Maḥmūd Muḥammad Shāker: The Life and Thought of a Non-Stereotypical Anti-Modernist

Abstract

Maḥmūd Shāker was an anti-modernist thinker who developed a non-stereotypical stance from Modernity, Colonialism, Orientalism, and contemporary Arab modernists. He developed his literary method that he attributed retrospectively to Islamic pre-modern tradition. Maḥmūd Shāker is a literary critic who could have had some tangencies with many of the prominent intellectual trends in the early and mid-twentieth century, such as Salafism, Arabism, Islamism, and Nationalism. However, if a negative definition is sought to describe him, he can be classified under none of these groups. Magdy Wahba may be correct in what he went for; that Maḥmūd Shāker represents the voice of anti-colonial anger in the conscience of the Islamic orthodoxy. However, I believe that Shāker also represents the Islamic societies’ unrest quest to connect with self after the identity crisis caused by the colonization processes.