Thread by @mullasadra

The Egyptian philosopher ʿAbd al-Rahman al-Badawi (1917-2002) is perhaps one of the most underrated thinkers of #ContemporaryArabThought - a major #Heideggerian_existentialist #Sufism and #IslamicPhilosophy specialist who studied at Fuad I (later #Cairo) University 1/

Many of us who study #IslamicThought know him for his editions of #ArabicAristotle #ArabicPlato #ArabicPlotinus as well as editions of the work of #Avicenna #IbnSabin #SiwanalHikma and others - without his efforts we would not have editions of the #PlotinianaArabica 2/

In the 1930s he studied in Cairo and obtained his PhD in 1944 supervised by #AlexandreKoyré (1892-1964) on the notion of 'existential time' that engages with #Heidegger - this like his other early works was published by #DaralNahdaalMisriya 3/

When he defended his thesis, Taha Husayn (1889-1973) heralded it as the 'beginning of modern Arab philosophy' as reported in #AlAhram on May 30, 1944 as cited in Di-Capua 4/

Another early interest was #Sufism and #Avicenna as a student of ʿAlī ʿAbd al-Rāziq (1888-1966) which led to his other early work on the concept of the #InsanKamil or #PerfectHuman as manifestation of the divine in the monism of the #IbnArabiSchool 5/

He was not the first - but in a sense was in an #Islamicate context - to link #Heideggerian_existentialism with #mysticism and he wrote his MA dissertation on 'Le Problème de la mort dans la Philosophie Existentielle' published much later in the 1960s 6/

Both #existentialism and #Sufism focused on the #subjectivity of the individual in which the concepts of #Dasein and #InsanKamil came together 7/

He also wrote Humam al-shabāb on the #existentialist malaise of the colonial situation in #Egypt that signalled his later political activism in involvement in writing the constitution of 1952 8/

Later #Marxism and #SartreanExistentialism eclipsed #Heidegger in the #Arab context but #CharlesMalik remained faithful, there has been a more recent rise in interest in him in #Iraq and elsewhere and at least since the 1960s he has been a mainstay of Iranian #existentialists 9/

His disillusionment with Egyptian politics despite his chair in 1959 at ʿAyn Shams University, he went into exile first in #Benghazi after 1967 and then via #Tehran in 1973 to #Kuwait where he taught 1974-1982 where many of his works were republished and then #Paris 10/

In 2002 he published two volumes of his memoirs that are a critical account of #ContemporaryArabThought and politics 11/

More recently the University of #Erlangen has become a major centre for the study of #ContemporaryArabThought and the Syrian philosopher Hala Ali wrote a dissertation on him in 2009 opus4.kobv.de/opus4-fau/fron… 12/

There is of course a partial study of Badawi in #DiCapua but also in Sevinç Yasargil's contribution to #IslamicateHeidegger 13/

significance of Badawi lies not only in his reception of #EuropeanPhilosophy (writing pioneering works on #Nietzsche and #Kant) but also in his conceptualisation of #history, #memory and the notion of #turath that is central to the enterprise of #ContemporaryArabThought 14/

A small footnote to this - I read this piece recently which is very interesting on the process of editing #ArabicAristotle nature.com/articles/s4159…