Islam, Psychoanalysis, and the Arabic Freud | Omnia El Shakry

E291 | A tale of mutual ignorance between psychoanalysis and Islam has obscured the many creative and co-constitutive encounters between these two traditions of thought, both so prominent in the 20th century. This presumed incommensurability has hardened the lines between the "modern subject," assumed to be secular and Western, and its Others, often associated with Islam or with the East. In this episode on her forthcoming book, The Arabic Freud, Dr. Omnia El Shakry asks what it might mean to think psychoanalysis and Islam together as a "creative encounter of ethical engagement." She shows how psychoanalysts and thinkers in Egypt after World War II drew on Freud and Horney alongside Ibn 'Arabi and Abu Bakr al-Razi to explore the nature of the modern subject, the role of the unconscious, and the gendered process of ethical attunement. In so doing, she suggests that Arabic psychoanalytic texts were neither epiphenomenal to politics nor simply political allegory for nationalism or decolonization; rather, we have ethical and historiographical responsibilities to read these texts and others like them as something more than a product of their time. More at http://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2017/01/arabic-freud.html Omnia El Shakry is Associate 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 (Stanford UP, 2007) and The Arabic Freud: Psychoanalysis and Islam in Modern Egypt (Princeton UP, 2017, forthcoming), as well as editor of the multi-volume Gender and Sexuality in Islam (Routledge, 2016). Susanna Ferguson is a Ph.D. Candidate in Middle Eastern History at Columbia University. She is currently working on a dissertation entitled "Tracing Tarbiya: Women, Gender and Childrearing in Egypt and Lebanon, 1865-1939." Credits Episode No. 291 Release Date: 8 January 2017 Recording Location: University of California, Davis Audio editing by Chris Gratien Music: from archive.org - Harmandali - Recep Efendi, Cemal Efendi; from Excavated Shellac - Munira al-Mahdiyya – Aldahre Kataâ Awsali Special thanks to Kara Güneş for permission to use the composition "Istanbul" in the outro. Bibliography available at http://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2017/01/arabic-freud.html