Omnia El Shakry’s The Arabic Freud is both admirably ambitious in its quest to map “the topography of modern selfhood” and meticulous in the stories it threads together in this process. What the book offers across its four chapters is not only a description of a moment in intellectual history—the emergence of psychoanalysis in twentieth-century Egypt—but an entire method of history writing, navigating the conceptual poetics of reception and translation, on the one hand, and pushing critically at the valences of ethics and politics, on the other. . . . The critical importance of the questions raised and the imaginative scope of the book assure its place alongside key philosophical reflections on selfhood. And yet, The Arabic Freud’s unique strength derives from what many of these other philosophically oriented studies fail to offer. In contrast to the abstraction often characteristic of the genre, El Shakry masterfully situates her reflections in time and place, attending to how selfhood comes to be understood in the entwined traditions of psychoanalysis and Islam. The book is instructive both in the story it tells and the method it reveals in doing so.
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The Arabic Freud: Discourse interruptus
by
Fadi A. Bardawil
The Arabic Freud masterfully excavates the neglected archives of psychoanalysis in mid-twentieth century Egypt, and offers a doubly contrapuntal account to Laroui. Omnia El Shakry examines a minor tradition of modern psychoanalytic Arab thought whose coordinates cannot be plotted on the axis of linear historical progress. Moreover, authors like Yusuf Murad and al-Taftazani, whose works she looks into, articulated psychoanalytic concepts with medieval Islamic treaties. These authors were far from being “unattached” to, or alienated from, their “native milieus.” They moved back and forth between al-Ghazali (1058-1111) and Freud (1856-1939) without any sense of swimming against the gushing streams of empty homogeneous time. To say this is to emphasize that these thinkers inhabited a world of multiple temporalities. In unearthing this archive, El Shakry makes subtle yet radical displacements—in its lay meaning, not the Freudian one—on two interconnected, but analytically distinct, fronts.
A wind from the invisible: A reply to Spadola and Khan
by
Anand Vivek Taneja
I am honored and humbled by the great care and critical attention with which Naveeda Khan and Emilio Spadola have read my book Jinnealogy: Time, Islam, and Ecological Thought in the Medieval Ruins of Delhi. In their responses, both Khan and Spadola craft exquisite images that advance the conceptual work of the book. Or, to use Spadola’s preferred term, they think figurally: the images are neither symbol nor meaning, but thought itself, thought that “inhabits and motivates discourse but cannot be reduced to it.” {...} The bringing together of thought and affect has much to teach, I believe, not only to scholars of Islam, but to the wider world of humanities and social sciences. How do we think not just about affect but with and through affect? How might mourning and joy and hairat contribute to forms of thinking about the world and our political and ethical responses to it? Khan sees an appropriateness, for instance, in which the tone of mourning allows us to fully engage with the bureaucratic destruction that has marred the Islamic landscapes of Delhi. Spadola similarly pushes us to think with the figural, to what inhabits and moves discourse but cannot be reduced to it.
Islam in shadows
by
Naveeda Khan
Anand Vivek Taneja’s Jinnealogy is an elegant contemplation of the ruins of the fortress built by Firoz Shah Tughlaq, who ruled Delhi from 1351-88 AD. Its elegance is borne out especially by the author interweaving his own experience of the compound with the voices of those he met in passing and those he came to know over the course of his fieldwork within this space and its environs. Its elegance is evident also in the cinematic references that animate Taneja’s imagination and those of his interlocutors, and the Urdu literary textual tradition readily at hand. Taneja demonstrates a serious commitment to redressing the archival and national amnesia at work in a contemporary India determined to make all things Muslim/Islamic foreign, polluting, and anti-nationalist. Not only does he insist upon the Indic nature of Islam, he claims that Islam is indexed within the lives of non-Muslim Indians through a form of stranger hospitality that is distinctly tied to the culture of Muslim shrines. And in this manner he provides the important reminder that many, besides Muslims, have ongoing relations to such shrines . . . While I might question the presumption that Islam constitutes a stable and unified object of study, or that it needs saving, whether from nationalist amnesia or from itself (as in Taneja’s insistence that what he witnesses is necessarily progressive, anti-hierarchical, and non-patriarchal), I do not doubt that this book is the labor of much scholarship and love.