Thread by @HusseinAboubak

An authentically German Islam
In May 1944, the Arab giant of letters Taha Hussein announced the birth of the first Arab modern philosophy after spending 6 hours examining the first PhD philosophy candidate in modern Muslim and Arab history, Abdulrahman Badawi. Badawi's /1

dissertation attempted to provide a mystical Islamic Sufi synthesis of Heidegger's phenomenological existentialism to solve the problem of cultural authenticity. He fused German idealist mysticism with Islamic mysticism. In other words, he created an Islam that is /2

authentically German. Badawi became the first modern Arab philosopher and the founder of Arab and Muslim philosophical studies.
In 2000, Badawi published his autobiography in two volumes in which he admitted he had profound Nazi sympathies. He told a story about how in 1937 /3

when he was sent to Munich to learn German, he met Hitler in person and was mesmerized by his charm during the opening of the House of German Art At Munich. Badawi wrote of how he was captivated by Hitler's long speech about German artistic authenticity and how he called to /4

abandon degenrate art. According to his autobio, his encounter led him to be fascinated with Nazism and pour over Nazi literature such as Mein Kamp and Rosenberg's The Myth of the 20th Century. He subscribed to the newsletters of the Nazi party and brought a lot of literature /5

with him back to Egypt. In his own words, the experience allowed him to feel a "deep and profound connection" to the German spirit. In 1938 after his return to Egypt, he joined fascist-inspired Young Egypt and wrote several pamphlets and booklets introducing Nazism in Arabic./6

In 1939, he wrote the first Arabic book on Nietzsche, a book professed later by many figures such as Nasser and Sadat to have touched them. It was his love for Nazism that made him so fond of Heidegger. Badawi later resigned from Young Egypt and led mostly an apolitical life /7

except for a brief period in the mid-50s when he was helping in drafting the Egyptian constitution. Badawi at the time was considered one of the primary figures of the Arab Left, and in the 1960s he appeared on the TV in the inquisition prepared for Taha Hussein.
Eventually, /8

Badawi's prolific writings provided an existentialist reading of Islam and Islamic history. They embroiled all modern Arab culture in an impossible intellectual battle of an impossible Heideggerian dichotomy of Islamic authenticity and Western modernity. Badawi shaped modern /9

Arab intellectual culture. He taught in Cairo, Kuwait, Tehran, and Paris. According to the eminent Lebanese thinker George Tarabishy, Badawi was"undoubtedly one of the intellectual makers of this Arab generation... his 120 published books left an indelible mark on modern Arab /10

culture and how Arab intellectuals see the Arab past and the Western present." Indeed Badawi's work reinvented the Muslim tradition and Islamic history, and his Heideggerian shadow still hangs over all Arab discussions of turath, authenticity, kalam, and philosophy. It is fair/11

to say he built the modern Arab intellectual basis of conceptualizing Islam. When Muslims or Islamists shed rivers of tears over the lost innocence of Islamic authenticity, it is a German voice speaking through them.