The late Hassan Hanafi wrote in his memoirs, "I wish to be buried next to the one I loved throughout my life, ... I hope that the pressure of death will be light, for I have been tired in my life and I hope that I will not get tired in my death. Othman Amin and Jean Jayton, and my students Nasr Hamid Abu Zaid and Ali Mabrouk.And I hope to see my children...and grandchildren...I hope that God will forgive sins and pardon me, and that I come with a pure intention (a day when neither money nor sons will benefit except those who come to God with a sound heart). In the grave is lonely but forgetful. I wish to see the light in the darkness; the light of the heart in the darkness of the place. I wish to smell the scent of roses instead of the smell of a decaying body. Whoever harmed them unintentionally, I will return to you as pure as Adam and Muhammad (the Day when neither wealth nor children will benefit except he who comes to God with a sound heart).
This text accurately expresses Hanafi's personality on the personal and intellectual levels, as it combines his various human tendencies;
Natural, philosophical and religious, which is the combination that characterized his two-component project;
Intellectual and political, in which he tried to compose or mix between Islam and Marxism, between heritage and innovation, between text and reality, and between the theoretical project and the political project.
This synthesis was picked up by the jurist Sheikh Mustafa Al-Zarqa - may God have mercy on him - when Hanafi expressed in the Algiers Forum in 1981 some of his ideas that he had written down in the theoretical introduction to his project titled “Heritage and Renewal” in 1980.
In my opinion, Hanafi represents the last major project in reading heritage, which has spread since the seventies of the last century after the June 1967 defeat, which left a profound impact, especially on the souls and minds of the "progressive" elite at the time.
In that introduction - and the lecture as well - Hanafi called for a shift from the world of the unseen to the world of martyrdom, and from the language of theology (God, Messenger, reward, account, punishment, angel, demon,...) to a language "more rational, open and humane" (human, mind). consideration, action, virtue...). He believes that the first language is a closed language and is subject to religious symbols, while the second can be understood by any individual - regardless of his culture. He thinks that he is thus formulating "progressive alternatives in place of the prevailing alternatives" in religious heritage and awareness, and in fact he was using the concepts and language prevailing in his time, even in his ideological milieu.
The intellectual and religious elite in the forum listened to Hanafi, which sparked controversy at the time. Al-Zarqa objected to him, saying, “Anyone who reads your lecture does not come out of it except that you want to slip the Marxist thought and insert it into the interpretation of the Qur’an.” He supported Muhammad Al-Mubarak’s proposal not to include the text of Hanafi’s lecture Within the forum's printed work; He asked him to straighten out “the crookedness in it, and to delete the misguidances in it”; Because the words of Hanafi - according to Al-Zarqa - require a settlement between the believer and the unbeliever, and that the issues of faith and unbelief turn into a mere intellectual or philosophical sport.
In my opinion, Hanafi represents the last major project in reading heritage, which has spread since the 1970s after the June 1967 defeat, which left a profound impact, especially on the souls and minds of the "progressive" elite at the time. These projects begged different references, and were motivated by various purposes, but were brought together by ideology and broad hopes that convinced their owners that one of them - alone - could re-evaluate the fertile and rich knowledge of a nation extended in time, place, fields and disciplines, meaning that the production of a nation and generations of scholars and specialists through the centuries In various fields, it can devolve into an individual formulation undertaken by an individual thinker who re-presents it to the nation of the present era to change the course of the present and shape the future.
These projects included names such as Hussein Mroueh, Tayeb Tizini, Muhammad Arkoun and Muhammad Abed Al-Jabri, in addition to Hassan Hanafi, who passed away a week ago. They are projects that have different positions on what they called “heritage”, a term that is sometimes narrowed to include the sciences that arose in Islamic civilization around the religious text only, and it expands others to include the texts of the revelation itself (Qur’an and Hadith), and all the projects were preoccupied with the question of renaissance or modernity. Or progress or rationalization on different labels.
These projects were born in the light of political and ideological struggles in the intellectual, cultural and religious circles between the seventies and the nineties, with which the Islamic heritage - as a whole - turned to a new level in which it was opened to dense and conflicting interpretive readings at the same time that reflect the ideologies and priorities of the heritage readers. In it the epistemological and ideological were mixed, i.e. the boundaries between heritage (viewed from within and according to its methods, concepts and mechanisms), and the biases and orientations of those who read it, and these tendencies prior to reading the texts of the heritage itself, and driven by ideas, currents and Western approaches from an elite who studied some of them in Europe and studied Others are based on the products of Western thought, so their ideas ravaged him and changed his condition and conscience.
During the Cold War (between the 1940s and the 1990s), two models of the solution dominated; They are the progressive socialist and the reactionary capitalist, and the state of independence in the Arab world (the Arab countries became independent between 1940-1960) led to the marginalization of heritage and its revival movements that prevailed in the first half of the 20th century, and in the sixties the shift towards revolutionary socialism grew and exacerbated - as a consequence - The estrangement between the Islamists and the state, which was called "national" or "nationalist", then came the defeat of 1967, so "hopes were broken, horizons were blocked, opinions and theories were shattered, and research was put forward in the political, intellectual and social axioms of everyone with a core," according to the expression of our professor Tariq Al-Bishri - may his soul rest in peace. God - who was among those who switched from leftist thought to Islamic thought in the seventies, which witnessed a recognition by some progressives of the need to build a self-styled Arab culture that lives the era, its concerns and problems, and does not deny itself and its cultural and civilizational specificity.
In this context, numerous works appeared dealing with the question of Ennahda and presenting “heritage” as a “problematic” on the one hand, and an arena for ideological struggle against “religious reaction” (represented by political Islam) on the other.
Political Islam was opposed to the two presented solutions together, and offered a third solution, which is the "Islamic solution."
Perhaps some of its bearers considered themselves an extension of the 19th century reformers who tried - starting with Rifa'a Rafi' al-Tahtawi and then Muhammad Abdo and his school - to find a link between Western cultural data and the content of Islam represented by its heritage, an idea that generated - at the time - the conflict between the incoming and old inherited hadith.
Heritage reading projects have created multiple approaches in which we can distinguish between 3 approaches:
The first approach: revolutionary or revolutionary, and includes two approaches; The first is an eclectic attempt to highlight the progressive aspects of the heritage in line with the prevailing revolutionary trends in the seventies, as we find in Hussein Marwa (1974), Muhammad Emara in his first stage (1974), and Tayeb Tizini (1978). The second is synthetic and tried to rebuild the sciences of Islam to fit with reality and serve the needs of the present in establishing a comprehensive renaissance based on the perceptions and biases of its owners, as we find in Hassan Hanafi in particular. The dominant feature of this trend is the Marxist ideas that later formed the reference of Muhammad Shahrour, who in the nineties tried to reformulate a new Islam with its principles, pillars and rulings, and to clarify for us the Sharia that we and generations of scholars did not understand for centuries!
The second approach: deconstruction;
With the aim of liberating the “Islamic mind” from the authority of the past represented by the religious text and the traditional text in general;
It is a necessary step for the desired modernization, as we find in Muhammad Arkoun through his project, which he called "Applied Islamism", in which he applied a dense set of Western concepts and approaches.
The third approach: a fragmentary evaluation approach, which searches in the “Arab mind” for roots and origins, and searches for its various elements and components with Western concepts that were produced for a heritage other than heritage and in a context other than the context, in order to select from it the demonstrative rational aspects and exclude everything else (i.e. statement and gratitude).
This approach sees rationality as the necessary beginning to modernize the "Arab mind", and that heritage is the real battlefield with the Islamists to wrest their authority from them and then win the public. This approach is represented by Muhammad Abed Al-Jabri.
Thus, heritage has turned into a problem and a tool in ideological battles, after it was for decades preceding the seventies era of a general cultural revival that does not find any embarrassment or problem in returning to it or re-publishing and reviving it, and transforming it into a scientific art with its traditions and rules, or in deepening awareness of it and building new knowledge. On the basis of it, as we have it in the first half of the twentieth century.
The problem of heritage - in its entirety - was not limited to re-reading it, selecting from it, or withdrawing its authority from the hands of Islamists in the midst of conflict over the public and projects of change in the Arab world.
Rather, it also imposed - in another category - the question of the feasibility of returning to it;
For an Arab group saw the mere return to heritage as a problem and an expression of a past authority that opposed modernization processes (ie, an Islamic reaction!);
Although the projects of reading the heritage of the owners of these projects had a renaissance and change tendency, regardless of the form and reference of that change.
Hanafi's project can be specifically read as an attempt to return to the "origins" that shape the public's conscience, and then he tried to analyze the religious awareness, which he sees as an alienated awareness in time and place, and there is a need to transform it into a harmonious human awareness to rebuild civilization, and discover self-potential through changing Axes of interest, begging to rebuild the sciences for this, while other readers of the heritage were preoccupied with methods of structural and historical analysis.
Based on this emotional vision, the focus is on human beings instead of centering on God, and around the liberation of the earth instead of focusing on the unification of God, and so on..., Heaven and salvation will be here on earth.
Hanafi set out a project to criticize the present and the past and go towards the lost earthly paradise, but it seems that in the opening paragraph he wrote in his memories (1935-2018) to the language that he himself called to turn from, which is the theological language that he previously described as closed, and it is the language of a vision God, the pressure of death, the loneliness of the grave and its forgetfulness, forgiveness, sins, light and darkness.
We ask God to have mercy on us.