Imran Abdullah
"The intellectual who does not translate his thought into an act that does not deserve the title of the intellectual," wrote the late Egyptian intellectual Abdel Wahab al-Messiri in his memoirs, "My Intellectual Journey: In Seeds, Root and Fruit," in which he recounted his journey since he was born in Damanhour, He moved to Alexandria and then to New York and finally to Cairo, where he settled and died at the beginning of July 2008.
Eleven years after his departure, the journey of the intellectual and human mentor seems more reticent in view of the transformations that the Arab world is undergoing today. He wrote about it in his memoirs, in which he presented his intellectual project with personal events and quotations from his books showing how the general intellectual issue itself translated into specific events and events in His own personal life, with his smooth, deep and cynical literary style.
Exceptional Masiri
Al-Masiri is considered an exceptional Arab thinker for several reasons. He is a cultured interlocutor with reality. He practices demonstrations, protests and political organization. He is an educated academic who works in various fields of knowledge, including modernity, materialism, secularism, Judaism, Zionism, English literature and literary criticism. Aesthetically and analytically, with an extraordinary cognitive and conceptual renewal.
Al-Messiri wrote for the private and public, to the extent that his works included children's literature, and enriched the Arab library with dozens of works in both Arabic and English, and varied between encyclopedias, studies and articles, most notably "Encyclopedia of Jews, Judaism and Zionism: A New Interpretive Model" which is one of the most important Arabic encyclopedias in the 20th century. History of the Zionist movement.
At the same time, he was a reformist dissident and one of the founders of the Egyptian Kifaya movement, which included various intellectual groups, opposed inheritance policies and the regime of former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, and paid for it by ignoring the authorities' intellectual status and even abducting him and throwing him in an abandoned path.
He published several books and poetry journals and translated some of his works into several languages such as French, Persian, Portuguese and Turkish.
Al-Messiri was able to sculpt several concepts in philosophy and social sciences, including the "interpretive models" he used in his project to critique Western modernism and material philosophy, as well as his objectivity and problematic bias.
In an article he wrote to Al-Jazeera Net shortly before his death, Al-Messiri said that some intellectuals from the beginning of the modernization project have been alerted to the dark and anti-human nature of this project, adding that it has transformed people from one to the other. Rationalization, is independent of the humanitarian goals, such as satisfying the needs of the human being and the achievement of efficiency and security to become targets and dominate the human and must comply with them.
Al-Masiri discussed the development of "alternative modernity," stressing the need to develop an Islamic humanitarian modernization system, a system whose goal is not continuous progress without end and the escalation of consumption rates and not based on the revolution of increasing aspirations, but balance with self and nature and achieving social justice.
He added that what is required is a new modernity that embraces science and technology and does not hit with values or humanitarianism. It is a modernity that revives the mind, does not kill the heart, develops our physical existence and does not deny the spiritual dimensions of this existence. The present lives without denying the heritage. .
Journey roots, seeds and fruits
He was born in 1938 in Damanhour in the Beheira Governorate in the northern Egyptian Delta. He joined the Department of English at the Faculty of Arts at the University of Alexandria in 1955. In 1964 he obtained a master's degree in Comparative English Literature from Columbia University in the United States and a 1969 PhD from Rutgers University.
Al-Messiri worked academically at Alexandria University and taught at Ain Shams University, several Arab universities, and the Islamic University of Malaysia.
He was a cultural adviser to the Permanent Delegation of the League of Arab States to the United Nations in New York and an academic advisor to the World Institute of Islamic Thought in Washington.
In his intellectual project, Al-Messiri discussed the phenomena of Zionism and its relation to the "membership" of Western civilization. He rejected the ideas of conspiracy theory. He used an analytical perspective, which is the essence of research and creativity, exploring non-traditional links between phenomena that were considered to produce a general pattern that he described as "explanatory model".
In his last article, al-Messiiri was optimistic that his vision of a modern humanistic alternative to "Darwinian modernism", which he considered to have "plunged us all into a dead end," could not be achieved, because it lacked a balance between contracting and translation, and its frantic pursuit of pleasure and consumption.
Al-Messiri said that this alternative vision can only be achieved within a framework of faith. Man can not, according to al-Masiri, exceed the desire for consumption and evil and constant and constant research only through faith in something greater than it.
Al-Messiri hypothesized that cognitive development and intellectual liquidity in the West would lead to a decline in Western centrality in history and culture. His preoccupation with the family and the writing of children's literature are central to the philosophy of the philosopher who presented his universal human vision of the critique of Western modernity.