"The Book of Job" and the Arab revolutions .. Who is responsible for evil in the world?

Doaa Abdel Latif - Cairo

In the Arab popular imagination, the story of the Prophet Ayoub appears to demonstrate the value of absolute patience in front of the trials and recognition of the will of the Creator, while the religious approach in the three Abrahamic texts appears deeper in view of questions about the meaning of divine justice and wisdom and the meaning of human suffering.

Job's journey, peace be upon him, and the philosophical depth it carries from which a contemporary reading can be drawn in light of the Arab uprisings, as it is characterized by many characteristics of distress and affliction, and the questions that lead to it, perhaps close to what came from the tongue of the Prophet in the Old Testament after having despaired of it in middle of the road.

This contemporary reading of Job Ayoub tried "The Forum of History and Cultural Memory" to discuss it in Cairo through a symposium titled "Ayoub's Travel and the Prospects of the Recent Arab Uprisings", which was held, Saturday, at the center of the contemporary image in the Egyptian capital.

During the symposium, Fouad Halbouni, a specialist in anthropology and political theology, and researcher in opposing cultural and artistic practices, Ismail Fayed linked Ayoub’s plight and the makers of Arab revolutions and posed many questions, including regarding the significance and meaning of the existence of evil, and whether the concept of affliction provides a different interpretation of divine justice and its relationship to human history.

Legitimate questions
At the beginning of his speech, the researcher Ismail Fayed reviewed the story of Ayoub in the Torah and the Qur’an, considering the story more clear in the Islamic text, especially within the explanation presented by the interpretation of al-Tabari, but the Old Testament presented a miracle in presenting the meaning, stressing at the same time that he is not going to examine the historical history of the text.

Fayed said that Job's book raised the problem of religiosity and its questions about what a religious person is, divine justice, will, and absolute monotheism, and how God permits evil to exist in the world.

Those questions raised by the travel, which the researcher saw in contemporary culture, touch with questions that occupy people's minds today, given the surrounding Arab tragedies, considering them legitimate.

On the issue of responsibility, he explained, "If we ask how God permits evil, we must also ask how humans allow themselves to do evil", pointing out the need to return to the idea that man is active in the world, and he went on "given what is happening in Syria ... the soldiers of Bashar al-Assad's army who They kill people. "

In addition, Fayed touched on the verses of creation in the Holy Qur’an that dealt with man as a moral actor, but he is weak on the side of Satan as a trigger for evil but under God’s will.

He added that all questions concerning matters of destiny, justice and justice guarantee the Ash'ari Sunni trend by answering them with the absolute exclusion of God, his truth and his absolute ability to bring down good and evil.

Ash'ari refused to explain the existence of evil in the world by returning it to any other activity, whether through the idea of ​​"the limitations of matter" to which philosophers went, or the choice of man other than good as the Mu'tazila considered.

In view of the current situation, the researcher saw that the relationship of the individual to religion changed with the start of the Arab uprisings, pointing to the emergence of religious revival movements in the seventies of the last century, which caused a change in the role of religion in the political and social field by reshaping the awareness of society.

There is a thread that Fayed saw between the Islamic movements’s perception of religion and the individual as a structure for society and the owners of Job who considered the friend’s plight - as mentioned in the book - a form of punishment for him for the mistakes he committed or the worship he abandoned as if God was a moral accountant.

Theodosia of Arab regimes
For his part, the researcher Halbouni mentioned the view of some philosophers such as Emmanuel Kant and Emmanuel Levinas in the concept of "Theodosia", which means trying to defend justice and divine ability in the presence of evil.

Halbouni pointed to the interest of Kant and Levinas in the travel of Job, because of his status in philosophical literature, where he pays to think about the problem of evil.

As for the Arab uprisings and their relationship to Theodosia, Halbouni saw that all questions about the uprisings - and as a clear model in the Syrian and Yemeni issues - are their response to the Arab regimes in their national form, which imposed a guardianship on their peoples.

He pointed to the researcher in the field of anthropology and political theology, to the attempts of Arab regimes that committed massacres against their peoples to give meaning to all their crimes as a historical necessity, such as preserving the territorial integrity, which is considered a type of theodosia.

He explained that these systems do not stop at justifying the crime, but rather seek to obliterate it or give it absurdity, so that it leads the survivors of it to vortex the question about whether the crime occurred or not.

Halbouni returned to the Book of Job again to indicate the divine experience and how he avoided harming the Prophet in his soul and relied on harming him in money, the boy and the body.

"As for Assad's prisons, systematic torture and incursion into oppression occur to break the spirit that is at the heart of human life and the last wall of any person, which destroys any attempt to give birth to a perception of a new life outside of prison."

The political researcher concluded his speech by referring to what he considered joyful and crying at the same time, which is that most Arab regimes that were pregnant during a battle with Western colonialism in the sixties of the last century ended up being used with their peoples the scorched land policy used by the Zionists with the Palestinians.

Religious reasoning and "enlightenment"
To further deepen the research, Al-Jazeera Net asked the journalist interested in interfaith dialogue, Abdullah Al-Tahawi, about the approach of religions to what was discussed in the symposium, so he went on to say that the religions' view of the matter is close as it confines between affliction for purification and punishment for the sinner and the sinner. Pains in the Enlightenment. "

Al-Tahawi continues in his talk to Al-Jazeera Net, saying that during the era of European Enlightenment (18th century), the pain was reinterpreted according to a logic that subjected it to scientific and logical laws rather than religious interpretations. Thus, natural disasters were also secularized, as happened in the Lisbon earthquake in 1755, noting that the American anthropologist Talal Assad in this regard.

Regarding Islamic culture, Al-Tahawi added, "There are some schools that dealt with evil in a different way. Mu'tazilites considered that evil is from man and is better than God, while Sufism viewed all divine conditions and afflictions, including the types of evils in the sense of gift, grant and kinship."

Al-Tahawi says that the Holy Books and the Qur’an tell the story of the trials - including the story of the Prophet Ayoub and Yunus, peace be upon them - but in the Islamic text, the trial of Prophet Yunus included the idea of ​​revision and self-criticism, which is a step forward in the Qur’an according to his expression.