Dr. Amara is an objective, systematic researcher, who serves science and respects curriculum.
He carried the mentality of the philosopher, the heart of the Sufi, the discipline of the jurist, the enthusiasm of the preacher, the tenderness of the writer, and the will of the fighter.
(Yousif Al Qardawi)
The departure of Mohamed Emara was not on the twenty-eighth of February 2020, merely a declaration of the death of an Islamic thinker or an Egyptian researcher known as the Encyclopedia. The image that was printed in the minds of many when hearing the name of Mohamed Emara is as close as possible to that old fighter who is debating in a mass gathering, or the elderly who He holds the pen to underline his wisdom, or the sheikh who sits in his antique library, wears his thick glasses, surrounded by his disciples who intercede in the science.
During the past fifty years, the name "Mohamed Emara" was engraved in the Arab intellectual scene, as his ideas often attended in discussions of modern Islamic intellectual currents, and his presence was either a martyrdom of his idea, or to preserve his theses, or even in response to some of his views. But what was agreed upon - and despite these differences in the position of Dr. Amara- That his name remained present among the currents of Islamic thought, as it is rare to compose an Arab academic message dealing with what is called “modern Islamic thought” except that you will find among its references a book written by Muhammad Amara.
The last of the educated generations
It can be said that the generation of "Amara" has been given a number of factors that are no longer present or available in the generations that followed, so that we can call this generation of Azharites who witnessed before the 1952 revolution and beyond as "the late Al-Azhar intellectuals". Despite the emergence of Al-Azhar architecture, it fluctuated in various paths and paths, from writers, Al-Azhar, politics, Egypt, the girl and the left, and his imprisonment, then his direction to Arab nationalism, and finally his opposition to the Islamic awakening, which the situation settled in theorizing from the end of the sixties and early seventies until his death. She met in a unique composition architecture, as he obtained his religious knowledge through Al-Azhar education, Arab culture from Dar Al-Ulum, and societal political movement through his affiliation to the left, in addition to his knowledge of the areas of civil and legal knowledge.
The architecture also has a complex intellectual work, between achieving and directing the works of the media of the past era from the School of Revival and Renewal [a] which is attributed to Sheikh Muhammad Abdo and Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, in addition to the research work in teams of early Islamic thought such as Shiites and Mu'tazilites and the flags of Sunnis at a time There was no interest in these comparative research spaces in Arab academic studies, then preoccupation and theorizing about Arab nationalism, and later the Islamic idea and the Islamic University [b]. Amara lived at the heart of the battles he chose for himself. Linked to the restoration of what he perceived as a waste of "Islamic gaps". [1]
Since the seventies, Amara has tended to pay attention to what he called "Islamic civilization consciousness", and his writings in this section abounded to include topics such as: civilization, women, Sunnah, the Qur'an, and the defense of Islamic awakening, with a large number of literature and debates, which had a broader reputation in Back then. Amara increased this reputation during his shift from the left to Islamic affiliation after a setback 67 within the left movement, which quite a few of it turned to the Islamic trend at the time, where their names were intertwined together, such as Muhammad Amara, Tariq Al-Bishri, Fahmy Howeidi, and in some form Abdul Wahab Al-Masiri , And others.
What this means is that the history of Amara and his generation is a form of history for a portion of contemporary Islamic ideas in its multiple transformations. However, despite these movements that characterized Amara's life, he maintained until the end of his life his organizational affiliation to a particular group, organization or current, whether it was ideological or sectarian, and he was content with belonging to the general Islamic line, or what is sometimes called the Islamic Moderation Stream. This has allowed him a degree of openness to the schools and ideas of Islamists, and a degree of freedom of scientific and dynamic choice, which is worth highlighting, and we monitor the most important areas in which Dr. attended. Mohamed Emara, and his personal development over his extended career.
The last fighter in Mohamed Abdou School
"Dr. Mohamed Amara does not need to shine the spotlight on him, but rather he suffers from it, as he occupies a wide area of contemporary Arab culture with his important books and articles. I believe that Amara's primary question was about Al-Nahda, and it represents the focal point around which all his other works revolve. Intellectual, and he is not only a researcher about it, but a participant in it. "
(Hassan Al-Shafei, President of the Academy of the Arabic Language)
For more than a quarter of a century, Mohamed Emara has been interested in the heritage of the School of "Revival and Renewal", which is the name given to the Jamal al-Din Afghani School and Sheikh Muhammad Abdo and what has branched from them. Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, Muhammad Abdo, Rafa'a Rafih al-Tahtawi, Abdul Rahman al-Kawakibi, Qasim Amin, Ali Mubarak. Amara had serious studies about these personalities and their intellectual contributions, and these works took a large part of his writings, which gave him a great knowledge of the cultural, intellectual and political movement in the last century, and because of his proximity to these names he lived an architecture with the details of this school, and lived its flags And its symbols, until its name became associated with the flags of this school, and the matter went beyond that until it was seen by the emitter of the Arab-Islamic Renaissance, and that the secular currents hijacked these names to it [c].
He has been to studies of Dr. Corner architecture is unmistakable for the eye, and it is his desire to highlight the Islamic ideas and rationality of these characters at the same time, which is the middle position - according to Amara - that these characters have taken between two different streams, namely, the “stream of alienation” and “the current of inertia.” [2] When Amara approached the Islamic awakening in the seventies and eighties, he tried to create a link between the Islamic awakening and its roots in that era of Arab enlightenment, which spread in the early twentieth century. This attempt appears in the intense and repeated praise of Amara on the flags of this school and on the head, including Jamal al-Din al-Afghani and his student, Professor Muhammad Abdo, who describes Amara as "the greatest Islamic minds who endowed with great energy to renew Islamic thought, and the evacuation of the rubble of heresies, myths and additions to the origins of Islam." [3]
With this hierarchy that Amara created, he attributed the emergence of contemporary Islamic movements to this old school in the last century, and evokes the influence of Hassan Al-Banna’s ideas of Sheikh Rashid Reda, who was affixed to the disciples of Muhammad Abdo, which made Amara consider that the Hassan Al-Banna project an extension and development of the Abdo Project. He elaborated on this idea in his book "The Milestones of the Civilized Project in the Thought of the Imam Hasan al-Banna." [4]
This intellectual work generated from Dr. Amara wanted to revive what he called the "Enlightenment" and Islamic "rationality", which he saw in this school, and adopted the call to combine legal knowledge with civil knowledge, and rejected what he called "the legal tradition", which was settled in the books of Al-Azhar and its curricula since the Mamluks era. This position from Dr. Amara is consistent with the issue of developing Al-Azhar education, which was called by Professor Muhammad Abdo himself while he was a mufti, which revolved around the conflict between Muhammad Abdo and a number of Al-Azhar sheikhs in what is known to renew Al-Azhar curricula in the last century. [5]
Despite the culture of Al-Azhar architecture, its preservation of Arabic poetry collections, its study on the way footnotes in Al-Azhar, and its approach to the Arab Renaissance movement in the last century, it did not relinquish its openness to the literary and intellectual life of its era, as it has read the cultural records that magazines abound in this era ( 5) So, he read the entire Al-Azhar magazine, and the entire “Al-Risala” magazine, which are among the most famous cultural magazines in the last century. He also obtained the original copy of the “Al-Urwah Al-Thaqi” magazine issued by Al-Afghani and his servant from their exile in Paris, which made Amara a broad knowledge. And unique to the flags of the past century and its various events.
The left and the detainee .. before the awakening
"There are two issues that are necessary in my life - from the beginning to this date - and they are: the issue of freedom and the liberation of the country, and the issue of social justice, which used to mobilize people to stand with the needy, and this made me belong to the left."
(Mohamed Amara)
Dr. approached. An architecture from the Egyptian left in the 1940s, and he got acquainted with their leading theorists. This period allowed him to read in Marxist literature and Western thought, which added to his architecture an accumulation of knowledge in a different area, which he welcomed later in his epistemic life. This approach was represented in the "struggle of For social justice, "which made Amara's attachment to the left and his involvement in it as an anti-imperialist hegemony and a call for social justice, which did not make him extend his left until he adopted Marxism in its materialistic atheistic structure, says Dr. Amara: "My positions in the left and the national and then Islamic stages have matured and developed, but there were no sharp breaks between them. I was left in the revolutionary social sense, not in the ideological sense, so there was no atheism because the spiritual experience and the authentic religious formation prevented me from being absorbed in Material thought and material theory. ”[6]
Amara elaborates on this period and says: “And when the parties - including the girl Egypt and the Socialist Party - were canceled, we had no choice but to the left, but the left was then the knight of the social issue and social justice, and he had a position on the national issue, he was against the military bases And foreign presence. I had entered the left as a matter of social issue and as a matter of revolutionary issue. " In his career, Amara was involved in political mobility within the university, and he was publishing a left-wing magazine at the Faculty of Dar Al Uloom, and he was dismissed from the university for a year because he led a national and national conference, until he was arrested about six years, which led to his graduation delay to 1965 instead of 1958.
Parallel to this "leftist", if true, he adopted the architecture of the idea of Arab nationalism and took a lot of space from him, and he wrote on this issue his first books, and his writings expanded on him after his release from prison. Even after converting to the Islamic trend in its broad sense, he did not leave the architecture of the call to Arab nationalism, but rather made it part of a larger project, the vast Islamic University project, a term that was used by Mustafa Kamel, Muhammad Farid, and Jedi leaders of the National Party in the last century.
From left to the 1970s awakening
“Dr. Amara is a encyclopedic scholar in an era in which the encyclopedias are rare. It reminds us of the biography of distinguished scholars and thinkers such as Moheb El-Din El-Khatib and Mohamed Farid Wajdi, and he is very accurate in using and analyzing terminology, mixing in his writings between nationalism, patriotism and Islam.”
(Abdel Halim Owais, Professor of History and Islamic Civilization)
If we can - with some transcendence - consider Sayyid Qutb the first theorist of the generation of the sixties from the Islamists, then the same thing can be considered with personalities such as Youssef Al-Qaradawi, Muhammad Al-Ghazali, Muhammad Amara, Muhammad Salim Al-Awa, Tariq Al-Bishri and Fahmy Al-Huwaidi in the seventies generation, who have increased their presence in the 1980s and 1990s [D], which means that dr. Amara has held a great position among the dynamic activists, despite his predominance in the work and theoretical studies in the previous period of his life, to become from that time one of the most important and brightest Islamic thinkers throughout the eighties and nineties until the Arab Spring.
This made Amarah develop his own project, which he called "the project of civilized Islam". In spite of the differences between this intellectual project and the project of the sixties generation, this trend is relatively far from the controversy used by the school of the sixties and belonging to Professor Sayyid Qutb and Abi Al-Mawdudi in its vocabulary such as "governance" and "community ignorance" and emotional isolation, even if the two schools agreed in Many of the implications [e].
Another presence of Amara played with others in this period was represented in the global Islamic entities, which were established since the seventies and eighties and were active in the nineties, and they carried the idea of what is called "moderation" and "civilized Islam". Amara was a member of the preparatory committee that laid down the basic paper for representatives of the Islamic trend at the first meeting of the founding conference of the Islamic National Conference, and worked with him by Muhammad Salim al-Awa, Fahmi Howeidi, Tariq Al-Bishri, and Youssef Al-Qaradawi. Amara also had an activity in the "Center for International Thought", and its contributions in this civilized direction increased with a number of previous names, in addition to other names such as Ismail Raji Al Farouqi, Fathi Malkawi, Abdul Rahman Al Naqeeb, Rifaat Al Awadi, Taha Jaber Al Alwani and Abdul Hamid Abu Sulaiman , And others.
With time, Amara increased presence in satellite channels, magazines and cultural newspapers, as well as in debates in the nineties, which made Amara as one of the unofficial representatives of the current of Islamic thought in these areas combined, and this role that Amara represented - with others - had a great place in Promoting Islamic culture globally.
Nevertheless, Amara remained retaining his Azhar culture, and he remained greatly appreciated and respected by the official religious establishment until the end of his life. He was included in the Islamic Research Academy during the reign of Sheikh Sayed Tantawi, then became a member of the Council of Senior Scholars that was established after the revolution, and he remains a member Until his death, despite his declared position on the 2013 coup in Egypt.
Church, left, and atonement ... witnessed battles
"When Dr. Mohamed Emara writes or talks about a case in which you do not feel that he is a writer who writes with a pen, or an author who is writing paper, or a preacher who is standing on the pulpit, or a speaker who speaks at a symposium, but rather you feel that he is a fighter in a battle carrying weapons, and a mujahid linked to the gaps protects the murmur, You see swords flicker as he writes or preaches.
(Yousif Al Qardawi)
A number of battles erupted between d. Amara and Pope Shenouda, and the Coptic media was waging war from time to time on Amara, and this matter continued until his death. Amara had a strong position on Pope Shenouda, as he considered him "the head of strife in Egypt", and that strife in Egypt did not take effect until after he took over Pope Shenouda the patriarchate, because Shenouda - according to Amara - insists that he play the role of the politician with his religious leadership, and the reason for that - In the view of Amara - the old affiliation of Shenouda to the Coptic Nation community [7] [and], which was seeking to control influence in Egypt, which made Sadat rule the removal of Pope Shenouda from his position, before Mubarak brought him back again.
The peak of the escalation between Amara and the Egyptian Church when Amara issued his book "A Scientific Report" in 2009, which he was entrusted with by the Islamic Research Academy to respond to an evangelical publication distributed in Cairo under a pseudonym [d. Samir Morcos]. He refuted the architecture of this evangelical publication in his book, which included evidence of the distortion of the Bible and the Torah, and the statement that Christianity is not converging doctrines with one belief, such as the doctrines of Islamic jurisprudence, but different doctrines, as well as criticizing the architecture of the doctrine of original sin and miracles of the Christians. [8]
Despite these battles, Amara insisted that the Islamic civilized approach had absorbed the Copts in the past and was able to accommodate them in the present, and that the problem was in the hidden political role played by Pope Shenouda, and that Egypt did not know this case with Pope Kyrillos, nor with the Anba Moses, nor the poor father Matta, who considers Amara a reflection of the Church's historical position in coexistence with Muslims.
Mohamed Emara, Pope Shenouda and the Church
Emara debates have spread since the nineties, when Dr. Amara himself is on the site of Al-Manafih from Islamic thought against Marxism and secularism, armed with his previous experience with the Egyptian left in his years of joining them, as it allowed him to see the flags of Arab Marxist thought and contact them directly in extended fellowships, which made Amara aware of their deficiencies in the understanding of Islam As Amara says the same. He was often referring to Dr. Building on this meaning in his writings, he mentions in his book “The Marxist Interpretation of Islam”: “I am an old expert in Marxism and Marxists in language, thought, practice, methods of work, and patterns of relations.” [9]
Dr. has written. Architecture of this book in response to d. Nasr Hamed Abu Zaid, and divided it into introductions on "Freedom of Belief, Belief, and Apostasy," and then included it in two sections: "What is not permissible is disagreement, and what is permissible is disagreement." The architecture discussed what was reported by Dr. Abu Zayd is one of the ideas in his books, based on a critique of the Marxist structure in the analysis of the text, which Abu Zaid departs from in his dealings with the Qur'an, and then addresses the architecture of these problems from the texts of Islam, the Noble Qur’an and Islamic heritage. It is noticeable in the response of Dr. Amara said that he did not mention the expiation of Abu Zayd, but confirmed that the dispute with him is primarily intellectual, and his main reason is the dispute over how to understand Islam, despite the tendency of other scholars to say that Abu Zayd was atoned at the time, which is what the court ruled [g]. In his criticism of Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd, Amara did not start from Abu Zayd's invocation of the Mu'tazila in the issue of the creation of the Qur’an, as most Islamic responses to it were launched, as Amara has a non-hostile stance with the retired theses as follows.
Amara was inclined - according to his expression - to pluralism and the right to express opinion, and opposed the ruling issued by the court in response to Abu Zayd, and stated that "Dr. Nasr Abu Zaid's case is an intellectual issue, its field of intellectual dialogue, and the specialists in it are the thinkers and researchers, and not a legal issue ... Dr. Nasr is the owner of an intellectual project, and I am among those who differ radically with his issues. His writings revolve around the historical sacred texts, and I see such ideas that should be the subject of intellectual and objective dialogues, not an article of advocacy and judicial rulings.
Abu Zayd himself praised these words, and considered him a fair and rational stand by Dr. Amara. Dr. Amara saw this in his famous debate with Dr. Nasr Hamed Abu Zaid on the "opposite direction" program.
The debate of Muhammad Emara and Nasr Hamid Abu Zaid
And if we leave the church, Abu Zayd, and we go back a little, specifically in 1992 AD, then we are with another debate, and it is one of the most famous debates of the last century, which took place in the 1992 book fair between Dr. Amara, Sheikh Muhammad Al-Ghazali, Brotherhood Leader, Mamoun Al-Hudhaibi, and on the other side were Faraj Fouda and Dr. Muhammad Khalaf Allah.
The debate dealt with the topic of "the Islamic state and the civil state", and after this debate two months, Faraj Fouda was assassinated for his repeated call to call for secularism and to leave the Sharia and judge it [h], and this debate is considered one of the most famous debates of the last century, especially after the assassination of Fouda in the year in which it was held Debate.
The debate of Muhammad Amara and Faraj Foda
The parties fought ..
"And I am also very reassured to me that I am on the path of Islamic moderation that there are dozens of books in the secular trend attacking me, and also in the current of religious extremism and inertia attacking me, and if a person is attacked by this team and from this team, this is evidence that he is not here and there is not, but it is In between between these two teams. "
(Mohamed Amara)
With all these stages in which Muhammad Amara fought, at the beginning of his life he approached the Mu'tazilites and their ideas, worked to direct their heritage, and in his scientific thesis on the philosophy of governance in Islam he called the role of Mu'tazilah, as he achieved the messages of justice and monotheism, and wrote several articles in defense of Mu'tazilah. [11] However, Dr. Amara has eased with time the affiliation to the Mu'tazila - and if he did not take a marginal position among them - and became closer to the general Al-Ash'ari movement, and he repeated in his writings that the Al-Ashari movement represents more than 90% of the Islamic nation.
Then he singled out writings for the defense of Sheikh Ibn Taymiyyah and Salafism in its historical sense, and he did not take a hostile stance from it, but rather reconciled with it, and the secularists calling for leaving the Sharia have become normal, which made Amara's position of the various Islamic currents with a degree of selection and transmission without limiting himself to the achievement of a specific saying, It seems that he did not want to adhere to a specific doctrine among his secular opponents, a position close to that of Imam Abu Hamid al-Ghazali on the philosophers when he said: “So they void what they believed to be cut off by different obligations, so he obliged them at times to the Mu'tazila school, and the other to the Karmiyya school, and the endowment of Waqfism, and not I get up from a specific doctrine, but make all the difference one ide on them, because the rest of the difference may have violated us in detail, and these are subject to the fundamentals of religion, so let us pretend against them, then when adversity comes the hatred. ”[12]
And in the last stage, which Dr. Muhammad Amara tended to adopt the general issues of Muslims, it made him a place between the various currents of thought, and made the currents from a Brotherhood, ancestral, Sufi, or Azharist movement, rational and uplifting, you see Dr. Amara as a part of it, and it violated it in his general approach.
Dr. Mohamed Emara has added to this unique case of his public stances with issues of freedom and social justice, and Dr. Emara has remained in his place within the Council of Senior Scholars in Egypt and he has not left, yet he denounced the various massacres that occurred in Egypt, and issued a visual statement that what happened in Egypt A bloody coup against the dream of freedom that people lived in hope of.
The total positions of this character, her biography, and her defense of what she believes to be right, while allowing the opportunity for freedom of the other opinion; He explains the reason behind the intense hospitality that Emara received in his life, which continued after his death, as it was inherited by the general intellectuals in the Islamic world.
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Margins
- [A] An intellectual school that appeared in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the most important of which was Jamal al-Din al-Afghani and Muhammad Abdo, and it diversified into several tributaries after them; Secular, Islamic, and d. Amara is one of the most prominent contemporary scholars of this school.
- [B] The caliphate is expressed in a contemporary image with the word "Islamic University", an idea that was frequently denounced by Abd al-Razzaq al-Sanhouri Pasha, who developed the Egyptian Civil Code, and wrote his message in the Sorbonne "The Caliphate and its evolution into the League of Eastern Nations." Amara took care of the legacy of Al-Sanhouri Pasha and compiled for him a book entitled “Islamiyyat al-Sanuri Pasha”.
- [C] There is a great conflict between the various schools of thought about this school and its branches or streams from it. For more about this, you can review:
- [D] It is a subject of a free comparison that will be presented in a separate report later, God willing.
- [E] You can review Sheikh al-Qaradawi's meetings on Sayyid Qutb, and some of his reservations about his theses, for example.
- [And] an extremist Christian group founded in Egypt along the lines of the Muslim Brotherhood, and it used to adopt the slogan "Christ is our goal, and the Bible is our constitution ...".
- [G] We see that Dr. Amara is very broad in excuses to the point that it may make him criticized by others, especially with some of these areas affecting contract areas or separating positions.
- [H] Although Fouda is mostly a journalist in writing and not systematic scientific writing, a large number of his books have been devoted to this call, such as: “Dialogue on Secularism”, “Played”, “Terrorism”, “The Nazir”, and "Before the fall."
- [J] This idea spread widely after the death of Dr. Amara, and it seems that it is just propaganda to rid old accounts with him without relying on any real facts or evidence.