When a friend told me a few days ago of the death of the thinker Dr Abdelwahab Elmessiri, and once the first shock had passed and sorrow at the loss of this man, so remarkable for his thought and his struggle, had set in, I recalled the impression with which I took leave of him at our last meeting, more than two years ago. It was in Doha, on the margins of the first intellectual forum of the Al Jazeera Centre for Studies on “Islam and the West: for a better world” (Doha, 26–28 May 2006), and he gave me a set of his books and a copy of his encyclopaedia on Jews and Judaism on CD, a gift I treasure. My impression then was that if Elmessiri were to be described by a triad, it would undoubtedly be “authenticity, detachment and commitment”.
Elmessiri’s writings and talks express a deep-rooted authenticity and an attachment to the values in which he grew up, values that suffered not a scratch during his long stay in the West. He did not share the fate of a number of his peers who were sent on study missions to Europe and America and were so dazzled by the lights of the “cities of light”, as they called them, that they suffered a passing headache or lasting damage. Yet Elmessiri was enlightened and open to the noble values and valuable systems of thought that the West produces.
Elmessiri was detached and unimpressed by the “world of things”, to use the expression of the thinker Malek Bennabi, may God have mercy on him. This was not only at the intellectual level, though he often warned in his writings of the danger of reifying human beings, reducing them to their functional dimension, and reducing civilisation to its material, built dimension, in particular Islamic civilisation, which rejects vying in tall buildings and focuses on building the human being. It extended to a way of behaving that I observed on the few occasions I had to meet him: his mere presence in places of luxury, his way of dressing and sitting and the serenity he always radiated, was enough to make those present realise the triviality of the decor and recall, as he spoke, that other, lofty human values exist. Elmessiri’s detachment was also reflected in his style of writing: though a man of letters and a poet, he took care to avoid ornate language, striving for precision and clarity in setting out ideas and focusing on method, which gave his writings a certain abstraction and philosophical depth. But it is a philosophy that is easy to grasp, dealing with the real problems of human beings, especially Arabs, and focusing on their daily concerns; it does not debate “the sex of angels”, as some would-be philosophers like to do, intruders on philosophy in our Arab world, “Hobbes’s companions”, as a friend calls them, who misjudge the nation’s priorities.
Many have spoken, and will speak, of the abundance of Elmessiri’s intellectual output and the vastness of his encyclopaedic work on Jews and Judaism, a work that has undoubtedly enriched the Arab library greatly. But he also served the nation through his accurate diagnosis of the disease from which it suffers and his identification of the effective cure. He was among the first in the Arab world to grasp some fundamental points: 1) if the nation faces great dangers and challenges, occupation, multifaceted aggression and projects targeting its foundations and threatening its identity and existence, despotism and corruption, rampant within its body, are the two main causes that weaken its immunity and hamper its resistance to these dangers and challenges; 2) the condition of the nation can be put right only through comprehensive political change; 3) political change must rest on non-violent means; 4) change and reform require the union of all the active forces in society, whatever their political, intellectual and professional orientations.
This explains why Elmessiri joined a group of political, intellectual, cultural and trade union figures in Egypt in founding the “Egyptian Movement for Change – Kefaya”, which appeared in summer 2004 to oppose an extension of Hosni Mubarak’s term and the hereditary succession of his son, and became its general coordinator in January 2007. It is worth recalling that the movement refused to become a political party, because its founders, Elmessiri among them, had observed at close quarters the ills from which most Egyptian parties suffer, and Arab parties in general, Islamist or secular: the domination of the sheikh or the leader, dogmatism, worship of the structure, elimination of others, and so on.
Elmessiri’s commitment to defending the interests of the nation, and his presence at many sit-ins and protest demonstrations against corruption and the violation of freedoms, exposed him to harm. He and his brothers in Kefaya were described as traitors “seeking foreign backing”, in the words of the Egyptian president. He even suffered much harassment, going as far as his abduction, with his wife, and their being dumped in a remote desert.
Elmessiri, may God have mercy on him, was at once the Gandhi and the Chomsky of the Arabs. What he shared with Noam Chomsky was their love of language and their deep knowledge of its secrets, their primary field of expertise, and also their leaving research laboratories and lecture rooms for the street to oppose injustice and contribute to political and social change. What he shared with Mahatma Gandhi was his detachment and distance from the “world of things”, and his struggle on the ground for non-violent change in the wretched conditions of peoples, a change that restores dignity to the individual and vitality to society. Elmessiri was thus the best example of the committed intellectual, and how badly we need people like him in our Arab world, crowded with intellectuals who belong either to the sect of “the sultan’s scholars” or to the camp of the “breadwinners” floundering in the world of household appliances.
Dr Abbas Aroua, Director of the Cordoba Centre for Peace Studies, Geneva, 12 July 2008
