Sadiq Jalal al-Azm

Works

• 1969Critique of Religious Thought

  Essays published in Beirut arguing that religious thought, as it was used to explain the defeat of 1967, cannot be reconciled with the scientific knowledge of the age; the best-known essay reads the refusal of Iblis to bow before Adam as a tragedy of loyalty to God. Al-Azm was tried for inciting religious strife and acquitted.

• 1981Orientalism and Orientalism in Reverse

  Essay in the journal Khamsin: Edward Said rightly exposed Orientalism as a style of domination, but by tracing it back to Homer he made it as timeless as the essences he criticised; those who answer it by asserting an unchanging Islamic or Arab essence reproduce Orientalism “in reverse”.

Position

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.

Life & context

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.

Further main works

• Kant’s Theory of Time (1967)
• Self-Criticism after the Defeat (al-Naqd al-dhātī baʿd al-hazīma, 1968)
• The Origins of Kant’s Arguments in the Antinomies (1972)
• The Mentality of Taboo (Dhihniyyat al-taḥrīm, 1992)