The Review and Critique of Hassan Hanafi’s Heritage Reconstruction Project

Heritage and modernity are among the most challenging and perhaps the most sensitive issues of the last two hundred years of the Islamic world, around which different and sometimes contradictory, extremist, and deviant readings and approaches have been formed. Undoubtedly, this issue is one of the common and frequent topics in the intellectual discourse of the Arab world and has attracted the attention of many thinkers. Hassan Hanafi (1935) is a thinker, theorist, and one of the most prominent contemporary religious modernists. His project of heritage reconstruction is one of the great projects in the Arab Islamic world. Hanafi launched a project to rethink and rebuild the legacy of the past to resolve the crises and challenges of the Islamic-Arab world. This present descriptive-analytical study aims to review and critique Hassan Hanafi’s heritage reconstruction project. The study addresses the following questions: What is the definition of heritage from Hanafi’s point of view? What are the components of the Hanafi’s heritage reconstruction project? What are Hanafi’s intellectual foundations in this project? What is the Hanafi approach to this project? What are heritage readings? This study uses two articles of Nasrullah Aghajani as benchmarks. The results show that according to Hanafi, heritage reconstruction is made in special ways, some of which involve language and words, some refer to meanings and concepts, and some to the very nature of objects and subjects.

Modernity in the Arab world began from the moment the Arab thinker realized that the Westerners were ahead of him and that he was still lagging behind. The beginning of this moment is mentioned in the attack of Napoleon Bonaparte in the late 18th century. That is, modernity did not originate from the context of an internal cultural revolution. Some see it as a moment of cultural invasion and the spread of Western colonialism in the Arab world. Modernity allowed the Arab intellect to discover itself, its shortcomings, and its space. The clash between the Islamic and Western systems took place during Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798, which led to their confrontation and affected the people. The issue of heritage and modernity is one of the most important challenging issues in contemporary Arab thought in the 1970s, especially if we look at the vast amount of writings, researches, and seminars that have dealt with this subject. Hassan Hanafi (born 1935, Cairo) was a thinker, theorist, and one of the most prominent contemporary Egyptian religious modernists. He was an Islamic theorist, a graduate of the French Sorbonne University, and taught and researched in many universities in Arab countries. He had the middle ground between fundamentalism and secular currents. Hanafi became famous for his Islamic leftist views and the intellectual project called ‘heritage reconstruction’. Hanafi works in the three areas of reconstruction of Islamic heritage, western studies, and the recognition of issues related to the contemporary reality of Muslims.

The present study critiques Hanafi’s heritage reconstruction project using a descriptive-analytical approach. Articles have already been written on Hanafi’s intellectual foundations, methodology, and Western studies project. We can even refer to numerous and noteworthy articles (e.g. Nasrullah Aghajani and his book entitled Islam and Modernity in Egypt).  The two studies of Aghajani have been considered in this study as benchmarks of criticizing Hanafi’s heritage reconstruction: ‘Islamic heritage in the grip of modernity: a critique of Hassan Hanafi's approach in the reconstruction of Islamic heritage’ and ‘the methodology of Hassan Hanafi's intellectual system’.

In Aghajani’s first study, the issue of modernization and ways of modernizing heritage, which is considered in the present study, is mentioned. But the project of heritage reconstruction and its components and readings, the difference between modernity and innovation, and other issues raised in the present, have not been considered by Aghajani. In the second study, Hanafi’s methodology including the epistemological and non-epistemological fields affecting his intellectual system is stated and only influential people and schools are mentioned and Hanafi’s reconstruction project is not discussed.
Hanafi presented a project called ‘heritage reconstruction’ to solve the contemporary crises of the Islamic-Arab world, which is one of his most important intellectual projects based on conceptualization. He refers to the legacy of spiritual data left over from the history of Islam in the fields of traditional epistemology. He believes the tradition itself must be achieved by suspending existing interpretations. Hanafi has a utilitarian view of the Islamic tradition that should be reconstructed in that part of the Islamic tradition. This view is in line with the conditions of the Islamic world. Hanafi describes the Islamic heritage phenomenologically according to Husserl's phenomenology.