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The American Sufis: Self-Help, Sufism, and Metaphysical Religion in Postcolonial Egypt

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 October 2019

Arthur Shiwa Zárate
Arthur Shiwa Zárate*
Affiliation:
Comparative Religious Studies, San José State University
*
aez2108@columbia.edu
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Abstract

This article examines an Arabic commentary on the American self-help pioneer Dale Carnegie's How to Stop Worrying and Start Living, written by a one-time leading intellectual of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, Muḥammad al-Ghazālī. Ghazālī’s 1956 commentary was perhaps the earliest manifestation of an influential genre of literature within the Islamic world today: “Islamic self-help.” Although scholars treat Islamic self-help as an effect of neoliberalism, this article reorients the study of Islamic self-help beyond neoliberalism by showing first, that Ghazālī’s early version of it emerged through a critical engagement with several ideological forms that relate in complex ways to neoliberalism's antecedent, liberalism; and second, that his Islamic self-help is best understood in terms of an Islamic encounter with American metaphysical religion made possible by Carnegie's text. It argues that Ghazālī’s Islamic self-help constituted a radical reconfiguration of Western self-help, one that replaced the ethics of self-reliance and autonomy with Islamic ethical sensibilities clustered around the notions of human insufficiency and dependence upon God. In doing so, it highlights how scholars of contemporary Islam might fruitfully pose the question of how novel intellectual trends and cultural forms, like self-help, become Islamic, instead of limiting their analysis to how Islam is reshaped by modern Euro-American thought, institutions, and practices.

Keywords

self-helpmetaphysical religionSufismMuḥammad al-GhazālīneoliberalismIslamDale Carnegie
Type
Self-Help
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 61 , Issue 4 , October 2019 , pp. 864 - 893
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 2019 

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References

1 Jaddid ḥayātak—al-fiṭra—adab al-nufūs—Muḥammad al-Ghazālī—1 (Renew your life—human nature—etiquette of souls—Muḥammad al-Ghazālī—1), YouTube video, 27:33. Posted by “Ṭarīq al-Hidāya,” 4 Sept. 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lOGhlkCOIMI&list=PLgGbVipmQpbrMhGGAU8BZeltMG9LAFNht (accessed 19 Feb. 2019).

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15 Neoliberalism is distinct from liberalism because rather than simply seeking to free the economy, it attempts to model “the overall exercise of political power … on the principles of a market economy.” See Foucault, Michel, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–1979 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 117–57, 131Google Scholar; Rose, Nikolas, The Powers of Freedom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 141–42CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For an historical overview of neoliberalism, see Harvey, David, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007)Google Scholar.

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17 Compare Ghazālī’s text, for instance, with al-Qaraḍāwī, Yūsuf al-Īmān wa-al-ḥayāh (Faith and life) (Beirut: al-Dār al-Sa‘ūdīya li al-Nashr, 1969)Google Scholar; ʻĀʼiḍ al-Qarnī, La taḥzan.

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22 Nevertheless, this conception of religion owes itself to the legacies of nineteenth-century American liberalism and the study of comparative religion, both of which posited a non-institutional, ritual free belief-centered core of “religion.” See Leigh Eric Schmidt's history of American liberal religion, Restless Souls: The Making of American Spirituality (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2005)Google Scholar; and Tomoko Masuzawa's study on the formation of the discipline of comparative religion, The Invention of World Religions, or, How European Universalism Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005)Google Scholar.

23 See, Bender, New Metaphysicals.

24 Doostdar, Iranian Metaphysicals, 6.

25 The Arabic translator of Carnegie's text occasionally omits from his translation Carnegie's references to Christianity.

26 Groundbreaking studies such as Elshakry's, Marwa Reading Darwin in Arabic, 1860–1950 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Shakry's, Omnia El The Arabic Freud: Psychoanalysis and Islam in Modern Egypt (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017)Google Scholar, have complicated this narrative, though it remains firmly entrenched in the scholarship. Classic formulations of it can be found in Hourani, Albert, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age, 1798–1939 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983 [1962]), 114–15, 123, 143–44CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Kerr, Malcolm, Islamic Reform: The Political and Legal Theories of Muḥammad ʻAbduh and Rashīd Riḍā (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966), 16–18, 209–11Google Scholar. More recent formulations can be found in Euben, Roxanne, Enemy in The Mirror: Islamic Fundamentalism and the Limits of Modern Rationalism, A Work of Comparative Political Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 9, 18, 80–81, 87, 91, 116CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Tripp, Charles, Islam and the Moral Economy: The Challenge of Capitalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Dallal, Ahmad, Islam, Science, and the Challenge of History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 160–62Google Scholar; and Hallaq, Wael, The Impossible State: Islam, Politics, and Modernity's Moral Predicament (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), ix–xii, 155–56Google Scholar.

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30 Carnegie's “greatest legacy” was “the establishment of a robust self-help movement that has shaped modern American values in fundamental ways”; Watts, Self-Help Messiah, 7.

31 Ibid., 5, 275–78, 284, 310.

32 Rose, Inventing Ourselves, esp. 1–21, 150–68. See also, Rose, Powers of Freedom. Following Foucault, Rose understands power to operate not just as a repressive force but also as something that produces human behavior. See, Foucault, Birth of Biopolitics, 51–70; Foucault, Michel, The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 87–104Google Scholar.

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40 Kayfa taksib al-aṣdiqā’ wa tu'aththir fī al-nās (How to gain friends and influence people) (Cairo: Dār al-Kutub al-Ahlīya, 1946)Google Scholar.

41 In the second edition of “How to win friends and influence people,” Ziyādī describes his astonishment at the “extraordinary speed” with which the first Arabic edition disappeared from the shelves; Kayfa taksib al-aṣdiqā’ wa tu'aththir fī al-nās, 2d ed. (Cairo: Maktabat al-Khānjī bi Miṣr, 1951), v. Likewise, in the second edition of “How to stop worrying and start living,” Ziyādī describes how the “swift sales” and positive reception of the first edition surprised him; Da‘ al-qalaq wa-ibda’ al-ḥayāh, 2d ed. (Cairo: Maktabat al-Khānjī bi Miṣr, 1951), 1Google Scholar. Ziyādī does not say for either text how many copies were sold.

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45 Ibid., 15–16.

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48 Ibid., 10.

49 Ghazālī mentions that he read Ziyādī’s translation; Jaddid, 12.

50 Carnegie, How to Stop Worrying, 152.

51 Ziyādī, Da‘ al-qalaq, 285.

52 Carnegie, How to Stop Worrying, 153.

53 Ziyādī, Da‘ al-qalaq, 285.

54 Carnegie, How to Stop Worrying, 153–54.

55 Ziyādī, Da‘ al-qalaq, 286–87.

56 Carnegie, How to Stop Worrying, 165; Ziyādī, Da‘ al-qalaq, 301.

57 Carnegie, How to Stop Worrying, 165; Ziyādī, Da‘ al-qalaq, 301.

58 Ziyādī, Da‘ al-qalaq, 281–82.

59 Ibid., 30–31, 222, 312.

60 See “Fiṭra,” in Fleet, Kate et al. , eds., Encyclopedia of Islam, 3d ed. (Boston: Brill, 2007)Google Scholar.

61 Vasalou, Sophia, Ibn Taymiyya's Theological Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 83Google Scholar.

62 Ghazālī, Jaddid, 4.

63 Ibid., 12.

64 For an account of the debates caused by Darwin's theories, see Elshakry, Reading Darwin.

65 al-‘Awda ilā al-īmān (The return to faith) (Cairo: Dār al-Ma‘ārif, 1959)Google Scholar.

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69 Nawfal, al-Islām, 166–207. Some of the quotes he draws from Carnegie's text include the words of Carnegie himself, Carl Jung, the Mayo Brothers, Alexis Carrel, William James, and Plato. He cites these individuals on issues ranging from the negative health effects of worry to the therapeutic and scientifically established benefits of religion and prayer.

70 Carnegie, How to Stop Worrying, 154.

71 James, William, Varieties of Religious Experience (New York: Penguin Books, 1982 [1902]), 28–31Google Scholar. See also James's comments on “mysticism,” which he argued was the core of religion (ibid., 379–82).

72 Ibid., 94–123; Albanese, Republic, 412–23; Knapp, Krister Dylan, William James: Psychical Research and the Challenge of Modernity (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

73 This is the reason James was interested in spiritualism and psychical research; Knapp, William James, 1–15.

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76 Ibid., 165, 152.

77 For example, see Albanese, Republic, 225–26, 258–64, 277, 297, 397–98, 408, 413, 426, 434–35.

78 Bender, New Metaphysicals, 10, 17–18, 28, 30, 68, 95, 98–99, 101, 129, 133, 168.

79 Türesay, “Between Science and Religion”; Doostdar, Iranian Metaphysicals, 21–22, 112–22, 136–37, 163, 171–72.

80 Schayegh, Who Is Knowledgeable Is Strong, 88; Tripp, Islam and the Moral Economy.

81 Chatterjee, Partha, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993)Google Scholar.

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83 Ghazālī, Jaddid, 196. Ghazālī understands these Westerners to be “Jews” and “Christians” who are dissatisfied with organized religion, 197.

84 He is speaking of what he sees as the mistaken Christian doctrine of the trinity.

85 Ibid., 197.

86 Ibid., 198.

87 Ibid., 199.

88 Ibid., 188, 205.

89 Albanese, Republic, 6, 15.

90 Carnegie, How to Stop Worrying, 165.

91 Ibid.

92 Ibid., 152–53, his emphasis.

93 Ghazālī, Jaddid, 206.

94 Ibid., 205; Ziyādī, Da‘ al-qalaq, 302–3.

95 Ghazālī, Jaddid, 207.

96 Carnegie, How to Stop Worrying, 162; Ghazālī, Jaddid, 205.

97 Carnegie, How to Stop Worrying, 165; Ghazālī, Jaddid, 219.

98 Ghazālī, Jaddid, 221.

99 Rose, Inventing Ourselves, 158.

100 Yaqub, Salim, Containing Arab Nationalism: The Eisenhower Doctrine and the Middle East (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 23–55Google Scholar; Beattie, Egypt during the Nasser Years, 111–19.

101 Calvert, John, Sayyid Qutb and the Origins of Radical Islamism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010)Google Scholar.

102 Quṭb's critique of American culture was first published in 1951. For this article and others he wrote about the United States, see Ṣalāḥ ʻAbd al-Fattāḥ al-Khālidī, Amrīkā min al-dākhil bi-minẓār Sayyid Quṭb (America from the inside in the view of Sayyid Quṭb), 5th ed. (Jeddah: Dār al-Manārah, 1991), 97–123Google Scholar. See also, Calvert, Sayyid Qutb, 139–56.

103 For a widely circulated argument of this nature, see Bernard Lewis, “The Roots of Muslim Rage,” Atlantic (Sept. 1990): 47–60.

104 Kenney, “Selling Success,” 672.

105 Ghazālī, Jaddid, 13.

106 I have been unable to determine the date the program originally aired, although judging from its appearance it was probably during the 1990s.

107 Jaddid ḥayātak—al-fiṭra.

108 I borrow the term “resonance” from El Shakry, who explores how Arab intellectuals perceived a range of “epistemological resonances” between Islamic traditions and Freudian psychoanalysis; Arabic Freud, 2.

109 Ghazālī, Jaddid, 12.

110 Schmidt, Restless Souls, 25–62.

111 Schimmel, Annemarie, Mystical Dimensions of Islam (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1977), 3–4Google Scholar. Nevertheless, as the “private and personal” overtones of the term “mysticism” fail to account for the political and collective activities of Sufis, Carl Ernst suggests that the term can be misleading when applied to Sufism, in Sufism: An Introduction to the Mystical Tradition of Islam (Boston: Shambhala Publications Inc., 2011), xixGoogle Scholar.

112 Christmann, Andreas, “Reclaiming Mysticism: Anti-Orientalism and the Construction of Islamic Sufism in Post-Colonial Egypt,” in Green, Nile and Searle-Chatterjee, Mary, eds., Religion, Language, and Power (New York: Routledge, 2008)Google Scholar.

113 Ibid., 73.

114 Rakā’iz al-īmān: bayna al-‘aql wa-al-qalb (The pillars of faith: between intellect and heart) (Kuwait: Maktabat al-Aml, 1967), 165Google Scholar.

115 Anzali, “Mysticism,” 211–12.

116 See his two tributes to Sufism: Affective Side of Islam, and Pillars of Faith. In his autobiographical notes Ghazālī describes how Sufism was a central component in his childhood religious life. His father was “a lover of Sufism, who respected its men and selected from their ways what he wished”; Min maqālāt al-shaykh al-ghazālī (From the articles of Shaykh Ghazālī), vol. 3 (Cairo: Nahḍat Miṣr, 2005), 164Google Scholar. Ghazālī also reports that he was named after the twelfth-century Sufi scholar Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī (d. 1111). See his description of his father's esteem for Abū Ḥāmid, in “Qiṣṣat al-ḥayā” (Life story), in Islamīyāt al-Mar‘ifa (Jan. 1997), pt. 1.

117 al-Gharīb, Ramaḍān Khamis, Maḥāwir al-mashrūʻ al-fikrī ladā al-shaykh al-ghazālī (The pivots of the intellectual plan of Shaykh Ghazālī) (Cairo: Dār al-Ḥaram li al-Turāth, 2003), 63–74Google Scholar; al-Qaraḍāwī, Yūsuf, al-Shaykh al-ghazālī kamā ‘araftuhu: riḥlat niṣf qarn (Shaykh Ghazālī as I knew him: journey of half a century) (Cairo: Dār al-Wafāʾ, 1995), 95–101Google Scholar.

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119 Carnegie, How to Stop Worrying, 89, his emphasis.

120 Ibid., 91–93.

121 Ghazālī, Jaddid, 112.

122 Ibid., 113–15.

123 Ibid., 118.

124 Ibid.

125 Ibid., 119.

126 Ibid., 119–20.

127 Ibid., 120. Ghazālī here uses an abbreviated form of the term khawāriq al-‘āda, or khawāriq al-‘ādāt, meaning “exceeding the customary.” The term is used in Islamic literature to refer to semi-miraculous occurrences, especially those effected by Sufi shaykhs.

128 Ibid.

129 Ibid.

130 Ibid., 121.

131 Carnegie, How to Stop Worrying, 99; Ghazālī, Jaddid, 122.

132 “A tradition,” writes Asad, “consists essentially of discourses that seek to instruct practitioners regarding the correct form and purpose of a given practice that, precisely because it is established, has a history”; Idea of an Anthropology of Islam (Washington, D.C.: Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, Georgetown University, 1986), 14Google Scholar.

133 Asad, Talal, “Thinking about Tradition, Religion, and Politics in Egypt Today,” Critical Inquiry 42, 1 (2015): 166–214, 175CrossRefGoogle Scholar. I am not suggesting that liberalism is not a tradition. Alasdair MacIntyre, from whom Asad borrowed and modified the concept, held that liberalism was one. See Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988), 349Google Scholar. Regardless, Asad is not referring to liberalism here, but rather to “self-invention,” a phenomenon associated with lifestyle markets.

134 Schimmel, Mystical Dimensions, 109–12. See also, Khalil, Atif, “Tawba in the Sufi Psychology of Abū Ṭālib al-Makkī (d. 996),” Journal of Islamic Studies 23, 3 (2012): 294–324CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

135 Ghazālī, Jaddid, 15–24.

136 Ibid., 173.

137 Carnegie, How to Stop Worrying, 175.

138 Ghazālī, Jaddid, 250.

139 Carnegie, How to Stop Worrying, 153.

140 Ghazālī, Jaddid, 201.

141 Ibid.

142 On this virtue in Sufism, see Schimmel, Mystical Dimensions, 117–22.

143 For a controversial critique of this and related Sufi virtues, see the Egyptian literary scholar Mubārak's, Zakī al-Akhlāq ‘inda al-ghazālī (Ethics according to [Abū Ḥāmid] al-Ghazālī) (Cairo: al-Maktaba al-Tijārīya al-Kubrā, 1924)Google Scholar.

144 Ghazālī, Jaddid, 203.

145 Ibid., 23.

146 Scott, Seeing Like a State, 87–102.

147 On the Nasser regime's state-sponsored social uplift initiatives, see Starrett, Gregory, Putting Islam to Work: Education, Politics, and Religious Transformations in Egypt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 79–80CrossRefGoogle Scholar; El Shakry, Great Social Laboratory, 197–218; Bier, Laura, Revolutionary Womanhood: Feminisms, Modernity, and the State in Nasser's Egypt (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011)Google Scholar.

148 See Ghazālī’s al-Islām fī wajh al-zaḥf al-aḥmar (Islam in the face of the Red March) (Beirut: al-Maktaba al-ʻAṣrīya, 1966)Google Scholar.

149 This is not to suggest that the Egyptian state and modernism were unconcerned with ethics and the self. Bier's account shows that the Egyptian regime promulgated a revolutionary socialist ethic, in Revolutionary Womanhood, 60–100. Furthermore, Schayegh's study highlights the Iranian modernist fixation with psychology, in Who Is Knowledgeable Is Strong, 157–93. Yet, in the Egyptian regime's ethical project, the state was conceived as the primary engine of reform. See, Meijer; El Shakry, Great Social Laboratory, 197–218.

150 Ghazālī, Jaddid, 14.

151 Ibid.

152 Hoesterey, Rebranding Islam, 1.

153 For the neoliberal critique of the state in the name of individual freedom, see Harvey, Brief History, 5–38, 64–67.

154 Kenney, “Selling Success,” 668–69.

155 Adamson, Peter, Philosophy in the Islamic World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 91–97Google Scholar; Pormann, Peter E. and Savage-Smith, Emile, Medieval Islamic Medicine (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), 48–49Google Scholar.

156 al-Jawzī, Ibn, Al-ṭibb al-rūhānī (Spiritual medicine) (Cairo: Maktabat al-Thaqāfa al-Dīnīya, 1986), 40–43Google Scholar. On this tract, see Perho, Irmeli, The Prophet's Medicine: A Creation of the Muslim Traditionalist Scholars (Helsinki: Finnish Oriental Society, 1995), 130Google Scholar.

157 On Prophetic medicine, see Perho, Prophet's Medicine; Pormann and Savage-Smith, Medieval Islamic Medicine, 71–75.

158 al-Jawzīya, Ibn Qayyim, Al-ṭibb al-nabawī (The prophetic medicine) (Cairo: Dār Iḥyāʾ al-Kutub al-ʿArabīya, 1957), 147–56Google Scholar.

159 On Islamic ethical thought during the Ottoman period, see Yılmaz, Hüseyin, Caliphate Redefined: The Mystical Turn in Ottoman Political Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018)Google Scholar.

160 Ghazālī was, at any rate, immersed in the study, production, and reformulation of Islamic ethics. He not only studied Islamic ethics (al-akhlāq) with one of the pioneers of the modern study of ethics at al-Azhar University, Muḥammad Yūsuf Mūsā (1899–1963), but also authored his own ethical manuals, including, for instance, Muslim Character, which was very much imbued with Islamic philosophical ethics. He was also a producer of classical Islamic ethical manuals, making them available in more accessible forms. For example, see his edited edition of al-Jawzī’s, Ibn Ṣayd al-Khāṭir (Quarry of the mind) (Cairo: Dār al-Kutub al- Ḥadītha, 1960)Google Scholar. On Ghazālī’s interest in Islamic philosophical ethics and their place within mid-twentieth-century Islamic thought, see Arthur Shiwa Zárate, “The Making of a Muslim Reformer: Muḥammad al-Ghazālī and Islam in Postcolonial Egypt, 1947–1967,” PhD diss., Columbia University, 2018, 16–123.

161 Carnegie, How to Stop Worrying, 62.

162 Ghazālī, Jaddid, 83.

163 Ibid., 80–82.

164 Ibid., 89.

165 ʻAbbūd, al-ʻAqīda, 137.

166 Ibid., 140–41.

167 Ibid., 138.

168 Ibid., 140.

169 Rudnyckyj, Spiritual Economies, 131–56; Kenney, “Selling Success”; Atia, Building a House, 135–57.

170 See, for example, al-Azmeh, Aziz, Islams and Modernities (London: Verso Books, 1993), 39–59Google Scholar; Eickelman, Dale and Piscatori, James, Muslim Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 23–45CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ragab, Ahmed, “Prophetic Traditions and Modern Medicine in the Middle East: Resurrection, Reinterpretation, and Reconstruction,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 132, 4 (2012): 657–73CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a critique of this approach, see Kendall, Elizabeth and Khan's, Ahmad introduction to Reclaiming Islamic Tradition: Modern Interpretations of the Classical Heritage, Kendall, Elizabeth and Khan, Ahmad, eds. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016)Google Scholar.

171 Ahmed, Shahab, What Is Islam? The Importance of Being Islamic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

172 On this point, see also El Shakry, Arabic Freud, 42–43.