Christian theology has seemingly forgotten the Father’s ironic relationship with the Son, lost sight of the Father’s worry and concern for Jesus’s safety, and stalled in the metaphor of divine fatherhood.
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Science and the soul: New inquiries into Islamic ethics 
by
Omnia El Shakry
Translation, tradition, and the ethical turn: A reply to Bardawil and Allan
by
Omnia El Shakry
The Arabic Freud ... does not aim to augment the literature on psychoanalysis by contributing yet another reading of Freud (merely to be added to the French, American, Argentinian, or Indian Freud), nor does it simply argue that psychoanalysis as a discipline was itself constituted by the Other (and, therefore, always already inflected by histories of colonialism and of the non-West). Eschewing the pretension to abstraction so characteristic of philosophical reflections on selfhood, it rejects the premise of much Euro-American theory in which “geopolitics provides the exemplars, but rarely the epistemologies.” Instead, I stage a scene of reading between psychoanalysis and Islam that takes place otherwise, at the intersection of multiple epistemological and ethical traditions of selfhood. Such “irreducible work of translation, not from language to language, but from body to ethical semiosis” cannot resort to the resolutely secular framings within which a knowledge formation like psychoanalysis has traditionally been understood.
Science and the soul: New inquiries into Islamic ethics
by
Michael Allan
Vectors of translation
by
Michael Allan
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.
Science and the soul: New inquiries into Islamic ethics
by
Fadi A. Bardawil
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.