Twin monuments of our moral and aesthetic imagination: Hamid Dabashi remembers Egyptian intellectual Nasr Hamed Abu Zayd, who died last week, and filmmaker Youssef Chahine* I have been privileged to know many great Egyptians in my life, the dearest and closest to me being my late friend and colleague Magda al-Nowaihi, a gifted literary critic and scholar whose beautiful and blossoming life was cut brutally short in 2002 when we lost her to ovarian cancer. The sudden passing of Nasr Hamed Abu Zayd on 5 July 2010 has reminded me of not just one, but in fact two particularly towering Egyptian monuments under whose extended shadow our part of the world was blessed and made more meaningful. In the span of almost exactly two years, we have lost Youssef Chahine (on 27 July 2008) and now Nasr Hamed Abu Zayd (on 5 July 2010), as if witnessing the syncopated fall of two twin towers that had graced the landscape of our moral and aesthetic imagination for over half a century. Not just in the Arab and Muslim world, but even globally, those who know Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd (1943-2010) rarely have reasons to know Youssef Chahine (1926-2008), and those who have read and admired Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd's extraordinary achievements as a hermeneutician and semiotician may scarce be able to name two of Youssef Chahine's films in one sentence, or claim to have seen his Bab al-Hadid (1958) when they were still teenagers, or, better yet, still remember the corner of their closet where they hung a poster of Hind Rustom (away from intrusive eyes)! The older I get, and the more these monumental figures of our corner of the world pass away, the more I realise what an astonishingly privileged life I had as a young boy growing up in southern Iran, with a father who alternated among Mohammad Musaddiq, Gamal Abd al-Nasser, and Jawaharlal Nehru as his political heroes, and to whose dying day the songs of Umm Kulthum and Mohammed Abdel-Wahab, along with those of Delkash and Banan, were his greatest joy and consolation, next to Russian vodka of course and the company of my mother, a deeply pious and observing Muslim whose punctilious precision in following her religious duties was graced with a vast margin of tolerance for the impieties of the man she loved. Having known both Youssef Chahine and Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd personally, followed their works closely, and been privileged to have been in their gracious company at many film festivals and conferences from Cairo to Locarno to New York, and then from New York to Beirut to Rabat, gives me a certain perspective on both men and what they have meant for all of us, for it now seems to me that I have always seen and read one with and through the lens and text of the other. I am now absolutely convinced -- the first thought that crossed my mind when I read the sad and shocking news that Nasr Hamed Abu Zayd had passed away -- that the society that produced him and Youssef Chahine at the balanced centre of its judicious self-awareness ought to also be aware of how precious that balance is, where the horizon of our moral and aesthetic imagination rests. As I told the distinguished Egyptian philosopher Hassan Hanafi, when we were both recently at a conference in Edmonton, Canada, there is an Egyptian balance of hope and despair, promise and paralysis, that seems to define all of us who were born and raised in the age of Mohammad Musaddiq, Gamal Abd al-Nasser, and Jawaharlal Nehru, our anti-colonial heroes who made us "postcolonial" avant la lettre. The globality of vision that made them possible, and that (in the same vein) produced Youssef Chahine and Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd, has always been at the mercy of the fanaticism and brutality that have paradoxically emerged from the very same fountainhead that fed our innermost hopes and aspirations. Sayyid Qutb and Ayatollah Khomeini misinterpreted our dreams and thoughts and delivered them back as nightmares. The first memory I must get out of my mind is that of Nasr Hamed Abu Zayd and I sitting next to each other in the back of a bus that was taking us from our hotel in Rabat, Morocco, to the conference centre where we were both giving talks in December 2003. On behalf of the Moroccan ministry of culture, my dear friend Anissa Bouziane had organised an international conference on "The Dialogue Between Cultures: Is It Possible?" Mohamed Achaari, the Moroccan minister of culture, had presided over the conference as a typical showcase, where, pomp and ceremony notwithstanding, we had more fun in between official sessions than during the sessions themselves. From Egypt, my good friend Ferial Ghazoul, a leading literary critic, and from the Netherlands Nasr Hamed Abu Zayd had come, and I recall that the great Egyptian novelist Sun'allah Ibrahim's spectacular refusal to accept a major official literary prize was the subject of discussions among us during that conference. Mohammed Arkoun was there, so were Malek Alloula, Alain Badiou, and many other leading Arab, European and American scholars and public intellectuals. From New York, Edward Said and I were invited. But we lost Edward to leukemia in the September of that year before that December conference. Salem Brahimi, the son of Edward's good friend Ambassador Lakhdar Brahimi, had brought along a documentary he had produced on Edward called Selves and Others: A Portrait of Edward Said (2003) for public screening. As Nasr Hamed and I sat at the back of the bus catching up on our latest news, there suddenly popped up the head of Bernard Lewis, boarding the same bus and attending the same conference, entirely unbeknownst to both of us. From the following day, I opted to take a cab ( taxi saghir, they call them in Morocco, the "little cabbies") to the conference site, forfeiting the pleasure of Nasr Hamed and other friends' company during the morning bus ride, but catching up with them at the conference site. "You Iranians are so particular in your politics," he would tell me later, laughing. "It is the Shi'i in you!" Noah Feldman, fresh from Iraq advising Paul Bremer, the American viceroy in Iraq at the time, on drafting a constitution for the Iraqis, kept Bernard Lewis company for the duration of the conference. There and then I knew--no, no dialogue among civilisations was possible. Long before that conference in Morocco, I had met Nasr Hamed Abu Zayd in New York for the first time over dinner at Edward and Mariam Said's reception for him, and had read his works even earlier, from my graduate student years at Penn, where my late teacher George Makdisi (1920-2002) had introduced me to his groundbreaking work on Qur'anic hermeneutics in the mid 1980's. At the time very few people knew of Nasr Hamed's Al-Ittijâh Al-'Aql" fi al-Tafs"r: Dirâsa f" Qadiyat al-Majâz fi 'l-Qur'ân ind al-Mu'tazila (1982) or even his Falsafat al-Ta'w"l: Dirâsa fi Ta'w"l al-Qur'ân ind Muh" al-D"n ibn 'Arab" (1983). Years later, when I was working on my book on Ayn al-Qudat, I discovered his Mafhém al-Nass: Dirâsa f" 'Ulém al-Qur'ân (1991) and Naqd al-Khitâb al-D"n" (1998). My late colleague Magda al-Nowaihi later introduced me to Nasr Hamed's Al-Mar'a f" Khitbâ al-Azma (1995) and Dawâ'ir al-Khawf: Qirâ'a fi Khitâb al-Mar'a (1999). My favorite among Nasr Hamed's work, however, has remained his Al-Tafk"r f" Zaman al-Takf"r (1998), a reflection on his condition of exile and apostasy which he wrote in the aftermath of the infamous incident when, in the early 1990's upon his request for academic promotion in March 1993, an Egyptian Shari'ah court declared him an apostate from Islam and annulled his marriage, forcing him and his wife, Ibtihal Younis, professor of French Literature at Cairo University, into exile in the Netherlands, when an extremist Islamist group issued a death sentence on him. This was during one of the darkest chapters in modern Egyptian history, when the attempted murder of the Nobel Prize-winning author Naguib Mahfouz, and the killing in 1992 of the intellectual Farag Foda, had created an exceedingly tense environment in the country. Despite the banal horror of the death sentence on him, there was always a delightful sense of humour about Nasr Hamed's reflections on the whole atrocious incident. He loved to tell stories about cartoons appearing in Egyptian periodicals in which husbands were using him as a metaphor, wondering how they could arrange for a similar annulment of their marriages! When an Egyptian columnist mocked the couple for "carrying on like Romeo and Juliet" because they had held hands during an interview with CNN, Nasr Hamed had quipped, "and what is wrong with Romeo and Juliet?" It is equally important to remember that Nasr Hamed never allowed the atrocious sentence issued against him by his fellow Egyptians to be abused by the Western European and North America media as a weapon in their Islamophobic arsenal and thus use it, as have ignoble characters ranging from Salman Rushdie to Ayaan Hirsi Ali, to promote his own career. He endured the hardship of exile and being under a death sentence with grace and humility and remained to his dying day a principled and dignified Muslim. If my introduction to Nasr Hamed Abu Zayd was academic and serious and took me a while to get to know the warm and joyous man behind the ideas, my introduction to Youssef Chahine was playful and sparkled with the joy of discovery and culminated in teaching the full range of his cinema to my students at Columbia, to which I invited the great maestro to give lectures anytime he came to New York. He always joked that my interest in his films had to do with my juvenile infatuation with Hind Rustom (the Gina Lollobrigida and Sophia Loren of Arab cinema), the lead actress of his Bab al-Hadid. I saw Chahine's Bab al-Hadid (1958) when I was in my late teens, while his adaptation of Abdel-Rahman Al-Sharqawi's Al-Ard (1969), along with Sidney Franklin, Victor Fleming and Gustav Machaty's cinematic adaptation of Pearl S. Buck's The Good Earth (1937), was instrumental in the political education of my generation (the Maoist phase of our Marxism, to be precise!) With his initial trilogy and subsequent quartet -- Alexandria...Why? (1978), An Egyptian Story (1982), Alexandria, Again and Again (1990), and Alexandria...New York (2004) -- Chahine became globally celebrated as the flamboyant autobiographer of his nation. From Al-Nasser Salah Ad-Din (1963) to Al-Massir (1997), Chahine remained the steadfast mirror image of his people, from the trauma of the Arab-Israeli wars to the horrors of religious fanaticism in his homeland, the same fanaticism that had forced Nasr Hamed Abu Zayd into exile. To me, Youssef Chahine and Nasr Hamed Abu Zayd are two complementary components of Egyptian intellectual and artistic cosmopolitanism of the 20th century, and one can scarcely know one of them fully without knowing the other, above all getting to know through them the creative effervescence from which they both came. Nasr Hamed Abu Zayd's hermeneutics is entirely predicated on a structural semiotics that reads the Qur'anic literary tropes as the effervescent semiosis of a narrative logic that must be interpreted via an interpolation with and through the rhetoric of the Muslim reader's faith. He made of faith, and this to me is the singular sign of his interpretative genius, a hermeneutic proposition in his semiotic reading of the holy text. This is in fact how he accounted for the central signifier of wahy (as the modus operandi of the Qur'anic revelation) in any reading of the sacred text that made it into a literary master sign without robbing if of its metaphysical import. That very open-ended semiosis becomes, in turn, the texture of a flamboyant aesthetics, which Youssef Chahine borrows from later Italian Neorealism, and from Fellini in particular, to craft his own cinematic sense of probing frivolity. Nasr Hamed Abu Zayd teases out unsuspected meanings from the Qur'an with the same hermeneutic free play that Youssef Chahine unwinds the serious knots of reality in his own version of Neorealism. The enduring significance of Nasr Hamed Abu Zayd's hermeneutics, as a result, is his positing of the Qur'an as an infinite (implosive) play of self- sanctifying signs that internally order the sacred text as the locus classicus of an inner sanctum that gives its believing reader/interpreter a compelling sense of in/voluntary belief, which is at once illusory and revelatory. In other words, by seeing the sacred text as a system of signs Nasr Hamed Abu Zayd placed the location of the revelatory disposition of the sacred text (the location of his hermeneutic camera, as it were) not from above but from within, not in the author's intention (which in this case is beyond human reach), but in the reader's hope (which is always already historical and worldly). To be able to do that and still remain a believer--as he did--is a singular sign of hermeneutic genius. Nasr Hamed Abu Zayd went to read the Qur'an as if he were going to see a Youssef Chahine film, where he saw a hall of mirrors full of sacred signs waiting to reveal themselves anew: not just the unseen through the seen, but the seer through the sign. He, hermeneutically and in effect, re-enacted the moment of divine revelation--from the man-prophet-Muhammad to wo/ man-believer-Muslim. Nasr Hamed Abu Zayd planted, as it were, a Youssef Chahine camera inside the head of every Muslim who went to see/ read the Qur'an. The brain-dead and soulless "Muslims" in his vicinity instinctively saw the magnificent danger in that vision of the Qur'an and were frightened out of their wits--and thus their sentence against him. The fact of this correspondence between Nasr Hamed Abu Zayd's hermeneutics and Youssef Chahine's cinematic cosmo-vision has been driven home to me particularly when I look at the reception of both of them in Iran over the last 30 years, where under the forced and violent over- Islamisation of a similarly cosmopolitan culture a whole generation of those who call themselves "religious intellectuals" or " roshanfekr-e dini " has been under the influence of what they have made of Nasr Hamed Abu Zayd. But scarcely any one of them has a clue who Youssef Chahine was, or have cared to come to terms with what the cosmopolitan culture that produced them both had invested in their respective work, and as a result they have a very limited (if not altogether contorted and flawed) image of the great Egyptian hermeneutician. This fact, alas, is not only true of these "religious intellectuals," but, even worse, it is equally true of the leading Iranian filmmakers and their typically Eurocentric conception of cinema. "Who were those Arabs you were hanging out with?" was the question Mohsen Makhmalbaf put to me in August 1996, when we were all at the Locarno Film Festival for a complete retrospective of Youssef Chahine's work. "Those Arabs" I was hanging out with during that festival were Youssef Chahine, Yousry Nasrallah and Oussama Fawzi, three generations of Egyptian filmmakers who happened to be in Locarno that year not just because of Youssef Chahine's complete retrospective that Marco Mèller (the festival director) had organised, but also because Yousry Nasrallah was a member of the jury that year, and Oussama Fawzi was premiering his brilliant debut film Afarit el-asphalt (1996) in competition. Samir Farid, the distinguished Egyptian film critic, was another of "those Arabs," and so was the late Egyptian documentary filmmaker Mohammed Shebl (1949-1996), who was also there that year (with a documentary he had just done on Youssef Chahine), and through him I was finally to meet none other (would you believe it?) than Hind Rustom herself, when she was walking her poodle by Lake Maggiore! Imagine my unsurpassed delight when she, now having beautifully aged, graciously hugged and allowed me to kiss her hands. Bliss! The reception of both Youssef Chahine and Nasr Hamed Abu Zayd in Iran was distorted and limited by virtue of (perhaps among many other reasons) the deeply troubled social and fraught intellectual disposition of the country in the brutal aftermath of the 1979 Revolution. In that context, everything that these "religious intellectuals" touched they shaped in their own image. In that context, and except for very few learned circles of cineastes, Youssef Chahine remained terra incognita, and not integral to a collective cosmopolitan consciousness. In that context, Nasr Hamed Abu Zayd, meanwhile, was reduced to being a " Qur'an-Pazhuh," or " Qur'an-Shenas," as they continue to call him today, namely a "Qur'an scholar," or "Qur'anic commentator." Products of a radically alienated creative ego, these "religious intellectuals" in effect did to Nasr Hamed Abu Zayd what they had done to Iranian cosmopolitan culture, cutting him off from his worldly disposition as an Egyptian intellectual, underplaying his hermeneutic and semiotic disposition, and reducing him to their own self-image -- to a "religious intellectual," effectively, and (despite all their love and admiration for him), forcing him into an exile not too dissimilar in its consequences to that religious edict issued against him by fanatical Islamists in Egypt. Calling Nasr Hamed Abu Zayd a " Qur'an- Pazhuh " is like calling anyone from Friedrich Schleiermacher through Wilhelm Dilthey to Hans-Georg Gadamer a "Biblical Scholar," or Bach a "Church Organist," or Mozart a "Court Composer," or Jean Baudrillard an "Advertising Agent." Yes--Schleiermacher, Bach, Mozart, Baudrillard, and Nasr Hamed Abu Zayd had something to do with the Bible, the church, the court, commercial advertising, and the Qur'an. But those were not their defining dispositions. No doubt the Qur'an had a central significance for Nasr Hamed Abu Zayd (as did the Bible for Schleiermacher), for it posited for him a significant hermeneutical challenge; but he was, first and foremost, a hermeneutician not a " Qur'an-Pazhuh "--a term as fallacious in defining who and what Nasr Hamed Abu Zayd was as that which his European colleagues keep using of him: an "Islamist." Evidently, Europeans in general have not made up their minds yet whether this term refers to a terrorist or to a scholar of Islam--or perhaps to both! Nasr Hamed Abu Zayd would have been a hermeneutician if he wrote on Yellow Pages. The text of the Qur'an was the playing field of his hermeneutics, where its semiological free play provided an exciting interpretative challenge to him--as a Muslim, a scholar, a hermeneutician, a semiotician, and all of those at one and the same time. But just like everything else about these "religious intellectuals" in Iran, they had neither the moral will, nor the intellectual wherewithal, to come to terms with the organic totality or the hermeneutic idiomaticity of a thinker outside their own purview, and thus they cut and pasted him into their own distorted, limited and limiting, and above all religiously predetermined discourse. Thus, Nasr Hamed Abu Zayd was turned into yet another Karl Popper at the hands of a particular penchant for militant over-Islamisation of the Iranian intellectual disposition, which continues to this day in the various obituaries they are writing for him, even though the leading members of this cadre of "religious intellectuals" no longer even live in Iran. The fundamental flaw in the Iranian reception of Nasr Hamed Abu Zayd was that Iranian "religious intellectuals" twisted and turned him into one of their own-- with their attention to what they called "Religion/ Din " being the index of an obsessive compulsive disorder that could not allow the entrusting of faith to the worldly current of history. But this was not the case with Nasr Hamed Abu Zayd, who was no "religious intellectual." As a hermeneutician, he was a healthy product of a healthy cosmopolitan culture; his Iranian admirers were the unhealthy outcome of a decidedly brutal distortion of (and an outright hostility against) a similarly cosmopolitan culture and the unabashed beneficiaries of the bloody destruction of all alternative voices to theirs, until they had served their political purpose of silencing and intimidating those who thought differently than they did. Then, the innately fascistic disposition of the Islamic Republic (not just this but any Islamic Republic) that they had willingly or unwillingly served now turned against them. Nasr Hamed Abu Zayd was a hermeneutician and semiotician of unsurpassed brilliance, the product of a cosmopolitan culture that had naturally also given birth to Youssef Chahine and scores of other artists, literati, literary critics and intellectuals, a culture that had not cut itself violently and brutally into pieces, tortured and massacred thousands of its finest minds in mass executions in prison (at the personal order of "Imam Khomeini," as these "religious intellectuals" still call him), with unsurpassed vulgarity purged them from the universities, or else forced them into exile, or butchered them in "serial murders," so that these "religious intellectuals" could have the playing field cleared for themselves and do as they willed and wished without anyone in the vicinity seriously questioning their premises, assumptions, and conclusions. What ever these "religious intellectuals" achieved, and they did produce a powerful and exciting chapter in modern Iranian intellectual history, they achieved on the broken back of others and in an environment in which those who thought differently from them were systematically imprisoned, forcefully retired, forced into the indignity of exile, disillusioned and silenced, or outright serially tortured and murdered. Nasr Hamed Abu Zayd was no "religious intellectual" of this sort. They cut him to their own size and saw in him the mirror of their own broken pieces. Whatever the historical judgment on the quality of their intellectual achievements might be, these Iranian "religious intellectuals" were incapable of producing anything near the hermeneutical brilliance of Nasr Hamed Abu Zayd. They kept talking about the necessity of such a hermeneutic, but they never had the courage, the imagination, or the moral and intellectual wherewithal actually to produce it. This was so not because their leading representatives were any less learned or intelligent than Nasr Hamed Abu Zayd. This was so because Nasr Hamed Abu Zayd emerged from the same environment that produced Kamal Abu-Deeb, for example, who had gone back to Al-Jurjani's Theory of Poetic Imagery (1979), almost at the same time or just slightly before Nasr Hamed Abu Zayd had gone to the Qur'an, in order to navigate the theoretical simulacrum of structural semiotics in the formation of Arabic poetics. The Iranian "religious intellectuals" were not even on speaking terms (in more than one sense) with the Iranian counterparts of people like Kamal Abu-Deeb (Reza Barahani), Adonis (Ahmad Shamlou), Naguib Mahfouz (Mahmoud Dolatabadi), or Sun'allah Ibrahim (Houshang Golshiri). They had been brutally (with utter vulgarity) forced into silence and exile. A busload of them barely escaped with their lives when they were thrown off a cliff to be murdered. The throats of other representatives of them were cold-bloodedly cut and their bodies mutilated in the course of the so-called "serial murders." Unless and until these "religious intellectuals" come to terms with the fact that such club-wielding thugs attacked and silenced scores of leading Iranian intellectuals and scholars who were not "religious intellectuals," they will never know what barbarity they have been instrumental in perpetrating upon their homeland. To this day if Mahmoud Dolatabadi, a leading Iranian novelist who is not in the august gathering of "religious intellectuals," were to dare to utter a word about those who were responsible for the vulgarity of the cultural revolution in Iran, leading "religious intellectuals" would write lofty and highfalutin proclamations attacking and ridiculing him for having dared to point a finger at them. The sheer banality of this evil defies reason. What we know about other cultures, or make of the great thinkers and artists they produce, tells us much less about them and far more about us. Like any other society, Egypt has a myriad of its own problems, struggling against its own brand of tyranny and fanaticism. Nevertheless, it is still a complete and healthy society, not one that is alienated from what and where it is, traumatised, bifurcated, having brutally cut itself into opposing and murderous segments. Cairo (or Beirut, or Casablanca, for that matter) is an infinitely more wholesome and healthy cosmopolis than Tehran has been over the last three decades, where the most innocent and healthy dreams and desires of an entire nation, 80% of them under the age of 40, are held hostage to the decadent and delusional fanaticism of a ruling theocracy and its security apparatus. If he had not been a product of that cosmopolis, and if he had not been in creative conversation with artists, literati and philosophers who thought differently to how he did, Nasr Hamed Abu Zayd would not have been what he was. He did not become what he became by either remaining silent or by being instrumental in the murder or purging of other Egyptian intellectuals. It is only with a comparative awareness of another society like Egypt, or the way a monumental thinker like Nasr Hamed Abu Zayd has been cut to a much smaller size in contemporary Iran, that we find how catastrophic have been the consequences of the Islamist takeover of a multifaceted social revolution that militant Muslim ideologues violently hijacked from an entire nation. Youssef Chahine and Nasr Hamed Abu Zayd are no longer with us to see the dawn of a new beginning in Iran, where one might hope that one day soon one will see the reflection of their complete and compounding brilliance in the fully restored cosmopolitan consciousness of a people. But in their deaths, as in their lives, Youssef Chahine and Nasr Hamed Abu Zayd continue to brighten our minds and bring the joy of discovery to our hearts and show us a world dancing like "particles of dusty lights" (Rumi's metaphor) right before our eyes--signs of an infinity of possibilities to alter the metaphysics of despair that have laid violent claim on our souls. * The author is the Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, New York
