This guy has some serious following amongst officials.
Mohammed Abed al-Jabri is without a doubt one of the most important contemporary Arab intellectuals. His work focuses on the failure of the Enlightenment in the Islamic world and the search for an Arab identity in modernity. Sonja Hegasy introduces the Moroccan philosopher
The Moroccan philosopher al-Jabri subjects Arab culture to fundamental analysis and critique in the Enlightenment tradition
The starting point of Mohammed Abed al-Jabri's work is the question of referential authority in Arab-Islamic societies. Who determines Muslim history? Who is entitled to read women's rights into the sacred texts? What kind of technical or social innovations are allowed and with what justification? These are all issues pointing to a basic conflict about the individual's power of judgement.
Al-Jabri holds the view that the changes brought by modernity to the Islamic world also bring about change in the religion of Islam. In fact, this can be observed everywhere. Islam in Morocco differs considerably from Islam in Malaysia as well as from the Islamic convictions of "Black Muslims" in the United States.
Yet, this is where Jabri's approach encounters resistance in the Arab world, as many Arabs still consider themselves the custodians and preservers of the "true" and therefore only Islam.
Deconstruction of Arabic thought
The discussion that al-Jabri has set into motion centres on the individual and rational interpretation of sacred texts. He frees these texts from the patterns of interpretation based in the 8th century and grants the ability of interpretation to the rational power of judgement exercised by every individual.
In his four volume work, The Critique of Arab Reason, al-Jabri analyses the structural boundaries of scientific ways of thinking, which he regards as the cause of the failure of the modernization process in the Arab world.
In his "Contemporary Critique" of Arab-Islamic philosophy, Al-Jabri rejects what he calls the current polarization of Arab thought between an imported modernism that disregards Arab tradition and a fundamentalism that would reconstruct the present in the image of an idealized past
In the introduction to his first volume from 1984, al-Jabri includes his The Critique of Arab Reason in a series of publications on the theme of crisis and renaissance of Arabic culture that have appeared over the last hundred years.
His work revolves around the issue of how knowledge is produced. This has led al-Jabri to investigate the grammar of the Arabic language, as well as Muslim law, theology, mysticism, rhetoric, and philosophy.
According to al-Jabri, these fields all exhibit the same structures of knowledge production. He claims that the method of analogy is deeply rooted in thinking within the Arab-Islamic cultural sphere, as this method was carried over from Islamic jurisprudence to all fields of science.
In the science of religious interpretation (ulum al-bayan), the unknown is always classified below that of the already known. Reasoning in the natural sciences (ulum al-burhan) is, by analogy, based solely on deduction. Mysticism (ulum al-irfan), on the other hand, has meant for most intellectuals a retreat into the private sphere, so that here, as well, no momentum towards modernization can arise.
Al-Jabri criticises these three types of understanding as posing the greatest barrier towards innovative and modern thinking, as a prescribed pattern for interpreting the past can also have consequences for the politics of today.
Overcoming traditional patterns of thinking
By contrast, European and Greek culture, al-Jabri notes, are not only characterized by the division between knowledge and magic, but, in particular, by their concern with the conditions for the possibility of thinking.
He calls for giving up the idea of unity (tauhid) outside of the religious sphere, because only in the clash of various and contradicting theories and theoreticians, between the natural sciences, religion, and state power does the necessary dynamism for progress develop.
In his works, al-Jabri shows the relativity and contextuality of the Arabic cultural heritage and concludes that it cannot provide any guidelines for action in the modern world. He also argues against the polemic that the individual striving for reason, protest, and criticism are "imported drugs from the West" and will only weaken the Muslim world.
In his works, al-Jabri illustrates the relativity and strong ties to context of Arab cultural heritage
Since the 1970s, al-Jabri has been one of the advocates of a radical, secular leftist society in the Arab world. He was one of the active members of the Union Nationale des Forces Populaires (UNFP), the left wing of the Istiqlal party, which split off from the main party in 1959.
After the UNFP was banned in Morocco in 1973, he served from 1975 to 1988 as a member of the politburo of the Union Socialiste des Forces Populaires. Al-Jabri is co-author of a philosophy textbook published by the Ministry of Education and used as teaching material.
In his position at the university, al-Jabri has introduced a generation of alienated students to their historical heritage and its unorthodox trends. He has greatly contributed to the discourse on Arab identity by popularizing philosophical and scientific knowledge within the framework of his political activity and through his teaching. In 2008, he was awarded the Ibn Rushd Prize for Freedom of Thought in Berlin.
Al-Jabri proposes the thesis that the structure of Arabic thinking has until now not brought forth a "scientific revolution" and subsequently no modernization, because it has internalized the systems of religious interpretation.
To work out and exemplify these structures of thought is among the most important tasks needed in order to overcome the intellectual standstill in the Arab world.
A plea for the freedom of thought
Al-Jabri is against tradition that means merely repeating history. And he is also against tradition that merely has to be learnt by rote
By deconstructing religious interpretation and law, al-Jabri's philosophy has taken on a political edge. Al-Jabri deconstructs the position of Islamists, who produce a straight line, supposedly objective, and overpowering story in order to prescribe a single identity upon the individual.
Al-Jabri's approach to the theory of knowledge begins with an emancipatory impulse, as he places the engaged citizen who is able to interpret historical and contemporary events at the centre of his endeavour.
He regards the freedom of the individual and the differences between individuals as the core of social (self-) organization. Differences become a constitutive basis for society. Here one finds the social explosiveness of his work.
Al-Jabri rallies against a tradition that only believes in the repetition of history. He also rejects any tradition that only requires its adherents to learn by rote in order attain its mastery.
Yet, for al-Jabri, mastering a tradition means knowing its various aspects and thereby recognizing its relativity and historicity. Only those who are open to innovation can shape the future. Innovation and creativity can only blossom where there are no bans on thought.
Sonja Hegasy
© Qantara.de 2009
Sonja Hegasy holds a PhD in Islamic Studies and is Vice Director of the Centre for Modern Oriental Studies (ZMO) in Berlin, Germany.
"Reason is a light which is certainly needed to illuminate the darkness, but it can also be useful in full daylight." (Mohammed Abed al-Jabri)
Mohammed Abed al-Jabri was without doubt one of the most significant social theorists of the Arab world. His dissertation on Ibn Khaldun, a pioneer of modern sociology, in 1970 brought him the first doctorate awarded by the University of Mohammed V in Rabat following Moroccan independence. It was the first of a total of over thirty works.
Al-Jabri was both a critical philosopher and a proponent of a left-wing programme of social policy. From 1959 onwards, he worked with the Moroccan opposition politician Mehdi Ben Barka in the Socialist Union Nationale des Forces Populaires (UNFP). And he remained committed to education, initially as a teacher, then as a school inspector, a writer of school books, a university teachers and mentor.
In the tradition of Immanuel Kant
Drawing on the history of non-orthodox Muslim movements, such as the Kharijites, Ismailis, Shiites or Sufis, he called for an oppositional mode of thought. Al-Jabri saw himself in the tradition of Immanuel Kant, in that he called on his readers to insist on their right to define the world on the basis of their observations, and not on the basis of pre-defined, traditional or out-of-date authorities.
He was, in the best sense, a "public intellectual." In 1990, he published a North African "East-West Dialogue" as a kind of argument and counter-argument with the Egyptian philosopher Hassan Hanafi. His main work, "The Critique of the Arab Mind," appeared in Beirut and Casablanca between 1984 and 2001 in four volumes, and led to lively controversy.
According to al-Jabri, two main elements in the history of political ideas continue to have an influence in the Arab world and are responsible for its continuing stagnation: imitation rather than critical thought has become the main form of awareness, and rulers are counselled but they are not controlled.
To counter that influence, Al-Jabri wanted to strengthen the rational, intellectual tradition in Muslim thought and drew on the Andalusian commentator of Aristotle, Averroes or Ibn Rushd, as his authority.
Like many contemporary intellectuals in the Arab world, Mohammed Abed al-Jabri is scarcely known in Germany. It was the current writer who introduced the philosopher and publisher Reginald Grünenberg to his works in 1995. Ever since, Grünenberg has persisted with his plan to publish al-Jabri's major works in German in his Perlen Verlag publishing house. An introduction to his work appeared in 2009, with an introduction by one of al-Jabri's assistants.
Dialogue with the Muslim world
I was able to bring that volume to al-Jabri last May. He would have loved to have lived to see the German translation of "The Critique of the Arab Mind." An English translation is also still in progress. As a result, one of the most important Arab intellectuals is scarcely known in the West, however much people may talk of the importance of dialogue with the Muslim world.
Al-Jabri's attack on conventional authority is as explosive socially as the works of the Egyptian Farag Foda, who was killed by an Islamist group in 1992, or those of the Sudanese scholar Mahmud Mohammed Taha, who was hanged in 1985.
Both Taha and Foda were declared to be apostates, and thus beyond the protection of the law, by the state religious authorities. It was a sign of the greater liberalism of Morocco that al-Jabri never faced such threats. The Moroccan king even offered him national honours, but he always refused.
A target for Islamists
Reginald Grünenberg asked him in a letter published in 2005 whether his provocative views had never led to repression or violence against him.
For millions of young people, Al-Jabri has reconciled modernity, their desire for democracy and their cultural heritage, says the Moroccan sociologist Fatima Mernissi
Al-Jabri replied, "I have never yet found myself the object of any kind of aggression on account of my political position or on account of those of my ideas which express an ideological or cultural position… When I criticise an intellectual tendency or wish to distance myself from it, then I do so solely as a thinker who wishes to make his position clear, and not as an opponent or an enemy."
But the day after his death, Islamist websites were stirring up hatred against him.
The Moroccan feminist Fatima Mernissi once wrote that, to judge from the heated debates in which students are everywhere continuously engaging, al-Jabri was probably the philosopher who was most read by young people in the Arab world.
For "millions of young people," Al-Jabri had reconciled modernity, their desire for democracy and their cultural heritage, she wrote. Young people read his works eagerly, and got to know a version of Muslim history in which reason and the formation of individual opinions were a fundamental element.
Al-Jabri was a member of a well-educated generation which experienced the independence struggles in North Africa as young men; they went on to influence the formation of their society in every area. His motto was, "Have the courage to use your own intelligence!"
