I think that no Egyptian intellectuals in the early 20th century wanted to destroy their culture and values. However, many of them embraced Western ideas, which their contemporaries questioned and sometimes misinterpreted. Most intellectuals of this era were enslaved by Eurocentrism. They dealt with Western civilization without any kind of criticism; they considered Western history to be the only model for development and progress. They were believing in the West.
Salama Moussa is no exception. At the age of nineteen, Salama Moussa traveled to Europe, spending three years in France and four more in England. He became familiar with many Western intellectual trends while in Europe, but materialism captivated him. He returned to Egypt in 1913, and he became an advocate of secularism, democracy, and liberalism. He was a socialist. He knew Marx, but he was not a Marxist but a Fabian socialist, or perhaps a utopian socialist.
A sober reading of Moussa’s book “Freedom of Thought and Its Heroes in History” supports my image of him as a model of the Egyptian intellectual who believed in the West. The first time I read this book, I was twenty years old. I was impressed by the simplicity of Moussa’s writing style and the breadth of his knowledge. When I reread the book at the age of fifty, I realized that Salama Moussa relied on an imaginary history of Islam. He did not rely on the sources of this history but on an imaginary history created by Western Orientalists, and Moussa repeats their words without examining their thoughts. Therefore, you will find him describing Islam as a Bedouin religion suited to their nature. This is an Orientalist statement based on 19th-century Orientalists’ belief in Aryan intellectual superiority over Semites. It is a racist statement unsupported by objective scientific evidence. Such thinking led Europe to its destruction in WWII and continues to threaten it today. Yet Salama Moussa repeats the allegations without thinking about it, as if it were a scientific fact.
Then Salama Moussa uses this wrong idea to move on to another wrong idea as well. He says that tyranny in the Islamic political system originates from the nature of these Bedouin tribes that believed in Islam, who are tending towards submission to tyranny. This is a very strange statement because it contradicts what Western imperialism experienced in the nature of the Arabs, and Bedouin Arabs in particular, and how they stubbornly refused to submit to a tyrant. Ralph Emerson, the American poet and philosopher, cited this refusal in his poem “Give All to Love”: “Free as an Arab.” Once again, Salama Moussa does not attempt to investigate the Orientalist judgment but rather repeats it as it is, as it came from the West, so it is necessarily true and correct.
One of Salama Moussa’s biggest methodological problems was his lack of familiarity with Arab-Islamic culture. Therefore, when he attempted to establish evidence that Muslims practiced systematic religious persecution of non-Muslims, he chose Umar ibn al-Khattab, Al-Ma’mun, and Fatimid Caliph Al-Hakim as examples of Muslim rulers who practiced this systematic persecution. Unfortunately for him, these choices are wrong. Salama Moussa accused Omar ibn al-Khattab of persecuting Egypt’s Copts, based on the writings of the Coptic historian Sawirus ibn al-Muqaffa. This historian lived in the tenth century, more than two centuries after the Islamic conquest of Egypt. His writings described this conquest and the establishment of Islamic rule in Egypt, relying on anonymous witnesses whose testimonies have been torn apart by internal and external criticism. Strangely, Salama Moussa did not list Sawiris Ibn al-Muqaffa in his reference list for his book’s first edition, which was published by Dar al-Hilal in 1927. I believe that Salama Moussa did not read the writings of Sawirusibn al-Muqaffa but rather read an intermediate source that quoted from Ibn al-Muqaffa. This intermediate source is the book of the fanatical American missionary Edith Butcher, “History of the Coptic Nation and Orthodox Church,” which was published in 1900.
Al-Ma’mun, Salama Moussa’s second example, was a typical Machiavellian prince. His general policy was “divide and conquer,” striking Arabs with Persians, Sunnis with Shiites, and Mu’tazila with both. He inflicted great suffering on the Muslims, so how can you expect non-Muslims to escape his cruelty? Al-Ma’mun’s policy towards non-Muslims did not represent the policy of Muslims towards others by any means. As for the third example, Al-Hakim was insane, and his sister Sitt al-Mulk killed him after his madness almost led the people to revolt and overthrow the Fatimid rule and destroy their empire. However, the history of Al-Hakim provides us with a positive example of Muslim/non-Muslim relationships in this era. Al-Hakim’s mother was a Byzantine slave girl who followed the Melkite doctrine—the doctrine of the Orthodox Church in Constantinople—and who was married to Al-Aziz, Al-Hakim’s father and the Fatimid Caliph of Cairo. There is not a single piece of evidence that the subjects of Al-Aziz or Al-Hakim refused to have the caliph’s wife and mother be a Christian woman.
In his book, Salama Moussa continued to repeat the views of Orientalists without investigating their allegations. He reiterated the Orientalists’ claim that Al-Ghazali had demolished philosophy. Had they been fair or understood, they would have realized that what Al-Ghazali demolished was Gnostic philosophy, which contained more magical, astrological, and alchemical elements than logic. This is the philosophy that Russell, Durant, and Abd al-Rahman Badawi questioned: could it be considered a Greek philosophy on par with Aristotle’s philosophy or even the philosophy of the Stoics? Had Salama Moussa been fair and impartial, he would have read Al-Ghazali’s project in its entirety and within its historical context. He would then have understood that Al-Ghazali’s goal, in his works Maqasid Al-Falasifa (The Goals of the Philosophers), Tahafut Al-Falasifa (The Incoherence of the Philosophers), Miyar Al-Ilm Fi Fan Al-Mantiq(The Criterion of Knowledge), and Mihak Al-Nazar Fi Al-Mantiq (Touchstone of Reasoning in Logic), was to rid philosophy and logic of the superstitions of Gnosticism and Neoplatonism. Salama Moussa does not content himself with simply relaying the Orientalists’ allegations about Al-Ghazali without investigation. However, he accuses Al-Ghazali of having ordered the killing of philosophers if he had been in power, citing a phrase Al-Ghazali wrote out of resentment toward the Gnostics. This accusation reflects Salama Moussa’s ignorance of the historical circumstances in which Al-Ghazali lived. Al-Ghazali, because of his close relation with Nizam Al Mulk, the strong prime minister of the Seljuk Empire, could have, had he wished, incited the authorities against whomever he wished, but that never happened.
Salama Moussa wrote a chapter glorifying atheism entitled “The Revolt Against Islam.” Once again, Salama Moussa demonstrates his ignorance of Islamic cultural terminology, as he imagines the term atheism, which recurs frequently in Islamic historical sources, especially during the Abbasid era, to be the same as atheism in its contemporary Western culture. This is wrong; Islamic sources say atheism is a form of the ancient Persian Mazdakism cult, which vanished after Khosrow II killed Mazdak and his followers. Mazdakism evolved into a political movement that reappeared from time to time and may have caused serious unrest, such as Al Muqanna’ movement. Meanwhile, some Muslims, such as Abu al-Ala’, were known for their atheistic ideas, but no one judged them, and their effects persist to this day.
The humorous chapter he wrote, titled The Story of Coffee, is an example of the systematic misinformation Salama Moussa employed in his book. This chapter is based on a book by Abdul Qadir Al-Ansari, author of Umdat Al-Safwa Fi Hal Al-Qahwa. In his book, Al-Ansari summarized the issue of the prohibition of coffee, an issue that arose in the fifteenth century due to a misunderstanding of the term coffee. In traditional which arose in the fifteenth century due to a misunderstanding of the termr, when modern coffee, or coffee beans, appeared, some Faqihs mistakenly equated it with wine, considering it intoxicating and thus forbidden. This was due to the laziness of these Faqihs and their lack of convenience. As for Ibn Iyas Al-Hanafi, the famous Faqih and scholar, he experimented with coffee beans, and when he proved that they were not intoxicating, he declared them permissible. Al-Ansari’s goal in writing this book was to document the issue of coffee, prove the errors of those who said it was forbidden, and prove its permissibility under Islamic law. But Salama Moussa misleads the story. He ignores the author’s scientific objective and the incident’s context are ignored, portraying the issue as if the Faqihs were seeking to impose their dominance over people’s lives, akin to the clergy’s exploitative use of religion in Europe.sa had understood what Islamic Fiqh means, he would have realized that Faqihs do not have the right to forbid or permit, but rather they exert their own effort and issue fatwas based on what they believe is most likely, and the Muslim is bound by what is most likely, just as eating and drinking forbidden things has nothing to do with intellectual freedom.
The second section of the book is devoted by Salama Moussa to freedom of thought in Europe. I am compelled to compare this section with another book published approximately ten years before Salama Moussa’s book, A History of Freedom of Thought by the Irish historian John Bury.
The flaw in Salama Moussa’s book is that the author has a conclusion, copied from Western cultural history, and then sought to construct an argument for it derived from our history to give it methodological legitimacy. Essentially, he prioritizes one aspect over another. He then presents the predetermined conclusion as the culmination of an objective method. Thus, if the causes of the problem are the same in European and Islamic history, the treatment and solution must be the same.
Dr. Wisam E. Mohammed is an Egyptian academic, writer, and translator, interested in modern Egyptian cultural history.
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