Islamism as a Translingual Practice: Travelling Concepts in Al-Yasar Al-Islamic (the Islamic Left)

The redefinition of concepts from the Islamic tradition has been common in contemporary Islamist discourse (Maher, 2016). It was also usual the deployment of notions from Enlightenment thought by both liberal thinkers (Khuri-Makdisi 2010, 2016; and Abu-`Uksa, 2016) and Islamists themselves (Gómez, 2018). However, the conceptual travelling between Marxism and Islamism is much less known. This practice transcends the merely linguistic framework and the North-South sense that is common in other areas of the conceptual history of contemporary Arab ideologies. In this paper we will use Edward Said's paradigm of travelling theories (Said 1986 and 2000), Lydia H. Liu's notion of translingual practice (Liu 1995), and Reinhart Koselleck's foundations for a "fundamental concept" (Koselleck 2006) to analyze basic notions of the ideology of "the Islamic Left" (al-yasar al-islami), the so-called group of Egyptian thinkers led by Hasan Hanafi. In 1981, a sort of manifesto was published in the journal Al-Yasar al-Islami. From this text, we will analyze how the naturalization of fundamental concepts of Marxism took place. Our hypothesis is that waqi‘ (reality, materiality, conditions) is a core concept for understanding the Islamic semantics of historical materialism, revolution and cultural hegemony in the approach of the Islamic Left. We believe that in order to draw an inclusive history of Arab Marxism, it may be helpful to draw a history of concepts starting from the Arabic language itself, without focusing mainly on the translation of Western voices, but instead looking for the intelligibility of Marxist concepts at their intersection with Islamic modes of expression.