NMC Talk "Husayn Muruwwah and Ernst Bloch encounter Ibn Sina: On Marxist discoveries of Arab-Islamic philosophy circa 1952"

This talk is part of a chapter in Professor Jens Hanssen’s ongoing research on Arabic-German intellectual entanglement in the 20th century. It is about two philosophers, one German, one Lebanese, who were inspired by the Iranian Tudeh party’s millennial commemoration of Ibn Sina’s life and work in 1952 in Hamadan. Both independently invoked a materialist tradition of philosophy that they claimed had been buried under civilizational accounts of cultural heritage in Europe and the Muslim World. Professor Hanssen will juxtapose Ernst Bloch’s matter/form discussion in his essay Avicenna and the Aristotelian Left and Husayn Muruwwah’s al-Thaqafa al-Wataniyya article “Ibn Sina: fikra taqaddumiyya” both of 1952. He asks: What were modern Arab intellectuals’ stakes in Abbasi-Andalusian and continental philosophy in the 20thcentury? He offers some thoughts on Husayn Muruwwah’s 1979 masterpiece Materialist Trends in Arab-Islamic Philosophy. Finally, He considers how this subversive materialist tradition might challenge the civilizationalist discourses curated by Jürgen Habermas and Muhammad ‘Abid al-Jabiri.

Bio:
Jens Hanssen is Director of the Orient-Institut Beirut and Professor of Arab Civilization, Middle East History and Mediterranean Studies at the University of Toronto. His research explores the intellectual and material entanglements between Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East since the nineteenth century. He is author of Fin de Siècle Beirut (2005), co-editor of Arabic Thought beyond the Liberal Age and Arabic Thought against the Authoritarian Age (2016 & 2018). Most recently he co-authored/translated The Clarion of Syria: A Patriot’s Call Against the Civil War of 1860 (2019).

* See the event poster: Oct 24 NMC Talk with Jens Hanssen.pdf