Khalid Muhammad Khalid

Background

Khalid, Khalid Muhammad was born in June 1920 in village nearZaqaziq. GetIslamic thinker and reformer.

Education

Graduated a! al-Azhar University, Cairo, 1947. Studied English language at the British Council, Cairo. Traditional Islamic education, Qasim Amin and other Muslim modernists, as well the Western tradition.

Career

Teacher of Arabic in secondary schools until 1951, then journalist and independent writer. Keyserling studied the natural sciences at several universities, obtaining his doctorate in 1902 at Vienna where, inspired by Houston Chamberlain, he took up philosophy. In 1908 he returned to Livonia to inherit his family estate, but in 1911 he began a world tour which provided material for his best-known work (1919). Dispossessed after the Russian Revolution.

Keyserling emigrated to Germany where, in 1920, he founded the School of Wisdom at Darmstadt. Subsequent travels took him to the Americas. Keyserling’s itineracy and emigre status both reflected and conditioned his basic philosophical conviction that human life is essentially rootless and protean. Keyserling’s philosophy was expressly nonacademic.

His works centred on the theme of 'spiritual regeneration’ and were born of a wish to replace Western intellectualistic philosophy with.

Views

Khalid was continually changing his theoretical °rientation. In From Here We Begin (1950) he took a secular approach, maintaining that, even though Christianity and Islam are both express|ons of the true religion of God, priests and doctors of religious law have often sided with oppressive regimes. He drew a distinction between religious and political power and did not conceal ots sympathy for socialist ideas. This socialist trend is present in Democracy for Ever (1953), Particularly in its emphasis on cooperativism in a democratic society. Later, in 1981, after a deeper study of Islamic history and probably influenced oy the changed political situation, Khalid maintained that dbi and dawlah arc brothers, and that Islam actualized a social covenant involving a Power whose main task is to execute that eovenant. He argued that the idea of reformation Cleans more a recovery of the original sense of slam than an innovation. Later, Khalid pointed °ut that politics and worship must contribute together to the growth of personality and that radical organizations have the right to constitute regular parties and to take part in democratic Political struggle. Khalid became a distinguished rehgious figure in late twentieth-century Egypt.

Interests

• Sociologypolitics; religious philosophy.