The Unconscious in Islam

- What does it mean, I ask, to think through psychoanalysisand Islam together, not as a “problem” but as a creative encounter of ethicalengagement? Rather than view Islamic discourses as hermetically sealed, ortraffic in dichotomous juxtapositions between East and West, this book focuses on the points of intersection, articulation, and commensurability between Islamic discourses and modern social scientific thought, and betweenreligious and secular ethics" Pp.2- "The disciplinary divide between psychology and philosophy was not as pronounced in postwar Egypt as it was elsewhere, and epistemological questionsin the production of psychological knowledge were of great importance tothe founding figures of psychology. In fact, Yusuf Murad directly addressed thequestion of psychoanalytic epistemology in a series of articles, dividing knowledge between deduction or analogical reasoning (istinbat) and conjecture orintuition (hads). Characterizing psychology as a branch of metaphysics concerned with the question of the human psyche, he posited intuition as a directwindow into the substance of the soul (nafs).59" Pp.30Al-ʿAlim’s generation, the generation of the 1920s, was keen on the ideological politicization of intellectual and cultural programs. The role of the militant intellectual, newly conceived and inspired by intellectual figures such asSartre and political figures like Che Guevara, both of whom had visited theMiddle East, was to radically remake society from within.125 Yet al-ʿAlim’sappropriation and dissemination of the figure of the committed leftist intellectual who stood in an antagonistic relationship to the state, increasingly“came to mirror the authoritarianism and didacticism of the regime’s politicaldiscourse” and quickly turned into a “critical ‘terrorism’ ” of a Stalinist sort,underscoring the hazards of a Sartrean ontology entailing “a consciousness ofthe other that can be satisfied only by Hegelian murder.” Pp.40