This paper sets out to analyze the tense relation between the critiques of colonial psychiatry, present in a diverse range of Maghrebin writings whether francophone or Arabic, literary or historical, and the frequent recourse to the unconscious, abjection, resistance, projection and other mechanisms of psychoanalytic reflection on subjectivity. Given the wide spread repudiation of ethnopsychiatry and the predominance of a critique of colonial predation that argues madness, psychosis and sociopathy are indeed products of colonial rule, it is striking that present social ills and historical loss are still so often approached through figures of a psychic inscription of symbolic lack or injury. Histories of colonial psychiatry in the Maghreb (Jalil Bennani, Jock McCulloch, Richard Keller) have since 1995 publicized and documented the role played by French colonial psychiatric hospitals in Morocco and Algeria in advancing French psychiatric research through experimentation on a subject people. As early as the 1950’s political theorists Frantz Fanon and Albert Memmi and novelists Kateb Yacine and Driss Chraibi denounced colonial rule and demonstrated its production of mental disturbance in the colonized by mobilizing psychoanalytic tropes as critical tools. The analysis of symbolic and psychological harm wrought by the colonial relation forms one foundation of the discourse of decolonization and continues to be recognized as an enduring legacy of the period preceding independence and national sovereignty. Today, practicing psychoanalysts Jalil Bennani and Fethi Benslama treat the mental ills of postcolonial subjects in diaspora and at home and are reinventing psychoanalysis through cultural translation despite the intractable problem of its historical legacy. Stefania Pandolfo’s ethnographies of the meeting of medical discourses and patients’s accounts, continues to show that traditional therapies attributing mental suffering to djinn possession can flourish alongside medical treatment of psychiatric disturbances. The model of queer theory’s negotiation with a similar legacy wherein psychiatry produced the worst justifications for homophobia is instructive. Like the postcolonial psychoanalyst who theorizes the subject within modern science, the queer theorist has been obliged to rethink and reinvent critical tools for the analysis of subjectivity from out of this heritage. Thus psychoanalysis is renewed through a resistance to theory produced by the objects of psychiatry. Examination of this paradox in Bennani’s work on intercultural analysis exposes the transmission of this medical and historical legacy in contemporary subjects and points to new subjectivities in the making.

This paper considers how psychoanalysis travelled in postwar Egypt, primarily through an exploration of the journal Majallat 'Ilm al-Nafs, published in Cairo and co-edited by Yusuf Murad and Mustafa Ziywar between 1945-1953. The journal, illustrative of the emerging disciplinary space of psychology in Egypt in the 1940s, understood psychology as a science of selfhood and the soul, rather than the empirical study of mental processes. In stark contrast to the so-called “tale of mutual ignorance” between Islam and psychoanalysis asserted by Fethi Benslama, the paper traces a tale of historical interactions, hybridizations, and interconnected webs of knowledge production between Egypt and Europe. It explores the points of condensation, divergence, and the epistemological resonances that psychoanalytic writings had in postwar Egypt. Tracing the formation of a modern Arab psychological subject in fields as diverse as psychology, Islamic philosophy, and the law, I demonstrate that psychoanalysis was a tradition with deep and varied roots in the Egyptian postwar setting, not only among psychologists and mental health professionals, but also among Islamic thinkers and legal practitioners. More specifically, I argue that postwar scholars translated and blended key concepts from psychoanalysis and psychology with classical Islamic concepts, thereby putting forth a dynamic and dialectical approach to selfhood that emphasized the unity of the self, while often insisting on an epistemological and ethical heterogeneity from European psychoanalytic thought, embodied in a rejection of the dissolution of the self and of the death drive. The co-production of psychoanalytic knowledge across Arab and European knowledge formations definitively demonstrates the outmoded nature of historical models that presuppose originals and bad copies of the global modern subject—herself so constitutively defined by the presence of the unconscious. Beyond its contribution to the study of Arab intellectual history, an understanding of the body of work developed in Majallat 'Ilm al-Nafs enables us to reconsider that quintessential question of modernity, the question of the self, in a non-European context. Indeed, the story of the historical emergence of modern languages of the self in twentieth century Egypt moves us away from binary models of selfhood as either modern or traditional, Western or non-Western, and unsettles the assumption of an alleged incommensurability between psychoanalysis and Islam.

This paper explores uses of psychological and Islamic discourses in efforts to reform public secondary education in independent Hashimite Iraq (1932-58). These efforts targeted adolescence as a critical and precarious stage of psychological development and were often attempts to discipline politically transgressive youth with leftist sympathies. I focus on the writings of three leading educational theorists, Sati` al-Husri, Sami Shawkat, and `Ali al-Wardi. While there were important differences in their pedagogical philosophies, all were critical of “will” or “reason” as a determinant of human action, arguing that the science of psychology had demonstrated that effective education worked on the senses, the body, feeling, and the unconscious rather than on the intellect. And all criticized what they saw as the backwardness of Islam in their time, which was manifested in 1) the scholastic preoccupation of Islamic authorities with ideas, texts, and speech that worked only on the planes of reason and the conscious mind rather than on those of the body and the unconscious, and were therefore ineffective; and 2) Islamic pedagogies such as memorization, chanting, and rocking back and forth, which did work on the body and the unconscious and were effective, namely in producing mindless fanatics dependent on the guidance of external authorities rather than modern, self-disciplined subjects with developed interiorities. The problem for these secular reformers was thus not that Islam in their time concerned itself strictly with the soul, or perversely with the body, or that it saw itself as a set of ethical pedagogies rather than private beliefs (as suggested by three recent scholarly narratives). It was that it failed to provide “education for real life,” which meant 1) life that would ultimately contribute to the nation’s economic development; and 2) life that moved in its own stable linear time through specific psychological stages of development and according to the differences between the two sexes. Once the practices responsible for this failure had been carefully disavowed, Islam reappeared in the writings of these thinkers, not on either side of a soul/body divide but as a means of cultivating morality understood as sexual difference and heteronormativity. “Islamic” education (seen as best taught by those trained at Baghdad Teachers College, not in Islamic institutions) thus became especially important in the reform of secondary schools, where, it was hoped, it could help adolescents successfully traverse the perilous stage of life after puberty by disciplining their newly awakened sexual instincts.

What kind of language forms the properly “modern” Arab subject? Writing in 1893 in the Cairo periodical _al-Azhar_, British engineer Sir William Willcocks called on Egyptians to shed a purportedly artificial, dead language—formal written Arabic (fusha)—and to write in the colloquial idiom (‘ammiyya). Lack of a “natural,” “living” literary language, he opined, stymies the originality that drives scientific progress, hence modernity. Juxtaposing engineering diagrams with his translations of Shakespeare into colloquial Egyptian, Willcocks brings his point to life, presaging the contemporary Egyptian psychoanalyst Moustapha Safouan, whose _al-Kitaba wa-l-Sulta_ (2001) denounces the “hypnotic power” of fusha to submit the modern Arab subject to cognitive “despotism.” In 1912, Ottoman-Palestinian intellectual Ruhi al-Khalidi likewise valorized ordinary language in a second edition of his 1904 study of French and Arabic literatures, _‘Ilm al-Adab ‘inda al-Ifrinj wa-l-‘Arab_. Al-Khalidi rejected the premodern Arabic conventions of rhymed prose, its “glitter” and “vain luxury of useless words.” Better “to be clear, precise, and accessible” to an Arabic-speaking world increasingly “organized on the European model,” to introduce French literature in a simplified language modeled on Europe’s and thus “propagate modern ideas” among his Arab readers. This paper will read Willcocks and al-Khalidi as pedagogues who invoke new ideologies of language to re-form the modern Arab subject in the image of the European. Both, I argue, tie the Arab’s potential to become “modern” to the use of vernacular language. For Willcocks, the vernacular means colloquial Egyptian. For al-Khalidi it refers, counterintuitively, to a standard written Arabic gutted from within, eviscerated of “useless” rhetorical flourishes, stripped to a plainspoken concreteness associated with the “real.” Speakers of Arabic once held the language to be “incomparable,” in part because, as the language of the Qur’an, it bespoke the inimitability of the word of God. Redefining eloquence as a feature that Arabic shares with other tongues, al-Khalidi premises that redefinition on the modern tendency, common to all languages, to make words mirror worlds. Literary Arabic is now “eloquent” insofar as it serves science and helps its users climb the imperial “ladder of civilization.” In a modern world in which empiricism and empire traveled together, language could no longer revel in itself; it had to point, clearly and precisely, to life. Taken together, I conclude, Willcocks and al-Khalidi reveal that the languages of literature and science that come to define the “soul” of modern Arab subjectivity are at once imperially and empirically worldly.