Cairo
"no
money with
me today, you Tmhlna several days to give you your right?", Uttered by the
late thinker Abdul Wahab Meseiri factor was assisted, in
application of the
idea of
Alterahmi society called for an
alternative to the
community contractual.
His worker, who cleaned his house every week, insisted on saying at the moment of payment, “Leave it to me this time,” meaning, “You don’t have to pay me this time,” and he says - according to Al-Masiri - “even though I work as a servant for you and enter into a relationship with you.” contractually, we are humanly equal and must enter into a compassionate relationship that goes beyond economic exchanges (services for money)."
Therefore, Al-Masiri deliberately informed the worker that there was no money to postpone the payment of the wages for the following week, to give him the opportunity to be a creditor, in order to achieve compassionate human equality, as he mentioned.
Al-Masiri explains that the compassionate society, in short, is the society whose relations are based on compassion and sympathy among its members, in contrast to the contractual society in which relations are based on a contractual and conciliatory basis.
This early thesis in El-Messiri’s ideas “a compassionate society versus a contractual society” reveals an important aspect of its features that remained loyal to it until his death, which is the embodiment of his ideas in his reality, not that they remain mere theories flying in the void, and may not have a share of life The thinker or the life of his community.
Application stations
Al-Masiri’s path has many stations to implement what he believed in politically, and even in his last years, despite his illness, he did not stop working on the ground;
He served as general coordinator of the Kefaya movement, which was founded in late 2004 and in which several political currents joined forces to bring about a change in political life, with the slogan “No to extending power” to the late President Hosni Mubarak and “No to inheriting power” for his son Gamal Mubarak, and represented the Egyptians’ yearning for change towards a society of political justice. and social, which has long advocated by El-Messiri.
El-Mesiri, who was born in October 1938, and accounts differed in determining the exact date of his birth, began his political career on the left;
He participated in the establishment of the Egyptian Communist Party, which adopted the ideas of Marxist parties in other countries.
But El-Mesiri soon saw that the left’s ideas, despite their apparent nobility, fall under the “pleasure sector” that “promises man with an earthly paradise that will relieve him completely from the burden of history, moral obligation, and a sense of responsibility towards others,” as he described it.
This path took the physical or instinctive human being to guide his life and reformulate it in the light of his direct sensual pleasure outside any human social or moral systems, as he said in his book "Material Philosophy and the Dismantling of Man".
Like other thinkers such as Khaled Muhammad Khaled and Adel Hussein, Al-Masiri moved from the left to consider Islam a more feasible solution to humanity's material and spiritual problems, saying that "Islamic relativism is that a person believes that there is one absolute, which is the word of God, and other than it is relative human interpretations in its relationship to the Absolute that It is outside."
The late joined the Wasat Party - under establishment at the time - as the closest party to his new ideas, and he said in his book "My Intellectual Journey" that "faith was not born within me except through a long and deep journey. It has spiritual elements, as it is based on the inability of materialistic categories to explain man and on the necessity of resorting to more synthetic philosophical categories.”
El-Mesiri loves those who implement their ideas as a living reality. In one of his statements, he praised former Bosnian President Alija Izetbegovic, describing him as a "man of jihad and diligence."
Al-Masiri does not transcend his community, but rather stands in front of him meditating and learning from him what agrees with his ideas. He praised the idea of community members providing financial assistance to each other on occasions of weddings and sorrows, as a practical application of the model of a compassionate society, not a contractual one.
Journey to the West
Al-Masiri was born and received his primary education in the Beheira Governorate in northern Egypt. In the midst of the call for national liberation and the youthful influx of young people in universities with the ideas of the nascent Nasserite state, the late embarked on studying English literature at the Faculty of Arts at Alexandria University starting in 1955.
After completing his university studies, El-Messiri traveled to the United States to complete his graduate studies, and there he realized that “Western progress is the fruit of the plundering of the Third World, and that Western modernity cannot be separated from this plundering process,” as stated in his book, which summarizes his biography, “My Intellectual Journey: In Seeds.” Roots and fruits.
After his return, El-Messiri taught at Egyptian, Arab and Islamic universities. He also held a number of jobs related to his field, and won many local and international awards and certificates.
Al-Masiri returned with a deeper idea of the nature of the Arab-Western conflict in general, and the conflict between Arabs and Israel in particular, to write one of the most important Arab encyclopedias, "The Jews, Judaism, and Zionism".
Encyclopedia of Zionism
The encyclopedia - which he spent a quarter of a century writing - carved his name among the most important thinkers and theorists of the conflict, and it is the encyclopedia in which the great intellectual and literary product of the late, who varied between story writing and children's literature, was hidden.
Here, too, is a new application of his ideas. The scientific objectivity he called for applied it as he saw it in that huge encyclopedia, to the extent that some of his critics saw in it sympathy with the Jews, because he was objective and separated between the Jewish religion and its adherents and Zionism.
His critics saw that he tried to deal with the "Zionist enemy" as a "humane" phenomenon resulting from a societal process through a "religious premise for fear of lack of objectivity in the analysis."
Perhaps the prevalence of these criticisms was supported by what was stated in separate statements of the late, in which he said that “the functional nature of Israel means that colonialism created it to perform a specific function, as it is a colonial project that has nothing to do with Judaism.” He also said that “the Jews are not conspirators by nature.”
But whoever follows the late thinker will find that his thoughts do not only warn against Jewish Zionists, but also from Muslim Zionists, as he predicted in one of the seminars 26 years ago, “From now on we will find Jews in Muslim clothes. The same role played by the Jewish general, and therefore this phenomenon must be analyzed so that many of us do not turn into Jews without realizing it.”
Through the unique encyclopedia, he bestowed on the Jewish phenomenon in particular, and the experience of Western modernity in general, with a new, encyclopedic, objective and scientific view, using what he worked on during his academic career to develop the concept of explanatory models.
The intellectual on the street
All this history did not suffice for Al-Mesiri to protect him from being subjected to oppression during the Mubarak regime. Unknown persons attacked him in the capital, Cairo, and he was arrested by the Egyptian authorities more than once.
Commenting on this, El-Messiri stated that the intellectual "must be in the street," stressing his most prominent feature in his personality, which is the embodiment of his ideas as a reality in his life.
El-Messiri coined a number of new terms that formed the basis of his social theories, including what he calls the "embryonic tendency" of man as opposed to the "God's tendency", as well as the term (comprehensive secularism) different from (partial secularism).
Al-Masiri moved to the side of his Lord after suffering from cancer in July of 2008, leaving a huge legacy of creative works, intellectual literature, and living examples.