The Arabic Freud: Psychoanalysis and Islam in Modern Egypt

by Omnia El Shakry

The first in-depth look at how postwar thinkers in Egypt mapped the intersections between Islamic discourses and psychoanalytic thought

In 1945, psychologist Yusuf Murad introduced an Arabic term borrowed from the medieval Sufi philosopher and mystic Ibn 'Arabi--al-la-shu'ur--as a translation for Sigmund Freud's concept of the unconscious. By the late 1950s, Freud's Interpretation of Dreams had been translated into Arabic for an eager Egyptian public. In The Arabic Freud, Omnia El Shakry challenges the notion of a strict divide between psychoanalysis and Islam by tracing how postwar thinkers in Egypt blended psychoanalytic theories with concepts from classical Islamic thought in a creative encounter of ethical engagement.

Drawing on scholarly writings as well as popular literature on self-healing, El Shakry provides the first in-depth examination of psychoanalysis in Egypt and reveals how a new science of psychology--or "science of the soul," as it came to be called--was inextricably linked to Islam and mysticism. She explores how Freudian ideas of the unconscious were crucial to the formation of modern discourses of subjectivity in areas as diverse as psychology, Islamic philosophy, and the law. Founding figures of Egyptian psychoanalysis, she shows, debated the temporality of the psyche, mystical states, the sexual drive, and the Oedipus complex, while offering startling insights into the nature of psychic life, ethics, and eros.

This provocative and insightful book invites us to rethink the relationship between psychoanalysis and religion in the modern era. Mapping the points of intersection between Islamic discourses and psychoanalytic thought, it illustrates how the Arabic Freud, like psychoanalysis itself, was elaborated across the space of human difference.

Genres: Psychology, Psychoanalysis, Nonfiction, Islam, History, Religion, Egypt

224 pages, Paperback

Published March 31, 2020

Reviews

[Sara Salem · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fascinating exploration of the way Freud's work was received in Egypt in the early 20th century.

[Elliot · Rating 5 out of 5]

An absolutely outstanding book. Shakry's work in The Arabic Freud completely deconstructs the arguments of theorists like Charles Taylor, Jurgen Habermas, and Alasdair MacIntyre who see 1. Christianity as the progenitor of secularism and liberal rationality and other traditions as being inimical to this rationality (Islam as irrational fundamentalism) and 2. epistemological traditions as incommensurable. Instead, Shakry argues that the history of psychoanalysis in modern Egypt demonstrates a uniquely creative and ethical engagement of epistemological resonance with Islam (and Sufism in particular). Rather than incommensurable epistemologies and ontologies, the creative encounter between psychoanalysis and Islam is one of interaction, hybridization, and interconnected and mutual webs of knowledge production between the Arab world and Europe.

To quote Shakry's conclusion at length on the epistemological resonances between Islam and psychoanalysis that allowed for a creative and ethical encounter:

"Thus, for instance, ʿAbd al-Qadir notes that Freud’s 1923 discussion of the tripartite distinction of the self, the id, ego, and superego, could be found in Abu Hamid al-Ghazali’s Ihyaʾ ʿUlum al-Din, which was translated into German in 1913; that Avicenna’s view of the self and of fantasy was similar to that of Freud’s, and that some of Avicenna’s methods foreshadowed those of the group psychodrama techniques established by Jacob Moreno in the 1920s; and that Abu Bakr Muhammad Bin Zakariyya al-Razi’s Spiritual Physick heavily theorized the relationship between the psyche and the body, arguably the main concern of psychoanalysis."

Overall a really phenomenal work that demonstrates that 1. psychoanalysis doesn't have to be an inherently "secular" discipline and 2. Islam is not a reified tradition that is inherently hostile to to psychoanalysis.

[Griffin Duffey · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great work. Amazing how much detail is covered in 115 pages, and how much can come to bear on how we can think about traditions of psychoanalysis and modern philosophy’s relationship to thinking subjectivity outside of secular/enlightenment/colonialist spaces. El Shakry survey’s the very concrete quilting points of PA and Islamic social and political thought in post-war Egypt. As it turns out, many of the concepts Freud develops were received and thought alongside Islamic categories for formations of the self, and almost all the bases are covered. Desire, unconcious/ego/superego, even Lacanian categories such as jouissance are embraced and are treated as generative for the modern formations of Islamic thought. (Was surprised to see Lacan himself found Sufi thinkers to be immensely valuable to read.) These ideas were even actively used *against* forms of colonial power and consciously used to theorize decolonialized subjects vis a vis Fanon and others.

Most shocking of all was the fourth chapter on Egyptian criminology in the 1940s and the legal and ethical battles for PA to be used as a legitimate form of rehabilitation for troubled individuals as opposed to disciplinary state prisons and other forms of punishment. It can be hard to find the political and social critique in PA—something that I find necessary for any kind of robust epistemological framework (cf. Foucault) and perhaps I needed to look no further than thinkers like al-Rawi and Muhammad Fathi.

I mostly reached for this as an attempt to historicize and decolonialize my own engagement with PA. Even more than that, though, it was a much needed break from reading the theorist of PA themselves, which I have been struggling to enjoy past a certain point.


Here’s a taste:
https://aeon.co/ideas/how-midcentury-...

[Nazmiye Gül · Rating 5 out of 5]

It’s a literally eye opening book. I’m amazed by reading the echoes between the psychoanalysis and Islamic mysticism. But I wish the writer of this book would have a chance to read the books of Ekrem Demirli, a great Turkish commentator of the oeuvre of Ibn Arabi. His way of reading Ibn Arabi is so unique and subtle.
And while El Shakry exploring the parallels between Islam and psychoanalysis, she also makes great critiques about some well known contemporary philosophers such as Fethi Benslama and Julia Kristeva. Those pages were so interesting to me. You are writing so well but also you don’t mince your words. It was something I hadn’t encountered for a long time in the intellectual areas.

[Anas Taleb · Rating 2 out of 5]

You need to know psychology’s concepts to be able to understand the book, which was not my case