (and others’) approach to the Islamic tradition to one of unconditional allegiance, rather than complex re-interpretive engagement, as this chapter argues.
35Hanafi (1981; 1982).
36Kersten (2011: 153).
37Hanafi (2008).
38Hanafi (1992b: 16).
39Ibid.
40Hanafi (1988: 6).
41Ibid.
42Ibid.
43Hanafi (1992b: 27, 29). Elsewhere Hanafi (1988: 1:58, 68) distinguishes between Islamism, or “political Islam,” as an ideological movement that calls for a “retours aux sources,” and traditionalism, or the institutions and scholarly approaches associated with the study of Islam in Egypt and the Islamic world more generally. In this chapter, I only engage Hanafi’s critique of Islamism, and not his critiques of traditionalist approaches to Islamic knowledge. On the latter (including Hanafi’s critique of the Orientalist approach to Islamic studies), see Hanafi (1992b: 69–105). On the distinction between “Islamism” and “traditionalism,” see Haddad and Stowasser (2004a: 9–10). Such a reductive reading of the Islamist position has been duly criticized. See Meijer (2009); Hirschkind (2001: 18).
44Mahmood (2006: 323–47).
45Indeed, the seeming tension between Hanafi’s consideration of turath as an expression of specific historical conditions, and, simultaneously, as a “theory of action” in the present is resolved by Hanafi’s designation of the “psychological repository of the masses” as the means through which turath travels through time, and the vehicle through which a historically specific past could invest in the present and future.
46Hanafi (1989: 14). See, too, Esposito and Voll (2001: 68–69).
47Hanafi (1992b: 15).
48On the use of “consciousness” in modern Arab thought, see Farag (2001: 93–120); El Shakry (2014); Di-Capua (2012).
49Hanafi (1992b: 15). The conception of the masses, al-ʿamma or al-ʿawwam, as connoting the inferior rational capacity of the majority conveys the view that several contemporary Arab thinkers hold about the influence of the Muslim theologian and philosopher Abu Hamid al-Ghazali (1058–1111) on Arab-Islamic intellectual and political history. Hanafi (1998: vol. 1); al-Jabiri (1984).
50Hanafi (1992b: 15).
51Ibid.
52Here, as elsewhere, Hanafi (1988–1989: 170–87) places various kinds of Islamist ideology in one category with regards to their orientation towards the Islamic tradition (or to what each of these ideologies considers as the authoritative sources within that tradition). In this connection, it is important to note that Hanafi sees Sayyid Qutb (1906–66), one of Islamism’s most prominent ideologists, as an important source of inspiration. Hanafi finds Qutb’s earlier works to be more insightful than the ones he wrote during his incarceration in 1956–1966, but he also conveys an understanding for the circumstances that prompted Qutb to assume a more radical position in his latter works. See, too, Kersten (2011: 109–110).
53Hanafi (1992b: 15).
54For the Arab nationalist use of “consciousness,” see “The Constitution of the Ba’th party,” in Haim (1962: 233–41). For the Arab Marxist use of the term, see “The Declaration of the Organization of Communist Action in Lebanon,” in Ismael (1976: 178–95).
55Hanafi (1992b: 53).
56Critics have pointed out that Hanafi does not provide a specific analysis of how the Islamic disciplines have produced a submissive, apathetic consciousness. See, for example, Abu Zeid (1990: 54–109); Akhavi (1997).
57Hanafi (1992b): 20.
58Ibid.
59Koselleck (2004); Pandolfo (2000).
60Hanafi (1992b: 155).
61Hanafi (1988: 1:232).
62Hanafi (1992b: 149–51).
63Ibid., 143–45.
64Hanafi (1981: 126).
65Ibid., 119.
66I borrow the expression “leap” or “wathba” from Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd’s incisive analysis of Hanafi’s reinterpretation of Islamic theology. Abu Zeid (Abu Zayd) (1990).
67Hanafi (1981: 126, 128).
68Hanafi (1988: 1:400–01).
69Ibid., 85.
70Here the reference is to the Ashʿarite school of theology, widely considered to be the predominant position in the Muslim world since the time of al-Ghazali (1058–1111). The Ashʿarite position is usually considered to be an attempt at reconciling two theological positions: the Muʿtazalite position that the meaning of revelation could be rationally understood and justified and that human beings were able to judge truth from error and were therefore responsible for their acts, on the one hand, and the traditionalist position (usually referred to by ahl al-hadith) that revelation was knowable only by faith, and that human action was primarily determined by God, on the other. The Ash’arite position, founded by the ex-Muʿtazalite Abu al-Hasan al-Ashʿari (d. 936), understood faith as prior to reason in recognizing religious truth, but introduced rationalist methods of inquiry into traditionalist theology. With regards to divine predetermination of human thoughts and actions, the Ashʿarites coined the concept of “acquisition,” or the notion that “god creates the acts of individuals but individuals ‘acquire’ them; the act is God’s creation in that it is only at the moment action that he creates the power to act in the individual.” Watt (1962: 66). For more on the schools of Islamic theology, see ibid., 46–68; Makdisi (1962).
71Hanafi (1988: 1:85–86).
72Ibid., 86.
73Al-ʿAzm (2011 [1968]: 63).
74Ibid.
75Hanafi (2005: 32).
76Hanafi (1988: 6).
77Hanafi (1981: 123).
78Ibid., 128.
79Hanafi (1988: 1:87).
80This is a paraphrase of Samira Haj’s (2009: 7) definition of tajdid.
81Kersten (2011: 160).
82Hanafi (1988: 5:319–20).
83Ibid, 320.
84Ibid, 321.
85Ibid.
86Hanafi (1988: 3:60–71).
87Ibid, 186.
88Ibid., 353–54.
89The Muʿtazilites conceive of “truth” and “error” as judged by reason to precede, and necessarily converge with, the “truth” and “error” of revelation. This is based on the principle that “reason precedes revelation” (al-ʿaql qabl wurud al-samʿ), which is why theirs is generally perceived as “an approach that gives supremacy to reason at the expense of revealed data.” Vasalou (2008: 1–2).
90Al-Jabiri (1986: 314).
91Abu Zeid (1990: 93).
92Al-Jabiri (2006 [1980]: 26).
93Abu Zeid (1990: 93).
94Al-Jabiri (1995).
95Al-ʿAwwa (2007).
96Esposito and Voll (2001); Browers (2004); Haugbolle (2013).
97Salvatore (1995).
98Scott (2004: 4).