सादिक़ जलाल अल-अज़्म

कृतियाँ

• 1969धार्मिक चिंतन की आलोचना

  बेरूत में प्रकाशित निबंध, जो तर्क देते हैं कि 1967 की हार को समझाने में प्रयुक्त धार्मिक चिंतन उस युग के वैज्ञानिक ज्ञान से मेल नहीं खा सकता; सबसे प्रसिद्ध निबंध इब्लीस के आदम के सामने झुकने से इनकार को ख़ुदा के प्रति निष्ठा की त्रासदी के रूप में पढ़ता है। अल-अज़्म पर धार्मिक कलह भड़काने का मुक़दमा चला और वे बरी हुए।

• 1981ओरिएंटलिज़्म और उलटा ओरिएंटलिज़्म

  पत्रिका “ख़मसीन” में निबंध: एडवर्ड सईद ने ओरिएंटलिज़्म को वर्चस्व की शैली के रूप में सही उजागर किया, परंतु उसे होमर तक ले जाकर उन्होंने उसे उन्हीं सारतत्त्वों जितना कालातीत बना दिया जिनकी वे आलोचना कर रहे थे; जो लोग अपरिवर्तनीय इस्लामी या अरब सार का दावा करके उसका उत्तर देते हैं, वे ओरिएंटलिज़्म को “उलटे रूप में” दोहराते हैं।

मत

Al-Azm is on the map as one of the most outspoken representatives of secular critique in modern Arab thought. Trained in Kant and in analytic philosophy, he wrote on Kant’s theory of time and on the origins of Kant’s arguments in the antinomies. His “Self-Criticism after the Defeat” (1968) traced the defeat of 1967 not to fate or to outside powers alone but to the social and intellectual structures of Arab societies and the conduct of their leaders. “Critique of Religious Thought” (1969) argued that religion, as an organised system of belief, conflicts with the scientific knowledge of the age, and that its use by Arab regimes to explain and console after the defeat was ideological; in its most discussed essay, “The Tragedy of Satan”, he read Iblis’s refusal to bow before Adam as a tragic conflict between God’s command and God’s will, in which Iblis remained faithful to God alone. In “Orientalism and Orientalism in Reverse” (1981) he agreed with Edward Said that Orientalism had served domination, but objected that Said, by tracing it back to Homer and Aeschylus, made Orientalism itself an unchanging essence of the West, and could not explain why Orientalist scholarship was sometimes right; those Arab and Islamist thinkers who answered Orientalism by asserting an unchanging Islamic or Arab essence reproduced it in reverse. After the fatwa against Salman Rushdie he defended the novelist in “The Mentality of Taboo” (1992) and argued for secularism as a condition of democracy. Elizabeth Suzanne Kassab (2010) treats his work as a key part of the Arab tradition of cultural critique after 1967.

जीवन और संदर्भ

Sadiq Jalal al-Azm was born in Damascus in November 1934 into a prominent family of Ottoman notables. He studied philosophy at the American University of Beirut and took his doctorate at Yale with work on Kant. He taught at the American University of Beirut in the 1960s and worked for the Palestine Research Center; after the publication of his “Critique of Religious Thought” (1969) he was tried in Beirut for inciting religious strife and acquitted. From 1977 he taught modern European philosophy at the University of Damascus until his retirement in 1999, and also as a visiting professor at Princeton and other universities in the United States, Germany and Japan. In 2011 he supported the Syrian uprising; he spent his last years in exile in Germany and died in Berlin on 11 December 2016.

अन्य प्रमुख कृतियाँ

• Kant’s Theory of Time (1967)
• Self-Criticism after the Defeat (al-Naqd al-dhātī baʿd al-hazīma, 1968)
• Critique of Religious Thought (Naqd al-fikr al-dīnī, 1969)
• The Origins of Kant’s Arguments in the Antinomies (1972)
• Orientalism and Orientalism in Reverse (Khamsin, 1981)
• The Mentality of Taboo (Dhihniyyat al-taḥrīm, 1992)