Abdelwahab Elmessiri’s Islamic humanism

Elmessiri’s intellectual journey underlines his own transformation as a scholar who first studied English and American literature, then devoted his life to the study of Zionism within critical sociology as well as the sociology of knowledge. This can be traced back to the third book in his early trilogy: The End of History: An Introduction to the Study of the Structure of Zionist Thought (1972), The Earthly Paradise: Studies in American Culture (1979), and Zionist Ideology: A Case Study in the Sociology of Knowledge (1980–1981).

Since the publication of his well-known Arabic Encyclopedia of the Jews, Judaism and Zionism (1999), Abdelwahab Elmessiri (1938–2008) gained much popularity in the Arab world. His reception as an Egyptian Arab Muslim intellectual took different forms, including forums, conferences, periodicals, books, and documentary films. Special attention is given to Elmessiri’s reference to his brief membership in the Muslim Brotherhood, his Marxist background, his ‘conversion’ to Islam in the early 1980s, his participation in founding Al Wasat Party, and his role as a coordinator of the Kefaya movement in Egypt. Thus, Elmessiri’s reception extended beyond academia, making him an organic intellectual whose memory is celebrated by a wide range of intellectuals and politicians of different ideological backgrounds.

In this autobiography, one of the foremost intellectuals of his age provides us with the seeds, roots, and fruits of his human and intellectual achievements. Renowned for his exciting character and numerous publications on secularism, modernity, postmodernity, and Zionism, Elmessiri is a prolific author whose intellectual contributions have been compared by Egyptian and Arab scholars to those of such magnificent sociologists and intellectuals as Max Weber, Eric Voegelin, Herbert Marcuse, Zygmunt Bauman, Thomas Kuhn, and Edward Said.

The burning questions that haunt us in our modern secular world are lived by Abdelwahab Elmessiri in his intellectual journey as diverse and overlapping moments of joy and sorrow, innocence and experience, faith and doubt, materialism and mysticism. These moments were first experienced in the town of Damanhur, then in Alexandria, New York, and Cairo. He suffered such moments of absolute doubt and revulsion, and it took him a quarter of a century to move from the narrow confines of materialism to faith in the course of his intellectual journey.

In the course of his autobiography, seemingly personal experiences and small narratives are framed within a grand narrative: our confrontation with the consequences of secular modernity; our oscillation between faith and doubt; our loss of innocence and compassionate solidarity; our fear from the aggressiveness of modern contractual society; our submission to the arrogance of the absolute secular state; our surrender to the dominance of materialism; our conformity to the bias of physical and social sciences; our lamentations for the death of God; and our suffering from the emergence of Nazism and Fascism, the crimes against the Jews, the monopoly of the Holocaust, the occupation of Palestine, and the secularization of our visions, social relations, dreams, and even our libidos.

Elmessiri’s intellectual autobiography narrates the story of modern ideologies that have led to the marginalization of divine revelation, giving rise to materialistic worldviews that promise their adherents progress, happiness, and freedom. Elmessiri, however, introduced a critical sociology that underlines the dark side of modernity, stressing that modernity has transformed humankind into a bundle of biological functions, economic needs, contractual relationships, instincts, and sexual drives. In place of this materialism and secularization, Elmessiri experienced many moments of illumination, culminating in the advocacy of an ‘Islamic humanism’ that sees human life as complex and permeated with secrets, dualities, and diversities (Rihlati al-fikriyah, pp. 299, 709).

In a nonchronological organization, the narrator of this intellectual journey combines the spirit of an innocent child, an old wise man, a devoted Marxist, a purely rational materialist, a mystic philosopher, and an ‘Islamic humanist!’ These seemingly contradictory voices mingle together in this journey. Much more than an autobiography, this intellectual journey does not narrate irrelevant biographical facts but is a quest for meaning in our complex and insecure modern secular world. The line of this intellectual journey is neither straight nor circular, but a spiral hermeneutics of suspicion, recording Elmessiri’s thought process and his questioning of the phenomena and events he confronted.

It is true that Elmessiri is the Arab doyen in the fields of Jewish and Zionist studies. The Encyclopedia of the Jews, Judaism and Zionism (1999) is undoubtedly his magnum opus. But we know from his intellectual autobiography that his real involvement with Zionism started in 1963 when he went to Columbia University in New York to study for his master’s degree in English and comparative literature. His initial ambition was to become a literary critic, because his love for poetry was overwhelming. So how could a specialist in Romantic poetry and literary criticism become an expert on Zionism? Amusing, unusual, and edifying incidents explain this shift in Elmessiri’s intellectual journey.

His journey is also an engagement with questions that we find ourselves confronted with in our ‘modern liquid times,’ to borrow from the critical sociologist Zygmunt Bauman. We are haunted with such specters as the end of history, the new world order, and postmodernism, all of which deny the existence of any center, ultimate point of reference, value, absoluteness, identity, or responsibility. These specters reject all ideologies and values, thus creating a world of complete liquidity. This liquid, nonrational materialism, in Elmessiri’s view, is not only an anti-metaphysical revolution but also as a revolution against metaphysical materialism itself and the faith of humanism in the power of reason to understand and change the world. Liquid, nonrational materialism is seen as a worldview that declares the death of humankind in favor of such nonhuman categories as the market and power or in favor of such one-dimensional categories as the body, sex, and pleasure. Elmessiri’s personal experiences are exciting confrontations with such new liquid conditions of secular modernity. What happens to humans in a world without a god? What happens to humans in a relativistic world where there are no universal values? What happens to humans in a consumerist society centered on sex and the body? What is the fate of humans in a world where science has become separated from values and conscience? What is the fate of humans in a world that sees might as right, textuality as sexuality, discourse as intercourse, aesthetics as erotics, and eschatology as scatology?

All these questions and many others accompanied the narrator throughout his intellectual journey, giving rise to a vacillation between doubt and faith, gradually leading to the advocacy of Islamic humanism as a way out of the modern secular dilemma.

Perhaps the idea of ‘Islamic humanism’ and ‘new Islamic discourse’ have been exaggerated in the eyes of Elmessiri, his friends, and disciples because of the decline of leftist movements, the problems of liberalism, and the dangers of neoliberalism as opposed to the rise of political Islam. Perhaps the celebration of this notion of the new Islamic discourse can be attributed to Elmessiri himself when, in the 1990s, he explored the features of ‘the new Islamic discourse,’ providing the following diachronic classification: (1) the traditionalist Islamic discourse, which emerged as a direct and immediate reaction to the colonial invasion of the Muslim world and prevailed until the mid-1960s; and (2) the new Islamic discourse, which assumed a definite form in the mid-1960s. Both discourses, in Elmessiri’s view, endeavor to provide an Islamic answer to the questions raised by modernization and colonization. There are, however, radical points of divergence between them due to the fact that the bearers of the new Islamic discourse could recognize the other face of modernity, one that is totally different from the glorious Western modernity known, experienced, and studied by the first-generation pioneers of the Nahda period (Elmessiri, 1997).

The new Islamic discourse, according to Elmessiri, has three levels: (1) populist Islam, which stands in the face of modern society through charity work or terrorist acts; (2) political Islam, which tries to apply its program through legitimate channels rather than through terrorism or coup d’état; and (3) cultural Islam, which develops an Islamic vision that deals with the modern world. Elmessiri identifies his writings with the discourse of cultural Islam. But the aspiration for justice, the call for preservation of the environment, and the advocacy of open architectural designs are not an Islamic monopoly. Rather, they are a human tendency that does not reflect any new Islamic specificity.

Perhaps the claims of the Islamization or the Islamicness of Elmessiri’s discourse can be attributed to the dedication of his book Nazism, Zionism and the End of History (1997) to Roger Garaudy, who converted to Islam and uncovered Israeli myths concerning the colonization of Palestine. A close reading of Elmessiri’s book urges one to conclude that he should have dedicated his book not to Garaudy but to Zygmunt Bauman, the late British-Polish Jewish sociologist, who first introduced the idea of critical sociology in the 1970s. One can hardly differentiate between Bauman’s voice and Elmessiri’s voice in this significant book, which preceded the publication of the 1999 Encyclopedia and included many of its entries. In fact, Elmessiri referred in passing to Bauman in the introduction to his book, and he mentioned him in the introduction to the 1999 Encyclopedia, considering his writings as some of the major works that shaped his intellectual authority and his interpretations. Elmessiri also praised Bauman in his two-volume Partial Secularism and Comprehensive Secularism (2002). Nevertheless, Elmessiri never dedicated any of his books to Bauman, thus raising a big question mark that might be related to Elmessiri’s understanding of the Arab mentality, which does not feel comfortable with what the Jews produce, even if it is a critical discourse of radical secularism, colonization, and Zionism.

Elmessiri’s stay in Saudi Arabia in the early 1980s is one of the factors that might help us understand the notion of the new Islamic discourse because Elmessiri often refers to this period as a moment of illumination in his ‘conversion’ to Islam. It was in Riyadh that Elmessiri attended a seminar on the problem of bias. Back in Egypt in the 1990s, Elmessiri received support from both the International Institute of Islamic Thought and the Engineers Syndicate in Egypt to hold a conference on this problem. The conference was praised by Fahmi Howeidy as a ‘cultural Intifada’ in one of his articles in Al Ahram newspaper. The proceedings of the conference along with other studies were later published in a two-volume work, The Problematic of Bias: An Epistemological Vision and a Call for Ijtihad (1995), published in Arabic by the International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT).

It is well known that Elmessiri often lavished praise on the open-minded attitude of the Islamic trend that includes the IIIT group and other key figures, including Rashid Ghanousi in Tunisia, Parvais Manzour in Pakistan, Ahmed Davoutoglu in Turkey, Taha Jaber al Alwani in Iraq, and Abdul Hamid Abu Sulaiman in Saudi Arabia. Elmessiri often seized the chance to praise the Palestinian intellectual Ismail Raji al Farouqi, the first elected president of the IIIT.

However, Elmessiri himself, late in his life, expressed dissatisfaction with the term ‘Islamization of knowledge,’ which had been used by IIIT for a long time, seeing it as extremely superficial. Elmessiri also rejected the notion of ‘the Islamicness of knowledge,’ calling instead for the ‘generation of Islamic knowledge’ from ‘the Islamic paradigm’ or the ‘Islamic point of reference.’ This paradigm, however, loses all kinds of specificity when Elmessiri states that the essence of this project is the ‘humanization of knowledge,’ and that his ‘Islamic discourse’ is no different from the discourse of the Frankfurt School. The only difference is that the Frankfurt School presents a tragic discourse whereas his discourse is full of hope (Al-Huwaiyah, pp. 105–107)!

Such a statement is completely ridiculous, and most probably was added by the editor of Elmessiri’s book, because Erich Fromm published The Revolution of Hope: Towards a Humanized Technology (1968), and there is no crucial difference between what is referred to as the new Islamic discourse and the Frankfurt School, which consisted mainly of Marxist Jews, and whose most prominent figure, Herbert Marcuse, presented radical solutions that were inconsistent with an Islamic worldview.

Perhaps scholars have seen Elmessiri as an Islamic intellectual because of his role in founding Al Wasat Party and the introduction he wrote to the party program in 2004. It is not surprising that Elmessiri confirms in this introduction that the political program of Al Wasat belongs to the ‘new Islamic discourse’ and that it is based on an Islamic point of reference. This Islamic referentiality (al marjieeyah al islamiyah), however, has no specific features and one can hardly differentiate between it and humanist Marxism. All that the reader can understand is that the point of reference is unlike comprehensive radical secularism, which creates a value-free world, unlike Sharia, which guides people in their conduct in their public and private lives, and encourages the freedom of faith and human dignity (Al-Huwaiyah, pp. 99–103). This understanding of al marjieeyah al islamiyah does not strike any distinction between it and Judaism, Christianity, Buddhism, or even Marxism.

More importantly, Islam is transformed into a general framework for society and the ‘civic state,’ governed by ‘civic specialists’ in government and administration (exactly like the experts and specialists that Elmessiri kept attacking throughout his intellectual journey and to whom he attributed the Nazi genocide); they are not Sheiks, priests, or men of jurisprudence. The ‘civic state’ is based on a human constitution (which is not seen as contradictory with seeing Sharia as the main source of legislation, the people as the source of power, and Islam the final point of reference) (Al-Huwaiyah, p. 100)!

Elmessiri always tried to assure his readers that his Marxist background was entirely absorbed in his ‘human Islamic’ vision, especially the rejection of injustice, exploitation, consumerism, and the surrender to the status quo (Rihlati al-fikriyah, pp. 136–137). This narrative is emphasized by Elmessiri’s reference to the traditional Muslim society he was brought up in as well as the narrative of his ‘conversion’ to Islam. This narrative has been criticized by a few intellectuals who associated it with the project of the Islamization of knowledge and the possibility of its abuse by political Islamists (Elmessiri, 2006: 42).

The narrative about his ‘conversion’ is central to Elmessiri’s intellectual journey, where he stresses that during a crucial period (1984–1985) Islam was transformed in his eyes from a mere religion he believes in into a worldview from which one can generate highly explanatory analytical paradigms, because Islam gives clues to the grand issues of existence (Rihlati al-fikriyah, p. 542). It ironic that Elmessiri did not generate any paradigms from the Islamic tradition! Rather, he introduced three major paradigms that entered Western discourse a long time ago: immanentism, comprehensive secularism, and functional groups. A new Islamic discourse in this narrative does not go beyond a critique of the modern condition and a commentary on human experience. Such a critique is required as a reminder of the consequences of modernity and Western colonization as well as the birth of Zionism and its atrocities in Palestine and neighboring Arab countries. If religion is the major identification of the Western critique of modernity, so Elmessiri’s discourse is a Jewish, Christian, and even agnostic discourse. In other words, Elmessiri’s discourse does not represent a unique Islamic discourse. Rather, it is a form of cultural critique in which all critics can participate in the face of modern ideologies that advocate global markets and neocolonial strategies.

Perhaps the idea of a ‘new Islamic discourse’ was promoted because Elmessiri published his two-volume work Partial Secularism and Comprehensive Secularism in 2002. It is well known that the word ‘secularism’ is associated in conservative Islamic collective consciousness (and perhaps the unconscious) with ‘anti-religion,’ ‘anti-morality,’ and all modern ideologies, whatever effort is done to end the false war and duality between Islam and secularism. In the transition period that Egypt has been undergoing, the word ‘secularism’ has been mistakenly associated with the advocacy of pro-Western ideologies and strategies that are meant to fight Sharia, the Quran, Islamic identity, etc.

In Elmessiri’s view, the understanding of secularism as the separation of church and state should be replaced by a more complex representation of secular modernity as a comprehensive world outlook that operates on all levels of reality through a large number of mechanisms (Elmessiri, 2000: 53). Elmessiri does not claim that this paradigm is entirely new, and he stresses that it was introduced by Western intellectuals, including Irving Kristol (secularism as a religious view deifying man), Ágnes Heller (secularism as a pantheistic view), Max Weber (secularism as the disenchantment of the world), and Zygmunt Bauman (secularism as a compulsive modernization and a social production of moral indifference; Partial Secularism, Vol. 1, pp. 101–108).

Elmessiri conceives the Enlightenment as ‘the philosophical basis of comprehensive secularism’ (Partial Secularism, Vol. 1, p. 290). His critique of the Enlightenment has much in common with the fierce attack launched by 20th-century historiography against materialists in general and Julien Offray de la Mettrie (1709–1751) in particular. Les philosophes as a group have been accused of being responsible for the rise of the totalitarian state, the ills of the 20th century, and nihilism, which denied humankind a special place in the universe. The Enlightenment legacy is reduced to a materialist view that can be seen in La Mettrie’s fundamental works on the philosophy of nature: L’Histoire naturelle de l’âme, L’Homme machine, L’Homme plante, and Le Système d’épicure. The repudiations of materialists as ‘purveyors of scandalous ideas’ are attributed to the fact that they were singled out by Karl Marx, thus making it easy for historians to hold them accountable for the ills of the 20th century, the practices of communist regimes, the rise of totalitarian governments, and even the Holocaust (Wellman, 1992: 264).

This view might be seen as nothing but a reduction of modernity to the ‘dark side of modern society,’ which was anticipated by Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno in Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944). This critique was later taken to an extreme by Herbert Marcuse in his One-Dimensional Man (1964). Elmessiri might easily be accused of being influenced by the tragic and pessimistic cultural critique of the Frankfurt School, the Weberian critique of rationalism, and the metaphors of the ‘iron cage’ of modernity and the ‘disenchantment of the world.’ As Bernstein (1991) suggests, we can see clearly that 20th-century critiques of the Enlightenment and rationalism ‘can be understood as variations of Weberian themes’ (p. 40).

Though Elmessiri never referred to the German-American political philosopher Eric Voegelin and his critique of secularism, it is still possible to trace his influence on Elmessiri. The first Western critic Elmessiri refers to in his search for revisions of secularism is the American Jewish writer Irving Kristol, dubbed the ‘godfather of neoconservatism.’ Kristol is the missing link between Elmessiri and Voegelin. It is Kristol who turned to Voegelin’s works to support his attacks on liberalism and a secular view of history. Secularism, according to Kristol, is more than science: it is a ‘religious view’ that proceeds to make ‘metaphysical and theological inferences.’ By embracing this secular religion (‘ersatz’ or ‘alternative religion’ in Voegelin’s terminology), humankind can make or create itself (the deification of human beings). Playing the role of God, humans can understand natural phenomena, control them, and use them rationally to develop their condition on Earth. This is how this secular religion, according to Elmessiri, developed the idea of progress and became the ultimate framework of both liberalism and socialism (Elmessiri, 2000: 101–102).

Elmessiri draws on the heritage of the Frankfurt School to support his critique of modernity. This shows clearly in his admiration of Herbert Marcuse’s notion of the ‘one-dimensional man’: one who is seduced by entertainment industries and manipulated by the media. As Elmessiri suggests, by the 1960s, in addition to the crucial contribution of the movement of the neo-left, Western critical discourse had been crystalized and the works of the Frankfurt School were abundant, criticizing the ambitions of the Enlightenment, colonial exploitation, and Western crimes against the Asian and African peoples (Elmessiri, 2000: 53). The mid-1960s and the 1970s, however, witnessed the eclipse of the problems of modernity, self, and history, celebrating instead the world of structuralism, a world that simply repudiates the notions of time and selfhood, or embracing a mystique of postmodernism, which emphasizes expressiveness, play, and sexuality (Berman, 1982: 33).

With these facts in mind, Elmessiri argues that there is a transformation from partial secularism or ‘solid materialist immanentism’ to comprehensive secularism or ‘postmodern liquid materialist immanentism.’ ‘Partial secularism’ (or ‘the solid phase’ of modernity) developed between the mid-19th century and 1965; it did not focus on the natural law alone, and it allowed a space for human (and moral and religious) law. The post-1965 phase, on the other hand, is the starting point of ‘comprehensive secularism’ or the ‘liquid period of modernity’ (Rihlati al-fikriyah, pp. 389–396).

Elmessiri conceives of the celebration of sexuality as a radical turning point, i.e., the point of the transformation of modernity from solidity to liquidity. Sensual pleasure was no longer the monopoly of a particular group or class and it became available to all in the name of the ‘democratization of hedonism’ (Rihlati al-fikriyah, p. 233). Though more dominant in Western societies, the obsession with pleasure, according to Elmessiri, has become a universal condition in the era of comprehensive secularism: pleasure industries ‘have infiltrated our dreams, have shaped our images of ourselves, and have controlled the very direction of our libidos’ (Elmessiri, 1996: 138). This point is also underlined by John Esposito when he stresses that although Christianity persisted in the consciousness of Western human beings and provided them with the ethics necessary to manage their personal and social lives, the culture industry and state security have controlled humans’ dreams and even the ‘direction of his libido’ (Esposito, 2000: 53–57).

It is surprising that Elmessiri tried in a few lines to stress that partial secularism (the separation of religion from the state) is consistent with Islam because it is a form of ‘moral secularism’ or ‘human secularism’:

I, as an advocate of man and faith, see no problem in the acceptance of partial secularism, that is the separation of religion from politics and perhaps economy, since I do not want to see Sheiks, priests, philosophers or English literature professors sitting in committees that discuss the ways of improving exports, budgets, the types of weapons required for our army. All these matters are technical and they have to be left to technicians and experts. (Rihlati al-fikriyah, pp. 389–390)

Elmessiri’s attempt to reconcile Islam and secularism was too late; he tried to make people love it after he showed its worst manifestations. It is hardly surprising that he tried to get rid of the term ‘secularism’ altogether, suggesting instead the concepts of a civic state and civic party with an Islamic point of reference. This phrase was associated with and promoted by the Al Wasat Party and was later adopted by the Muslim Brotherhood after their political ascendance following a revolution of young people who were calling only for bread, freedom, and social justice. The Muslim Brothers promised the masses a Nahda project with an Islamic referentiality during the presidential elections in 2012 and the masses were under the illusion that it was a fully planned economic, social, political, and cultural project that would achieve happiness for all. But this Nahda with an Islamic point of reference did not go beyond the promotion of notions of social justice and a fight against various forms of corruption.