Background
Hassan Hanafi was born on February 13, 1935 in Cairo into an artistic family.
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Hassan Hanafi
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Beginning in his student days, Hanafi showed an interest in exploring both Islamic philosophic traditions and Western philosophy and in developing relationships between these cultural heritages that have sometimes clashed. After earning his B. A. degree from the University of Cairo in 1956, Hanafi studied at the University of Paris (the Sorbonne) for ten years. Here he continued to explore the relations between Western and Arabic philosophy. He was greatly influenced by Jean Guitton, the foremost philosopher in Paris at that time. In 1959 and 1960 he read the complete works of Edmund Husserl in the German language. He came to admire the great philosophers of protest, Spinoza and Kierkegaard. He completed his Ph. D. in 1966.
Career
From Paris Hanafi went to Rome for the 1964 sessions of Vatican Council II. Already in the Paris years Hanafi did extensive writing. With colleagues he prepared for publication two volumes by Abu al Hussain al-Basri (Al Mu'tamad Pi Usul al-Fiqh 1964, 1965). At the same time he was completing and publishing his two doctoral dissertations and a third book in French. In these three volumes he investigated European Consciousness from the point of view of a non-European researcher, declaring the end of European Consciousness and a new beginning of Third World Consciousness. He also used phenomenological methods for the study of religion.
In 1966 Hanafi joined the faculty of Cairo University. In the following years he translated several European works into Arabic: an Anthology of Christian Philosophy in the Middle Ages, Spinoza's Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (to show the use of reason in religion and politics, to show the application of historical criticism to sacred scriptures, and to define the role of a free citizen in a free country), Gotthold Ephram Lessing's Education of the Human Race, and Jean-Paul Sartre's The Transcendence of the Ego.
Meanwhile, he was developing his own philosophy in a series of books. The titles of some of them (translated into English) gave significant clues to their purposes: Contemporary Issues, Volume I on Arabic thought (1976) and Volume II on Western thought (1977); Tradition and Modernism (1980); Islamic Studies (1981); and the five-volume From Dogma to Revolution (Min al-Aqida ila al-thaura; 1986).
Hanafi's reputation brought him many invitations for visiting professorships at the University of Toulouse (1969), the University of Louvain (1970), Temple University (1971-1975), the University of Khartoum (1976, 1977), the University of Kuwait (1979), the University of Fes, Morrocco (1982-1984), and the University of Tokyo (1984-1985). From 1985 to 1987 he was scientific consultant in the United Nations University in Tokyo. In 1988 he returned to his home base in Cairo University.
Achievements
Works
book
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Religious Dialogue & Revolution: Essays on Judaism, Christianity & Isalm
(For the first time, a Religious Dialogue is made far from...)
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Religious Dialogue & Revolution: Essays on Judaism, Christianity & Isalm
Religion
According to Hanafi, Islam is not merely a religion, but above all an ideology that connects the temporal and the sacred. He saw Islam as a continuation of a classical Islamic tradition of rationality and universalism. God is not logos, but praxis; not an idea, but a form of practice. Consequently, in Hanafi's view, Islam is a religion of revolution and justice prompting everybody to refuse any subordination to oppressive power and to claim the liberation of the world and its people in the name of God.
Views
In the structure of his philosophy Hanafi developed a "triple feeling theory, " appropriating historical feeling, speculative feeling, and practical feeling as resources for rebuilding Islamic culture. He found in Islamic monotheism the basis for a universalism of ethical principle, in which the norm and criterion is "the Good Deed. " He sometimes referred to the "three horizons" of human experience: spiritual values, science, and technology.
Quotations: "If Science affirms man as cognition, Technology links him to Nature and Spiritual Values incite him to face eternity. "
