"This is a man who walked to his place among the great sons of Egypt, and he will remain with them in the conscience of the Egyptians alive and like them will come, God willing."
With these words, Professor Tariq Al-Bishri ended his study on the great Egyptian leader Ahmed Hussein, and with this quote I begin my article in which I mourn a sun from the suns of Egypt, accompanied by the lament of the Prince of Poets on the death of Saad Zaaloul:
They spread the sun and bent overnight ... and the East bowed on it and cried
I remember when I called him when I traveled years ago that his voice was weak and mixed with calm and anticipation, but I sensed that his heart was still fleeting in his certainty, I did not know that this was the last time I had entrusted to the thinker Judge Tariq al-Bishri that I knew and approached him in the nineties of the last century when Cairo was active Forums and salons galore.
He was among a group of Islamic thinkers who returned from the reference of the left and then went on to plow the soil of Islamic thought and shred its sons. This is the group that included Professors Amara, Al-Masiri and Adel Hussein, so he stood with them on the same ground, and before them Dr. Abu Al-Majd.
May God have mercy on all, and Dr. Saif Abdel Fattah Ismail joined them in an advanced age.
When he read the path of ideas, institutions and the national community, the dynamic framework for living was occupied by him more than the intellectual formulas that the thinkers had created about them, and his opinion that the formulation of thinkers appeared as pure and pure laboratory materials, but rather isolated in their ideal composition and purity.
The stage of these great thinkers was the most fertile stage in the life of contemporary Islamic thought in terms of production and influence, as well as in terms of attracting and encouraging large research groups to be carried by the longing for knowledge to continue to enrich this thought.
Among these professors are Rafiq Habib Hisham Jaafar, Ibrahim al-Bayoumi Ghanem, Heba Raouf, and many researchers and thinkers in Egyptian universities.
The advisor famously made his long-term umbrella so he devoted to it every yearning for heavy knowledge and hardly any of the students replied about it, and the times of one of them were rarely free of the opportunity to review, present or discuss their research work, so it was one of the noblest things in the human professor that he placed in the consciousness and minds of his students.
As for the school of Our Master Al-Bashri, it is a reform school par excellence, for he was the first deputy of the Egyptian State Council who deeply understood the meaning of the state, and he was the owner of a keen jurisprudential and legal mind, and a Sufi heart inflamed with pure love for his nation, and he believed in the need to develop the institutions of the Egyptian state in the direction of its authority. The direction of the popular will, and he did not separate between the popular will and the reference of the Sharia, so he saw that they were one part, and the presence of either of them enabled the other idea to emerge, and then he was fully encouraging the idea of democracy and the supremacy of the nation, and political and legal reform, not only at the level of writing and research, but rather Also, by actively participating in the legal struggle, his judicial defenses were in great harmony with these two principles, as well as his historical and political writings, as well as his movement struggle among thinkers groups within the framework of the national community, and his articles that he wrote in the Arab Nasserite newspaper in the early 2000s are not forgotten. Under the heading "I invite you to disobey".
I traveled with Professor Al-Bishri several times, and I remember in one of my conversations with him my question to him about his childhood;
He told me that he was a decent child, and he said that this description was given by one of his teachers in the elementary school, then he sent a quiet laugh of his laughter and said, "This was a source of astonishment to my father, who saw that the reverence in the child is strange."
The truth is that the most important characteristic of mankind is that majestic dignity, this great humility, and fine etiquette, so when you see it, the image of the judge appears in front of you in its most brilliant and clearest meanings.
The silent judge who does not like his voice to interfere with the voices of others, if someone interrupts him silence, and if a speaker speaks during his speech he stops, and you do not know whether this is his objection or humility?
And everyone who knows him must resort to silence until he lets him speak, because he speaks slowly, separates for a while and then returns, after he sails, asking the sea about its guts from the latent dome.
But if you entered his knowledge world, you will not find before you more explicit than his great book "The Political Movement in Egypt" a key to its transformation from land to land;
This book, which was published in the fall of 1972, was the one that spoke in its subsequent editions of his shift from the left to the civilizational school, and the turning point was evident in questions that were sometimes praised and criticized, inquiring about why he did not treat the history of the Muslim Brotherhood in the spirit of the one front as part of The national community, as he did with other currents, and his response was, "They did not deal with an issue in the spirit of the front."
And he thought that there was enough in that answer, but this state of criticism remained, as he says, weaving in his chest and conscience, and I drew his attention a note saying, “How can the Islamic trend be popular with all these supporters and then we consider it strange?” Then he reached the methodological flaw. He said, "It was the external view of the Brotherhood that prevented me from exploring the national significance of their popularity," because their popularity is due to the Egyptians ’association with Islam, and then every idea close to Islam is close to the Egyptians.
"The Islamic current was not, therefore, a stray or an emergency current, and it was not a situation that contradicted another origin; rather, it was the original."
The human professor - may God have mercy on him - has a unique method when reading the path of ideas, institutions and the national community, as he is occupied - as he used to say - the dynamic framework of living more than the intellectual formulas given by thinkers about it, and in his opinion that the formulation of the thinkers appears as the preparation materials in laboratories pure and pure, but isolated In a way, in its ideal composition and clarity, as for the living thought in its mixing and overlapping with reality, it expresses itself in behavior, relationships, and the formation of institutions, as well as in its response to problems, he asserts.
Perhaps this approach was one of the reasons for the difference in his writings and their strength, and my opinion is that this approach that tracks the movement of people is the one that confirmed within it the sincerity of its transformation, as every deepening in the ordinary life of Egyptians far from blocking some writings automatically leads to the pulse of the Islamic civilization reference.
I remember that in 2004 I had an interview with the Bishop of the Youth Anba Musa, a man known for calm and gentleness, about the Islam of a Christian, and it was withheld in a monastery, so his parishioners submitted defenses as arguing about the Church with a number of customary and legal arguments, and the human advisor responded to him in a lengthy dialogue with me All this controversy was published in the Egyptian newspaper Afaq Arabiya, and as a result of that, a great intellectual battle broke out, in which the human professor and other thinkers and writers who criticized the church’s stance and behavior wrote after that. The truth, even on the tongues of its opponents, is that mankind has not deviated from his usual approach of moderation, sobriety, strength in truth and great responsibility towards the homeland.