Al-Aqqad and the Arab enlightenment intellectual
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Sixty years ago (March 1964) the famous Egyptian writer and literary figure, Abbas Mahmoud Al-Akkad, who marked Egyptian and Arab cultural life for more than four full decades, died. Al-Aqqad was a distinguished model of a type of encyclopedic thinkers who were known in cultural life at its time. He combined literary writing in poetry, prose, and narrative, philosophical contemplation, political and social treatment, and media activity.
We read of Al-Aqqad his geniuses, which were at that time a kind of psychological and historical writing uncommon in Arab thought. We also read his Islamisms, in which he took a different approach from his arch friend Taha Hussein, whose religious works were dominated by a literary spirit. He also differed in them from the ideological writings of the advocates of political Islam to whom he was an opponent. To them from a rational faith perspective. Although Al-Aqqad wrote about the most important philosophers of Islam, such as Ibn Sina, Al-Ghazali, and Ibn Rushd, his studies on the subject were not at the level of his solid literary works, and therefore Abd al-Rahman Badawi criticized him in his memoirs and considered his philosophical writings superficial and marginal.
However, we cannot deny that Al-Aqqad is one of the four figures who founded the contemporary Arab intellectual tradition. In addition to him, they include Taha Hussein, Ahmed Amin, and Zaki Naguib Mahmoud. The four were pioneers of Enlightenment and modernity thought, even if their interests, approaches, and ways of thinking differed. Taha Hussein took the path of cultural criticism from a rational, liberal perspective, which he expressed in the phrase Cartesian doubt. He established new methodological writing methods in the history of literature and ideas, and his works were characterized by boldness and confrontation.
As for Ahmed Amin, he is credited with being the first to have a project to write a comprehensive history of ideas, doctrines, and visions in the history of medieval Islamic culture, from a modern perspective. Although his knowledge of Orientalist writings and contemporary philosophical and interpretive approaches was limited, he succeeded in presenting a new and complex reading of the classical Arab-Islamic heritage in its philosophical, theological, and literary aspects, which remains rich material suitable for follow-up and reading. As for Zaki Naguib Mahmoud, he was the first to spread new scientific thought through his close acquaintance with English positivist philosophy.
The presentation of the ideas of the logical positivists was not separate from a committed theoretical position based on preaching the values of experimental rationality, procedural objectivity, and practical truth, although Mahmoud ended in his recent works towards a reconciliatory tendency between science and the spirituality of faith.
Al-Akkad did not follow the path of Taha Hussein, who was deeply imbued with French modernist thought to the point of considering that the only approach to contemporary civilization was conscious Westernization and disavowal of the Eastern heritage. Zaki Najib Mahmoud also did not follow the positivist, pragmatic tendency that he viewed through the eyes of the creative writer as a reductionism of thought and culture, falling short of achieving true human progress. Perhaps Ahmed Amin was the closest of the three to his thought, and he noted his books on the cultural history of Islam, in which he considered that he started from a “conservative, renewal” methodology.
It is not our concern to evaluate the path of the four thinkers who were overlooked by scientific research, despite the abundance of their production and the depth of their culture. Rather, what concerns us here is to point out that Al-Aqqad and his aforementioned contemporaries formed a model of encyclopedic intellectuals close to the thinkers of the European Enlightenment in the eighteenth century AD.
One of the characteristics of this model is the broad encyclopedic culture, which we strongly sense in Al-Aqqad, whose works have reached nearly a hundred titles, and in which he has dealt with various ancient and modern knowledge and cultural fields, and this is the feature that he shares with Taha Hussein. We also see in Al-Aqqad another characteristic of European Enlightenment thinkers, which is the combination of philosophical contemplation and the aesthetics of literary style, even in his more complex books such as “Thinking is an Islamic Duty” and “The Beliefs of Thinkers.”
Just as European Enlightenment thinkers adopted a rational religious tendency that rejected fanaticism and fossilization and embraced tolerance and freedom, Al-Aqqad went in the same direction, loyal to the project of Imam Muhammad Abduh, whom he described as “the genius of reform and education.” The cultural press was the preferred channel for the pioneers of the European Enlightenment to spread their ideas and opinions, and Al-Aqqad followed the same path. His writings in the magazines “Al-Risala,” “Al-Muqtafa,” and “Al-Mu’ayyad” carried ideas of renewal and modernization that radically changed the face of contemporary Arab culture. After sixty years, the Enlightenment intellectual disappeared from the Arab intellectual arena, and Al-Aqqad was one of the first figures on which the faltering Arab Enlightenment dynamic was based.
*Mauritanian academic
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