Waad & Nasr: Conversations

In the months of January, February and into the early days of March, 2022, Waad began to sketch out a fledgling sense of companionship with Nasr Hamid Abu Zeid (1943–2010). It was one essay of Nasr’s in particular that Waad came to focus on: “Reading turath in Ahmed Sadiq Saad’s texts.” Over these couple of months, Waad shared with those around her flickers of her engagement with Nasr and, through him, with Sadiq Saad (1919–1988), staging a kind of intergenerational conversation from the starting point of our own unfolding present. Something in that essay spoke to her in such powerful ways that she came to “have a sense Nasr will be the main companion to my journey” (February 15). This was a journey toward anthropology — after years of building out a practice as an economic reporter — a journey propelled by a desire to create a space from which haunting questions could finally be articulated and then engaged with. For years, these questions have been there, and, for years, they have eluded all attempts at articulation, she wrote (January 24).

For those who knew Waad, those haunting questions had as much to do with the questions themselves as they did with the spaces she occupied. From economic journalism to political organizing to academic research, Waad was in search of a structure of thought and feeling more than a pulpit: how can we — and Waad was not content to think of this we as some disinterested observer — move beyond ideological decoration or simple descriptive glossing of the social, economic and political problems that undergird the lives of so many? How can we find a way of speaking and thinking and most importantly caring that would measure up to the demands of the present?

While reality offers plenty of contexts to think through these questions, as it did for Nasr and Sadiq Saad in their own historical present, for Waad, the reality that came to fascinate her was that of the brickmakers of Ayyat, a town about an hour drive south of downtown Cairo. She first became aware of this reality in a complex way in 2016 while working with Ahram Online. The Social Solidarity Ministry had organized a press visit to lionize their post-2013 intervention in social provision to various labor sectors, including to the brickmakers of Ayyat, and Waad was sent along by her editor to take down the ministry’s official line. Ayyat is the type of place that only registers in the wider political consciousness when a minister visits or when workers force themselves onto the scene. Only then does the domestic press take a snapshot of the realities of this marginal space. But it is a snapshot that aims to quiet, rendering whatever potential political voice as mere clamor, din, complaint and thereby interchangeable with any other complaint. But as Waad trailed after the ministerial convoy, coming to rest at a high point overlooking the town, something bigger impressed itself upon her, and the circumscribed nature of the task of conveying the ministry’s grandeur gave way to something else. Out in the town, she could see smoke rising from the hundreds of kilns below, the individual stories of all those she had briefly met somehow coming together in this new view afforded by the horizon of sight. Ayyat is a brickmaker town, one that has been dominated by a single type of work for generations, a town that supplies the raw material for greater Cairo’s ever-widening gyre of self-built housing, a town where boys start working at the brick kilns that give them their daily bread but also slowly kill them until they must pass the trade onto their sons. Somehow, in that moment, it was as if Waad could figure a social body in formation, its histories as ephemeral as the smoke painted on the sky.

Waad would try to write this history many times in the years to come. In a 2019 production plan email, she wrote, “I will take up a long read on the bricks factory in Ayyat from the lens of intergenerational labor dynamics vis-a-vis state 'intervention' and 'regulation' of the private sector.” But like the attempts that came before this one, she gave up on the piece, sensing the chasm between the urgency and the available tools she had at her disposal.

When she embarked on an anthropology degree at the American University in Cairo in 2021, Ayyat returned, but this time outside the confines of journalism as a genre. She turned instead to a proposed ethnography (her MA thesis) on the social space of the town and the community from where brick-factory workers are drawn, “a study of capitalist relations in their singularity” — what she was beginning to formulate as a turn toward studying social space through muayashat (معايشات, singular معايشة, her preferred rendition of “ethnography” into Arabic) (January 24, February 15, March 7).

And with the return of Ayyat and the emergence of anthropology as a container for thinking, there was also the entrance of Nasr. Through their conversations, the impasse of earlier moments began to be dispelled by an emerging vocabulary. Their conversations and companionship were deeply generative, and it was very easy for Waad to recognize early on that “this one chapter by Nasr is life changing begad” (February 4).

But what is it exactly about Nasr’s essay that was helping her cross the chasm of silence, laying the ground for the practice of a shared-inhabiting (ethnography as muayasha) of social space? Following the flickers we have of Waad’s conversations with Nasr, we trace threads of these asynchronous conversations among intergenerational companions attempting to engage with the social body.

I.

“I have a theory.” 

The meaning of Waad’s playful tone in this text is clear: the brevity of the statement, its abruptness and the claims to theory are all clues of playfulness. It is a good sign that her COVID is receding and that further elaboration, which will be equal parts quirky and insightful, is coming. 

“Nasr Hamid Abu Zeid was an anthropologist,” she writes (February 14). It is quirky since he, in fact, was not an anthropologist.

But Waad had evidence to support her theory.

The first was a screenshot from a book she was reading, where the author says, “the ethnographic ‘field,’ therefore, has always been as much characterized by absences as by presences” (February 14 — the emphasis is Waad’s). A voice note immediately follows to expound on the resonances between how Nasr understands tradition as a field of competing practices — rather than as an object, for example, consisting of a restricted textual canon — as well as an articulated position within a broader social sphere: “One of the things I really liked about the chapter by Nasr was when he” — she pauses to reframe the thought with the aside “his descriptions of things were really gripping” before continuing — “so when he was talking about tradition as a location in and for social struggle, he was also talking about presence and absence, which is very similar to how we — how this paragraph describes — the ethnographic work in the field” (February 14).

The following day comes bearing further proof: another screenshot — this time of the contents page of Nasr’s book Dawa’er al-Khawf: Qira’a fi Khitab al-Mar’a (The Spheres of Fear: A Reading of the Discourse on Women, al-Markaz al-Thaqafi al-Arabi, 2007) with a salmon-colored circle around the title of the first chapter, “The anthropology of language and the wounding of identity.” She goes on to remark that, “it is interesting how aware he was of anthropological theories and how he worked with them... he has also worked at the intersection between anthro and comparative lit” (February 14).

Why did it matter for Waad that the author of “Reading turath in Ahmed Sadiq Saad’s texts” was “an anthropologist?” Waad had begun her MA degree in anthropology in the autumn of 2021, and with that came an interrogation of the discursive housing she now found herself in. This was by no means a straightforward endorsement of anthropology as such, but rather an attempt to think of what anthropology could mean as re-articulated from her own political commitments.

“There are very real ethical issues with ethnography,” she writes in a text message on March 7. “How to manage performativity, how to sustain relations and boundaries, being very intimate for research purposes then moving away when research is done. It is a tough power dynamic that involves so much larger political, ethical and existential questions in every small interaction. So, a lot of people end up taking a stance against ethnography and dismiss it as inherently colonial. Historically, it was, and in many ways it is still used as such. But then when you dismiss it, you leave knowledge about people and relations with them to the colonial and imperial? Why?!” And what is worse, she goes on to write a few texts later, is that leaving the discipline and research in general to these extractive practices will only heighten the existing paranoia embedded in popular culture, a paranoia built on real histories of exploitation and distrust.

In conversing with Nasr, Waad was trying to think through how anthropology could become muayashat, as she was teasing out how Nasr’s reading of tradition was also a tradition of reading whose resonance goes beyond the field of Quranic or literary studies, since it offers pathways for engaging the dynamic entanglements between social spaces and their traditions.

But you can also hear in her messages how the stakes were much more than the correct theoretical engagement.

“Being around the field with all its confusions,” she muses in a voice note from March 5, “with all its controversial meanings or whatever — or being around people would be a better way to say it in general, and people’s power and dynamics — I have been in isolation for so long, right? But isolation fucks up your perspective, and being around people is just much more grounding in terms of the layers of complexities that we get blinded from when we are just…” She corrects herself to avoid a generalization: “Or people like me, who don’t have abstract minds — when I am just reading theory, I am more vulnerable to very problematic ideas than when I am around people. And then I’m like, wait: things aren’t really like that” (March 5).

The field and Nasr: salves for loneliness.

II.

The headline details of Nasr’s biography are known enough. The afterglow of his high profile apostasy trial in 1995 is still there in the popular consciousness. But the smaller details of Nasr’s life, away from controversy or post-mortem mythologies, give voice to another Nasr, one occupying the margins of social and institutional space, a figure always dissatisfied with constraints, with the formulas of received convention.

Nasr completed his BA in Arabic Language at Cairo University in 1972 at the age of 29. The path he took to reach that moment was far from straightforward. He first completed his vocational degree at the age of 17, took up a government job as an electronic technician in Mahalla al-Kubra to support his family, studied on his own to attain his high school degree (thanawiyya amma) before he finally joined Cairo University. Once he set foot on campus in 1968 — against the backdrop of raging student protests — he wept. He was finally taking the first step toward his dream.

Four years later, he graduated with the highest cumulative average, not just in his department, but in the entire Faculty of Arts. Inter-departmental politics coalesced to block his right to be offered a post at the university. Drawing on the traditions of peasant and small state-employees’ plaints, Nasr sent a telegraph to the president of the university and sat by his door. In a beautiful recounting of this story during an interview, Nasr alludes to the long traditions of complaints in which his action partook. The situation by the president’s door heats up and voices are raised; it feels as if Nasr’s whole future hangs on this moment by the door. As he retells the story, he recalls the depths of injustice he felt, what it means to be a mazlum (a victim of injustice), and the social dangers entailed in squandering the value of hard work. His whole face is overtaken by expressions that can only be the visceral memory of that experience, which took on a different form and tenor in his 1995 tenure case turned apostasy trial — and in the interview, he moves seamlessly between these two stories and moments. Yet, he also can’t help pointing out a comedic dimension to the stand-off by the door.

The administrative manager at the university president’s office, and the university president himself, had no idea what his telegraph meant. He was bringing the vocabulary of small bureaucrats — he had been a small state employee for 12 years at that point — to bear on an entirely different space, where no one seemed to quite understand what “mutazallim bil bab” meant. The “foreignness” and inscrutability of the telegraph weren’t just lexical moves. They are rooted in the way Nasr was drawing on traditions — their vocabulary as much as their social practices — often operative in other social spaces (in this case, governmental offices and, in a different way, the countryside) to speak from/in another social space (here, the university). The attunement to the multiple valences of traditions, as a vocabulary for speaking and acting, allowed Nasr to inhabit his position as a scholar of Quranic studies at the Arabic department in unique ways — the position had its own tradition of infamous litigations of which Nasr was deeply aware (the 1947 case against Ahmed Saad Khalafallah and his thesis advisor Amin al-Khuli is infamous. The controversy resulted in Khalafallah’s thesis being rejected and Khuli being barred from supervising theses in Qur’anic studies. The position in Qur’anic studies remained vacant from that point until Nasr graduated and was selected by his teachers to fill it).

It is impossible, now, to know how much of this detail Waad was aware of. Perhaps it existed for her only as some implicit background feature made manifest in the writing itself: a political life striving — not dissimilar to her own striving — to fashion some space of thinking within the imperfect spaces we can latch onto. It must have been nice to find a companion, to feel an affinity from a depth perhaps not fully known.

III.

“I have a confession.” 

For us, Waad’s friends and family, this was another one of her famous formulations. The ensuing confession would often be of an incredibly innocent deed, something hardly worthy of a confession: she ate too many chocolate cookies, splurged when she was supposed to be taking serious “austerity” measures, fell asleep when she had promised herself to pull an all-nighter to catch up on work, or that she actually secretly enjoys it when Caramella and Meshmesha, her cats, use elaborate tactics to prevent her from using her laptop, demanding that all attention be on them — even as she complains about it and often has to escape their deadlock grip, seeking refuge with her laptop in cafes or the library.

Yet, this time, we are using Waad’s formulation to admit that her statement about Nasr might have been less quirky than initially assumed.

It appears that Nasr was, in fact, engaging with the field of anthropology. During his PhD years, he was introduced to an Egyptian professor, Abdul Hamid M. al-Zein, who specialized in the anthropology of religion and was based in Temple University. Their conversations were a portal into other readings and discussions, and Nasr acknowledged the criticality of their companionship for his PhD dissertation on interpretation in the oeuvre of the towering Sufi thinker Ibn Arabi (1165–1240) — a subject that he would continue to revisit throughout his career. Waad’s discovery of Nasr the “anthropologist” is anchored in a moment in the essay itself. In grappling with that moment, she was weaving the threads of the slowly emerging evidence of Nasr’s relationship to anthropology, not to argue for the influence of the field on him or even to say that one can discover in his work a ready-made manual of practice, ethnographic or otherwise. Rather, Nasr the “anthropologist” names the resonances she felt between the way Abu Zeid in his essay moves to carve out a space from which questions could be posed and engaged with and gave her a way to think about how she was trying to maneuver the new spaces she was finding herself in. How do we cut through the web of impasses that silence our questions before they can ever take form? To engage with Nasr as a companion and read him as an anthropologist is to draw on the suggestiveness of his moves for asking questions on how we can navigate the field, how we might be able to come to grips with the complexity of the present, from which position, and with what vocabulary.  

Nasr’s use of tanmiya is the pivotal site for the convergence of these concerns in his essay, and Waad started from this concept, revisiting it with every discovery of a new piece of evidence. 

Tanmiya is semantically evocative of ideas of growth while being conceptually entangled with notions of development and progress. For those familiar with the concept, its intellectual and political history, it might be difficult to muffle the echoes of developmentalist economism that are sometimes attached to, as well as projected onto, this term and that have, for some, facilitated the facile dismissal of the concerns it encodes. Nasr does not offer us an explicit definitional account of how he sees the term in contradistinction to other uses. Instead, he reveals its meaning through the movement of his thought in the essay, insisting that tanmiya is the often invisible concept and location subtending turath and reading — the two key terms in his title. Defining tanmiya, therefore, requires more than the search for a translational equivalent or an explicit definitional account in lexical terms. Rather, we have to move closer to the texture of the essay, tracing the movements of thoughts through which the concept is grasped as a location and a relationality.

The conversation between Nasr and Sadiq Saad unfolds through three main steps — and the essay is, in fact, divided into three parts that embody the movement of the discussion. Part one situates Sadiq Saad within the existing approaches to reading tradition, which are characterized by a shared impasse. Part two turns to how Sadiq Saad’s preoccupation with tanmiya enables him to bypass some of the foreclosures discussed in part one, and, in so doing, part two also uncovers tanmiya as the crux of curating the relationship between reading and tradition.

Part three in turn offers an instantiation of this interplay between impasse (part one) and bypass (part two) in Sadiq Saad’s approach. The argument moves on an arc that begins with delineating the contemporary approaches to tradition in general — briefly touching on their history — before it incrementally zooms in on Sadiq Saad and then on a specific moment in his corpus. We can describe this arc as moving from a more general wide-lens view to an increasingly more circumscribed focal point, noticing how the scale and unit of analysis become smaller the further along we move in our reading. Yet, this is not exactly a movement from the general to the particular, as much as it is the trail of a question moving to take its form and an explication of that form simultaneously.

While Nasr is careful to distinguish between two main approaches to tradition, he is also haunted by a pressing question on why such clearly different approaches should be subtended by a shared notion of tradition that is wildly de-historicized. If the first approach ventriloquizes tradition and seeks to monopolize it, imposing and reproducing a homogenous reading of a restricted canon as tradition itself, why would the second approach, the one aware of the fact that it is a reading of tradition and not tradition itself, also begin with the same dehistoricized conception and canon? What is producing this puzzling consensus between two antagonistic approaches and positions, the fact that these two positions cannot see their convergence notwithstanding? If there are two broad ways for situating reading in relation to tradition, with the first obliterating the distinction between them (i.e., between reading and tradition) and the second being aware of their distinction, why do both of them subscribe to a shared conception of tradition? The point is not a mere methodological curiosity because the convergence of these two distinct approaches obfuscates the present and the challenges it presses on its inhabitants. This is where tanmiya comes in.

Tanmiya in the essay is not the articulation of an already formed project for progress as much as it is another word for the present. It is the present approached not just in its facticity but also from within the possibility of changing it, to make it something other than what it is by responding to challenges and problems. Consequently, we have to begin from the realization that the actual content of tanmiya is open, but its openness is not absolute or abstract, it is dependent on how we respond to the challenges of the present, and what paths they open up for an alternative future/present. Consequently, the content of tanmiya is at once conversational and conflictual: it is born of a dynamic social process through which alliances and antagonisms are created. The two approaches can be situated as approaches to tanmiya — to the present as changeable. The first invests in the facticity of the present by ossifying tradition. In seeking to silence social dynamism in the present, it has to silence it in the past, imposing a sense of tradition as Truth dissociated from any socio-historical processes. This is not to say that proponents of this first approach may not call for change, but that their “change” is better understood as part of reproducing a largely unchanged present. For example, if they were to advocate for a return to tradition, militating against impure foreign elements, this may signal a discursive change or even a change in access to power, but it would reproduce the deep social dynamics — and it has to therefore be approached as a reproduction of the present rather than change in the strong sense. The confounding mystery for Nasr is why the second approach, the one clearly invested in tanmiya — as a stance from the present — also falls into the same trappings. The answer, once again, is tanmiya. 

Tanmiya is a changeable present, but the vision, direction and content of that change are built through conversations. This is the impasse for the second approach. In assuming that they already know the content, their focus is directed to its dissemination. What this inadvertently means is that conversations are less the space where shared questions could take form and then be seriously engaged, and more a one-directional undertaking, one that necessarily risks repeated failures — since it does not correspond to what tanmiya necessitates. The failure is not confronted as a problem of finding space for conversations and forms for shared questions, but as a failure in disseminating ideas born from the ostensible cultural split in the present between the modern and the traditional. In this way, the second approach finds itself having to relapse onto the already existing conception of tradition, begrudgingly conceding to a cultural(ist) split in the present between the imported and the autochthonous.

Part three gives us an example of this: in reading Kitab al-Kharaj (Book of Taxation) by Qadi Abu Yusuf ibn Yaqub (d. 798), who composed the book as an economic manual for managing state resources during the Abbasid Caliphate — and more specifically addressed to the Caliph Harun al-Rashid (d.809) — Sadiq Saad offers an insightful reading of Abu Yusuf’s economic assumptions, focusing on his biased discarding of labor as a crucial resource. While Sadiq Saad is keen on seeing the book through the prism of socio-political dynamics, he interprets the slight as one owed to pre-modern idealistic thought in general. 

Nasr shows how, in so doing, Sadiq Saad ends up creating the very object (“tradition” as religious, idealistic and incapable of accessing the present) that he assumes. In other words, he finds the tradition that foils the dissemination of the content of tanmiya in Sadiq Saad’s present. Instead, Nasr proposes that Abu Yusuf’s ideology, the fact that he works for Harun al-Rashid — unlike his mentor who refused to work for caliphs — is the culprit for this slight and not a generic idealism. In other words, the specific readings existing in pre-modern tradition are not born just out of a generic religious idealism, and by extension, its seeming continuity into our present is not an (idealistic) element of identity that needs to be maneuvered around through labors of dissemination. Rather, the specific form of premodern traditional thought and its specific position in the present are both born of socio-political dynamics. The failure to see one, to historicize it, is the failure to see the other. A dehistoricized tradition is both the effect and pivot of a dehistoricized present. It is the dynamic through which questions about the present and the search for spaces from where they could be asked are foiled even as one seems to be actively engaged in their pursuit.

P.S.

Waad did make a trip to Ayyat in early March. But rather than serving as a crowning moment after years of fixation and frustration, the trip had left her unable to get out of bed. She skipped class and the gym and neglected basic home functions. 

Grasping at lessons from this space of paralysis, she offers a first pass at a contradiction the trip had unearthed, how it had both galvanized a sense of purpose, even if it pushed against her own limits. “I think I can be very good at it, but emotionally, I am too invested and hence too vulnerable.” 

Lying in her bed, surely flanked by Caramella and Meshmesha, she writes,“I actually worry about my ability to survive, which I really want to. Fa moshkela, I don’t trust myself to be strong.” 

A few minutes later, the dual valences of the trip come into sharper focus: “While I don’t think I am able to do it after that experience, I don’t think I am able to live without doing it. This is truly what gives my life meaning, not political activism but connecting with people and truly caring despite all of the complex layers.” 

How can we offer someone trust in themselves, somewhere here and now, someone in the past? How can we think about practice in the way Waad and Nasr did, as a crafting of space through which to connect with people and truly care despite all of the complex layers that separate us? We want to know. And we wish Waad were here to help us, to send a text, to write about Ayyat. But all that is left are traces. We hope, in reading, you can join this conversation of care.