Call for papers | Revue Occhialì “Interwoven Thoughts. Islam and Judaism in Contemporary Philosophy” — LIMITE : 31/11/2024

Interwoven Thoughts. Islam and Judaism in Contemporary Philosophy 

edited by Giacomo Maria Arrigo and Lorenza Bottacin Cantoni

Over the centuries, Western philosophy of Greek origin has frequently been in dialogue with Jewish thought which has been and continues to be a constant source of confrontation. In more recent times, the speculative arc of the “new thinking” which, for Franz Rosenzweig, extends from Athens to Jerusalem (one might add: via Rome), outlines a philosophical path that aims to reconcile theoretical and religious experience in a practice that bridges the gap between existence and philosophy. The fruitful confrontation between the Greek-Christian speculative horizon and the Jewish source has had a significant impact on the direction of contemporary philosophical thought. Walter Benjamin, Martin Buber, Emmanuel Levinas, and Jacques Derrida are just a few examples of Jewish philosophers or thinkers of Jewish origin who have attempted to translate a spirituality that challenges philosophical language into the categories of metaphysics. Nevertheless, the dialogue between the Greco-Christian West and Judaism is traversed by an otherness that cannot be ascribed to this binomial. This aspect is, however, often overlooked in the philosophical field.

In The Man Moses and the Monotheistic Religion (1939) Sigmund Freud puts forth the hypothesis that Moses was of Egyptian origin and transmitted monotheism to the Jewish people. Edward Said (1935-2003) subsequently denounced the West’s construction of the “other” in the form of the Orient through academic, literary, and political discourses and practices. Such a framework maps global culture in which a generic Eastern Other is connoted with backwardness, passivity, and unknowable exoticism (due to its irrationality). This is then used to justify and support imperialism and colonialism. According to Said, Orientalist discourse determines a representation that has had profound implications for Western understanding and interaction with Eastern worlds, often reducing their varied richness to simplified and negative stereotypes. 

This volume aims to question the notion of the Eastern and Western worlds through a philosophical confrontation that engages with the Mediterranean dialogue between European, Jewish, and Islamic thought. Reconstructing the role of Islamic thought in this philosophical dialogue is a challenging task. Nevertheless, it is undeniable that Islamic philosophy played a pivotal role in the transmission and transformation of Greek thought, particularly during the Middle Ages. Philosophers such as Avicenna, Averroes, and Al-Farabi not only preserved but also developed and rethought the Greek legacy, relating it to the underlying principles of Islamic knowledge. It is sometimes the case that medieval and modern Western philosophical thought fails to recognise the profound debt to Islamic philosophy. This is illustrated by the rich stream of translations from Arabic to Latin, which were compiled by exponents of the school of Toledo. This contribution, fundamental to the preservation, dissemination and interpretation of the Aristotelian corpus and classical Greek thought in Europe, has too often been misunderstood. Here we openly dissociate ourselves from the perspective that seeks to downplay the role of the Islamic world in the transmission of Greek knowledge. These interpretations favor a predominant influence of Christian monks, which we do not accept. This thesis, defended by S. Gouguenheim in his essay Aristote au Mont Saint-Michel, is characterized by unacceptable Eurocentrism and questionable historical-philological methodologies, which we would like to deconstruct here. Moreover, despite the great importance of the contributions of Islamic authors from the medieval period, Islamic thought has often remained on the margins of the dominant philosophical narratives in the West since the modern era, perhaps also because of the complex placement of its authors in a theological or juridical-political disciplinary field rather than a strictly metaphysical one.

Nevertheless, Islamic thought itself in modern and contemporary times is animated by the intention to engage with European philosophy, as evidenced, for example, by the project of renewal (tajdīd) of Hasan Hanafī, whose speculative project aims to dismantle the power dynamics of the lemmas “Orientalism” and “Occidentalism” through a critique of the notion of the “other” in which the self is the dominant subject and the other is the object subordinated to the gaze of the hegemon. Orientalism, according to Hanafī, reveals more about the subject of research than the object of research: the Western vision aims to better understand in order to better master an East that is as generic as it is misinterpreted. Thus, we need to think of power relations as temporary, and to reverse the sense of the hermeneutic subject-object dynamic, so that the gaze of the ‘East’ can carry out, with the study of the ‘West’, an even stronger project of decolonizing (Hanafi, 2012).

Taking this as its starting point, this volume aims to analyze how contemporary Islamic thought is measured against the Western philosophical tradition, which elements are retained and which are reinterpreted and rethought according to purely Islamic categories, attempting to show, for example, how the lessons of Mounier and Lacroix are mixed with the early reading of Heidegger in the personalism of Muhammad ‘Aziz Lahbābī (1923-1993); how the democratic tradition is put to the test in Muhammad ‘Ābid al-Jābrī’s (1935-2010) critique; how a Western-derived term such as secularism of thought is interpreted within the Muslim tradition in Bassam Tibi’s (1944) reading; how a European Muslim conceives of the Westernization-decolonization plexus, and what political implications the critical exercise of a possible collective Muslim identity implies in Tarīq Ramadān’s (1962) reformist view.

Another strand of reflection is that which concerns the intellectual experience of contemporary female Islam, which is primarily focused on practical philosophy and less interested in theological-theoretical speculation. How has feminist thought developed in the West inspired recent reflections on the meaning and role of women in Islam? Beginning with the feminist experience of Hudā Sha’rāwī (1879-1947), which opened up the possibility of thinking critically about women’s rights and raised the question of female self-determination, the debate on women’s freedom and, in dialogue with some Foucauldian themes, on the political control/regulation of sexuality has gradually become central. This is evidenced by the gendered jihad theorized by Amina Wadud (1952), who understands Islam not as mere submission, but as a commitment to take on God’s work, and who promotes a genuine struggle for the re-signification of female categories not as subordinates, but as true political subjects with specific characteristics that mark a gendered difference from male subjects. 

Despite the all too often proclaimed theoretical irreconcilability between the Western and Islamic worlds, today it seems more urgent than ever to rethink philosophical thought as an opportunity for contamination and fruitful confrontation: if the Jewish framework turns out to be a central element for philosophical thought, the same cannot be said for that part of the Semitic world that is Islam, which, for both internal and external reasons, has ended up being perceived as an unrelated and closed alterity. From this perspective, the journal Occhialì intends to provide an opening for a series of questions, such as: to what extent does contemporary Western thought recognize Islamic otherness and how does it elaborate it? To what extent has philosophy assimilated elements of the two great monotheisms under consideration here (Judaism and Islam), translating them into the lexicon of metaphysics, and how are these elements currently conceived philosophically? How do Jewish thinkers, by religious confession or by education, question their own “Judaism”, and to what extent does this inform the relationship with other ways of thinking? What is the specificity of Islamic thought? How does it enter into dialogue with issues currently at the center of philosophical debate? What rational (and irrational) motivations animate the failure to recognize an Islamic philosophy that can be fully inscribed in academic reflection? And from what perspective do Muslim thinkers read contemporary philosophical texts? What elements conveyed by the Jewish context are elaborated or criticized within contemporary Islamic speculation? What are the systems of values and politics based on Islamic, Jewish, and contemporary “Western” views, and what intersections exist between the resulting systems?

All of these questions (and many others) can only be adequately answered through a perspectival triangulation that gives space to each vertex individually, as well as to the relations of comparison or exclusion between them. By proposing a bold attempt at comparative reflection, Occhialì aims to bring out possibilities of convergence (or significant divergence) between two spiritual and speculative universes that have always animated the Mediterranean region.

Facing a world that too often forgets to consider the encounter between seemingly irreconcilable cultures, and in which anti-Semitism is re-emerging, unable to consider the Semitic universe as plurivocal and composed of different souls (Islamic and Jewish, which are themselves plural), this issue wants to offer itself as a field of confrontation and as a genuine intercultural gesture. 

With the ambitious hope of offering a space for fruitful dialogue, the following volume aims to call for reflections and studies that can promote a philosophical comparison between the three great traditions of thought that have marked the history of the Mediterranean.

The articles, written in English, French, Italian or Spanish, must be sent by 30 November 2024 to rivista.occhiali[at]gmail.com in a format compatible with the procedure of blind review: a file will have to include the author’s name and surname, email address, a short biographical note, title and abstract (150 words in English), 3- 5 keywords; the other file will have to include the contribution without any reference to the author or to their known works that might point back to them. The articles, formatted according to the editorial norms, shall not exceed 30,000 characters, including spaces and excluding the bibliography.

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