Mourad Wahba. Fundamentalism and Secularization

• DOI: https://doi.org/10.13169/reorient.7.2.0233
• Pages: 233-235
• Published date: 14 December 2022
• Date: 14 December 2022
• Author: Geoffrey Hughes

BOOK REVIEWS 233

ReOrient 7.2 Produced and distributed by Pluto Journals

Mourad Wahba. Fundamentalism and Secularization. Robert

Beshara (trans.). London: Bloomsbury Publishing. 2022. Hardback

($103.50). 176 pp. ISBN 9781350228689.

By Geoffrey Hughes, University of Exeter

It is a common complaint that Western philosophy and especially Anglo-American

philosophy are too insular and self-absorbed when it comes to engaging with other

global philosophical traditions. Yet Robert Beshara’s translation of the North

African philosopher Mourad Wahba’s Fundamentalism and Secularization sets

out to actually do something about it. Consisting of an interview between author

and translator, translations of two supplementary essays and a translation of the

original Arabic text of Fundamentalism and Secularization, the book offers a

glimpse into a world of erudite philosophical debate that tends to be limited to

those who speak Arabic. From his chair at Egypt’s Ain Shams University, the

distinguished professor has spent decades observing profound changes in Egyptian

society, combining elements of analytic, continental, Islamic, and Africana phi-

losophy to present his original Arabic-speaking audience with a novel philosophi-

cal project that is resolutely relativistic in its style of thinking while rejecting both

fundamentalism and postmodernism. Instead, Wahba places his hopes in the rec-

lamation of a rationalist Islamic philosophical tradition he traces back to ibn

Rushd, which he argues has been wrongly ceded to the West at a great cost.

While Wahba’s work as a philosopher must ultimately stand or fall on its phil-

osophical merits, I also approach the text with great interest as an anthropologist

– and here the book is more than happy to oblige. The text begins with an inter-

view that situates Wahba as a human being within a broader intellectual milieu.

We learn about his influences, alliances, and antagonisms. This includes encour-

agement from the head of the Protestant Churches of Egypt (the book was origi-

nally published by the Egyptian Coptic Church’s Dar Al-Thaqafa press). He also

relates engagements with other North African philosophers and his role in estab-

lishing a community of academic philosophers throughout Africa. Wahba further

speaks of his rejection of Samuel P. Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations thesis

(2021: ix), his break with Enrique Dussel over the “counter-enlightenment” ten-

dencies of Liberation Theology (2021: xiii) and his ambition that ibn Rushd’s

argument for the free interpretation of sacred texts might supplant the relative lit-

eralism of ibn Taymiyyah and the Muslim Brotherhood (2021: xvii). All of this

helps make the book a better teaching resource by motivating the argument and

providing crucial context.

Beshara notes in his interview how Wahba’s interest in the late twentieth

century in the parallels between the Muslim Brotherhood and the New Right in the

DOI:10.13169/reorient.7.2.0233