Sadiq Jalal al-Azm

Sadiq Jalal Al-Azm (

Al-Azm was schooled in Beirut, Lebanon, earning a B.A. in Philosophy from the American University of Beirut in 1957. Al-Azm earned an M.A. in 1959 and a Ph.D. in 1961 from Yale University, majoring in Modern European Philosophy.

Career

In 1963, after finishing his Ph.D., he began teaching at the American University of Beirut. His 1968 book Al-Nakd al-Dhati Ba’da al-Hazima (Self-Criticism After the Defeat) (Dar al-Taliah, Beirut) analyzes the impact of the Six-Day War on Arabs. Many of his books are banned in Arab nations (with the exception of Lebanon).

He was a professor of Modern European Philosophy in the Department of Philosophy and Sociology at the

Al-Azm was at the center of a political controversy in December 1969 when he was arrested in absentia with his publisher by the Lebanese government; he had fled to Syria only to later return to Beirut to turn himself in, where he was jailed in early January 1970. He was charged for writing a book that aimed at provoking feuds among the religious sects of Lebanon. This was after publication in book form of various essays that previously appeared in journals, magazines and periodicals. Together, they comprised the 1969 book, Naqd al-Fikr al-Dini (Critique of Religious Thought) (Dar al-Taliah, Beirut). In it, Al-Azm's rebuke of political and religious leaders and the media who supported them for exploiting their populations' religious sentiments was relentless and made him enemies. He applied a Marxist-materialist critique to religion, not to discredit people's religious commitments, but to expose how "Arab regimes found in religion a crutch they could use to calm down the Arab public and cover-up for their incompetence and failure laid bare by the defeat, by adopting religious and spiritual explanations for the Israeli victory...."[8]

Al-Azm was released from prison in mid-January 1970 after the "Court decided in consensus to drop the charges filed against the Defendant Sadiq Al-Azm and Bashir Al-Daouk due to the lack of criminal elements they were charged with."^{[8]: Appendix} Subsequent editions of Naqd al-Fikr al-Dini include the Documents from the Tribunal and continue to be published in Arabic to this day, though with restricted access in the Middle East.

Al-Azm long believed his arrest was motivated by other factors, perhaps as a way to "settle scores with their critics and foes." Regardless, the arguments Al-Azm raised in Critique of Religious Thought continue to be debated, and there have been numerous books published in Arabic furthering the positions of both sides of the debate. The most thorough chronicling of the "affair", to use the author's own words, outside the Middle East was in the German journal, Der Islam, by Stefan Wild in an essay translated "God and Man in Lebanon: The Sadiq Al-Azm Affair" in 1971.^[9]

Prominent views

Historian Albert Hourani characterizes Al-'Azm's writing as "a total rejection of religious thought."^[10] Al-Azm was a critic of Edward Said's Orientalism, claiming that it essentialises 'the West' in the same manner that Said criticises imperial powers and their scholars of essentialising 'the East'. In a 1981 essay, Al-Azm wrote of Said: "the stylist and polemicist in Edward Said very often runs away with the systematic thinker ... we find Said ... tracing the origins of Orientalism all the way back to Homer, Aeschylus, Euripides and Dante. In other words, Orientalism is not really a thoroughly modern phenomenon, as we thought earlier, but is the natural product of an ancient and almost irresistible European bent of mind to misrepresent the realities of other cultures, peoples and their languages. ... Here the author seems to be saying that the 'European mind', from Homer to Karl Marx and A.H.R.Gibb, is inherently bent on distorting all human realities other than its own."^{[citation needed]}

Within a decade, Al-Azm became an active participant in the dialogue surrounding free speech and the 1988 publication of The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie.^{[citation needed]}

Bibliography (English)

Al-Azm wrote numerous books and articles in Arabic, and some have been translated into European languages including Italian, German, Danish, French. Neither Al-Nakd al-Dhati Ba’da al-Hazima nor Naqd al-Fikr al-Dini has been translated in its entirety into English, though selections of Naqd al-Fikr al-Dini have appeared in English translation in John J. Donohue and John L. Esposito's Islam in Transition: Muslim Perspectives ([1982]2007, 2nd Ed.) Additionally, chapter two of Nakd al-Fikr al-Dini was translated into English in a 2011 Festschrift in honor of al-Azm's career published under the title Orientalism and Conspiracy: Politics and Conspiracy Theory in the Islamic World, Essays in Honour of Sadiq J. Al-Azm.

Books

• 1967 Kant's Theory of Time New York, Philosophical Library.
• 1972 The Origins of Kant's Arguments in the Antinomies Oxford, Clarendon/Oxford University Press.
• 1980 Four Philosophical Essays Damascus, Damascus University Publications.
• 1992 The Mental Taboo: Salman Rushdie and the Truth Within Literature. London, Riad El-Rayess Books.
• 2004 Islam und säkularer Humanismus (Islam and Secular Humanism), Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2005
  ISBN 3-16-148527-0
• 2011 Self-Criticism After the Defeat. Saqi Books. London.
• 2013 Secularism, Fundamentalism, and the Struggle for the Meaning of Islam. (Collected essays in 3 volumes) – Vol. 1: On Fundamentalisms; Vol. 2: Islam – Submission and Disobedience; Vol. 3: Is Islam Secularizable? Challenging Political and Religious Taboos. Gerlach Press, Berlin 2013–2014,
  ISBN 978-3-940924-20-9
• 2014
  Arabic: نقد الفكر الديني).^[12]
• 2014 Islam - submission and disobedience
  ISBN 9783940924223