Humanism in Africa

Ibn Rushd (1126–1198), known by his Latin name Averroës, was a North African philosopher whose work came to prominence in Cordoba, Spain. He was a pioneer in African Muslim thought, and his influence includes commentaries on Aristotle that affected European scholasticism and the struggles to transform it. Rushd argued for the secularization of political life and the dominance of reason. For this position, he was widely rejected in the Muslim world, save for a small set of followers. The debate over these ideas, however, continued in the question of the role of modernity in the Muslim world. Among the many scholars who took up this issue was the Egyptian-born Imam Muhammad Abdou (1849–1905), who argued for freeing thought from convention and who presented a political theory of citizen rights for social justice, rather than blind obedience to the religious state. Zaki Naguib Mahmoud (1905–1993) defended the dominance of reason through logical positivism in science and based his form of humanism on secular naturalism. Abdel-Rahman Badawi (1917–2002), also Egyptian born, presented his atheistic existential philosophy as a more radical humanism for the Muslim world by comparing it with Sufism. In both Sufism and his philosophy, he argued, the human subject is prioritized. The writings of the Algerian novelist and historian Assia Djebar (1936–) has brought a new dimension to the question of subjectivity and the impact of physical and historical limits. In her historical work, Djebar examines the emergence of women revolutionaries under extraordinary repressive circumstances and, in her novels, how reclamation of their voices and bodies exemplify liberation for women.