Taha Hussein and the Dialectic of Arab Enlightenment

Quinn Teague-Colfer

A fourth-year student of International Relations, French and German at the University of Toronto.

This article is part of the“The Arab Renaissance in Contemporary Eyes” project, which is the fruit of cooperation between Henna Platform and The Department of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations. In this project, Henna team provides editorial assistance to the graduate and undergraduate students to publish their final papers on Henna’s website. You read in this series of articles: Intellectuals of the Modern Arab World by Jens Hanssen, The Arab Nahda from Feminist Perspective by Sara Molaie, Cultural Healing After Tragedy by Timothy Boudoumit, The Importance of Being Wrong by Shauna McLean, and Self-definition in Changing Worlds by Mosab Alnomire. 

Translated to Arabic by Mosab Alnomire

Lebanese novelist and intellectual Elias Khoury writes in his essay For a Third Nahda that a “requirement of the third Nahda is calling things what they are. The Arab world cannot establish its Nahda without comprehending its defeat” (Khoury 2018, 367). Khoury reminds us that enlightenment lies neither in the rejection nor the consecration of past thought but rather in the introspection demanded by its shortcomings. To heed calls by Khoury and others for a third Nahda and confront the intersecting crises facing the contemporary Arab world, we must first examine past failures to reckon with crises of similar magnitude. Dialectical engagement with earlier attempts at rebirth and enlightenment must be central to the third Nahda, grounding its discursive rupture in an immanent critique of the failures of early 20th-century Nahdawis and judicious integration of their insights. Closely reading Taha Hussein’s The Future of Culture in Egypt provides an accessible entry point to such critique.

The work of Taha Hussein, “Dean of Arabic Literature” and the “last Nadhawi,” is often criticized for its elitism and liberal articulation of Egyptian nationalism (di-Capua 2018, 1074-1075). Among Hussein’s most important works is The Future of Culture in Egypt, published in 1938 on the eve of the Second World War. The Future of Culture argues for adopting European cultural practices and political institutions in post-independence Egypt (Hussein 1938, 2). Hussein posits Ancient Egyptian knowledge production was central to developing classical Greek thought, citing the influence of Greek texts safeguarded in Egypt throughout the Dark Ages in the European Enlightenment (Hussein 1938, 4, 8-9). Hussein argues this shared epistemological history grants Egyptians “European minds” distinct from their Eastern neighbours (Hussein 1938, 4-7). Thus, Egyptians must be educated in the classical European model to reach equality with Europe  (Hussein 1938, 14). As a politician and reformer, Husayn advocated for robust parliamentary democracy. He worked in the years preceding the 1952 coup d’état to build the foundations for universal education (Ahmad 2018, 10-11).

The Future of Culture separates the harsh realities of European modernity from their epistemological origins. The horrors of imperialism and fascism are merely footnotes in the onward march of industrial modernity, with the need to avoid imperialism only briefly mentioned in the text (Hussein 1938, 15). Hussein advocates for the reclamation of classical thought without interrogating its role in imperial and fascist barbarism or how Egypt might avoid a similar fate. Hussein cites Japan, feared and respected for its effective imitation of Europe, as a model for Egyptian development, but overlooks its growing militarism and ultra-nationalism (Hussein 1938, 14). Absent in Hussein’s binary conception of knowledge as either Eastern or Western are sources of knowledge production in sub-Saharan Africa and the Americas, a negation of their ability to produce knowledge. Hussein’s desire to stake a claim for his country to the hegemonic epistemology of his time must be considered in its temporal context. The Future of Culture was published preceding a great rupture in Egyptian society, several years before the decolonizing winds of change swept across the colonized world and amid Europe’s descent into fascism. We must empathize with Hussein’s earnest engagement with European Enlightenment thought and honor his contributions to Egyptian nation-building in spite of the contradictions present in his work.

The post-war insights of Hussein’s German Jewish contemporaries in the Frankfurt School offer a compelling analysis of the pathologies of Enlightenment thought (and by extension, The Future of Culture), particularly Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment. Reckoning with the trauma of the Holocaust, Adorno and Horkheimer sought to understand the descent of supposedly “enlightened” societies into genocidal barbarism. They propose a dialectic of Enlightenment: “Myth is already enlightenment, and enlightenment reverts to mythology.” (Adorno & Horkheimer 2022, xviii) Adorno and Horkheimer posit that myth and enlightenment seek to overcome existential fear through the domination of the natural environment (Adorno & Horkheimer 2022, 10). Enlightenment and myth share a paranoid logic of “unveiling,” where existential fear of the natural environment is assuaged through the domination of its elements (Sedgwick 2002, 141). Nature is reconstituted through human subjectivity, as myth grants subjectivity to the inanimate, and enlightenment uses positive reason to render nature legible (Adorno & Horkheimer 2022, 4). Adorno and Horkheimer argue that enlightenment is a radical manifestation of mythic fear, seeking to subsume all life under the totality of reason. The Holocaust illustrates the barbarism of Enlightenment’s natural endpoint, where the desire to dominate, exploit, and subjugate becomes totalitarian. Thus, the epistemological framework and civilizational rhetoric employed by Hussein and his liberal Nahdawi contemporaries are embedded with an inclination towards such barbarism. The adoption of European epistemologies without sufficient critical engagement has often led to violent expressions of its logic of domination. But imperialism cannot be essentialized as a uniquely European affliction, as all whose epistemologies are rooted in fear and domination are vulnerable to its temptations.

The liberatory potential of The Future of Culture lies not in its prescriptions but instead in the immanent critique it demands from the 21st-century reader. Like Hussein, we, too, live in a time of rupture, defined by intersecting crises. Our ways of knowing not only respond to historical events but also drive their development. If, as Hussein asserts in The Future of Culture, Arab thought has (in part) framed European history from antiquity, it must also possess the discursive power to frame not only the future of the Arab world but also that of Europe. A new epistemology is needed to drive a discursive rupture, motivated not by fear and domination but by synthesis and liberation. A new Nahda can emerge only through dialectical engagement with the early 20th-century Nahdawis, where immanent critique drives the synthesis of Nahdawi writings (e.g. heeding Hussein’s calls for robust democracy and engagement with the international community) with a new discursive framework. Without the capacity for rigorous critique, we cannot hope to confront the problems without passports that define our time.

Bibliography

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