Sadik Dżalal al-Azm

Dzieła

• 1969Naqd al-fikr al-dīnī (Krytyka myśli religijnej)

  Eseje opublikowane w Bejrucie, dowodzące, że myśl religijna, jaką posłużono się do wyjaśnienia klęski 1967 roku, nie daje się pogodzić z wiedzą naukową epoki; najbardziej znany esej czyta odmowę pokłonu Iblisa przed Adamem jako tragedię wierności wobec Boga. Al-Azm został oskarżony o podżeganie do waśni religijnych i uniewinniony.

• 1981Orientalism and Orientalism in Reverse (Orientalizm i orientalizm na opak)

  Esej w czasopiśmie „Khamsin”: Edward Said słusznie ujawnił orientalizm jako styl dominacji, ale wywodząc go od Homera, uczynił go tak samo ponadczasowym jak istoty, które krytykował; ci, którzy odpowiadają mu, głosząc niezmienną islamską lub arabską istotę, odtwarzają orientalizm „na opak”.

Stanowisko

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.

Życie i kontekst

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.

Dalsze główne dzieła

• 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)