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Introduction to the report
Yesterday, October 21, the Egyptian thinker Hassan Hanafi died, at the age of 86.
Hanafi is considered one of the most prominent theorists of the Islamic left movement, and one of the pioneers of what is known as the “Francophone Arab School,” a contemporary Arab modernist current that works on reinterpreting Islamic heritage by drawing inspiration from French intellectual curricula, and expanding the use of reason in interpreting legal texts and deriving new meanings from them.
In this article, we learn about the most important ideas of Hanafi and the Francophone school, as well as the most important criticisms leveled against it.
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"Today, it is as if we are witnessing a radical and comprehensive re-evaluation that touches on the core elements of our intellectual vision. The heritage has been lowered from the cockpit to the dock!"
(Ibrahim Al-Sukran)
At the end of the eighteenth century, the European continent was on a date with its most pivotal stage in history. The French Revolution of 1789 and the subsequent radical changes in the nature of the relationship between religion and reason, as a result of the previous close interaction between political tyranny and ecclesiastical authority, led to the intervention of the old continent in A long battle, with which she replaced the religious ruler with the rational ruler, who re-legalized all things according to his vision.
At a distance from the European intellectual earthquake, a group of intellectual schools emerged in the Islamic East that deal with heritage with the same rational/modernist doctrine existing in the West, despite the different contexts in which both Western and Arab modernity arose, including from a continuous debate about the mind And transferring the first over the second sometimes under the name of interpretation.
The Francophone school, which was “actually established with the withdrawal of France’s forces”[1], owned a good part of this debate, following in the footsteps of France itself in Europe. The Egyptian thinker Hassan Hanafi, as one of those who agree with the Francophone approach, sees that “the mind It must be an absolute reference.” He also indicates that Ibn Taymiyyah settled this dispute early in Islamic history by saying that “correct transmission does not contradict explicit reason,” despite Ibn Taymiyyah’s warnings regarding the realization of reason in matters of the Prophet’s hadith, for example, and prioritizing them over reason. [2].
This (Francofour) trend, according to Ibrahim Siddiq, provided many projects in our Islamic world.
To re-read the texts of Sharia, emptying them of their contents, and replacing them with new meanings [3], or what the Saudi researcher Ibrahim Al-Sukran calls the separation of the total from the partial [4], and the following is a brief review of the criticism presented for this Francophone heritage relationship and the methodology of the second dealing with the first.
The Egyptian thinker "Hassan Hanafi"
Francophonie and heritage
At the level of definition, the Francophone has close connotations for its term, as it has been used by a purely descriptive reference since 1880 AD by many geographers, but in its simple and direct meaning it expresses the International Organization of French-speaking Countries “as an official language, or a widespread language” [5].
The organization was actually established with the withdrawal of the French forces, to pass, according to Moroccan researcher Idriss Jandari, its goals through the values of modernity, enlightenment and its sisters[6].
However, with a more in-depth definition, Ibrahim Al-Sakran believes that Francophonie is originally a concept given to the French-speaking countries, but its use has expanded to the extent that it has become an “ideological commitment” to the dissemination and promotion of the French language and culture, as it is “an expression of a contemporary Arab modernist current working to reinterpret The Islamic heritage is inspired by the French intellectual curricula, which means adapting the reading culture for the benefit of the reading culture”[7].
Writer Ibrahim Al-Sukran (networking sites)
This is confirmed by the Moroccan thinker Muhammad Abed Al-Jabri, as one of those who belong to the Francophonie, when he says: “The observation made by a colleague when he said that French epistemology is more present in what I wrote, indeed.. This is true, and it is due to several reasons, subjective and objective, as for the reasons Subjectivity is that we in Morocco are linked to French culture more than we are linked to Anglo-Saxon culture”[8].
The same influence is also evident in the literature of the Algerian thinker Mohamed Arkoun when he talks about the Qur’anic stories as a “legendary structure”[9] as he put it, to explain his intention of the word “legend” “that it does not originate from the Arabic language, but from the French language that does not bear The “myth” is any negative connotation, rather it carries a meaning that says: the beautiful creative figurative imagination, which spans the minds and shapes their collective imagination, which is filled with bright images of a specific period, such as the period of the Messenger, may God’s prayers and peace be upon him”[10].
Here he excludes the Arabic connotation of the term “legend” in dealing with the Qur’an, which carries with it a negative connotation that: “old tales of a mythical nature”[11], and replaces it with the French tool of expression, which raises the question about the appropriateness of a linguistic tool foreign to the original text for its interpretation. Or dealing with it, especially with Arkoun’s saying in another place: “The methodologies that I apply to the Arab-Islamic heritage are the same methodologies that French scholars apply to their Latin Christian or European heritage”[12].
So, here, as an example of the Francophone school, it shows a problem that many of those who monitored it addressed with criticism and scrutiny, which is dealing with the Islamic legal heritage with Western modernist tools that are alien to its analysis. A dispute in the premises before it is a dispute in the results” [13], the crisis is not in Arkoun’s positive expression of the “mythical structure” (the results), but rather - according to the saying of the sword - the crisis in the use of the word “legend” itself in his talk about the Qur’anic stories (Introductions). How can an Arabic book illustrated by an Arabic word with a French connotation be understood?
Between method and interpretation
Algerian thinker Mohamed Arkoun (networking sites)
In his book "The Essence of Islam", the Egyptian thinker Muhammad Saeed Al-Ashmawy monitors this Francophone pattern in dealing with Islamic sciences. He says that a number of Arab thinkers who went through Francophone in the field of reading heritage, such as Muhammad Al-Jabri, Abdul Majeed Al-Sharafi, Hassan Hanafi, and Arkoun, have They adopted an attempt to change the understanding of the legal texts in a human/rational way until the matter, according to Al-Ashmawi, came to dealing with Sharia as a spirit devoid of rulings (the duality of the total and the partial when drunk).
We may see what Al-Ashmawi expressed very clearly in Al-Jabri’s saying: “We have called since the eighties of the last century to exclude the slogan of secularism from the dictionary of Arab thought and replace it with the two slogans: democracy and rationality”[14], which, on the other hand, provoked strong criticism at Al-Sakran for this rational/modern methodology in dealing with heritage, or humanizing it if we wish to scrutinize.
He says that "the Francophone/Maghreb school completely reshaped its logic, re-formulated its thinking style, its way of dealing with things, its way of looking at facts and evaluating events, by absorbing its own tools for reading, interpretation and observation, rearranging the internal pyramid of values, and redrawing the mental schedule of priorities" [15].
From this entry, the researcher Khaled Al-Seif[16] in his doctoral dissertation came to analyze this modernist hermeneutic phenomenon, referring to the evolution of the concept of interpretation, beginning with hermeneutics, whose origins were linked to Christian sacred texts. It can be called the sequence of the three stages: the author's stage, the text stage, and the reader's stage[17].
Researcher Khalid bin Abdulaziz Al-Saif (communication sites)
Beginning with intertextuality that deals with the text as a result of a group of overlapping texts, which is the author’s stage “in which the focus is on the background of the text and its context in which it moves”[18], then structuralism that goes to the author’s death and analysis of the text’s structure by isolating it from any historical or social system It is the stage of the text, and it ends with deconstruction, which aims to find a gap between the text and what it hides.
Arkoun’s critical project, as a Francophone Arab model, is based “on the application of contemporary Western critical tools and concepts to religion, heritage and Islam, and the goal it aims at through its project is: reformulating the Islamic heritage in a way that allows the contemporary Muslim to integrate into the spaces of Western modernity”[20]. His project in the secularization of Islam, in the words of Imad Eddin Ibrahim, through two endeavors.
The first is the separation of Islam from social life, and the second, as stated in his book “Arab Thought,” centers on dealing with heritage “according to new mechanisms, which are the tools that the Western mind has reached, such as linguistics, psychological, social and anthropological sciences, and the reading of religious texts according to its guidance. As she alone is able to transcend the emotional charge on the one hand and the sacred on the other hand, to deal with the religious heritage without any backgrounds whatsoever”[21].
Humanizing heritage and central switching
Humanism, as a concept exploded as a result of the European Renaissance, can be defined as placing man as a measure of things, or “as Crane Brenton comments that it was the humanists who believed that man is the standard of everything, and that every man is the measure of himself. As for George Headley, humanism is in fact an exclusion of interpretations.” offered by the religions of revelation, and looking at them as a form of illusion, that is, we can read the sacred texts with a human symbolic reading”[22].
Crane Brenton (networking sites)
In the intersection between this concept and the Islamic heritage, the human interpretation of heritage can be understood as “a reinterpretation of heritage and the birth of its core concepts, and its internal movement, an interpretation in which any moral or religious motives or subjective convictions are excluded, and in which it searches for material motives - whether political, or economic.” , ethnic, or otherwise - through the use of the anthropological conceptual apparatus under the slogan of arming with the tools of the human sciences”[23].
In the sense that the formations of the conflict are interpreted as being motivated by a sovereign, mass, authoritarian struggle, or economic purposes, which is what the drunk sees, that is, reading the texts of revelation and heritage as a civil reading, transforming the revelation from a ruler over civilization to a mere advocate for its products that justifies and pleads for it, and nothing else is accepted from it. ![24].
Perhaps one of the most prominent examples of this in the Francophone school is the project of Muhammad Abed Al-Jabri in the criticism of the Arab mind. He also emphasized, secondly, the necessity of separating the Arab reader from his heritage, that is, for the reader to look at the heritage objectively, rationally and historically through the methodological gains of contemporary sciences"[25].
We see on the same approach, Muhammad Arkoun, through his project on reading heritage with the tools of the human sciences. Western model of thinking” [26].
As well as the goal of his critical project to build “applied Islamism” by applying scientific methodologies to the Holy Qur’an, such as those applied to Christian texts, which subjected the religious text to the test of comparative historical criticism and deconstructive linguistic analysis”[27], as Nasr Hamid Abu Zaid sees, as one Among those influenced by the Francophonie, hermeneutics/reinterpretation of texts is “a genuine starting point for looking at the relationship of the interpreter with the text, not only in literary texts, but also in reconsidering our religious heritage on the interpretation of the Qur’an”[28].
In the end, some may see that one of the previous thinkers “does not call for a criticism of religion itself, but rather focuses on the problem of interpretation and rationality in the face of transmission, regarding what is related to the texts of Sharia” [29], but the drunk finds, through his critical work, “the consequences of civil discourse.” This discourse has turned into “a faint fabricated image that suffers in its internal structure from a deep cognitive fragility as a result of being dependent on selectivity and absence without clear methodology or criteria that can be referred to,” meaning that it has become “a mixture of results that can be proven to the contrary” [30]. , as happened extensively with regard to the techniques of politicization and transmission, which he himself previously addressed in his book “The Modernist Interpretation of Heritage,” and can be referred to in our previous report (The Modernist Interpretation of Islamic Heritage.. How did they take it out of context?), as examples of the use of Western techniques in interpreting heritage and its consequences.