BIODATA
Hichem Djaït is currently professor emeritus of history at Tunis University. He was a visiting professor at several universities, including Berkeley in 1974, McGill in 1977 and Collège de France in 1988. His books include ازمة الثقافة الاسلامية (Crisis of the Islamic culture), Beirut, Dar al-Tali‘a, 2001; La grande discorde: Religion et politique dans l’Islam des origines (The great discord: religion and politics in Islam), Paris, Gallimard, 1989; Al-Kufa, naissance de la ville islamique (Al-Kufa, birth of the Islamic city), Paris, Maisonneuve et Larose, 1986; Europe and Islam: Cultures and Modernity, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1985; and La personnalité et le devenir arabo-islamique (The Arab-Islamic personality and destiny), Paris, Le Seuil, 1974. Born in 1935 in Tunis, Djaït became agrégé in history in 1962 and received his Ph.D. in history and social sciences in 1981 from the Sorbonne.
SYNOPSIS
Djaït evolved from a sympathetic commentator on the Arab reception of modernity to a fundamental critic of the accepted versions of early Islamic history and their effects on Muslim life and politics.
EXCERPT (Translated)
Certain departments of orientalism, among others, contributed to the negative inherited views of the West toward the "Orient" and compelled it to adopt hostile and unfair positions vis-à-vis Arabs and Muslims. This attitude, says Hichem Djaït, was characterized by a rigid psychological perception of Islam and a self and the other-focused tendency that nearly blasts the thought, culture and the very mentality of the different other.
This has undermined orientalism's status because it was depicted as merely having filled the vacuum that once existed when Arabs and Muslims were weak and falling behind, culturally and scientifically, as well as during colonialism and its negative consequences.
This rigid perception had elevated the Western self in an irrational fashion that contradicts the West's description of the different other as an "irrational" being, as well as its intellectual and cultural marginalization of that other. Furthermore, the West has worked on establishing a cultural and historical memory revolving around the Western self–a self that is distinguished from the other who lacks the West's superior rational, cultural and ethnic attributes.
–"The Madrid Religion Dialogue Conference: Action and Expectations," Al Hayat, July 26, 2008
EXCERPT (Original in Arabic- Link)
إن الموروث السلبي عند الغرب،الذي غذته بعض دوائر الاستشراق وغيرها من الدوائر،جعلته يتخذ مواقف سلبية ومعادية وغير منصفة للعرب والمسلمين. وهذه الرؤية – كما
يقول هشام جعيط – اتسمت «برؤية سيكولوجية جامدة للإسلام و بنزعة مركزية للأنا والآخر تكاد تنسف فكر وحضارة، بل وعقلية الآخر المختلف. وهذه قللت كثيراً من وضعية الاستشراق وربما مكانته، إذ صور أنه ملأ الفراغ الذي وجده في فترة من الفترات وهي فترة ضعف العرب والمسلمين وتراجعهم العلمي والثقافي وكذلك فترة الاستعمار ونتائجه السلبية. وهذه الرؤية الجامدة أيضاً في بعض منطلقاتها ضخمت «الأنا» بصورة لا عقلانية، وتخالف ما يطرحونه
للآخر المختلف بأنه «لا عقلاني» ناهيك عن قدراته وملكاته العقلية والفكرية وإقصاء الآخر وتهميشه فكرياً وثقافياً، والعمل على تأسيس ذاكرة تاريخية ثقافية محورها «الأنا» الغربي وتميزه وتفوقه بصفات وخصائص يفتقدها الآخر عقلياً وحضارياً وعرقياً.
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