"The Reasonable and the Unreasonable in Our Intellectual Heritage" .. Why does this book raise controversy?

It is related to the book "The Reasonable and the Unreasonable in Our Intellectual Heritage" by the Egyptian philosopher Dr. Zaki Naguib Mahmoud, who was born in 1905 and contributed a lot to translation and cultural life in Egypt.

The writer’s proposal faced wide criticism during the publication of the book. Those who saw the necessity of completely abandoning the heritage blamed the writer for his attempt to keep part of it, and those who saw the need to adhere to the heritage as it is considered his attempt to be an evasive step in order to nullify the entire heritage.

Dr. Amr Riad, Professor of Islamic Studies at the University of Louvain in the Netherlands, considered that the book “The Reasonable and the Unreasonable in Our Intellectual Heritage” is a key mark in the thought of Naguib Mahmoud, who before his travels to Europe admitted that he was not sufficiently familiar with Arab culture, and was skeptical about the possibility of reforming Arab culture. From the cultural conditions of the Arab world, but when he knew the heritage well, he began to select from it what was philosophically appropriate.

According to Dr. Riyad, the writer considered in the forties and beyond that abandoning heritage is a civilizational suicide.

In the opinion of Professor Ahmed Zaha El Din Obeidat at Wake Forest University in America;

The discussion about the book was between the traditionalists and the modernists, and that Najib Mahmoud wanted a link between this and that.

As for Dr. Abdul Salam Haidar, a professor at the European Islamic Institute in Belgium;

He presented his reading of the book on the grounds that some scholars believe that the writer's call to take only the reasonable side of the heritage is to avoid the side of the unseen, and in the opinion of Professor Haider, they are inaccurate in the writer's vision.

And when the writer - Haider adds - talks about the reasonable in the heritage, he thinks that Islam is a rational religion and that many of the verses of the Noble Qur’an encourage consideration, contemplation and the use of reason. Basic texts in Islam, noting that when he deals with the absurd, he talks about magic, astrology and the irrational aspect of Sufism.

"Naguib Mahmoud missed the destination"

In his reading of the book, Moataz Abu Qasim, professor of Arabic language at the University of Trabzon in Turkey, says that some people appear to them that there has been a revolution in the thought of Zaki Najib Mahmoud, when he went to Britain to study philosophy, he adopted the positivist doctrine and wrote a lot about it.

According to Abu Qassem, the peculiarity of Islam is that heritage collides with religion, which makes the separation between heritage and religion impossible.

From the point of view of the professor at the European Islamic Institute in Belgium, one of the weaknesses of the book is his talk about the era of translation in Baghdad, especially his adoption of the vision of a German orientalist, and that the Greek heritage did not affect the Arabs because their nature is different from this heritage, but it did affect the Europeans.

Dr. Abu Yarub Al-Marzouki, a professor of philosophy in Tunisia, says that the writer did not mean to achieve the heritage in order to make Arab and Islamic youth combine the two cultures on scientific grounds.

According to Moataz Abu Qassem;

Najeeb Mahmoud erred in dealing with heritage, as he treated Western theory as a lifeline for the Islamic nation.