28/10/2023–|Last updated: 10/28/202310:36 PM (Mecca time)
Fifteen years after his death, the intellectual journey of Egyptian author and academic Abdel Wahab El-Messiri seems more current given the transformations that the Arab world is going through today. Al-Mesiri is considered one of the most prominent specialists in the history of the Zionist movement, the Palestinian issue, studies of literature, modernity, and contemporary philosophy, in addition to his political activity.
The late thinker enriched the Arab library with dozens of books in Arabic and English, and varied between encyclopedias, studies, and articles, perhaps the most prominent of which is “The Encyclopedia of Jews, Judaism, and Zionism: A New Interpretive Model,” which took a quarter of a century to prepare, and is classified as one of the most important Arabic encyclopedias of the twentieth century.
Al-Mesiri wrote more than 30 An article It was published on Al Jazeera Net, the last of which was an article he sent to be published in conjunction with his passing, and a program hosted by him no limits Two months before his death, the programme Private visit In two episodes broadcast days after his death in Palestine Hospital in Cairo at the beginning of July 2008, Al-Mesiri said in that interview that despite Arab governments normalizing relations with Israel, “the masses, by their common sense, remain hostile to Zionism.”
Tragedy and comedy
In his article “The Zionist state between tragedy and comedyWhich was published for the first time after his death, Al-Mesiri wrote, “Contrary to what many imagine, the obsession with the end of the Jewish state is nested in the Israeli conscience, and they are right about that, as we must not forget that all similar settlement enclaves (the Crusader kingdoms – the French settlement enclave in… “Algeria (the apartheid state in South Africa) has met the same fate: disappearance.”
In his article, Al-Mesiri reviewed some of the jokes made by the Israelis that express their true vision of reality and their response to it, “which is a different vision from the Zionist statements and from the image presented by the Arab media and some academic studies that are content with studying the Torah, the Talmud, and the Zionist statements, instead of studying the Zionist settlement reality with all its contradictions and achievements.” And his failures.”
Al-Mesiri says that the joke, with all its advantages and disadvantages, expresses what is called the unspoken, which are things that cannot be revealed for many reasons. These reasons may be subjective, meaning that one cannot confront them frankly, or they may be objective reasons, meaning that one is afraid to express his opinion publicly.
Al-Mesiri reviews some of the jokes he collected from Israeli newspapers, and talks about the Israelis, saying, “The West told them that it would settle them in Zion, Palestine, the land of ghee and honey (as the biblical narrative tells them), a land inhabited by the Amalekites and Canaanites who could be simply exterminated (as the biblical narrative also tells them). And as the historical narrative tells them of what happened in other settlement experiments such as the United States and Australia).”
He continues, adding, “But instead they found that Palestine is full of its population, which is increasing in quantity and quality, and is resisting them with all violence. And that the West, in fact, wanted to get rid of them by settling them in an area of strategic importance to it, so that they can protect its interests, and that they entered into the path of A dead end, as their conflict with the Palestinians and Arabs continues and has not stopped since the beginning of settlement in 1882 until the year 2007, and there is no end to the conflict on the horizon. This has generated among them a dark sense of historical dilemma and a feeling of loss of direction.”
History and solutions
In his article “The Zionist vision of historyAl-Mesiri explains the philosophy of “permanence,” in which God resides in all of His creatures or in one of them and identifies with them to become one essence. He continues, “The Jewish vision of history – in my view – is a vision of permanence, meaning that some rabbis imagined that God had inhabited the Jewish people and thus became A chosen people, all their actions – whether good or evil – are sacred actions, and their history has become sacred history.”
He considers that the Zionists inherited this solutionist vision that manifests itself in “the confusion between chronological history and sacred history. The history mentioned in the Qur’an – or the stories mentioned in it – is not chronological history, but rather a history that aims to guide people.”
Hence, the stories of the prophets – as Dr. Ali Abdul Wahid Wafi explains – are not complete, but certain significant events were chosen, so that the moral lesson becomes clear and the sermon appears.
Hence, it is not possible to talk about Islamic history, but rather the histories of Muslims. Chronological history is the field of chaos, the field of rise and fall, while sacred history is an ideal history, in which the right person is rewarded and the wrongdoer is rewarded. The mission of sacred history is to provide man with standards by which to judge chronological history.
In contrast to this, some Zionists believe that God has resided in history, and thus temporal human history – the field of guidance and misguidance – is mixed with sacred history through which the will of God is revealed, in all its great and small aspects, according to what the late thinker wrote.
Therefore, we find that the Zionists believe that the stories mentioned in the Old Testament (the history of kings and tribes) are sacred and temporal history at the same time. Therefore, we find that the biblical stories are presented in full with all their facts. The facts of the history of the Hebrew kings – for example – are presented in full from the time the king ascended the throne until his death.
The goal is not to preach or provide the believer with moral standards, but rather the goal is to monitor all the facts, as they are the subject of solutions, and they are important in themselves, as they transcend good and evil, and therefore cannot be judged by any moral standards, according to Al-Mesiri’s expression.
Arab world
In his article “The new Middle East in the American-Zionist perceptionAl-Mesiri says, “It can be said with great confidence that the Western strategy towards the Islamic world since the middle of the 19th century stems from the belief in the necessity of dividing the Arab and Islamic world into different ethnic and religious states, in order to make it easier to control.”
He continues, “This perception of the Middle East stems from the perception that history has completely stopped in this region, and that the Arab people will remain merely a tool in the hands of most of its rulers who blindly submit to the United States.”
He continues, “Within the framework of partition, the Zionist settler state, which is firmly planted in the Arab body, becomes a natural and even a leading state. Partition is, in fact, a process of normalization of the Zionist state, which suffers from its structural anomaly, as it is a foreign body implanted in the Arab region.”
Al-Mesiri considers that this view underlies a vision that considers the Arab East to be merely a space or region without history or common heritage, inhabited by unrelated religious and ethnic groups that have no historical memory or sense of dignity. The Arab is a materialistic, economic creature driven by materialistic economic motives, according to this vision.
