Omnia El Shakry, The Arabic Freud: Psychoanalysis and Islam in Modern Egypt. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2017; 206 pages, Hardcover £30; ISBN: 9780691174792
By Chris Wilson
‘Out of the darkness my eye glimpses a faint light. I see my small hand as it reaches for the moon from atop my mother’s shoulder. What a memory! How often have we reached for moons that are no less unattainable? I recall the tremendous effort I once expended trying to take hold of my mother’s nipple, only to be thwarted by something with a bitter taste…’[i]
By the 1940s, the Oedipus complex, along with a host of other Freudian notions, would have been familiar to an Egyptian reading public. Naguib Mahfouz’s The Mirage (al-Sarab), published in 1948, offered readers one of the most evocative portrayals – and starkest warnings – of the perils of an excessive, pathological, and ultimately destructive attachment to the mother, in the story of Kamil Ru’ba Laz. So unattractive was this portrait of Kamil that when an acquaintance was informed that Mahfouz had based the character on him – the problem in his life, Mahfouz later recounted, as in Kamil’s, was his relationship with his mother – he pulled out a revolver and made threats against the future Nobel Prize winner.[ii]
Together with radio shows hosted by practising psychoanalysts, the introduction of psychological and intelligence testing into the military, and a flurry of other novels, plays, and films which dealt in similarly Freudian themes, Mahfouz’s novel was one of the many ways in which psychoanalysis became ‘nothing short of ubiquitous in postwar Egypt’.[iii] Yet rather than attempt a comprehensive reception history, Omnia El Shakry’s The Arabic Freud – the much-anticipated monograph-length sequel to her article of the same name, published in Modern Intellectual History back in 2014[iv] – has its sights set on a different aim, one at once more focussed and more ambitious. The Arabic Freud, at one level, offers a richly researched intellectual history of an encounter between psychoanalysis and Islam which took place in Egypt over the 1940s and 1950s, reconstructing how a generation of philosophers, psychologists, and criminologists sought to cross-fertilise Freud with pre-analytic Arabic and Islamic traditions. On another level, however, El Shakry recuperates these thinkers not simply as objects of historical inquiry, or as mere products of their political context, but producers of theory in their own right, whose arguments and ideas can enrich and expand our understandings of the self and the other, intuition and ethical cultivation, and psychoanalysis and Islam, today. We can learn from, not only about, academic psychologist Yusuf Murad, Sufi shakyh and philosopher Abu al-Wafa al-Ghunaymi al-Taftazani, and criminologist Muhammad Fathi, El Shakry argues. If these twin ambitions sometimes appear to tug The Arabic Freud in different directions, the tension is a productive one. This is a short text, at only 115 pages, but a densely argued one, and one which will reward multiple re-readings.
While one might be forgiven for wanting to dive straight into The Arabic Freud, it is worth lingering a moment on its stunning jacket art. Featuring a lithograph of one of the ceramic tiles created by Rachid Koraïchi as part of his 1998 travelling exhibition Letters of Clay: Homage to Ibn ‘Arabi, it is an apt gateway to El Shakry’s text. In an interview in July 2018, Koraïchi explains his recurring interest in the great Sufi masters like Ibn ‘Arabi, Jalaluddin al-Rumi, and others, as stemming in part from a desire to puncture a (mis)representation of the Islamic world as being in crisis, or as a source of unease, tension, and violence, by showcasing instead ‘the tolerant and sophisticated writings of the great Muslim poets and sages who have left such a large imprint on succeeding generations’. Letters of Clay, underlining this point, retraced in reverse order Ibn ‘Arabi’s own life itinerary, starting with his resting place in Damascus and ending at his place of birth, Murcia.
Koraïchi’s work is an apt starting point because El Shakry,too, continually returns to the medieval Sufi philosopher Ibn ‘Arabi (d.1240), and shares a concern with how a thinker might travel. More fundamentally, both seek to contest a misrepresentation of Islam. El Shakry’s interlocutors here – the Tunisian analyst Fethi Benslama, Bulgarian-French philosopher Julia Kristeva, and Syrian psychoanalyst Rafah Nashed – contend no dialogue is possible between Islam and psychoanalysis. It is, to take the words of Benslama, a tale of mutual ignorance. Yet El Shakry decisively shows how psychoanalysis and Islam were brought into a mutually transformative conversation in postwar Egypt, by deftly tracing the epistemological resonances and elective affinities between the two as living traditions. Indeed, what is methodologically impressive about The Arabic Freud is the careful even-handedness with which it stages this encounter, such that psychoanalysis in Egypt is never reduced to a mere importation from the West. Individual chapters unfold in a way that underlines this point; starting with a broad-brushstroke account of infantile sexuality, for instance, which leads a reader to think that Murad, al-Taftazani, and Fathi are simply glossing Freud, before digging deeper and revealing the complex ways in which these thinkers wove together Freud and Ibn ‘Arabi, Melanie Klein and Abu Hamid al-Ghazali (d.1111), Karen Horney and Fakhr al-Din al-Razi (d.1209).
The Arabic Freud is in two parts. The first – The Unconscious and the Modern Subject – puts philosophical and ethical debates about the nature of the soul, self, and psyche under a microscope; the second – Spaces of Interiority – follows psychoanalysis into more pragmatic areas such as adolescent sexuality and criminal psychology.
The first chapter, Psychoanalysis and the Psyche, examines key concepts – integration and unity, insight and intuition, the self and the other – as elaborated on the pages of Yusuf Murad and Mustafa Ziywar’s journal, Majallat ‘Ilm al-Nafs (‘The Journal of Psychology’), which ran from 1945 to 1953. It sets out Murad’s distinctive integrative (takamuli) approach to psychology, which figured the self as a unity of psychic, bodily, and societal aspects. In his emphasis on unity, Murad was drawing on Gestalttheorie as well as Ibn ‘Arabi; there is more than an echo of Fanon here too, in the importance in a context of decolonisation which attached to a project of reconstituting the psychic life of the colonised from the scattered and fragmented elements left in the wake of colonialism.
The second chapter, The Self and the Soul, shifts the focus from Murad to Abu al-Wafa al-Ghunaymi al-Taftazani, Sufi shaykh and professor of philosophy at Cairo University. Parallels between Sufism and psychoanalysis are numerous – traditions of dream interpretation, the analogous relationships between shaykh/disciple and analyst/analysand, and a highly specialised vocabulary of the self and its topography. Indeed, the ease with which similarities are drawn is suggestive of psychoanalysis’s own debt to the mystical traditions, an instance in which reconstructing this specific encounter between psychoanalysis and Islam might enrich our understanding of the psychoanalytic tradition more generally.
One danger amidst all these parallels, and potential criticism of The Arabic Freud overall, is that its focus on affinities, resonances, and hybridisations means it passes over points of tension and disconnect, but in this chapter, El Shakry is careful to note that the stakes in the encounter between Sufism and psychoanalysis were very different. The aim of the former, after all, was not so much self-knowledge, as knowledge of God, and belief in divine transcendence carried over into thinking on the self, such that the presumed hallmarks of modern selfhood – interiority, autonomy – did not replace but rather coexisted with the heteronomous subject of premodern orthodox religious discourse. The question of the status of the secular subject when psychoanalysis travels is a central one, not only in relation to Islam or the Middle East. As Christiane Hartnack has noted, in her study of psychoanalysis in colonial India, Freud himself was privately concerned psychoanalysis would not travel easily. When the ivory statue of Vishnu sent by the Indian Psychoanalytic Society to mark his seventy-fifth birthday began to develop cracks, he mused in the privacy of his diary: ‘Can the god, being used to Calcutta, not stand the climate in Vienna?’[v] El Shakry recasts the cracks feared by Freud as openings towards a creative encounter of ethical engagement.
The third chapter, The Psychosexual Subject, develops some of these themes further, arguing that the postwar Egyptian subject was defined both by autonomy and heteronomy, neither fully religious nor fully secularised. But it is also a sharp intervention in a debate over what happens to sexuality in the history of the Middle East. Responding to the idea that sexual pleasure and desire, common in premodern Ottoman texts on sexuality, had either been silenced entirely by the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, or displaced by a scientific sexology aimed at regulating sexual contacts and pleasure along bourgeois lines, El Shakry convincingly argues that sexual pleasure and desire never went away; rather, the emergence of psychoanalysis in the postwar period was able to breathe new life into earlier premodern classical literature centred on desire and the appetites, and on the ethical cultivation of the child – a far cry from the incommensurability alleged by Benslama indeed.
The final chapter, Psychoanalysis before the Law, digs into a set of debates sparked by attempts to have psychoanalysis admitted as evidence in the court of law. A central figure here is Muhammad Fathi, professor of criminal psychology, who became convinced in the 1940s that psychoanalysis – rather than biomedicine – held the key to ensuring that law and justice aligned in the courtroom. Yet while many of his colleagues shared his hope of mitigating criminal responsibility by pointing to contributing psychological factors, Fathi found himself embroiled in deep disagreements with Mahmud al-Rawi, Mustafa Isma’il Suwayf, and Murad himself over where exactly to look for these contributing factors. Fathi emphasised the individual’s (in)ability to resolve historic, mostly sexual complexes; his contemporaries were more inclined to give weight to present-day explanations, which took account of social and environmental considerations.
The above summaries only sketch some of the arguments made in these chapters, which touch on a bewildering array of subjects, including insight and intuition, love and same-sex desire, and the problem of the properly feminine subject. Though densely argued, El Shakry writes in a way which brings along the reader; the subheadings too prevent the reader from being overwhelmed. Certain unifying themes help knit the text together, too, notably the question of translation. The question of translation was a central one to Murad, a member of the Academy of Language, in particular, and the first issue of Murad and Ziywar’s new journal provided a list of the Arabic equivalents to key terms in the field of psychology and psychoanalysis. Murad reached back into classical Arabic texts for his translations, with the unconscious (al-la-shu’ur), for instance, taken from Ibn ‘Arabi; rather than reading these translations as simply grafting new concepts onto old, El Shakry is attentive to the epistemological resonances between these older classical and newer psychoanalytic usages, and the ways in which these pre-existing meanings stretched or even dyed the fabric of psychoanalytic terms. Nafs – glossed as soul, spirit, psyche, self – smuggled into the idea of the self a spiritual core; al-la-shu’ur too carried over its meaning as a place where God could be manifested. Yet I wondered about another kind of translation: that between clinical practice or the case study, and theory. In The Arabic Freud, psychoanalytic theory floats – with notable exceptions – largely free of practice. Yet, as El Shakry has since demonstrated in a compelling complementary article on Sami Mahmud Ali, translator and psychoanalytic theorist, thinking about the translation from clinical practice into theory can be extraordinarily productive, opening up the possibility, for instance, of figuring incarcerated female prostitutes as the co-creators of psychoanalytic theory.[vi]
A second thread which ties together The Arabic Freud is a shuttling between belief in the opacity and transparency of the human subject. At points, psychoanalytic theorists and practitioners argued for a transparent human subject; this was especially the case in the courtroom, where psychoanalysis promised to render visible criminal intent. At other points, it was the opacity and unknowability of the human subject which loomed large, influenced both by Lacan as well as a Sufi topography of the self, one element in which was the sirr, the secret held between God and his servant alone. El Shakry warns that the former was liable to be seized upon by a postcolonial state hungry to render all visible – and malleable – under its technocratic gaze, and notes that in other ways, too, the stress in Murad’s integrative psychology on harmonious totality fed into the political ambitions of the Free Officers who seized power in 1952. Yet these connections between the intellectual history of the encounter between Islam and psychoanalysis, and the politics of this tumultuous period in Egyptian history, are alluded to, rather than fully developed.
However much the reader might like to know more about these connections, in resisting pursuing these, El Shakry holds true to the wider principle that these thinkers and their ideas can and should be taken seriously not as just another exemplar in a global history of psychoanalysis, nor as merely epiphenomenal to political history, but as theorists and intellectual productions in and of themselves. If Murad, al-Taftazani, and Fathi are El Shakry’s interlocutors, rather than just objects of historical study, then it may be appropriate to credit the decision to step back from the political history at least in part to the influence of Murad himself. In The Arabic Freud, Murad is depicted as a bridge between an older generation of intellectuals who were proponents of an enlightened liberal literature molded in the image of Europe, and a younger generation of vanguardist radicals for whom decolonisation and engagement were the intellectual currency of the day; he emerges as a thinker always more interested in ideas for their own sake, and not merely as means to a political end, like the production of the national or socialist citizen-subject; less interested in national health than in self-integration. The Arabic Freud, in a sense, follows suit, by taking the encounter between Islam and psychoanalysis in postwar Egypt on its own terms. One suspects Murad would have approved.
Chris Wilson (@cw498) is a lecturer in the history of the modern Middle East at the University of East Anglia. His research focuses on the history of colonial psychiatry and mental illness in Palestine under the British mandate. Parts of this research were published last year in The Historical Journal, The Jerusalem Quarterly, and Contemporary Levant . More recently, he has drawn parallels from the history of psychiatry with Covid-19’s impact on care homes for The Conversation.
References:
[i] Naguib Mahfouz, The Mirage (originally published 1948, Cairo: American University of Cairo, 2015, trans. by Nancy Roberts 2009) p.17.
[ii] Gamal al-Ghitani, The Mahfouz Dialogs (trans. by Humphrey Davies, Cairo: American University of Cairo, 2007), p.95.
[iii] Omnia El Shakry, The Arabic Freud: Psychoanalysis and Islam in Modern Egypt (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2017), p.4.
[iv] Omnia El Shakry, ‘The Arabic Freud: The Unconscious and the Modern Subject’, Modern Intellectual History 11, 1 (2014), pp.89-118.
[v] Christiane Hartnack, ‘Colonial Dominions and the Psychoanalytic Couch: Synergies of Freudian Theory with Bengali Hindu Thought and Practices in British India’, in Warwick Anderson, Deborah Jenson, and Richard Keller, eds Unconscious Dominions: Psychoanalysis, Colonial Trauma, and Global Sovereignties (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2011), p.108.
[vi] Omnia El Shakry, ‘Psychoanalysis and the Imaginary: Translating Freud in Postcolonial Egypt’, Psychoanalysis and History 20, 3 (2018), pp.313-35.