Sadiq Jalal al-Azm

Sadik J. al-Azm at University of California, Los Angeles, 2006

Sadiq Jalal Al-Azm (Arabic: صادق جلال العظم‎‎) (born in 1934) is a Professor Emeritus of Modern European Philosophy at the University of Damascus in Syria and was, until 2007, a visiting professor in the Department of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University. Thus far, his main area of specialization has been the work of German philosopher Immanuel Kant, but he now places a greater emphasis upon the Islamic world and its relationship to the West, evidenced by his contribution to the discourse of Orientalism.[1] Al-Azm is also known as a human rights advocate and a champion of intellectual freedom and free speech.[2]

Birth and Education

Al-Azm was born in Damascus, Syria, into the prominent Al-Azm family.[3] He grew up in the well-known Damascene Sunni land-owning family of Al-Azm. The Al-Azm family rose to prominence in the eighteenth century under the rule of the Ottoman Empire in Greater Syria, which was acquired in 1516 by the cosmopolitan Turkish Empire.

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 University of Damascus from 1977 to 1999. He continues to be active in lecturing at European and American universities as a visiting professor. In 2004, he won the Erasmus Prize with Fatema Mernissi and Abdulkarim Soroush. In 2004 he received the Dr. Leopold Lucas Prize awarded by the Faculty of Protestant Theology of the University of Tübingen. In 2005, he became a Dr. Honoris Causa at Hamburg University. In 2015 he was awarded the Goethe Medal by the president of the Goethe Institute.

Controversy and Arrest

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...."[4]

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." [5] 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 has 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.

Prominent Views

Al-Azm is 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.

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.

Bibliography (English)

Al-Azm has written 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

Articles

Interviews

References

  1. ↑
  2. ↑ "Syrian intellectuals call on the Baath congress to revive 'Damascus spring'". ArabicNews.com. 6/9/2005. Retrieved 2009-01-15. Check date values in: |date= (help)
  3. ↑ al-Azm, Sadiq Jalal (2008), "Science and Religion, an Uneasy Relationship in the History of Judeo-Christian-Muslim Heritage", Islam & Europe, Leuven University Press, p. 129, ISBN 9058676722
  4. ↑ Introduction to Naqd al-Fikr al-Dini
  5. ↑ Appendix: Documents from the Tribunal of the Author and Publisher
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