Two Intellectuals: The Malaysian S.N. Al-Attas and the Egyptian Mohammed 'Immara, and the Islamization of Knowledge Debate

Abstract

In Plaidoyer pour les intellectuelsJean Paul Sartre begins his essay with the negative perception of the intellectual in society. He remarks that the intel lectual is someone who is looked upon with suspicion and ambivalence. The intellectual is constantly condemned for being negative and critical; he is often mistaken in his analysis and understanding of the world. He is weak, he does not produce, but has to survive merely on his salary. The Marxist intellectual is attacked for being dogmatic. However, for Sartre, the intellectual's interference in matters which are not his business is a necessary evil. Sartre fears that intellectuals will wither away under the increasing wave of Americanization and be replaced by specialists and tech nocrats. What interests us in Sartre is precisely the idea that technicians and specialists would, in the long run, threaten the status of the intellec tual. For Sartre, and similarly, in Edward Said's Representations of the Intellectual, it would seem that what distinguishes the intellectual from other special ists is the self-critical stand, the critical mind and the conscious role in debunking bourgeois ideology as a 'universal-particular' problem.2 Briefly, in wanting to change the world, the intellectual is caught up in the con tradiction between practical knowledge (truth, universality) and ideology (particularism). Sartre's book is a collection of lectures he gave in Tokyo and Kyoto in 1965. The debates about French colonialism in Algeria, the Algerian nationalist movement, the legitimate use of violence as an anti colonial riposte and the stand of the French left towards the issue of vio lence, were the concerns of intellectuals in the sixties. Reading Sartre from the perspective of the nineties is certainly illuminating, but not without its contradictions. The slogan for changing the world and representing the people or the masses as an ideological alibi — to make the revolution a profession that might lead to an enhancement of social status — is yet an eternal dilemma that, paradoxically, strangles intellectuals. The work of Bourdieu on intellectuals teaches us how easily one could fall into demagogic and populist attitudes in attempting to speak on behalf of the proletariat. Bourdieu points to communication problems and habitus differences between the intellectuals and the working class that lead to the bad consciousness