Straus Fellow
Academic Year 2011-2012
Wael Farouq
Wael Farouq was born in Cairo, Egypt. He was assistant professor for Islamic studies at the Copto-Catholic Faculty of theology in Cairo, Egypt (2005-2008). He has been visiting professor at the Faculty of Law, Macerata University since 2005 and instructor at the Arabic Language Institute at the American University in Cairo since 2006.
He is a columnist in several Arab and Italian newspapers and magazines and President of Tawasul cultural center for inter civilization dialogue.
Primary area of his research interest is the language of Islamic culture (literature, philosophy and religion) in which he has published several researches, among them "Alle Radici Della Ragione Araba" (Roots of the Arabic Reason) in Dio Salvi la Ragione, Cantagalli 2007, "Radici storiche e linguistiche della Sharia islamica" (Linguistical and historical roots of the Islamic Law), Macerata University 2007, "The language of Islamic Philosophy, a textual study of the Encyclopedia of Ikhwan Al-Safa – Purity brothers" Cairo 2008, " La ragione come atto" (Reason as an act) in Nuntium 2008/2-3 and "Islamic law and challenge of the modernity: Conformity and conflict", Cairo 2010.
Research
Islam, Arab mind, fiqh and language
An analysis of the factors which shaped Arab mind and constituted the seeds of contemporary Islam’s contradictions and problematic issues
With this research project I intend to address three topics of great relevance, both for contemporary Arabo-Islamic society and for world society in general, especially considering the increasing importance of a deep understanding of Arab culture, given the present political, economical and strategical scenario. The outline of the project, divided in three parts, is presented below:
a.) The novelty introduced by Islam: religious or social?
With the rise of Islam, two new words entered the Arabic lexicon: Islam itself and jahiliya. In fact, the first action undertaken by the new religion was the choice of its own name – its definition – as well as the name of what represented its antithesis. Linguistically speaking, the word Islam is derived from the root slm, which conveys the opposite meaning of “illness”, “being killed”, “being broken”. In a similar way, all derivatives of slm possess meanings related to “peace”, “integrity”, “safety” and “give one self to God”. On the other hand, the theological meaning of Islam, which took shape during the two centuries following its appearance, is commonly accepted to be “submission to the Supreme God in whatever concerns human life”. In opposition to that, from the linguistic point of view, the word jahiliya, used by Islam to define its antithesis, carries the meaning of “anger associated with violence against others”, and only in a second phase this word started to indicate the time preceding Islam, characterized by idolatry, misbelief and rejection of faith in one God. What are these two words telling us about the driving force of Islam and its main goal?
In addition to that, researchers think that Islam added very little to previous religions, i.e. Judaism, Christianism and Hanifiya, the pure monotheistic religion, supposed to be the true religion of Abraham. This fact is confirmed by the Islamic texts themselves, as the Prophet himself said: “I was sent to bring morals to completeness”. Further confirmation comes from the conditions required to enter Islam, among which we find the belief in Judaism, Christianism and all the prophets, because Islam appeared with the purpose of emending the distortions caused to revelation by the “People of the Book” (ahl al-kitab), i.e. Jews and Christians. From all of this, we can understand that Islam came to light for no other reason than that of transforming jahily society, based on ‘asabiya (tribal solidarity and cohesion force) and on the use of violence as a common means of life, into a society based on brotherhood rooted in faith and humanity, a society where people share life, loving and trusting its Creator to Whom they surrender, because He is the one who provides every creature with its subsistence, without the need for human violence or conflict.
Could it be then, given the reasons above, that the Prophet’s hijra (emigration) from Mecca to Medina was not a simple flight from the misbelievers’ violence and their attempts to kill him, but rather a symbolic action signifying the exit from the tribal jahily society, in order to enter the Muslim believers’ society? Could this be the reason why the hijra continued to be performed well until the end of the second Caliph Omar b. al-Khattab’s rule (644 d.C.) by any person who wanted to announce his adherence to Islam? Was this the reason why the first action performed by the Prophet in Medina was to bind in a relationship of brotherhood the muhajirun (Muslims who moved from Mecca to Medina escaping persecutions) and the ansar (the inhabitants of Medina who accepted Islam, offering help and protection to the Muslims from Mecca), thus creating a new society based on faith relations and not on blood relations? This will be the subject of the first part of the research.
b.) The origin of contradictions in contemporary Islam: a religion opposing tribal values, expressed in a language codifying the same tribal values it came to abrogate?
Less than a hundred years after the Prophet’s death, Muslims were ruling most of the ancient world. Arabs left their desert to reach the agricultural civilizations surrounding them and mixed with their people. As a consequence, their languages got mixed as well. At a certain time, they felt that both their culture and religion, strongly dependent on orally transmitted texts memorized by heart, were facing a danger: if the language got lost, both religion and identity would be lost as well. As a result, a unique movement in language history arose: thousands of scholars left their homes, accompanied by camels loaded with several hundreds tons of ink and paper, and traveled to the desert in search of the most isolated Arab tribes, some of which – as it is reported – did not even know Prophet Muhammad’s mission. These scholars recorded everything said by those Arabs, who had preserved the purity of their languages thanks to their isolation. In Arabic language history this period is known as “the age of collection and recording ”. The texts of this age subsequently became the main reference for the interpretation of the Koran and the Hadith, the two main sources of the Islamic Law (shari’a). In this way, the tribal language recorded by those scholars – and consequently the tribal culture and traditions – became the main reference for understanding Islam, which had come with the purpose of destroying this same tribal culture. Is this paradox able to explain the contradictions we find between the source text, i.e the Koran, and both the legal and cognitive system built from it? Could it be that, after the process of memory forming, which took place in the age of recording, and due to the specific retrieval and transmission tools used for this task, the mind remained imprisoned by those texts, regardless of the source text? In fact, while we cannot find a single sura in the Koran which does not contain the call to reflection, thinking, use of reason and discernment, we find at the same time that the word “mind” in Arabic is etymologically derived from the name of the process of “tying together cattle legs" so that they cannot move or stand. The concept is ethically and religiously derived from: " mind is called ‘the mind’ because it prevents those who possess it from getting in trouble – thus restricting their movements. "It is the mind referred to by the expert of Islamic jurisprudence (faqih) al-Ghazali, i.e. "the mind which, once it testifies to the truthfulness of the prophet, must cease to act.". The paradox highlighted above will be the subject of the second part of the research.
c.) To which extent, and in what ways, is “fiqh’s mind”, shaped many centuries ago, still affecting Arab society today?
The concept of “mind” explained above, connected with Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh), has dominated all intellectual activities in Islamic society. If we tried to describe Islamic civilization using the name of one of its products, we would have to call it a “civilisation of fiqh”, in the same way we call Greek civilization a “civilisation of philosophy” and contemporary European civilization one of “science and technology”. Indeed, if we considered the intellectual production of Islamic civilization in terms of either volume or quality, we would find that fiqh comes unequivocally at the top of the list. What has been written there, including lengthy and brief expositions, explications, explications of explications, is indeed uncountable. We might even say that, until recently, no Muslim family in the Arab world or in the heart of Asia or Africa did not have books of fiqh in their homes. In other words, no Muslim with a good command of Arabic did not have direct contact with books of fiqh. In that respect, fiqh is to be considered one of the most evenly disseminated possessions among people in Arab and Islamic societies. It follows naturally that fiqh has had a strong impact on those societies, not only in the behaviour of individuals and communities, which is its primary target, but in the “intellectual behaviour” of those societies, i.e. their way of thinking and their intellectual production.
Given the facts above, it is undoubtedly to be expected that a thourough investigation of the mind of fiqh, during the stages of its development, will play a major role in understanding Arab society today. Would it be possible, for example, to trace back the stands of Arab society towards democracy, human rights, justice, and other topical issues of contemporary world, to this particular concept of mind? This will be the subject of my investigation in the third part of my research.
