The Middle East’s political revolutions will depend on a transformation in Arab-Islamic thinking

With the current seismic shifts in the political landscape of the Middle East, the outside world appears to be realizing that the region’s future is not limited to a choice between authoritarian strong-man regimes providing a precarious stability, or the uncertainties associated with an Islamist take-over. But what is still missing in analyses of these peoples’ revolutions - driven by rising Arab middle classes - is how political pluralism depends on intellectual openness.

What has gone largely unnoticed is that, alongside the rise of radical Islamism from the 1970s onwards, scholars and academics began developing alternative ways of thinking about religion, which did not reduce Islam to a political ideology.

This is not only because policy makers, political pundits and other Middle East watchers focus primarily on the antagonism between existing regimes and their Islamist detractors. Also in their home countries, these progressive and innovative Muslim thinkers are often caught between governmental repression of dissenting opinions and the hostility of the Islamic religious establishment. To safeguard their religious authority, representatives of traditional Islam not only made common cause with the government but also pandered to the Islamists, by dismissing these liberal voices as heretical.

For example, in 2007, scholars from Cairo’s al-Azhar Islamic University declared the Egyptian philosopher Hasan Hanafi ‘mentally instable’ because he compared the Qur’an to a supermarket, from which you could take what you wanted. This provocative statement was not intended to demean Islam’s holy book, rather stress that sacred scriptures are subject to interpretation and cannot be treated as a manual for clear-cut political models. A few years later, Amr Hamzawy, a political analyst with the Carnegie Endowment whose name briefly circulated as the new minister of youth after Mubarak’s fall, used the Islamist attacks on Hanafi to illustrate Egypt’s lack of intellectual freedom.

A former Muslim Brotherhood sympathizer, by 1960 Hanafi had already moved away from the Islamist agenda, focusing instead on the potential of Islam’s wider intellectual legacy for the emancipation of not just the Middle East but the Third World in general, from regressing into a theocracy.  Hanafi was no stranger to controversy. Because of his revolutionary reinterpretation of Islamic thinking along the lines of Latin American liberation theology, he had been in trouble with both Egypt’s state security apparatus and the Islamists before.  Just prior to the outbreak of the Suez Crisis of 1956, Hanafi had moved to France for postgraduate studies at the Sorbonne.  Paris of the 1950s and 1960s was at the heart of dramatic intellectual and political changes and Hanafi underwent full exposure. While his academic formation was influenced by thinkers such as Paul Ricoeur, Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and the theologian Jean Guitton, he was also immersed in the ideas of the theorists of Tiers Mondisme or Third Worldism, such as Franz Fanon.

This reshaped Hanafi’s views of Islam, turning away from the radical Islamist ideology of Sayyid Qutb and toward the ideas of the Indo-Pakistani poet and philosopher Muhammad Iqbal. Islam was no longer a blueprint for a political agenda, but the point of departure for a new comprehensive philosophical method in which theological thinking was to be transformed into an anthropology along the lines of Kant’s reconciliation of rationalist and empiricist thinking into transcendental idealism. However, Hanafi insisted on coining his methodology in Islamic terms. To his mind the various Muslim and Western strands of thought all came together in The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam. In this book, Iqbal had shown himself an adept mediator between Islamic and Western ideas, looking not merely at theological notions and dogmas, but taking Islam as a civilisation and building on its wider cultural heritage or turath.

In what became a lifelong preoccupation, Hanafi took Iqbal’s ideas one stage further, by developing a double critique of both the Islamic and Western civilizational legacy. The ‘Heritage and Renewal’ Project which he has been developing for the last thirty years envisages a new way of thinking for citizens of Egypt, the Muslim world, and eventually the entire Developing World, by critically examining the failings of their heritage as well as the shortcomings of the West.  Unfortunately for Hanafi, it caused not only suspicion among the state authorities, but his criticisms of atrophied traditional Islamic learning and rejection of the Muslim Brotherhood slogan ‘Islam is the Solution’ also caught the ire of the Azhar establishment and the Islamists. Only now, in the wake of the February 25^th revolution, is there a chance for the openness he has advocated for decades. In an article for al-Arabi Weekly, entitled ‘The Awakening of the Giant’, he noted that: “The people broke the barrier of fear. They jumped forward along the historical path.”  The very one had been sketching since the 1960s.

Beyond Egypt