Between Enlightenment and Modernization… The Arab Intellectual Dilemma
On these days, sixty years ago (March 5, 1963), the pioneer of enlightenment, Ahmed Lotfi al-Sayyid, passed away. A student of the two imams, Jamal al-Din al-Afghani and Muhammad Abduh. He was the greatest preacher of liberalism, statesman and intellect, head of the Arab Linguistic Academy, and founder of the first modern Arab university (Cairo University).
Ahmed Lutfi Al-Sayyed was defending the European Enlightenment model and seeing it as the only horizon available for progress, even under the colonial umbrella. After this founding generation, the call for enlightenment in Arab thought declined, and the original relationship between the lights and modernity was severed. A broad trend has emerged in Arab thought, criticizing Eurocentrism, and calling for a modernity that is consistent with the cultural and value identity of Arab-Islamic societies, which means a break with the dynamism of the European Enlightenment, which was tainted by two other concepts: irreligious secularism and the ideology of historical progress.
This problem has its field of application in Western thought itself, and this was recently revealed by the French historian “Antoine Lailati” in his book “The Legacy of Lights: The Ambiguities of Modernity.” What “My Night” shows is that the Enlightenment movement was one of the effects of the first modernity, in terms of the deep normative crisis that Christian Europe experienced after the bloody contract wars, with the emergence of signs of the nation-state and the emergence of the first globalization (between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries). The thought of the lights expressed the dilemma of modernity in terms of the contradiction between the axiom of the universal mind that embodies the unity of human nature and is loaded with the ideals of liberation and progress, and the phenomenon of European exception, that is, the exclusivity of certain societies and cultures with modern leadership thanks to their historical and anthropological specificities.
The question raised here: Is modernity a stage of human progress that all societies reach according to a law of global historical development, or is it a phenomenon unique to European societies for fundamental reasons related to their doctrinal and cultural systems? According to the first approach, modernity is seen as a product of the industrial revolution and what it led to in consecrating applied experimental rationality, the labor division system, and liberal individualism, and these are universal features that adapt to all civilized and social contexts.
According to the second approach, modernity itself is the tangible institutional expression of the Enlightenment’s philosophical and ideological values and ideas. Despite the intense overlap between the thought of the lights and the movement of modernization, Western philosophical and social thought knew two distinct styles of criticism of the Enlightenment and criticism of modernity.
In the eighteenth century, Jean-Jacques Rousseau was one of the pioneers of Enlightenment thought and one of the most important advocates of the social contract and the first to crystallize the idea of qualitative improvement for humanity. The technology that ends up transforming man himself into a material for domination and exploitation. Rousseau, and after him the philosophers of the German Enlightenment, considered that the values of rational criticism, historical progress, and liberation are not unique to modern societies, but rather may be subject to fading and being lost in societies controlled by consumer technology and individual utilitarianism.
This intellectual path has reached its extent in recent writings on “liberal censorship”, “the industry of complicity” and “political tattoos” .. all of which revolve around the destructive effect of rationality and control separate from the ideals of liberation and human subjectivity advocated by the thought of the lights. The German-American philosopher Leo Strauss considered that the Enlightenment criteria are stronger and more effective in the ancient (Greek and medieval Islamic) political and moral philosophies, because they preserve the principle of the natural finality of human existence and the idea of justice in its core value content.
For some reason, Ahmed Lutfi Al-Sayyed worked on translating the ethical and political texts of Aristotle, which he considered beneficial to contemporary Arab societies, although they raise problems and ideas far from the context of European modernity. It is the same course that Taha Hussein adopted (especially in his book “Leaders of Thought”), and he was very close intellectually and politically to Lotfi Al-Sayyid.
The question we conclude is: Do we need the ideas of the Enlightenment or modernization as a historical and social path? It does not seem that the option of modernization in itself poses a fundamental problem given the multiplicity of approaches to modernity and the prevailing impression that it can be built on independent normative foundations. As for the Enlightenment example, it seems complex and the discrepancy is wide regarding its content and its period, hence the importance of returning to the legacy of modern Arab Enlightenment.
Mauritanian academic
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