1paradoxosalpha
Many years back, in my review of Answer to Job, I wrote:
Just as Freud wrote Moses and Monotheism at the end of his career, in which he analyzed the Hebrew religious tradition; Jung wrote Answer to Job late in life as an attempt to integrate the Christian God.It occurs to me that another such work of scripto-historical psychologization may have been written for Islam. Can anyone point to such a work? Or at least to an intellectual figure who stands as a secular psychological successor to Islam in the way that Freud does for Judaism and Jung for Christianity?
2sashame
I dont think a comparable work has ever been written by an analyst who was steeped in muslim culture but rejected an orthodox islamic devotional practice, so i think the short answer is probably "no"
but you may be interested in the works of A. H. Almaas, who created a mystical self-help system inspired by sufism, or the works of Ali Shariati, who as a devout Shia muslim developed a mystical-socialist interpretation of the role of Shia thought in liberation, or Henry Corbin's Jung, Buddhism, and the Incarnation of Sophia, where Corbin (a famous interpreter of iranian sufism) compares Jung's Answer to Job to strands of sufi mysticism (and Buddhism! go figure!)
perhaps you may just want to check out The Arabic Freud: Psychoanalysis and Islam in Modern Egypt. i havent read it myself, but it seems like the author there is talking still abt smthg not quite the same as freud/jung. freud/jung were both thinkers who rejected orthodox judeo-christian devotion, but attempted to assimilate such an attitude into their systems. it seems El Shakry is instead interested in muslim analysts who blended their devotion (and its traditional theology) with psychoanalytic systems
i think the ultimate issue is that freud is a paragon of modernist secularism, and jung while more ambivalent is still also wrestling w it. but modernist secularism has a diff relationship to judaism & christianity than it does to islam. this is part of Talal Asad's argument in Formations of the Secular
but you may be interested in the works of A. H. Almaas, who created a mystical self-help system inspired by sufism, or the works of Ali Shariati, who as a devout Shia muslim developed a mystical-socialist interpretation of the role of Shia thought in liberation, or Henry Corbin's Jung, Buddhism, and the Incarnation of Sophia, where Corbin (a famous interpreter of iranian sufism) compares Jung's Answer to Job to strands of sufi mysticism (and Buddhism! go figure!)
perhaps you may just want to check out The Arabic Freud: Psychoanalysis and Islam in Modern Egypt. i havent read it myself, but it seems like the author there is talking still abt smthg not quite the same as freud/jung. freud/jung were both thinkers who rejected orthodox judeo-christian devotion, but attempted to assimilate such an attitude into their systems. it seems El Shakry is instead interested in muslim analysts who blended their devotion (and its traditional theology) with psychoanalytic systems
i think the ultimate issue is that freud is a paragon of modernist secularism, and jung while more ambivalent is still also wrestling w it. but modernist secularism has a diff relationship to judaism & christianity than it does to islam. this is part of Talal Asad's argument in Formations of the Secular
3paradoxosalpha
Thanks for the useful input!
I am a long-time appreciative reader of Corbin, but I wasn't aware of the specific title you mentioned.
I have read and reviewed Shariati's On the Sociology of Islam, and I see how it could be relevant to what I'm after, but it is definitely a different beast: an Islamicization of secular historiography and sociology, rather than a psychological rationale for sacred Islamic narrative.
The El Shakry title looks like it's not the thing itself, but a good lead to it.
I am a long-time appreciative reader of Corbin, but I wasn't aware of the specific title you mentioned.
I have read and reviewed Shariati's On the Sociology of Islam, and I see how it could be relevant to what I'm after, but it is definitely a different beast: an Islamicization of secular historiography and sociology, rather than a psychological rationale for sacred Islamic narrative.
The El Shakry title looks like it's not the thing itself, but a good lead to it.
5paradoxosalpha
I'm not assuming that it does exist, but I want to read it if it does.
I don't think that Freud is quite the "paragon of modernist secularism" he is often taken for. (See my reviews of Bakan's Sigmund Freud and the Jewish Mystical Tradition and Freud's own Future of an Illusion for some details.) You say he "attempted to assimilate" something of Judaism. I think he was a vehicle for a current that moved through prophets and rabbis, while attempting to conceal a genealogical Jewishness of his work. To the extent that he succeeded in "denaturing" his Jewish inspiration, he gave that current an impact on people who would never have knowingly sought into Jewish spirituality.
Similarly, Jung wanted the trappings of secular "science" that Freud had tried so hard to acquire, but he never stopped doing (highly heterodox) Christian theology and mysticism.
I don't think that Freud is quite the "paragon of modernist secularism" he is often taken for. (See my reviews of Bakan's Sigmund Freud and the Jewish Mystical Tradition and Freud's own Future of an Illusion for some details.) You say he "attempted to assimilate" something of Judaism. I think he was a vehicle for a current that moved through prophets and rabbis, while attempting to conceal a genealogical Jewishness of his work. To the extent that he succeeded in "denaturing" his Jewish inspiration, he gave that current an impact on people who would never have knowingly sought into Jewish spirituality.
Similarly, Jung wanted the trappings of secular "science" that Freud had tried so hard to acquire, but he never stopped doing (highly heterodox) Christian theology and mysticism.
6sashame
illuminating review!
but indeed that is basically my evaluation of modernist secularism in general -- it is much more thoroughly indebted spiritual currents/genealogies than most of its adherents r willing to admit. freud and jung, it is true, belong to a much more interpretive strand of such modernism. but i think even the most stubborn positivist or materialist has some debt to a vision of the world filtered thru e.g. thomist and augustinian understandings of truth, order, and function (this is basically from agamben, who i think articulates it most clearly in The Kingdom and the Glory: For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government, and himself gets it from foucault in his Lectures at the Collège de France, particularly the notion of truth-telling)
but i think what defines european modernist secularism wrt religious studies, and freud/jung's psychologizing & historicizing of religion, is the process of denial & "explanation" as opposed to "understanding" (distinction taken from Tonnies, but perhaps like Ricoeur's "hermeneutics of suspicion")
i think this mode of denial/explanation is unlikely to b found in muslim intellectual milieu, imo partly bc the dar al islam never underwent processes quite like papal rule, renaissance humanism, or the peace of westphalia (which all saw divisions drawn bw spiritual and "less-spiritual" spheres of the world). i dont think there was ever as extreme an ostensible epistemic rupture bw science & theology/mysticism. ofc ik that such an ostensible rupture is in many ways at a superficial/rhetorical level, but as a result i dont think u will find any analyst (raised/steeped in muslim culture) attempting to psychologically explain the history of islam
but indeed that is basically my evaluation of modernist secularism in general -- it is much more thoroughly indebted spiritual currents/genealogies than most of its adherents r willing to admit. freud and jung, it is true, belong to a much more interpretive strand of such modernism. but i think even the most stubborn positivist or materialist has some debt to a vision of the world filtered thru e.g. thomist and augustinian understandings of truth, order, and function (this is basically from agamben, who i think articulates it most clearly in The Kingdom and the Glory: For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government, and himself gets it from foucault in his Lectures at the Collège de France, particularly the notion of truth-telling)
but i think what defines european modernist secularism wrt religious studies, and freud/jung's psychologizing & historicizing of religion, is the process of denial & "explanation" as opposed to "understanding" (distinction taken from Tonnies, but perhaps like Ricoeur's "hermeneutics of suspicion")
i think this mode of denial/explanation is unlikely to b found in muslim intellectual milieu, imo partly bc the dar al islam never underwent processes quite like papal rule, renaissance humanism, or the peace of westphalia (which all saw divisions drawn bw spiritual and "less-spiritual" spheres of the world). i dont think there was ever as extreme an ostensible epistemic rupture bw science & theology/mysticism. ofc ik that such an ostensible rupture is in many ways at a superficial/rhetorical level, but as a result i dont think u will find any analyst (raised/steeped in muslim culture) attempting to psychologically explain the history of islam
7paradoxosalpha
Yes, I think we concur. I too read Agamben that way. (I most recently enjoyed his Opus Dei: An Archaeology of Duty.) And I certainly see him as following in Foucault's footsteps.
I am a big fan of good old suspicious Ludwig Feuerbach, who I think offers useful points of departure for these lines of thought.
Your third graph may be true, but it won't keep me from searching, now that the idea has occurred to me. I think that the anti-rationalist religious elements that express that rupture in Christianity do exist in Islam (e.g. Wahhabism, albeit influenced by Christian epistemologies), and what the history of Islam may lack in terms of the Western doctrinal and credal mutations (color me skeptical), it has made up for in precipitations from colonial regimes.
I am a big fan of good old suspicious Ludwig Feuerbach, who I think offers useful points of departure for these lines of thought.
Your third graph may be true, but it won't keep me from searching, now that the idea has occurred to me. I think that the anti-rationalist religious elements that express that rupture in Christianity do exist in Islam (e.g. Wahhabism, albeit influenced by Christian epistemologies), and what the history of Islam may lack in terms of the Western doctrinal and credal mutations (color me skeptical), it has made up for in precipitations from colonial regimes.
