Fu’ad Zakariyya was born in 1927 in Port Said in Egypt, and died in March 2010. He can be listed together with his compatriot Muhammad Al-Ashmawi and the better-known Syrian philosopher Sadik Al-Azm, in the secularist current of contemporary Muslim philosophy. However, his tendency, inherited from the Egyptian positivist philosopher Zaki Najib Mahmud (1905-1993), to insist on the importance of scientific epistemology to oppose all mystical and esoteric tendencies, is more emphasized. As explained by the historian Massimo Campanini, Zakariyya’s ideas are situated on a borderline and contact point between scientism and liberalism.
More specifically, the invitation Zakariyya addresses to Muslims and above all to Arab intellectuals, the victims of and also responsible for what he calls “Arab intellectual underdevelopment,” is to exploit that rationalist, and in a sense “secular,” culture that already in the Middle Ages was part of the Muslim world’s philosophical and scientific heritage. If, thanks precisely to this heritage, “during a certain historical period, Arab science and philosophy represented the nec plus ultra of world culture, this enlightened period was followed by a long phase of stagnation during which levels achieved in the past were practically forgotten.” This led Arabs to develop an a-critical and above all a-historical relationship with their own past and their Islamic religious heritage (turath) and culture, perceived as a fixed and immutable reality.
“The authentic turath,” explains Zakariyya in Laicité ou islamisme: les Arabes à l’heure du choix (al-Fikr, 1991), “Is the one that continuously merges with the historical movement, to become one of its inseparable elements,” while the Arabs’ static and “alienated” relationship with their past is at the basis of the absurd attempt, made by fundamentalists and others, to “search in the lost past of the turath definitive answers to present day problems.”
The Egyptian philosopher insists that an intellectual “renaissance” in the contemporary Arab world, similar to the one that influenced the western world in the 15th and 16th centuries, would necessarily have to involve the Muslim’s re-appropriation of their own historicity, opposing the “hypostatization” of the past and the Islamic legacy.
It could be argued that Zakariyya’s vision is of idealised human beings and is highly influenced by western cultures, and hence could be seen as an excessively “external” perspective of the Arab culture for which he hopes there will be a “renaissance” (the search for a mix between scientific rationalism and secularism around which Fu’ad Zakariyya’s ideas are articulated). He undoubtedly, however, deserves credit for creating the theoretical foundations, albeit certainly effective from a “pedagogic” perspective, for a renewal of the Islamic culture in its relationship with modernity and its own history.