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Main Islam, State, and Modernity: Mohammed Abed al-Jabri and the Future of the Arab World
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ISLAM, STATE, AND MODERNITY Mohammed Abed al-Jabri and the Future of the Arab World With a foreword by ABDOU FILALI - ANSARI MET EDITED BY ZAID EYADAT, FRANCESCA M. CORRAO, AND MOHAMMED HASHAS Middle East Today Middle East Today Series editors Fawaz A. Gerges Department of International Relations London School of Economics London UK Nader Hashemi Center for Middle East Studies University of Denver Highlands Ranch CO USA The Iranian Revolution of 1979, the Iran-Iraq War, the Gulf War, and the US invasion and occupation of Iraq have dramatically altered the geopolitical landscape of the contemporary Middle East. The Arab Spring uprisings have complicated this picture. This series puts forward a critical body of first-rate scholarship that reflects the current political and social realities of the region, focusing on original research about contentious politics and social movements; political institutions; the role played by non-governmental organizations such as Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Muslim Brotherhood; and the Israeli-Palestine conflict. Other themes of interest include Iran and Turkey as emerging pre-eminent powers in the region, the former an 'Islamic Republic' and the latter an emerging democracy currently governed by a party with Islamic roots; the Gulf monarchies, their petrol economies and regional ambitions; potential problems of nuclear proliferation in the region; and the challenges confronting the United States, Europe, and the United Nations in the greater Middle East. The focus of the series is on general topics such as social turmoil, war and revolution, international relations, occupation, radicalism, democracy, human rights, and Islam as a political force in the context of the modern Middle East. More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/14803 Zaid Eyadat · Francesca M. Corrao Mohammed Hashas Editors Islam, State, and Modernity Mohammed Abed al-Jabri and the Future of the Arab World Foreword by Abdou Filali-Ansary Editors Zaid Eyadat University of; Jordan Amman, Jordan Francesca M. Corrao LUISS Guido Carli University of Rome Rome, Italy Mohammed Hashas LUISS Guido Carli University of Rome Rome, Italy Middle East Today ISBN 978-1-349-95155-0 ISBN 978-1-137-59760-1 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-59760-1 Library of Congress Control Number: 2017936341 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: © Goldnetz/Alamy Stock Photo Cover design: Fatima Jamadar Printed on acid-free paper This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature The registered company is Nature America Inc. The registered company address is: 1 New York Plaza, New York, NY 10004, U.S.A. The essential interrelationship between thought as an instrument and thought as content is an indisputable fact. If we take into account another indisputable fact as well, which is that thought whether as an instrument of thinking or ideas as the conceptual product itself, is always a consequence of contact with the environment with which it interacts, especially the social and cultural environment, and it is simple enough for us to recognize the importance of this environment in the formation of thought, both as instrument and as content, and thus, the importance of the particular specificity of social and cultural environment in forming the specificity of thought. Consequently, Arab thought, for instance, is Arab, not only because of its being conceptions and views and theories that reflect the Arab reality, or which expresses it in one form or another, but because it is also a result of the method or way of thinking in which a number of givens contributed to its formation, including the Arab reality itself and all the particular phenomena relating to it. Mohammed Abed al-Jabri, The Formation of Arab Reason (1982; Center for Arab Unity Studies and I.B. Tauris, 2011). To Arab philosophers and scholars who think, speak and write in difficult times To dedicated scholars who care about the well-being of this world Foreword The Voice of New Aspirations and Grand Narratives According to Eugene Rogan, author of a recent history of the Arabs, the recovery of sovereignty has been a major concern for the Arabs since an Egyptian army lost a battle against Ottoman troops near Aleppo on 24 August 1516. This defeat, by "paving the way for the conquest of the Arab lands by Ottoman Turks",1 opened the way to a series of invaders and colonizers who have dominated the Arab world for centuries. The Ottomans were followed by various European powers, and it was only around the middle of twentieth century that new, independent Arab states emerged from what seemed a period of long hibernation. The Moroccan philosopher Mohammed Abed al-Jabri (1935–2010) belonged to the historical moment when national sovereignty was thought to be back in hand and where full emancipation from external domination seemed possible. Among the most urgent tasks that needed to be addressed, the one which prevailed in the mind of al-Jabri was about the Arab cultural heritage and its possible role in contemporary societies. This brilliant and rich heritage, which enabled Arabs to experience their common identity, needed extensive rethinking, a radical reappraisal of every aspect of life relevant to the shaping of the new, future-bound collective identity. One of the early challenges was that the heritage of high culture that could be adopted for the definition of national identity could not ix x Foreword be confined to any one of the newly created nation states. Most political activists and intellectuals believed that these states were artificial units and that the only real entity was the pan-Arab nation, "from the Ocean to the Gulf", that could claim classical Arabic as their language for formal, cultured communication. Their main task was to overcome division and bring about political and cultural unity at the earliest. Al-Jabri subscribed entirely and wholeheartedly to this vision. He saw his political activism within left-wing circles of the Moroccan nationalist movement as part of the Arab struggle for their unity and the regaining of full sovereignty. In fact, both as a militant of the nationalist movement and as an academic, al-Jabri felt himself to be ready for the enormous task of rethinking the Arab cultural heritage and its role in the present age. He began by a rediscovery of two prominent intellectual figures from the past: Ibn Khaldun and Ibn Rushd. Later, his work led him to engage in one of his most ambitious intellectual projects, i.e. to entirely rewrite the intellectual history of the Arabs. The idea was not to offer another historical narrative or compilation about thinkers and writers of the past, but to go much further, to submit or to engage with the heritage in critical ways, adopting the tools and questions that have come to the fore in our time. His reading of the heritage was intended to go beyond the display of rich diversity and eye-catching expressions. He wanted to reach out to the assumptions, rules and aims—implicit and explicit—that had motivated various intellectual ventures of the past. The outcome of this project was a series of four books under the overall title of naqd al-'aql al-'arabī (Critique of Arab Reason), the first volume about the formation or genesis of Arab reason, the second about structures, the third about its politics and a decade later he added a fourth on ethics. It is in this series of books that he suggested the first of his famous triads: bayān (rhetoric), 'irfān (intuitive knowledge) and burhān (demonstration) as being three different ideals that defined partially overlapping but independent circles of thinkers and literati in the Arab past. His "discovery" of Ibn Rushd (Averroès) had been a momentous turn in his thought. Bringing such a medieval figure from learned and specialized circles into the light of public discussion enabled al-Jabri to achieve one of his most desired goals, that of engaging the public in debates about issues of rationality, tradition, religion and politics through critical evaluation of the phases of classical history and open adhesion to, even enthusiastic apology for, those who advocated demonstrative reason. He could appeal to public opinion as his language was accessible to all those Foreword xi who could read a newspaper; it was almost devoid of technicalities and carried messages that struck a chord in a wide spectrum of audiences. Later, in his al-'aql al-ssiyyāsī al-'arabī (Arab Political Reason), he proposed another set of three key concepts: qabīla (tribe), ghanīma (booty) and 'aqīda (creed) that helped make sense of political thinking and behaviour of Arabic-speaking peoples in the past. The first was a short term for the group spirit or sense of collective identity, which was mainly tribal in character and capable of driving actors on the political scene; the second points to an economy where plundering and looting came to be seen as legitimate rewards for collective political action; and the last refers to religious beliefs and their influence in motivating political behaviour. The focus on the intricate action of the three forces of Arab history took the narratives proposed by al-Jabri radically away from apologetic discourses with their emphasis on "pure intentionality" and strictly religious motivations to the exclusion of social and economic forces. Al-Jabri also turned his attention in the later part of his career to the most sacred part of the Arab-Islamic heritage, the Qur'ān, offering another grand narrative where he attempted to bring a historical perspective to the study of the scriptures, but managing at the same time to show respect for the sacred as conceived by most Muslim audiences. What will be remembered about al-Jabri above all is his outspoken attitude, his "daring" to challenge more than one view held as self-evident. One of them is the distinction between scholarly, erudite discourse and essays aimed at wider audiences. He wrote on subjects usually considered as the preserve of specialists in ways that belong to the op-ed style of journalism. In this way, he brought topics from the academic arena to the public sphere. This was bitterly criticized by many of his colleagues, who saw in his popular writings a retreat from academic rigour. The other is the assumption, widely held in Arab educated circles, that the cultural florescence of the medieval Muslim West (the Maghreb and Al-Andalus) was an echo of what had taken place in the Muslim East, a late re-enactment or imitation of the high culture of the East. Contrary to this view, he clearly stated that it was in the Muslim West that the ideal of rational demonstration (burhān) emerged, which was later adopted in European learned institutions and led to the birth of modern science and philosophy. At the same time, the Muslim East was "bewitched" by the ideal of mystical knowledge ('irfān) and turned its back on reason and rationality. This raised a storm of protest and refutations from intellectuals in the East, and intensified controversies which xii Foreword dogged him until the end of his life. Mohammed Abed al-Jabri left no one indifferent; intellectuals throughout the Arab world were passionately either for or against him. His oeuvre offers several original insights which are just beginning to be assessed with some degree of objectivity. The present volume is the first publication in English to offer such assessments in a number of essays by specialists focusing on various aspects of one of the most original and multifaceted Arab philosophers and intellectuals of our time.2 Abdou Filali-Ansary Emeritus Professor Aga Khan University London, UK Notes 1. "The trajectory of Arab history across these different periods has been marked by peaks and troughs of greater and lesser sovereignty and independence of action. For to say that the Arab world has been subject to foreign rules does not mean the Arabs have been passive subjects in a unilinear history of decline. Arab history in the modern age has been enormously dynamic, and the Arab peoples are responsible for their successes and failures alike. They have worked with the rules when it suited them, subverted the rules when they got in the way, and suffered the consequences when they crossed the dominant powers of the day". Eugene Rogan, The Arabs: A History (London: Penguin, 2009). 2. The unavoidable focus on intellectual battles fought by al-Jabri may leave the impression that he had the kind of aggressive and arrogant attitude displayed by some great and influent thinkers towards the others, especially those who did not belong to the circles of their immediate followers. Yet, my personal memory of him takes me always to a moment where, after one of his famous and densely attended lectures, he was surrounded by a large group of students, competing between them to have his attention and listen to their enquiries. Having seen me at a distance, he gently pushed away the little crowd around him and came to ask me: where have you been, my friend, all this time? I did not know what to say. I had left academia for a position that I thought no one would take notice of. He then continued: putting in place institutions that provide resources for learning is essential, but we want you back to the real work and action, that of engaging philosophically with the issues of our society in our time. Later, I was impressed by one of the stories he tells about his childhood and young age where he mentions that, until the age of sixteen, he had been a shepherd living in a region of Morocco where people spoke Amazigh, and generally knew Foreword xiii little, if any of the Arabic language. He was expected to pursue the same occupation and the lifestyle that went with it. However, the elders of his family thought that he took such good care of his sheep that he ought to be sent to a large town to seek a job that would enable him to put his skills to a better usage. This is how he found himself in Casablanca, the largest city in Morocco, at a time where the national movement was defying the authority of the French Protectorate, which was a cover for straight colonization. Enrolled as a militant in the movement, he joined private schools that taught the Arabic language and, from then on, never stopped working for causes that he came to believe in, those of critical reason and the Arab unity as an ideal community founded on justice and equality. Abdou Filali-Ansary is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy, Aga Khan University, London. He was Director of the Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilizations, Aga Khan University in London from 2002 to 2010. He served, from 1984 to 2001, as the Founding Director of the King Abdul-Aziz Foundation for Islamic Studies and Human Sciences in Casablanca, Morocco, having previously taught modern philosophy in the Faculty of Letters in Rabat. Dr. Filali-Ansary has contributed to academic discourses on secularism, democratization and civil society in Muslim contexts and in 1993, co-founded the bilingual Arabic and French journal Prologues: revue maghrébine du livre. His work includes a translation into French of Ali Abderraziq's landmark book, Islam and the Foundations of Political Power (La Découverte and Le Fennec, 1994), and essays entitled, Is Islam Hostile to Secularism? (Le Fennec, 1996, 1999) and Reforming Islam: An Introduction to Contemporary Debates (Paris: La Découverte, 2003). Acknowledgements The editors wish to thank the Arab Renaissance for Democracy and Development Foundation (ARDD) in Jordan, the University of Jordan, the Department of Political Science, the School of Government and the Center for Ethics and Global Politics in LUISS Guido Carli University in Rome, Resetdoc Dialogues on Civilizations, and the Moroccan Embassy in Rome for having supported this project, when it was first organized as a conference. Thanks go also to all the participants for their commitment to this project and to the many others that have supported the idea, in particular professor Sebastiano Maffettone of LUISS University, professor Abdallah Saaf of Mohammed V University and Director of alJabri Foundation in Rabat at the time, professor Fred Dallmayr of Notre Dame University, Dr Abdellah Redouane, the Secretary General of the Islamic Cultural Center of Italy in Rome, besides Samar Muhareb, Giancarlo Bosetti, Valentina Gentile, Francesco Alicino, Juan Macias Amoretti, Cenap Aydin, and Daanish Faruqi; they all joined our alJabri Day in Rome and enriched it immensely with their presentations and roundtable discussion. Special thanks go to Mohammed Hashas for his efforts in having conceptually rendered this project possible and in having coordinated this volume and the First International al-Jabri Day, organized in LUISS University of Rome on 5 May 2015, in cooperation with the above partners. xv Contents 1 Introduction—Critique and Change: Al-Jabri in Contemporary Arab Thought 1 Mohammed Hashas, Zaid Eyadat and Francesca M. Corrao Part I Al-Jabri's Reconstruction of Arab-Islamic Thought 2 Mohammed Abed al-Jabri and Ibn Khaldun: A Path to Modernity 25 Massimo Campanini 3 The Critique of Arab Reason Between al-Jabri and Tarabishi 41 Abdul Karim Barghouti, Jamal Daher and Nadim Mseis 4 The Arab Reader by al-Jabri: The Question of Disjunction and Rejunction 65 Kinira Monica Carbone 5 An Intellectual Between the Maghreb and the Mashreq: Mohammed Abed al-Jabri and the Location of Thought 79 Idriss Jebari xvii xviii Contents 6 Al-Jabri and His Introduction to the Qur'ān 109 Mariangela Laviano 7 The International Becoming of an Arab Philosopher: An Analysis of the Non-reception of Mohammed Abed al-Jabri in Euro-American Scholarship 127 Mohamed Amine Brahimi 8 Al-Jabri in Indonesia: The Critique of Arab Reason Travels to the Lands Below the Winds 149 Carool Kersten Part II Politics, Ethics, and the Future of the State in the Arab World 9 State and Religion in al-Jabri's Political Thought 171 Mohsine El Ahmadi 10 "Dare to be Wise!" On the Reception of al-Jabri Post-2011 183 Sonja Hegasy 11 Reflections on Education and Culture in al-Jabri's Thought 205 Francesca M. Corrao 12 A Critique of al-Jabri's Arab Ethical Reason 219 Zaid Eyadat and Hanadi Riyad 13 The Ethical Dialectic in al-Jabri's "Critique of Arab Reason" 249 Harald Viersen 14 The Arab Possible State: From al-Tahtawi to al-Jabri 271 Mohammed Hashas Appendix: Al-Jabri's Biographical Sketch 303 Index 307 Editors and Contributors About the Editors Zaid Eyadat is Professor and former Dean of the School of International Studies and Political Science at the University of Jordan, and Chairman of the Board in Arab Renaissance for Development and Democracy Organization (ARDD, Jordan). He completed his Ph.D. at the University of Southern California in Political Science. He is Middle East and North Africa Regional Representative for Fundación Global Democracia y Desarrollo (FUNGLODE), Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. His publications include "Minorities in the Arab World: Faults and Fault Lines" in Eva Pföstl and Will Kymlicka, ed., Multiculturalism and Minority Rights in the Arab World (Oxford UP, 2014), "Political Islam in the Arab Spring" in Eva Pfostl, ed., Religion and Politics (APES, 2014), "Hegemony, Islamic Activism, and the State: Islamic Movements and the Arab Spring in Jordan" in Massimo Campanini, ed., Islam and the Arab Revolutions (Il Mulino, 2013), Migration, Security, and Citizenship in the Middle East. "The Modern Muslim World" series. Palgrave Macmillan, August 2013, "The Arab Revolutions of 2011: Revolutions of Dignity" in Stephen Calleya and Monika Wohlfeld ed., Change and Opportunities in the Emerging Mediterranean (Mediterranean Academy of Diplomatic Studies, 2012); Count Bernadotte's Mediation to Palestine 1948: Mediation and Assassination (University of Jordan, 2011). xix xx Editors and Contributors Francesca M. Corrao is Professor of Arabic Culture and Language at the Faculty of Political Science in LUISS University of Rome, Director of MISLAM Programme (Master in Economics and Institutions of Islamic Countries) of the School of Government at the same university and chair of the Scientific Committee of the Fondazione Orestiadi in Gibellina (Sicily) and Dar Bach Hamba in Tunis. She is member of The Union of European Arabists and Italian representative of the EURAMAL, European Association of Modern Arabic Literature professors. She has been Research Member of the Institute of Oriental Philosophy, Soka University, Tokyo. Among her most recent works: Arab Revolutions. Mediterranean transition, Mondadori, 2011, 'Ijtihād' and 'Relevance of Sharia' to Contextualize Universal Human Rights Discourse," in Global Policy 2013, Arab Minorities, Liberalism, and Multiculturalism, in Multiculturalism and Minority Rights, 2014, L'Evoluzione Culturale all'Origine delle Rivoluzioni Arabe, in Economia e Istituzioni dei Paesi del Mediterraneo, 2014. Mohammed Hashas is a Postdoctoral Fellow at LUISS Guido Carli University of Rome, Department of Political Science. He taught Arabic, and Islam and Politics at the American University of Rome (2014– 2015). Hashas was a Visiting Research Fellow at Babylon Center for the Study of the Multicultural Society in Tilburg, the Netherlands (JulyOctober 2010), and at the Center for European Islamic Thought at the University of Copenhagen (September 2011–July 2012); he will be a Visiting Research Fellow at Oxford Center for Islamic Studies (midJanuary–mid-March 2017) and at ZMO Center in Berlin (April–May 2017). His papers have appeared so far with the Journal of Muslims of Europe, Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs, American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences, Oriente Moderno, the Journal of Studia Islamica, besides contributions to edited books and Arab journals. He is currently co-editing two volumes on Imams in Western Europes: Developments, Transformation and Institutional Challenges (Amsterdam UP, 2018); he is also finalizing his monograph Intercultural Geopoetics: An Introduction to Kenneth White's Open World (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2017) and working on The Idea of European Islam manuscript. Editors and Contributors xxi Contributors Mohsine El Ahmadi Cadi Ayyad University in Marrakesh, Marrakesh, Morocco Abdul Karim Barghouti Birzeit University, Birzeit, Palestine Mohamed Amine Brahimi The School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (EHESS), Paris, France Massimo Campanini Department of Letters and Philosophy, University of Trento, Trento, Italy Kinira Monica Carbone LUISS University of Rome, Rome, Italy Francesca M. Corrao LUISS Guido Carli University, Rome, Italy Jamal Daher Birzeit University, Birzeit, Palestine Zaid Eyadat University of Jordan, Amman, Jordan Mohammed Hashas LUISS Guido Carli University, Rome, Italy Sonja Hegasy Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient (ZMO), Berlin, Germany Idriss Jebari American University in Beirut, Beirut, Lebanon Carool Kersten King's College and SOAS London, London, UK Mariangela Laviano PISAI Pontifical Institute for Arabic and Islamic Studies, Rome, Italy Nadim Mseis Birzeit University, Birzeit, Palestine Hanadi Riyad University of Jordan, Amman, Jordan Harald Viersen Centrum Für Nah- und Mitteloststudien (CNMS), Marburg, Germany Notes on Transliteration The volume adopts the International Journal of Middle East Studies (IJMES) transliteration system and Chicago style of referencing. However, we have avoided transliterating proper names; for example, in the text you will find Mohammed Abed al-Jabri, instead of Muḥammad ʻAbid al-Jābirī, and al-Ghazali, instead of al-Ghazālī, unless they are quoted in this or that way in original citations and references. For the common lexicon on the studied themes, you will find Arabic words and concepts in transliteration, like these: Arab (to be found as 'arabī), Hadith (ḥadīth), Halal (ḥalāl), Haram (ḥarām), Hudud (ḥudūd), Ijtihad (ijtihād), Jahiliyya (jāhiliyya), Khaldunian (khaldūniyya), Madhab (maḏhab), Maghreb (maghrib), Mashreq (mashriq), Quran (Qur'ān), Sharia (sharīʻa), Turāth (turāth). All transliterations are in lower case, unless otherwise in original citations or when in the initial of a sentence after a full stop. The definite Arabic article "al-" is used and sometimes is abridged as "l-" when in the middle of a sentence; "turāth" (tradition) is found as "al-turāth" in definite cases, though it is pronounced as "at-turāth." xxiii CHAPTER 1 Introduction—Critique and Change: Al-Jabri in Contemporary Arab Thought Mohammed Hashas, Zaid Eyadat and Francesca M. Corrao A deficit in global justice is very apparent. Local injustices do travel globally, and global injustices get their way to localities. What we mean by global justice is what Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na'im describes in Muslims and Global Justice (2011) as "globally inclusive conceptions of justice to be realized by human beings for themselves, everywhere, through their own self-determination". Global injustice is mobile now and permeates especially vulnerable economies and societies. There was hope that World War I and World War II could be the last catastrophes of a large scale. But the changes they have brought to particular geographies, frontiers, and demographies will apparently still have repercussions in the foreseeable future. The focus of our research as well as this volume concerns a particular geography and culture: the Arab world, by which we mean a heterogeneous world far away from being condensed in one description or narrowed down to one picture, be it cultural, religious, political, or M. Hashas (*) · F.M. Corrao LUISS Guido Carli University, Rome, Italy Z. Eyadat University of Jordan, Amman, Jordan © The Author(s) 2018 Z. Eyadat et al. (eds.), Islam, State, and Modernity, Middle East Today, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-59760-1_1 1 2 M. Hashas et al. whatsoever. The factors, internal and external, that interact in and with this particular world are many, and singling one or few ones, and ignoring the rest of factors misrepresents the dynamics of such a world and its diversity. This mobile injustice has intensified for the last 5 years since the beginning of the so-called Arab Spring or Arab awakenings, ignited by the self-immolation of the Tunisian street vendor Mohamed Bouazizi on 17 December 2010. The USA and Europe are not sheltered from similar moments of unrest. Social protests in Greece and Spain, the looming rise of right wing populism across Europe, demands for protection against police brutality by people of colour in the USA coupled with a rise in xenophobic and Islamophobic attacks during the presidential campaign of Donald Trump, and the bloody conflict in Iraq, Yemen, Libya, and most devastatingly in Syria are no longer local problems; they migrate beyond borders; the predicament in the Arab world is no longer only Arab, and it has not been purely Arab for the last two centuries. Terrorists of al-Qaeda and now of ISIS (the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq), either as results of the sociopolitical predicament in the region or as its consequence, or both, are hitting in the capitals of Europe and everywhere else to terrorize the world. The vast majority of victims of this terrorism are Arab-Muslims. The thesis of "failure of political Islam" (of Olivier Roy 1994) appears rhetorical, seeing all the events political Islam has caused or has been involved in. The radical version of political Islam is now seen as a form of "islamization of radicalism", as the French scholar Olivier Roy argues in Le jihad et la mort (Jihad and Death 2016), in opposition to the more "culturalist" view of his compatriot Gilles Kepel who focalizes the big role of religion in this radicalization in Terreur dans l'exagone: genése du jhad (Terror in France: Genealogy of Jihad 2015). These two opposing French perspectives on the issue have become more apparent after the two terrorist attacks in Paris in January and November 2015. A third voice from within the French context is that of Francois Burgat who replies to both scholars above, in Comprendre l'islam politique: une trajectoire de recherche sur l'alterité islamiste 1973–2016, in 2016, and sees that they both ignore the geopolitical factor in their analyses of Islamic radicalism and violence (Understanding Political Islam: A Search for an Islamic Alternative 1973–2016). These scholarly examples summarize in general the intensity of the debate in and around Europe and its 1 INTRODUCTION—CRITIQUE AND CHANGE: AL-JABRI IN … 3 connection to the Arab world. Their present and future, like their past, seem bound together. This boundedness, however, is not easy. It is not here that we intend to review the major political and intellectual trajectories in the modern Arab world. Doing so would require a minimum consideration of also the political and intellectual trajectories in the modern Europe—and also the USA. Such a task is difficult in one work or through one approach because it is obvious that each geography and entity of the two, or three if the USA is considered an independent apart from Europe though it is in many ways its continuity, is plural and heterogeneous. It is against essentialisms and generalizations that more serious work has to be done. The Arab intellectual tradition has stood against invisibilty or disregard in world scene and against obscurantism in its region. The early revivalist movements since the eighteenth century until the middle of the twentieth century, the Arab nahḍa (Renaissance), have opened the tradition to the modern world and its various issues. Albert Hourani's Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age 1798–1939 (1962) captures well this moment. The legacy of this period still lives, but it is obscured by both internal and external factors. This early movement was led by religious scholars and later was joined by political liberation leaders, who also had religious trainings or were religious scholars as well. It was mosques and religious schools that trained those early pioneers of reform and revival, before the modern school took space in the educational system in the vast Arab and Islamic world. Concentrating on liberation from European colonialism, on translation of the modern sciences and social theories, and on the education of the masses were the major priorities of these avant-guardist theologians, scholars, political activists, journalists, and public intellectuals. The post-colonial period that broadly ranges from the 1940s to the 1960s marks another wave of intellectual dynamics in the Arab world. This again is in no way separate from European history and politics: the horrible Holocaust in Nazi Germany, among other factors religious and political, has led to the formation of the state of Israel in 1948 in the geographic centre of the Arab world, considered the heartlands of the vast Islamic world. The religious motives of creating a Jewish State have given reasons for the rise of a religious motive from the Islamic side: the rise of political Islam, especially its radical wings, cannot and should not be studied without comparative studies of the growth of the 4 M. Hashas et al. place of religion in the discourse of state formations in this particular region. Early modern Arab reformists did not reflect that much on the religiosity or secularity of the state in their reform agendas, particularly because the Ottoman Caliphate was still a reality till 1924. It was independence, liberation, and cultural awakening that were at the heart of the early reformists, and not the state and its form, religious, secular, or "seculareligious", to borrow the description of the political sociologist Assef Bayat for the Egyptian state (2007). This does not mean that an alliance of religious and secular forces was not already taking shape in newly formed Arab or Islamic states, as is the case with Saudi Arabia and its connection with Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab and his movement, or as is the case with the formation of the state in Pakistan in 1947 (see Muslim Zion of Faisal Devji, 2013), and both antecede the formation of Israel, for example. This to say that religion-state formation does not concern a particular tradition or geography alone; if Europe solved the issue over the centuries, other parts of the world have a different history, and a different perspective on the matter, made complicated by various global factors now, which Europe did not face when it was forming and reforming its nation states. Since the emergence of religion, and Islam in particular, in the global scene as a force of action, during and after the Cold War, it is not the "Arab" world per se that has taken prominence in scholarship and news, but it is "Islam". Philosophers, intellectuals, and scholars coming from this region, let alone ordinary citizens, are now often designated by their "religion", called "Muslims", and not "Arab", because politics and the market appear to prefer certain nomenclatures to others in this period of history, and for other particular ideological and geostrategic reasons as well. This does not mean that it is a wrong approach to study issues as "Islamic" first; there is a lot of objectivity in such a way of reading the world, since there are serious issues that Muslims themselves know are complicated and need to be discussed and studied for comprehension of diverse problematics, and for a better political world. Various anthologies and edited volumes on contemporary Arab-Islamic thought are labelled "Islamic", and when examined one finds that while "Islam" still retains a vital role of the worldview of such a part of the world or such a scholar, other factors besides religion are not so much integrated into the analysis, as if every little or big event is certainly "Islamic". It is high time the recent magnum opus of the young Harvard scholar Shahab Ahmed (1966–2015) What is Islam? The Importance of Being Islamic (2016) 1 INTRODUCTION—CRITIQUE AND CHANGE: AL-JABRI IN … 5 is seriously integrated as a "paradigm shifter" in the study of Muslim societies and Islam in general. Simply put, Ahmed argues that the context, defined by Muslims but not only, has always played a major role in the practice and interpretation of Islam, that is why one might see apparent "coherent contradictions" in what is being Islamic. As an axial factor in human and social affairs, Islam becomes flexible and loose when lived. The Moroccan philosopher Mohammed Abed al-Jabri (1935–2010) under study in this volume was very aware of this, that is why his focus was on "Arab reason", and not on "Islamic reason" on which the renowned Algerian-French Islamologist Mohammed Arkoun (1928–2010) worked. We return to this note below as we proceed. During the post-colonial period, the "post-anti-colonial critique", in the words of the cultural critic Ella Habiba Shohat ("Notes on the 'Post-Colonial' 1992"), developed all over the once called Third World, and the Arab world has contributed to it. The second most important intellectual movement in the Arab world coincides with this period of critique and has become known now as the 1967 generation, i.e. the generation that lived the 1967 Six Days War of Israeli and Arab Armies, in which the latter were badly defeated. Ibrahim Abu Rabi subtitles his important work with a note we are making here: Contemporary Arab Thought: Studies in Post 1967 Arab Intellectual History (2004). That is, the Arab intellectual tradition has taken a different path since 1967; it has become more focused, and both theologically and politically clearly oriented and well articulated. It is a different generation from that of the early revivalists and reformists. The post-1967 Arab intellectual tradition practises what Elizabeth Suzane Kassab calls in her rich work Contemporary Arab Thought (2010) "double critique". It critiques internal intellectual stagnation and dictatorships, and also critiques external hegemony. Arab scholarship does both; it is a scholarship of resistance, and in that resistance seeks innovation and opens horizons of thought. But it is unfortunate that there is very little interest in translating Arab intellectual products into European languages. Even the big names of this generation that have made it to world prominence, like Hassan Hanafi, Mohammed Mahmoud Taha, Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd, and many others, are not translated but minimally; there are generally one or two books that are translated from Arabic, and the rest are citations or chapter excerpts. The case of the studied philosopher al-Jabri is one example: none of the four volumes of his magnum opus Critique of Arab Reason (The Formation of 6 M. Hashas et al. Arab Reason 1980, The Structure of Arab Reason 1984, Arab Political Reason 1990, Arab Ethical Reason 2001) has been translated into Spanish, French, Italian or German, to list these European languages. The English translation of the first volume has come out only recently as The Formation of Arab Reason: Text, Tradition and the Construction of Modernity in the Arab World (I.B. Tauris and CAUS, 2011)—the subtitle is not in the original text; it is an addition. What circulated in European languages earlier is the French rendering from two of his books: Us and the Tradition: towards a Contemporary reading of Our Philosophical Heritage (naḥnu wa al-turāth: naḥwa qirā'a mu'āsira li turāthinā alfalsafi, 1980), and The Tradition and Modernity (al-turāth wal-hadātha, 1991); these two books are excerpted from to compose the French title Introduction à la critique de la raison arabe (La Dècouverte 1994), by the two translators-admirers of the work of al-Jabri Ahmed Mahfoud and Marc Geoffroy. It is this same French version that the Italian and German versions are based upon and not upon the original texts of al-Jabri. The other available texts, also excerpts, of al-Jabri in English are Arab-Islamic Philosophy: A Contemporary Critique (translated by Aziz Abbassi 1999), and Democracy, Human Rights, and Law in Islamic Thought (I.B. Tauris and CAUS 2009). Such a shortage in translating important works of contemporary Arab philosophers and thinkers applies to all other figures. Moreover, scholars of Arab-Islamic studies often footnote them or devote some chapters to them and do not use their concepts in dealing with Arab world politics, sociology, anthropology, etc., as if these scholars have no place in the real Arab world, which is not true, as this volume will show in the case of al-Jabri and his influence. Since the formation of the terrorist ISIS, libraries in Europe have been filled with works on its ideology, genealogy, etc., in few months, while serious philosophical and theological works from the same Arab region have hardly found such abundant space and funding. Though the Arab Spring social protests of 2010–2011 shook a lot of prejudices about the Arabs and the thesis of "exceptionalism of the Middle East", in the sense that it is incompatible with modern aspirations and democracy, the emergence of ISIS since 2014 brought back the old stereotypes of the "despotic East" narrative. This narrative needs a counter-narrative from a scholarly perspective, not for any ideological or political agenda in scholarship, but because scholarship requires that a fair representation of what is there, what millions of Arabs, their philosophers and scholars say of their own region and their own aspirations. Besieging scholars 1 INTRODUCTION—CRITIQUE AND CHANGE: AL-JABRI IN … 7 and philosophers when they are already besieged by dictators, terrorist movements, and academic weak infrastructure is an intellectual boycott that is very inacceptable, especially that the same Euro-American context that requires Arab-Muslims to speak against obscurantism ignores its serious contribution in various ways. We go back to the point of post1967 generation to situate the work of al-Jabri. We have reservations about scholarly views that see a polarization among engaged scholars and intellectuals in the Arab world. In Trends and Issues in Contemporary Arab Thought (1990), Issa J. Boullata, for example, argues that there are the traditional intellectuals who are conservative and the progressive ones who are modern and Westernized. A scholar very acquainted with the varied views among Arab intellectuals would not dare to give such a view of polarization, chiefly prior to 1990, the date of the publication of the book, and shift that happened in world order post-1989. Even in politics, it is hard to speak of polarization, though the intensity of the debate grew since the Arab Spring and coup d'états in countries like Egypt in July 2013. (Remember our earlier note on the wording of Asef Bayat of Egypt as a "seculareligious" state). In Political Thought in Islam: A Study in Intellectual Boundaries (2005), in which attention is devoted to Arab philosophers and scholars besides other figures outside the Arab world, Nelly Lahoud adopts three types of intellectual movements in Arab political discourse (types developed by Ghassan Finianos, "Islamists, apologists and free thinkers", 2002): the Islamists, the Apologetics, and the Intellectuals. She complains that all these discourses are political oriented, though differently. She says that each camp disregards the other and monopolizes the discourse on politics. She devotes few pages to al-Jabri when she talks on the category of "intellectuals". She criticizes him, and others, for being too political in their intellect and their reading of the tradition for renewal. She blames the intellectuals for being militant intellectuals who lose the sense of innovation and the practice of philosophy because their ideas have a political mission, sociopolitical change as an aim. Here she echoes a dominant critique voiced by some known critics, like the Lebanese Ali Harb who laments the over-presence of the political in Arab intellectual and philosophical productions. This reading is not far from that of the Syrian thinker George Tarabishi—the famous critic of al-Jabri—who opines that there is no modern Arab philosophy yet for various reasons: first, there is a crisis in philosophy in general since science is taking precedence; second, modern 8 M. Hashas et al. philosophy requires the conditions of modernity, which the Arab world still lacks, so modern philosophy is practiced in the modern world or the world that initiated modernity; third, as long as there is no theological revolution in the Arab world and through which reason alone becomes the arbiter, we cannot speak of modern Arab philosophy (harṭaqāt I: addīmuqrāṭiyya wal 'ilmāniyya wal ḥadātha wal mumāna'a al'arabiyya [Heresies I: Democracy, Secularism, Modernity, and Arab Resistance], 2006). Tarabishi's view is also shared, but differently argued for, by the Egyptian philosopher Hassan Hanafi (Islam in the Modern World, vol. 1, 1995) and some other scholars, Arabs and non-Arabs. This debate also echoes classical similar debates whether there is an Islamic philosophy or not. This requires a detailed reply that we cannot do here (insights into this can be found in Mohammed Hashas, "Islamic Philosophy I, II, III", 2014). This volume is not on Arab philosophy, but it is on an aspect of it. It deals with a philosophical project that classifies Arab intellectual history and contributes to contemporary Arab political philosophy. The claim that there is no Arab philosophy, however solid it may appear, is not grounded, because it denies non-modern societies their philosophical existence and contribution, especially societies that enjoyed philosophy and philosophical debates in the far past, and whose continuity or revival they seek, as is the case with the Arab world today. If European modernity itself is the result of (bloody) political events— nurtured by other sociocultural, religious, and economic factors—why would not other societies also engage with their own (bloody) political events, in particular times and spaces, to theorize a world which they can call modern, postmodern, or whatever they wish to call? Philosophy is not only pure rational judo movement in the abstract; it is grounded on the here and now of the thinker-philosopher before it travels to the abstract. In his piece "What is Enlightenment?" Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) made it clear that freeing oneself from tutelage and the guidance of another through reason is what enlightens. To accept the situation that science is winning over the space of philosophy, that Europe is modern and one should go through it to understand and then overcome modernity, and that a theological-religious revolution is needed before reason is liberated, and only then we can speak of philosophy, as Tarabishi argues, is an absolute denial of freedom and denial of creative resistance to tutelage that European modernity has entrenched the world in, the Arab world included. The work of the Moroccan philosopher Taha Abderrahmane, who differs from al-Jabri's 1 INTRODUCTION—CRITIQUE AND CHANGE: AL-JABRI IN … 9 approach of reading the tradition, has a take on the issue and has devoted his energies also p ost-1967 shock to rebuild Arab philosophy on its own sources, language, and new horizons and paradigm (al-haq al'arabī fī alikhtilāf al-falsafī [The Arab Right to Philosophical Difference], 2002). Al-Jabri was aware that the project he started was politically oriented, and he gave himself and all Arab thinkers and scholars that right on the condition that they first state clearly their project or ideological attitude and at the same time, second, control it with objective attitudes in scholarship. His first text that brought him respect among Arab scholars is Us and the Tradition (naḥnu wa al-turāth, 1980). The long introduction of the book outlines his historicist and epistemological approach of reading the tradition, and puts forward the idea that as an insider to this tradition and region, he wishes to propose a path of renewal for a better future. In the same introduction, one finds also how he differentiates his project from other projects, that he considers either Eurocentric, too Marxist, too secular, too liberal, or too conservative. In the introduction, one sees that the aim he traced for himself was to unveil the ideological motives that permeate the epistemological structures or systems that formed the history of the Arab-Islamic world. It is of paramount importance to remember this line of his approach; otherwise, he would be misread. That is, al-Jabri had to integrate history, sociology and anthropology, besides linguistic and theological immersion into the tradition, in his digging into the knowledge systems of the Arab-Islamic world and how they manifested themselves in real politics. The medieval historiographer Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406) was his "mentor"; we note here that his first book, which is originally his PhD dissertation, is entitled Group Feeling and the State: Manifestations of a Khaldunian Theory of History of ArabIslamic Societies (al-'aṣabiyya wa dawla: ma'ālim naẓariyya Khalduniyya fī attārikh al-'arabī al-islāmī, 1971). The Khaldunian historicist-sociologist spirit that read the history of nations, how they rise and fall, and that of the Arabs from that perspective, must have been fundamental in the intellectual making of al-Jabri and his reading of the history of ArabIslamic world of ideas, added to that of course his familiarity with the European tradition, Marxist literature, and the French schools in linguistic analysis, structuralism, and deconstruction. It is al-Jabri's historisist spirit and epistemological focus that allowed him to read three systems of thought in The Formation of Arab Reason (al-bayān/rhetoric or linguistic analysis, al—ʻirfān/gnostic system, alburhān/demonstrative reasoning), three systems in Arab Political Reason 10 M. Hashas et al. (al-qabīla/tribe or tribalism, al-ghanīma/bountry or war rewards in wealth division, in the sense of "rentier state" in modern terms, al'aqīda/creed or dogma), and five value systems in Arab Ethical Reason (the Persian, Greek, Sufi, Arab, and Islamic). What al-Jabri finds in the structure of Arab reason is that what has dominated Arab value systems are those of rhetoric and gnosticism, instead of deductive reasoning and rationalism, which flourished but died away soon. As to the political reason, he finds out that an economy based on favouritism and nepotism and a creed that became dogmatic, literary, and conservative dominated the culture, and still do. As to ethical reason, he says that Persian authoritarian kingship, Greek, especially Platonic, idealism and Sufi isolationism and irrationalism are systems that neglected the other two most important value systems: the Arab value system of magnanimity, or al-murū'a, and the Islamic value of public good, al-maṣlaḥa al-'āmma, for social justice. Against the intellectual and political block in the region, al-Jabri used his scholarly "critique" to write many essay-books that treat contemporary issues, like globalization, culture, education, renewal, democracy, human rights, sharia, European thought, Arabism, Arab issues, Palestine, and Moroccan politics. His work was adopted from the very beginning by the known Center for Arab Unity Studies in Lebanon (markaz dirāsāt al-waḥda al-'arabiyya, CAUS). His "critique" made of him not only a "Moroccan" but most importantly an "Arab" philosopher. He became a frequent guest-speaker in the Arab world, despite the intellectual division he introduced in the contemporary Arab intellectual tradition; i.e. he argued for the idea that the West part of the Arab world or the Maghreb, which included North Africa and al-Andalus, was more rational in its intellectual production than its Eastern part, the Mashreq, which he accused of having introduced irrationalism and obscurantism in Arab-Islamic philosophy and culture—reversing in so doing the claim that the Maghreb always followed or mimicked the Mashreq. He waged serious attacks on giant medieval philosophers like Ibn Sina (Avicenna, d. 1037) and al-Ghazali (d. 1111), and the theosophic-Sufi tradition that developed through them. On the other hand, he elevated the status of Maghreb philosophers and positioned them as the rationalist harbingers of the European Renaissance, and Ibn Rushd (Averroes, d. 1198) stands on top of these. He believed that the future could only be Averroest, in the sense of being rational, objectivist in reading Sharia in context, and able to separate the domain of religion from the domain of philosophy in a 1 INTRODUCTION—CRITIQUE AND CHANGE: AL-JABRI IN … 11 reconciliatory and complementary manner. Averroes became the most important "mentor" for al-Jabri; he devoted a number of years reviewing and directing the re-publication of all his works. It is for these various reasons and factors cited above that al-Jabri focalized "Arab reason" in his work and not "Islamic reason". His classifications allowed him to see that Islam per se is neither the problem nor the only factor that defines the Arab-Islamic history of ideas and politics. On the contrary, as his Arab Ethical Reason argues, it is the negligence of Islamic values of public good and social justice that have deteriorated Arab conditions. But at the same time he warns that over-politicization of religion in the modern age just leads to further conservativism, irrationalism, and refusal of change. His reading of the Arabian context at the time of revelation, and sharia objectives, also as underlined by Maghreb theologians and philosophers like Ibn Rushd and al-Shatibi (d. 1388), gave him further reasons to give religion just the amount of importance he saw fit for Arab renewal. While he recognized its vital importance in revival, since it is the cornerstone of the Arab civilization, he did not see that the current problems are only religious-driven and that a religious reformation is what the Arab world needs to revive; he refused the Orientalist misrepresentations of Arab-Islamic history and replied to them in a couple of chapters in his various books. At the same time, his critique of Islamists and salafis is present everywhere in his project, since they, too, essentialize religion and block it in time and space, as some Orientalists and Eurocentrists do. That is why, again, his critique was to the mindset and language of this region, i.e. Arab reason and Arabic language, and not religion per se. At a certain point, he says that the world needs a new Marx that opens his horizon to the role and energy of religion for a more dynamic revolution. In the last decade of his life, al-Jabri devoted his time to working on the Qur'ān; he took the endeavour because of 9/11, 2001 terrorist events in the USA, which have since raised more issues on Islam, the Qur'ān, violence, etc. Before that he intended to produce a work on European history of ideas, but 9/11 changed his mind. He produced volumes on it, one is madkhal ilā al-qur'ān al-karīm [An Introduction to the Qur'ān] (2006) and the three others are fahm al-qur'ān al-ḥakīm: attafsīr alwādiḥ ḥasaba tartīb annuzūl [Comprehending the Judicious Qur'ān: A Clear Exegesis According to the Sequence of Revelation] (vols., I, II, III, 2008), a work that has not been studied yet, and in this volume, one chapter probes issues in his introduction to the Qur'ān. On the personal 12 M. Hashas et al. level, al-Jabri says in his autobiography Excavations in Memory from Distance (ḥafriyyāt fī aḏakira min ba'īd, 1997) that he chose to believe; he also recounts the ethical and religious education he received as a child in Figuig, a Berber town surrounded by an oasis in the east of Morocco. It is in his early childhood that he read classics of Arabic literature, memorized some parts of the Qur'ān, and learnt Arabic grammar. Al-Jabri is well received in the Arab world and beyond—and "reception" here does not necessarily mean "agreement" on his ideas and how he presented them. Some of his works and reformist ideas found their way to the Islamic world in Asia, like Turkey, Iran, and Indonesia, and were discussed among scholars and Islamic reformist movements. Al-Jabri's "critique of Arab reason" is now a must-read for any serious scholar of Arab-Islamic history of ideas, and contemporary Arab-Islamic thought. He stirred the intellectual debate post-1967 immensely and gave thinkers and scholars food for thought. He directly or indirectly engaged big scholars of his time. The abovementioned Syrian translator and thinker George Tarabishi spent some 20 years to produce four volumes to critique al-Jabri and at the same time present a different reading of the tradition, a project he entitled naqd naqd al-'aql al-'arabī [Critique of the Critique of Arab Reason]. Arab philosophers and prominent scholars like the Syrian Tayyeb Tizini (B. 1934), his compatriots Taha Abderrahmane and Mohammed Aziz Lahbabi (d. 1993), the Egyptians Hassan Hanafi and Tariq al-Bishri (b. 1933), the Lebanese Ali Harb, Ridwan al-Sayyid (b. 1949), and many others, have all replied minimally or maximally to his project. They critiqued his methodology, his inconsistencies in selecting the historical period studied, his citations and readings of medieval philosophers like Ibn Sinna and al-Ghazali as irrationalists, and his division of the epistemologies of the Arab world into Maghrebi and Mashreqi one, forgetting the original sources they share and the intertwining territories they marched upon in their philosophical writings. Al-Jabri's over emphasis on rationalism as the way out, and his total rejection of Sufism and its contribution to the Arab-Islamic intellect, is sharply critiqued as well, especially by Taha Abderrahmane. Despite the various critiques he received when he was still alive, al-Jabri was focused on his own work, and he did not reply to any of these, including the voluminous critique of Tarabishi. The only fruitful scholarly encounter we have track of, which has been celebrated in the Arab world circles of scholars, is his exchange with the Egyptian 1 INTRODUCTION—CRITIQUE AND CHANGE: AL-JABRI IN … 13 philosopher Hassan Hanafi in 1989 on The 7th Day Magazine (majallat al-yawm assābi') that was being published in Paris, which was collected later as a book ḥiwār al-mashriq wal maghrib: naḥwa i'ādat binā' al-wa'y al-qawmī al-'arabī, 1990 [Dialogue between the Mashreq and Maghreb: Towards Rebuilding Arab Nationhood Intellect]. The two philosophers debated liberalism, secularism, renewal, tradition, modernity, Nasserism, Arabism, Arab Unity, etc., for 10 weeks on the magazine and then for other 14 weeks afterwards Arab scholars and thinkers from the region got involved in the debate and shared their views on the magazine. This is known as the "debate of the 1980s". The reputation of al-Jabri in the vast Arab-Islamic world does not equal his reputation in the Euro-American world, not only because his Critique is not translated, as we noted above, but also most importantly because his open voice against "Western hegemony" and his use of concepts like "social democracy" in the Cold War period played a role in this silencing or unlucky invisibility.1 His defence of Palestine and the Palestinians against Israel as a colonial state is also clear in his essaybooks; he contributed to the formation of a weekly magazine called "Palestine" in 1968. He believed that the Euro-American relations with the Arab world are based on "benefits and nothing but benefits" (al-maṣāliḥ) and should be dealt with based on this perspective. Al-Jabri theorized "Arab Unity" to counter internal authoritarianism and external hegemony (waḥdat al-maghrib al-'arabī [Maghreb Arab Union,], 1987; su'āl al-hawiyya: al-'urūba wal-islam wal-gharb [The Question of Identity: Arabhood, Islam and the West], 1995). For him, the promotion of political renewal is based on four main elements that have to be integrated in the modern Arab reason, with reference to the tradition: human rights, rationality, democracy, and the rule of law. Arab modernity has to be crafted from within the tradition (addīn wa dawla wa taṭbīq asharīa [Religion, State, and the Application of Sharia], 1996). These were his main antidotes against regression, conservativism, dictatorship, and hegemony. For the internal divisions among radical secularists, socialists, religious conservatives, salafis, and other fractions in society, al-Jabri called for a more pluralist vision that is inclusive of all these; he called it the "historical block", borrowing the term from the Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci (d. 1937). This pluralist block integrates all in a democratic public sphere, where the rule of law applies; the "historical block" for him came as a reply to the failures of nationalist secularists, socialists, and salafis in making change, each tracing it alone; 14 M. Hashas et al. it was a proposal he launched as early as 1986 to overcome monopoly of political discourse and the call for change in isolation from the rest of stakeholders in society. This concept now appears as relevant in the Arab world as never before. That is why we think that al-Jabri has a lot of answers for the future of the Arab world not only on the intellectual scene but also on real politics (Mohammed Hashas, "Mohammed Abed al-Jabri: The Future of the Arab World?" 2014). In the 1970s and 1980s, al-Jabri was considered, by especially the conservatives, too secular for holding these critical and progressive ideas, especially that he was a founding member of the Moroccan Socialist Party in the late 1950s. He later became one of its leading theorists, before he left political activism in 1981 to devote his time to full academic research. Since 1958, he was a journalist-writer, and he made for himself a name before his Critique rose him to the high scholarly circles. He was adopted by the leading socialist figure and Third Worldist Mehdi Benbarka, who saw in him a future wealth to the country when he was around 18 years old. Al-Jabri intended to finish his studies in France but Benbarka encouraged him to go back to Morocco, which needed him, and he went back only after 3 months in Paris. The only long sojourn he had outside Morocco was a year spent at Damascus University, in 1958, the time when Egypt and Syria formed the United Arab Republic. This sojourn intensified his sense of Arabhood and aim for unity. He believed that division in the age of globalization damages every nation state, culture, education, and economy, and standing together helps in solidifying all these for a better negotiation with the external world and positive contribution to it. Al-Jabri wrote also on both Moroccan and Maghreb education systems in the 1970s and criticized their lack of vision and lack of investment in modernizing the sector; he also criticized both the French colonial experience and its impact on the educational system, as well as the Moroccan political system for its negligence of this vital sector. He encouraged Arabisation for cultural serious renewal, instead of adopting dialects and Berber languages, though he was of Berber origins himself; he saw that it is only through the Arabic language as a national heritage that contributed to the sciences and philosophy in the past that renewal can take shape. As a teacher in primary school, then as an inspector of philosophy in high schools, and later on as one of the first leading Moroccan scholars at Mohammed V University in Rabat, al-Jabri contributed immensely to the introduction of philosophical thought to the country and its schools; for example, to cover a shortage of Arabic 1 INTRODUCTION—CRITIQUE AND CHANGE: AL-JABRI IN … 15 texts in certain subjects of philosophy, he prepared two volumes entitled An Introduction to the Philosophy of Science in the mid-1970s. Overall, he simplified his scholarly works and ideas in an accessible language through his seventy-two Positions (mawāqif) booklets that have been widely circulated and can still be found in booths and street book-vendors in Morocco, since 2002. Between 2009 and 2010, three volumes that are a collection of these booklets came out as fī ghimār assiyyāsa (Amidst Politics I, II, III). In especially the first volume, he probes Moroccan history under the French Protectorate and Moroccan politics in the early post-colonial period. His critique of Moroccan politics and its lack of the will to democratize is found in various pages of his work. He was shortly imprisoned in 1963 and 1965 for having been suspected of mobilizing for social protests; he was released for lack of evidence. He wrote as an independent and leftist scholar, engaged with national issues, as he was engaged with international issues in other works. Al-Jabri received a number of awards, the latest of which is Ibn Sinna Award of the UNESCO in 2006, Ibn Rushd Award for Free Thought in 2008. In the late 1980s, he refused to apply for Saddam Hussein Award and Muammar Qaddafi Award for Human Rights in 2002. He also refused membership invitation to the Royal Academy of Morocco, preferring to stay an independent writer-scholar, and in the opposition. This edited volume, the first of its kind on an influential contemporary Arab philosopher, brings chapters that analyse how al-Jabri has been a fertile intellectual force in the contemporary Arab world. He was a public intellectual who held dear the tradition which he critiqued to see its modern version grow into a more open and flourishing future; he forged a path for an Arab version of modernity unique to its own historical experiences and traditions. We hope this will be an introductory volume for more future work on this far-sighted Arab-Muslim philosopher. What proceeds is a brief introduction of each of the 13 chapters that make this volume. Massimo Campanini's chapter, "Al-Jabri and Ibn Khaldun: A Path to Modernity", explores some of the core arguments and issues taken on by Arab-Muslim thinkers, with a focus on Hassan Hanafi and al-Jabri, and seeks to trace the latter's philosophical lineage by referring to Ibn Rushd and, more importantly, to Ibn Khaldun, and two central concepts of 'asabiyya (group feeling) and dawla (state). According to Campanini, while Ibn Khaldun was utterly pessimistic, al-Jabri—like Gramsci—nurtures the optimism of the will against the pessimism of reason. 16 M. Hashas et al. In their chapter entitled "The Critique of Arab Reason between alJabri and Tarabishi", the authors Abdul Karim Barghouti, Jamal Daher, and Nadim Mseis expound on the disagreement on the history of Arabs. The chapter serves as a calculated reference point of critiques levied against al-Jabri's methodology by another renowned Arab scholar, the Syrian George Tarabishi (d. 2016). They bring in the latter's critique of al-Jabri's distinction of Maghreb and Mashreq knowledge systems to argue that the difference between the two scholars remains on methodological grounds and not on substance; both philosophers agree on the importance of reason, but while al-Jabri defends it most in the Maghreb, Tarabish uses Arabic language and its formation of Arab reason as the argument that weakens al-Jabri's view. Kinira Monica Carbone's chapter, "The Arab Reader by Al-Jabri: The Questions of Disjunction and Rejunction", explores the way al-Jabri viewed the impact of text on the Arab reader's thought. By emphasizing the importance of text and reader, al-Jabri offers a critique of Arab reason, taken further here to redefine how the text is both written and read, i.e. how it is re-written by the reader. Kinira uses semiotics, with a main reference to Umberto Eco, to read al-Jabri's methodology of approaching the tradition and how he presents it to the Arab reader. Mariangela Laviano's chapter, "Al-Jabri and His Introduction to the Qur'an", deals with the philosopher's project towards the end of his life by providing a chronolical order of revelation and its order in the Book. Laviano not only explains how al-Jabri's methodology works, involving its relation to time, reasons of revelation, and its objectives, but also explores the reasons why he embarked on this project and its relation to his overall work on Arab-Islamic thought. She underlines the fact that he critiques European Orientalist approaches of reading the Qur'ān, since they apply their own tradition of reading sacred texts on a different tradition whose text was revealed and collected in a different manner. Idriss Jebari's chapter, "An Intellectual between the Maghreb and Mashreq: al-Jabri and the Location of Thought", highlights the importance of geography in not only political structures, but political thought as well. Jebari focuses on how al-Jabri's placement in the periphery of the Arab world determined his perspective on Arab thought as well as the reaction of the Arab centre to his work. Jebari examines three moments of al-Jabri's intellectual coming to the front stage of Arab scholarship: his arrival to the scene in the early 1980s with his Critique of Arab Reason, 1 INTRODUCTION—CRITIQUE AND CHANGE: AL-JABRI IN … 17 then his dialogues with Hanafi in the late 1980s, and ultimately the Critique of the Critique that Tarabishi issues in the 1990s onwards. Mohamed Amine Brahimi's chapter, "The International Becoming of an Arab Philosopher: An Analysis of the non-Reception of Mohammed Abed al-Jabri in Euro-American Scholarship", examines the ways in which a profound thinker and author such as al-Jabri has not reached the same level of recognition in the "West" as he has in Arab and Islamic worlds. Brahimi's chapter discusses the trajectory of al-Jabri's career which gave him such prominence, but also the structural barriers that limited him from obtaining the same recognition in the "West". The first part of the volume closes with Carool Kersten's chapter, "Al-Jabri in Indonesia: Critique of Arab Reason Travels to the Land Below the Winds", which traces the influence of al-Jabri in Indonesian reformist thought despite geographic and cultural gaps between the philosopher and his destination. This influence culminated in contributing in shaping various types of movements in Indonesia. The existence of such great barriers serves as an example of the importance, relevance, and depth of al-Jabri's work. The second part of the volume treats the question of politics and ethics in al-Jabri's examination of the history of ideas of the Arab-Islamic world. It also treats the invoked relevance of this influential social theorist in the Arab intellectual debates post-2011 uprisings and protests, and the possible future of the Arab state, based on the critique and work he has left. Mohsine El Ahmadi's chapter, "State and Religion in al-Jabri's Political Thought", underlines the core political aspiration of al-Jabri's work: in order to respond to the challenges of Western-driven modernity, and the relative decline of the Islamic civilization, Arab-Muslims must renew their political ideology. El Ahmadi discusses al-Jabri's work around authenticating new modernist political formations within the tradition of Islam through the examples of Ibn Khaldun as well as the Qur'ān and Sunna. He shows how al-Jabri is able to escape the rigidity of a binary perspective (that of Arab liberals that ignore the tradition or avoid dealing with it, and that of the salafis that remain enclosed within it) and manages to build a middle way that allows critique of both and allows formation of a different perspective for renewal. In her article "Dare to be Wise! On the Reception of al-Jabri Post2011" Sonja Hegasy brings al-Jabri to real politics, social change, and current Arab intellectual debates. She examines the different ways in 18 M. Hashas et al. which contemporary scholars have interpreted the work of al-Jabri in discussing the events of the so-called Arab Spring. Hegasy introduces 'Abdelilah Belqeziz, Sa'id al-'Alawi, 'Abd al-Salam ibn 'Abd al-'Ali, Farid Abdel-Nour, Abdullah R. Lux, Mohammed al-Amrani Alaoui, Mohammed Noureddine Affaya, and Drisse Jandari, who all cite and reappropriate al-Jabri and some of his ideas and concepts in discussing the future of the Arab Spring. In doing so, Hegasy lays clear the importance of this philosopher's work and how it is present in the project of Arab debates on renewal for social justice and good governance in the Arab world, in what she terms the "post-post-colonial era". Not far from the context of the Arab Spring is the chapter of Francesca M. Corrao, "Reflections on Education and Culture in al-Jabri's Thought". Corrao puts the philosopher's care for education as the means for both cultural and political renewal in the context of classical and modern Arab-Islamic views on the school. Corrao starts by polarizing the development of educational schools and critical thought in the Arab-Islamic tradition in the sense that there were political factors that also led to such a development in the past. For example, she brings in the Mu'tazila movement, the context of its development, and demise. This is linked with al-Jabri's view that the intellectual and philosophical debates in the tradition were not ideological-free. She ends her reflections by underlining al-Jabri's emphasis on the humanities as important disciplines for cultural opening and the development of critique among students in Arab schools, against rigidity that scientific teaching alone brings about. Zaid Eyadat and Hanadi Riyad's article, "The Arab-Muslim Ethical Crisis: A Critique of al-Jabri's Arab Ethical Reason in Context", discusses the "values crisis" in the Arab World and how al-Jabri's work offers a possibility for a new ethical thought to serve the needs of the current predicament. Eyadat and Hanadi emphasize the importance al-Jabri gives to ethics and values in Arab-Islamic thought, and explain how Arab politics ignored this vital aspect of the Arab-Islamic worldview; they examine how he defends a break from an inauthentic past, dominated by especially Persian and Greek paradigms of thought which underline kingship and idealist values, respectively; this ethical past of the ArabIslamic world, according to al-Jabri, paid little attention to the ArabIslamic ethical message of public good and social justice, as emphasized 1 INTRODUCTION—CRITIQUE AND CHANGE: AL-JABRI IN … 19 by Sharia objectives. Al-Jabri here aims at reconstructing a more authentic and ethical future, based on the tradition itself. Also related to the issue of ethics in al-Jabri's work falls the chapter of Harald Viersen, "The Ethical Dialectic in al-Jabri's 'Critique of Arab Reason'". Viersen first underlines the aim of the moral philosopher alJabri; he says that he is driven by the mission of modernizing and rationalizing Arab society by going through a critical examination of its ethical norms. However, he, Versen goes on, could not develop a truly modern ethical framework as he claims, since he failed to formulate a suitable methodology for the purpose; i.e. al-Jabri failed to harmonize his critique of Arab reason presented in his earlier work with his critique of Arab ethical reason developed some two decades later; he kept his focus, according to Viersen, centred on delegitimizing the conservatives and their dominant interpretation of Arab-Islamic ethics. In the closing chapter in this volume, "The Arab Possible State: from al-Tahtawi to al-Jabri", Mohammed Hashas aims to reinvigorate the possibility of a state based on traditional Arab-Islamic history despite the recent pitfalls of the "Arab Spring". Hashas explains how al-Jabri's work continues to delineate a path towards an Arab world free from its current stagnation and malaise. He begins by categorizing Arab political thought from the nineteenth century until the Arab revolts of 2010. Hashas then focuses on the critique al-Jabri offers of political thought and portrays that in three major problems or consequences: intellectual crisis, internal political dictatorship, and external Western hegemony. He concludes with his interpretation of al-Jabri's work by proposing "three strategies" to combat these three factors: a break from classical intellectual tradition, an emphasis on democratization and pluralism, and a regional awakening based on the Gramscian-Jabrian concept of a "historical block". Note 1. Fred Dallmayr, of Notre Dame University, also shares this view, which he presented in his paper "No Spring but Many Seasons: al-Jabri on Islamic Democracy", presented during al-Jabri Study Day at LUISS Guido Carli University of Rome, 5 May 2015. This paper, we are informed, makes a chapter in his forthcoming book Democracy to Come, Oxford University Press. 20 M. Hashas et al. Authors' Biography Mohammed Hashas is a Postdoctoral Fellow at LUISS Guido Carli University of Rome, Department of Political Science. He taught Arabic, and Islam and Politics at the American University of Rome (2014–2015). Hashas was a Visiting Research Fellow at Babylon Center for the Study of the Multicultural Society in Tilburg, the Netherlands (July–October 2010), at the Center for European Islamic Thought at the University of Copenhagen (Sept 2011–July 2012); a Visiting Research Fellow at Oxford Center for Islamic Studies (mid-January– mid-March 2017) and at Leibniz-ZMO Center in Berlin (April–May 2017). His papers have appeared so far with the Journal of Muslims in Europe, Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs, American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences, Oriente Moderno, the Journal of Studia Islamica, besides contributions to edited books and Arab journals. He is currently co-editing two volumes on Imams in Western Europes: Developments, Transformation and Institutional Challenges (Amsterdam UP 2018); he is also finalizing his monograph Intercultural Geopoetics: An Introduction to Kenneth White's Open World (Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2017) and working on The Idea of European Islam manuscript (Routledge 2018). Zaid Eyadat is Professor and former Dean of the School of International Studies and Political Science at the University of Jordan, and Chairman of the Board in Arab Renaissance for Development and Democracy Organization (ARDD, Jordan). He completed his PhD at the University of Southern California in Political Science. He is the Middle East and North African Regional Representative for Fundación Global Democracia y Desarrollo (FUNGLODE), Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. His publications include "Minorities in the Arab World: Faults and Fault Lines" in Eva Pföstl and Will Kymlicka, ed., Multiculturalism and Minority Rights in the Arab World (Oxford UP 2014), "Political Islam in the Arab Spring" in Eva Pfostl, ed., Religion and Politics (APES 2014), "Hegemony, Islamic Activism, and the State: Islamic Movements and the Arab Spring in Jordan" in Massimo Campanini, ed., Islam and the Arab Revolutions (Il Mulino 2013), Migration, Security, and Citizenship in the Middle East. "The Modern Muslim World" series. Palgrave Macmillan, August 2013, "The Arab Revolutions of 2011: Revolutions of Dignity" in Stephen Calleya and Monika Wohlfeld ed., Change and Opportunities in the Emerging Mediterranean (Mediterranean Academy of Diplomatic Studies 2012); Count Bernadotte's Mediation to Palestine 1948: Mediation and Assassination (University of Jordan 2011). Francesca M. Corrao is Professor of Arabic Culture and Language at the Faculty of Political Science in LUISS University of Rome, director of MISLAM Programme (Master in Economics and Institutions of Islamic Countries) of 1 INTRODUCTION—CRITIQUE AND CHANGE: AL-JABRI IN … 21 the School of Government at the same university, and chair of the Scientific Committee of the Fondazione Orestiadi in Gibellina (Sicily) and Dar Bach Hamba in Tunis. She is a member of The Union of European Arabists and Italian representative of the EURAMAL, European Association of Modern Arabic Literature professors. She has been Research Member of the Institute of Oriental Philosophy, Soka University, Tokyo. Among her most recent works: Arab Revolutions. Mediterranean transition, Mondadori, 2011, 'Ijtihād' and 'Relevance of Sharia' to Contextualize Universal Human Rights Discourse", in Global Policy 2013, Arab Minorities, Liberalism, and Multiculturalism, in Multiculturalism and Minority Rights, 2014, L'Evoluzione Culturale all'Origine delle Rivoluzioni Arabe, in Economia e Istituzioni dei Paesi del Mediterraneo, 2014. PART I Al-Jabri's Reconstruction of Arab-Islamic Thought CHAPTER 2 Mohammed Abed al-Jabri and Ibn Khaldun: A Path to Modernity Massimo Campanini Inna Allāha lā yughayyiru mā bi-qawmin ḥattā yughayyiru mā bi-anfusihim [Allah will not change the condition of a people until they change what is in themselves.] (Qur'ān 13, al-raʻ d, 11) Introduction Mohammed Abed al-Jabri studied Ibn Khaldun in the larger framework of his reconstruction and renewal (tajdīd) of the Arab intellect,1 in order to modernize the Arab world. He proposed mainly to come back to Ibn Rushd/Averroes,2 being a quite original representative of that trend of modernist thinkers who tried to re-found critically and historically Islamic turāth (heritage) through a critique of Islamic reason.3 As it is well known, in his Introduction to a Critique of Arab Reason,4 al-Jabri argued that the future of Arab-Islamic culture must be "Averroistic", that is rationalistic and democratic. Al-Jabri's interpretation of Ibn Rushd's rationalism is put in opposition to Oriental (mainly Avicennian) "obscurantism" with a historically and historiographically highly debatable thesis. It is difficult M. Campanini (*) Department of Letters and Philosophy, University of Trento, Trento, Italy © The Author(s) 2018 Z. Eyadat et al. (eds.), Islam, State, and Modernity, Middle East Today, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-59760-1_2 25 26 M. Campanini to agree that Avicenna was "a man of darkness" as al-Jabri reads him. Al-Jabri's thesis is ideologically well oriented, being situated in a broader framework of thought aiming at a confrontation with the greatest past of Islamic thinkers in order to find out a thorough Islamic way to modernity. Apart from the multifarious meanings of "modernity" itself, a number of questions arise. First of all, what is the pivot of Islamic rationality? Is it the political issue just because Islam is an ideology whose outcomes and implications are eminently political? Or are religious, juridical, social or anthropological dimensions more central? The renewal of Arab (Islamic) political intellect5 involves the hot and debated issue of the Islamic state. Did the Islamic state ever exist? And what were (and potentially are) its characteristics? The problem is crucial in what I call the ontology of modernity,6 because it involves the development of Islamic history in relation to the development of Islamic political thought, and because the Islamic state is vindicated today as the main issue of modernity (or even post-modernity) by a large number of Islamist trends. In trying to answer these questions, al-Jabri went beyond Ibn Rushd and dealt assiduously with Ibn Khaldun's thought. In order to understand precisely al-Jabri's interpretation, it is necessary first to synthesize Ibn Khaldun's ideas that are useful for our discourse. Ibn Khaldun and the Constituent Power Ibn Khaldun retains a common concept of Greek philosophical thought, of Plato and Aristotle alike: man is a political animal, and human beings are obliged to live in society. Through cooperation, the needs of a number of people, many times greater than their own number, can be satisfied. Unfortunately, aggressiveness is natural in living beings; humankind lives in a natural state of violence and reciprocal opposition; a restraining authority is needed and he who exercises this function becomes the head of the state, so that when mankind has achieved social organization, and when civilization in the world has thus become a fact, people need someone to exercise a restraining influence and keep them apart. The sovereign must dominate them and have power and authority over them, so that no one of them will be able to attack another. There are two kinds of human organization, the badawi (rural) and the ḥaḍari (urban). In the badawi civilization, the coagulating factor is 'aṣabiyya or group feeling. The stronger is 'aṣabiyya, the stronger is the 2 MOHAMMED ABED AL-JABRI AND IBN KHALDUN: A PATH … 27 badawi group. Thanks to 'aṣabiyya, the badawi group subdues its neighbours and realizes the state and becomes ḥaḍari. Group feeling is needed also to strengthen the inner ties of a civilized state, making it a powerful and feared structure, able to defend itself and to attack. Unfortunately, in the ḥaḍari civilization, strength and 'aṣabiyya loosen progressively and, at the end, civilization collapses. The cycle must start again. In this framework, the last outcome of the social and political mechanism of 'aṣabiyya is political authority, for people need rulers who keep them apart. As required by human nature, the ruler must be forceful, one who exercises authority energetically. In this connection, group feeling is absolutely necessary, for aggressive and defensive enterprises can succeed only through the help of group feeling. Also, religion is subdued to the group feeling laws. The natural condition of humans does not need religion, and the state could be settled up without religion. Religion is necessary to rule society better though. The Prophet Muhammad succeeded in making Islam triumphant because he was supported by the strong group feeling of the Meccan Emigrants and the Medinan Helpers (anṣar). The creation of the state through the instauration of royal authority implies that the sovereign supports his authority with the 'aṣabiyya. I have just said that the state could be settled up without religion, but religion strengthens the state. Indeed, Ibn Khaldun argues that the best state is the religious, particularly the caliphate which can be considered the model of the Islamic state: Royal authority implies a form of organization necessary to mankind. It requires superiority and force, which expresses the wrathfulness and animality (of human nature). […] Therefore, it is necessary to have reference to ordained political norms, which are accepted by the mass and to whose laws it submits. […] If these norms are ordained by the intelligent and leading personalities and minds of the dynasty, the result will be a political (institution) with an intellectual (rational) basis. If they are ordained by God through a Lawgiver who establishes them as (religious) laws, the result will be a political (institution) with a religious basis, which will be useful for life in both this and the other world. […] This makes it clear what the caliphate means:(to exercise) natural royal authority means to cause the masses to act as required by purpose and desire. (To exercise) political (royal authority) means to cause the masses to act as required by intellectual (rational) insight into the means of furthering their worldly interests and avoiding anything that is harmful in that respect. 28 M. Campanini (To exercise) the caliphate means to cause the masses to act as required by religious insight into their interests in the other world as well as in this world.7 Natural authority implies constriction and oppression of the sovereign over his subjects. Rational authority aims only to worldly interests. Only authority inspired by religion leads the people to act justly in order to get mundane and ultra-mundane gains. Ibn Khaldun believes that the caliphate—the form of state wherein religion and 'aṣabiyya are perfectly united—is an institution ordained by God; it is the pattern of the Islamic state. The caliphate, that is the Islamic state, underwent a process of transformation and corruption, however. Started as the ideal state, it transformed in a mulk, a patrimonial state grounded on injustice and force. The reconstruction Ibn Khaldun outlined of the caliphate's evolution is telling in clarifying his thought. There is no better way of paraphrasing Ibn Khaldun; I quote him directly at length: When the Messenger of God was about to die, he appointed Abū Bakr as his representative to (lead) the prayers, since (prayer) was the most important religious activity. People were thus content to accept him as caliph, that is as the person who causes the great mass to act according to the religious Laws. No mention was made of royal authority, because royal authority was suspected of being worthless, and because at that time it was the prerogative of unbelievers and enemies of Islam. […] The caliphate then went to 'Uthmān Ibn 'Affān and 'Alī. All these caliphs renounced royal authority and kept apart from its ways. They were strengthened in this attitude by the low standard of living in Islam and the desert outlook of the Arabs. Ibn Khaldun's theory is here consistent with the traditional Sunni outlook that considers 'Alī and Mu'āwiya both worthy persons and right caliphs. Both of them took care of religion and of the Islamic empire. Ibn Khaldun further explains this as follows: Then came the later Umayyads. As far as their worldly purposes and intentions were concerned, they acted as the nature of royal authority required. They forgot the deliberate planning and the reliance upon the truth that had guided the activities of their predecessors. This caused the people to censure their actions and to accept the Abbasid propaganda in the place of the Umayyads. Thus, the Abbasids took over the government. The probity of the Abbasids was outstanding. They used their royal authority to further, as far as possible, the different aspects and ways of the truth. (The early Abbasids) eventually were succeeded by the descendants of al-Rashid. 2 MOHAMMED ABED AL-JABRI AND IBN KHALDUN: A PATH … 29 Among them there were good and bad men. Later on, when the power passed to their descendants, they gave royal authority and luxury their due. They became enmeshed in worldly affairs of no value and turned their backs on Islam. […] It has thus become clear how the caliphate was transformed into royal authority. The form of government in the beginning was the caliphate. Everybody had his restraining influence in himself, that is (the restraining influence of) Islam. They preferred (Islam) to their worldly affairs, even if (the neglect of worldly affairs) led to their own destruction. […] A change became apparent only in the restraining influence that had been Islam, and now came to be group feeling and the sword. That was the situation in the time of Mu'āwiya, Marwān, his son 'Abd al-Malik and the first 'Abbasid caliphs down to al-Rashid and some of his sons. Then, the characteristic traits of the caliphate disappeared, and only its name remained. The form of government came to be royal authority pure and simple. Superiority attained the limits of its nature and was employed for particular (worthless) purposes, such as the use of force and the arbitrary gratification of desires and for world pleasures.8 We can deduce from these passages an evolving process that Ibn Khaldun believes necessary and unavoidable. The original caliphate was the just and the best political system: within it, religion was the main source of ethics and behaviour, and the sovereign was careful of the prosperity and welfare of his subjects. Then, patrimonial power took the place of the caliphate and injustice and abuse got the upper hand. The monarch was careful more of his own personal advantage than of the subjects' welfare, and the actual power became more and more remote from the ideal state of the caliphate. Thus, the caliphate is placed in a nostalgic past, the perfect time wherein group feeling and religion were espoused and produced the perfect regime. It is an anti-utopia, a dis-utopia, while the utopian state is normally located in the future and is an objective to be constructed anew; the perfect caliphate is located in the past. The problem is that, being located in the past, the caliphate cannot be reconstructed anew; actually, it is impossible to recover it.9 Ibn Khaldun has been the critical consciousness of the dying classical Muslim civilization; his thought has been, as it was, the summary of past Muslim experience in state building, intellectual production, social and economic evolution. Ibn Khaldun's reflection appears interesting not only for its content, but also for its methodology. 'Abdallah Laroui's interpretation of Islamic state and of Ibn Khaldun is fully aware of this, and it is perhaps useful to deal briefly with it in order to understand better al-Jabri himself.10 30 M. Campanini In Laroui's opinion, the Islamic state is an antinomic concept, a concept contradictory in itself.11 In Islamic history, religion and politics run divided and separated, and, although there was the strong desire to unite them, no coherent theory of the Islamic state was elaborated. Ibn Khaldun's analysis demonstrated this truth, in Laroui's opinion. His extreme realism led Ibn Khaldun to place history at the centre of his Weltanschauung, and he was radically pessimistic about his coeval political reality, although he tried to rationalize the political and historical data. In Laroui's view, this intellectual attitude draws our thinker near to Machiavelli.12 Ibn Khaldun and Machiavelli studied the state through a realistic, pragmatic, anti-utopian method in order to renew the Islamic world and Florence, respectively. They tried to suggest the ways to constitute new political and juridical systems. Therefore, the concept of constituent power was central in their thoughts. The constituent power is the energy, the dynamism that changes the status quo and builds up a new political and juridical system.13 In order to implement a new constituent power, conflict—between classes, between states, between humans—is not only unavoidable, but also necessary. Ibn Khaldun stresses the role of conflict in the social and historical process of transformation, both at micro and macro levels of reality.14 At the micro-level, humans are homo homini lupus, ready to attack one another, moved by a natural force that leads them to implement their individual interest against other's welfare. Consequently, "Human beings need someone to act as a restraining influence and mediator in every social organization in order to keep its members from fighting with each other".15 As we have seen, the necessity of a restraining power paves the way to state's construction and realization of royal authority: Royal authority is an institution that is natural to mankind. We have explained before that human beings cannot live and exist except through social organization and cooperation for the purpose of obtaining their food and other necessities of life. When they are organized, necessity requires that they deal with each other and satisfy their needs. Each one will stretch out his hand for whatever he needs and (try simply to) take it, since injustice and aggressiveness are in the animal nature. The others, in turn, will try to prevent him from taking it, motivated by wrathfulness and spite and the strong human reaction when one's own property is menaced. This causes dissension, which leads to hostilities, and hostilities lead to trouble and bloodshed and loss of life, which lead to the destruction of the species. Now, (the human species) is one of the things the Creator has especially (enjoined us) to preserve. People, thus, cannot persist in a state of anarchy 2 MOHAMMED ABED AL-JABRI AND IBN KHALDUN: A PATH … 31 and without a ruler who keeps them apart. Therefore, they need a person to restrain them. He is their ruler. As is required by human nature, he must be a forceful ruler, one who exercises authority.16 The need for continuous defence and military protection regards all human activities: If this is true with regard to the place where one lives, which is in constant need of defence and military protection, it is equally true with regard to every other human activity, such as prophecy, the establishment of royal authority, or propaganda. Nothing can be achieved in these matters without fighting for it, since man has the natural urge to offer resistance. And for fighting one cannot do without group feeling, as we mentioned at the beginning.17 At the macro-level, Ibn Khaldun's dialectics between the two 'umrans (civilizations)—badawi and ḥadari—involves continual strife and an ongoing transformation of political structures. The translation from the 'umran badawi into the 'umran ḥadari happens through violence. Violence actualizes the superiority of the 'aṣabiyya of a group over another. When the energy and dynamism of a social group (its constituent power) weakens due to the weakening of 'aṣabiyya, the group is prey to other groups' aggressiveness: A nation that has been defeated and has come under the rule of another nation will quickly perish. The reason for this may possibly lie in the apathy that comes over people when they lose control of their own affairs and, through enslavement, become the instrument of others and dependent upon them. Hope diminishes and weakens. Now, propagation and increase in civilization (population) take place only as the result of strong hope and of the energy that hope creates in animal powers (of man). When hope and the things it stimulates are gone through apathy, and when group feeling has disappeared under the impact of defeat, civilization decreases and business and other activities stop. With their strength dwindling under the impact of defeat, people become unable to defend themselves. They become the victims of anyone who tries to dominate them, and a prey to anyone who has the appetite. It makes no difference whether they have already reached the limit of their royal authority or not.18 Conflict and war determinate civilization's evolution. Any winning civilization trains its constituent power to build new institutions. After a 32 M. Campanini number of generations pass away, the constituent power precipitates into crisis. The constituent power of 'aṣabiyya finds out its limits in the state itself it constituted and realized. In Hegelian terms, the state becomes the dialectical negative of 'aṣabiyya. For state and civilization corrupt 'aṣabiyya; luxury and injustice destroy civilization. After the loosening of the group's feeling due to the triumph of civilization, the state collapses. 'Aṣabiyya creates state and authority, but the corruption of the group feeling weakens authority and finally the state collapses. In Ibn Khaldun (and in Machiavelli as well), "dis-utopia" (antiutopia)—the idea that it is impossible to build a perfect state—obstructs a teleological and finalistic path of human history. Consequently, Ibn Khaldun's hopes to renew Islam had been defeated by historical reality. The disenchanted and objective analysis of human societies through history he fathomed led to a rationalization of politics, as well as to the keen consciousness that the virtuous city, where justice dominates and the king reigns implementing the divine Law (i.e. the Islamic state) is just a dream. In the past, it was the caliphate,19 but now the caliphate is over and cannot be built up again. Although Ibn Khaldun's solutions are negative, his method is new and productive and can be compared with Antonio Gramsci's approach. The point is not to describe Ibn Khaldun as a forerunner of Gramsci. But, exactly like Gramsci,20 Ibn Khaldun views politics as a science grounded in philosophy. For politics represents the main hermeneutical key to understand history. History, on the other side, unveils us the "truth" of human affairs and teaches us how to direct political action without mistakes in order to realize the welfare of humankind. As a consequence, history is steadily grounded in philosophy insofar as only philosophy is able to provide history with a sound methodology of inquiry. As Ibn Khaldun puts it in a very important passage: The inner meaning of history involves speculation and an attempt to get at the truth, subtle explanations of the causes and origins of existing things, and deep knowledge of the how and why of the events. History, therefore, is firmly rooted in philosophy. It deserves to be accounted as a branch of it.21 History is a philosophical science insofar as it is a scientific discipline, working on sound epistemological premises, grounding its argumentations in reality, resorting to clear reasoning and analysis.22 The scientific character of history can lead the people who study it to re-appropriate 2 MOHAMMED ABED AL-JABRI AND IBN KHALDUN: A PATH … 33 politics and political consciousness. As Gramsci did, Ibn Khaldun studied history with a political aim. If politics is the main hermeneutical key of interpretation of history, to read history through politics can lead Arab and Islamic thought to re-appropriate its heritage by resorting to its own methods and instruments, and this is, at the end, the real modernity of Ibn Khaldun. Al-Jabri's Political Project The previous analysis was necessary to assess better al-Jabri's position in the debate about politics in/and modernity. Al-Jabri devoted a full book to the analysis of Ibn Khaldun's thought, focusing on the two central concepts of 'aṣabiyya (group feeling) and dawla (state).23 He argues that 'aṣabiyya is for Ibn Khaldun the very founding principle of all ArabIslamic political system. Without 'aṣabiyya, neither Muhammad's ideal community at Medina nor the caliphate nor in general the state would have existed. As it happened in Laroui, for al-Jabri too, Ibn Khaldun's thought is essential to interpret all Islamic history. Now, in al-Jabri's opinion, classical Islamic political thought confused surreptitiously the "king of the cosmic city", God, with the "king of the human city", the caliph. Caliphs claimed to be considered "shadows" of God on earth,24 while they were mere substitutes of the Prophet. It is important to stress that al-Jabri does not mean that this claim implies an arbitrary mixture of religion and politics, that is a kind of "theocracy". Rather, he denounces that worldly kings and sovereigns that claimed the sacredness of their power in order to grant its intangibility and irremovability. They exploited religion for their illicit goals. Three hermeneutical keys must be used to understand Islamic political development: "tribe" (qabīla); "booty" (ghanīma) and doctrine/belief ('aqīda). The first two are heritages of Bedouin and pre-Islamic civilization (the 'umrān badawi in Ibn Khaldun's terms); on the other hand, doctrine and belief are outcomes of the civilizing influence of Islam (of the 'umrān ḥaḍāri of "Islamdom," in Ibn Khaldun's terms). Qabīla is not simply the "tribe", but implies kinship (qar