By Marwan al-Husayni *

I had the privilege to be in contact with two of the world revolutionary professors and thinkers. Both are deceased now. Mohammed Arkoun died in September 2010. Kamal Salibi died in September 2011. Both were 82 when left our world. I knew more about Islam from Salibi who was Christian, and more about Christianity from Arkoun who was Muslim. I knew more about the mechanisms of critical thinking and objective writing from the two men.

While working closely with Salibi in Amman on many interfaith and intercultural projects, I read most of Arkoun's books. I was taken by his lifetime intellectual project “Rethinking Islam”. I was introduced to almost all segments of his intellectual pulse before I met him in 2007.

I assisted Salibi in writing his diaries "A Bird on an Oak Tree" and officially was the editor of the book. I also used to translate between Arabic and English for him in daily academic works. He left Amman at the end of December 2003. The connection between us resumed through Email messages and Facebook.

I am not writing this article to just say that I knew the two professors. They both were great teachers for me and I benefited much from them intellectually. But they belonged to what I call: the “Isolated Identity”. They were intellectuals whom their works were rejected by wider Arab and Muslim circles, and politically attacked for their archaeological efforts in history, knowledge and thought. They excavated and uncovered new epistemological layers for better understanding the history of early Christianity and Islam. Still, they were condemned for ideological reasons.

“Isolated Identities”, in the Arab World, means that scientific thinking leads to rejection, discrimination then isolation. Both men did not take the mainstream conceptions for granted. They scientifically defied deeply rooted realities and revolutionized the ways of looking at both histories of Christianity and Islam. Their works faced a long process of isolation and distortion.

The mindset of Rethinking always faces the mechanisms of Rejection in the Arab region. This is how I feel and live it. Arkoun and Salibi are remembered in some occasions and in limited circles, though they consumed their lives in huge intellectual projects that are of high importance to humanity.

For both of them, ideology and private agendas are the killers of scientific and critical thinking. Sometimes, Salibi and I would spend a whole day editing one paragraph of few lines. In the next day he would cancel the whole paragraph because “someone might hear an echo of distant ideology in it”, he used to tell me. “I do not want to enrage anyone because scientific and objective writing must be as pure as light”. For him, a scientific idea should introduce itself by itself.

Arkoun talked about "the strategy of rejection" which is a result of “imprisoning mind by ideology”. For him, ideology is ignorance; when mind is imprisoned by ignorance, it uses rejection to extinguish enlightened thinking.

Sadness was the end product for both minds of Salibi and Arkoun. When I last saw him, Salibi left to Beirut with sadness as the color of his eyes. I saw the same color in Arkoun’s eyes while he was talking about “those who insist not to listen”.

When ignorance becomes a mainstream ideology, what is the best identity marker that the intellectuals should magnify: Rethinking, Rejection or Reform?


* Media Strategist, Interfaith and Intercultural specialist