ʿAbd Al-Ḥalīm Maḥmūd’s Critique of the Notion of ‘Development’ (taṭawwur): A case study in Islamist conceptual trends in 1960s and 70s Egypt

Abstract

Recent literature on the Islamic Revival in Egypt in the 1970s and 1980s, building on Gregory Starrett’s notion of the ‘functionalisation’ of Islam, has emphasised that Islamist discourse of the Revival, far from being a ‘revival’ of pre-modern tradition, operated within a modernist paradigm: it viewed Islam from a ‘statist’ perspective as functional for social change in the way it disciplines the national population on the level of each individual. This article engages this discussion through a close reading of a textual version of a lecture by an Islamist Azharite intellectual of the 1960s–70s period, ʿAbd al-Ḥalīm Maḥmūd (d. 1978). In this lecture, he criticises a concept that is central to the modernist paradigm – the concept of ‘development’. Highlighting his oral discursive style as well as ideas, I home in on his criticism of the developmental thinking of the foundational nineteenth-century modernist thinker, Muḥammad ʿAbduh. I argue that his criticism, while reflecting and openly acknowledging his indebtedness to modernist thought, challenges and amends the ‘functionalising’ logic of modernism. In the process he articulates an epistemology and notion of history that are distinct from ʿAbduh’s, captured in his oppositional logic of the ‘divine’ and the ‘human’ and notion of ‘religion’ (dīn) as an unchanging social and political order. This article therefore, through conceptual analysis, offers ways of conceiving how Islamist discourses in 1960s–70s Egypt modified and challenged modernism and statism as well as adopting them.