The Arabic Freud: Psychoanalysis and Islam in Modern Egypt

Omnia El Shakry is professor of history at the University of California, Davis. She is the author of The Great Social Laboratory: Subjects of Knowledge in Colonial and Postcolonial Egypt and the editor of Gender and Sexuality in Islam.

She explores how Freudian ideas of the unconscious were crucial to the formation of modern discourses of subjectivity in areas as diverse as psychology, Islamic philosophy, and the law. The first in-depth look at how postwar thinkers in Egypt mapped the intersections between Islamic discourses and psychoanalytic thoughtIn 1945, psychologist Yusuf Murad introduced an Arabic term borrowed from the medieval Sufi philosopher and mystic Ibn ‘Arabi—al-la-shu‘ur—as a translation for Sigmund Freud’s concept of the unconscious. Mapping the points of intersection between Islamic discourses and psychoanalytic thought, it illustrates how the Arabic Freud, like psychoanalysis itself, was elaborated across the space of human difference.. Founding figures of Egyptian psychoanalysis, she shows, debated the temporality of the ps

From the Back Cover"In a world in which Islam is all too often thought to be incompatible with a ‘secular’ Western thought system like psychoanalysis, The Arabic Freud demonstratesspectacularlythat nothing could be further from the truth. At issue is not just the question of the nafs as psyche, but of the psyche as soul."--Stefania Pandolfo, University of California, Berkeley"A much-needed addition to modern Arab intellectual history. El Shakry rebuts the binary opposition between