Islamic Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Islam Cultural

and Clinical Dialogues 1st Edition

Visit the link below to download the full version of this book:

https://medipdf.com/product/islamic-psychoanalysis-and-psychoanalytic-islam-cult
ural-and-clinical-dialogues-1st-edition/

Click Download Now

ISLAMIC
PSYCHOANALYSIS AND
PSYCHOANALYTIC
ISLAM
Cultural and Clinical Dialogues

Edited by Ian Parker and Sabah Siddiqui

First published 2019
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2019 selection and editorial matter, Ian Parker and Sabah Siddiqui; individual
chapters, the contributors
The right of Ian Parker and Sabah Siddiqui to be identified as the authors
of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters,
has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced
or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means,
now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and
recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without
permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation
without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record has been requested for this book

ISBN: 978-0-367-08671-8 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-0-367-08674-9 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-0-429-02369-9 (ebk)

Typeset in Bembo
by Swales & Willis Ltd
CONTENTS

Foreword ix
Ian Parker
List of contributors xiv

Introduction 1
Sabah Siddiqui

1 ‘The unity in human sufferings’: cultural translatability in the

context of Arab psychoanalytic cultural critique 5
Eva Tepest

2 Islam: a manifest or latent content? 18

Maryam Aslzaker and Forough Edrissi

3 Representations of the psyche and its dynamics in Islam:

the work of Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyah 35
Chiara Sebastiani

4 Politics of secular psychoanalysis in India: Hindu-Muslim as

religious and political identities in Sudhir Kakar’s writing 48
Zehra Mehdi

5 Between neutrality and disavowal: being Muslim

psychotherapists in India 60
Shifa Haq and Sabah Siddiqui
viii Contents

6 The repressed event of (Shi’i) Islam: psychoanalysis, the trauma of

Iranian Shi’ism, and feminine revolt 70
Farshid Kazemi

7 Becoming revolution: from symptom to act in the

2011 Arab revolts 88
Nathan Gorelick

8 Decolonizing psychoanalysis/psychoanalyzing Islamophobia 102

Robert K. Beshara

9 Connectedness and dreams: exploring the possibilities of

communication across interpretive traditions 118
Julia Borossa

10 Islam, the new modern erotic 130

Gohar Homayounpour

11 Enduring trouble: striving to think anew 149

Amal Treacher Kabesh

Index 162
FOREWORD
Ian Parker

This book emerges from the international conference Islamic Psychoanalysis/

Psychoanalytic Islam which was organised by the College of Psychoanalysts in the
UK – a professional body open to different traditions in psychoanalysis. We were
fortunate to have the support of the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Arts
and Languages at the University of Manchester and Manchester Psychoanalytic
Matrix. There were speakers and participants from Brazil, Germany, Greece, India,
Iran, Ireland, Italy, Mexico, Turkey, the USA, and the UK. The idea for the
conference sprung from a conversation with a psychoanalyst who visited us from
Brazil last year, João Gabriel Lima da Silva. João was working on the impact of
Christianity on psychoanalysis in Brazil. This is a particular cultural context in
which psychoanalysis is very widespread and in which leading psychoanalysts have
often come from ecclesiastical backgrounds, to the point where it has been claimed
that youngest sons of the middle classes now go into training as psychoanalysts
instead of as priests. It prompted a thought about the way that culture frames
psychoanalysis, including the way that certain psychoanalytic ideas themselves
become thinkable. João pointed out that Christian themes in some forms of
psychoanalysis are powerful but go unnoticed by many practitioners.
This would seem to require us to make those connections explicit so that we
could interrogate them, perhaps in a project called ‘Christian Psychoanalysis/
Psychoanalytic Christianity’. But we wanted to do something more radical than
that. There have already been explorations of the link between Christianity and
psychoanalysis, some of them concerning the question of adaptation, adaptation of
psychoanalysis to society, beginning with Sigmund Freud’s own attempt to make
psychoanalysis more acceptable to his host culture by nominating the son of a
Christian pastor, Carl Jung, as first President of the International Psychoanalytical
Association. Jungians, as well as Freudians, have since tried to disentangle them-
selves from the consequences of that, including the complicity of Jung with
x Foreword

antisemitism. As we know, Jung was willing to become President of the Interna-

tional General Medical Society of Psychotherapy under the control of the Nazis in
1933, while Freud’s books were burnt, and his work condemned as being a ‘Jewish
science’.
If we just track back for a moment, we can see a number of questions
embedded in that claim that psychoanalysis is a ‘Jewish science’, including the
attempts to reclaim Freud as someone grounded in a particularly marginalised
sub-culture, as a Jew in what was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Now, it
does seem problematic to reduce psychoanalysis, whether that is done by its
friends or its enemies, to a particular kind of culture. Freud himself was a secular
Jew, and even his later writings on Moses and monotheism refused a religious
narrative, they rather look designed to provoke Jews as well as gentiles. And,
despite his tactical endorsement of Jung, he held true to psychoanalysis as a
critique of every culture, including the way that overly rationalist versions of the
Western Enlightenment were being installed in Europe. That critique of ration-
ality was to be crucial to the work of the psychoanalytic social theorists of the
Frankfurt School, of course.
A Japanese psychoanalyst commenting on the supposed colonial role of
psychoanalysis in the East once asked whether it was really indeed the case that
Freud was European. What he was getting at was Freud’s place as, we could say
to use a Scottish term, ‘outwith’ culture, both of the dominant Christian culture
of the time and of his own Jewish culture. And this Japanese analyst was also
getting at the status of psychoanalysis not as part of a culture, but as ‘liminal’ to it,
simultaneously part of it and as reflexively critical of it, both in it and at a distance
from it. We can see this liminal status of psychoanalysis in Japan where some
analysts are part of the very marginal Christian sub-culture there and are able to
use that position to reflect on dominant cultural assumptions about childcare,
dependency, and the development of the self. We can also see it in the work of
analysts who forge a link between Freud’s ideas and Japanese Buddhism, using
that link to open up contradictions between common-sense Buddhism and a
deeper reading of it as a metaphysical frame to grasp the evanescence of
subjectivity.
If we take the buried, hidden nature of culture inside different contradictory
forms of psychoanalysis around the world seriously, and if we treat psychoanalysis
as such as something that is never actually psychoanalysis ‘as such’ but is always
necessarily internally divided, then that gives a different vantage point on
the relationship between religion, any religion, and psychoanalytic theory and
psychoanalytic practice. It means that we tell the story (well, stories) of the
emergence and development of psychoanalysis in a different way, and it means
that we see other possible combinations of psychoanalysis with other cultural
forms in a different light. So, even as we elaborate a narrative about the
entanglement of psychoanalysis with culture, we have to bear in mind those
complications. Take this narrative, for example, as one that we came up with,
with João’s help, to frame this research project.
 Foreword xi

The unconscious was invented by Freud at a particular cultural-historical

moment, and it was invented in such a way as to construct and then seem to
unlock the self constructed in the nuclear family. Elements of the theory of
subjectivity that Freud patched together, and patched together differently in
different writings, drew on Judaism, not deliberately but as a function of his
engagement as an outsider with the Christian culture around him and around
his family and sub-cultural networks. And that meant that there was indeed
something ‘Jewish’ about this science of subjectivity and clinical practice that was
able to function, not a prescription for how individuals should be but as a critical
description which aimed at the transformation of who they could be. I am
summarising and condensing a range of reflections on the early nature of the
psychoanalytic movement as possibly, in some way, rooted in the position of the
Jews who comprised it. Notice here, also, the political stakes of Freudian theory
and practice. It does not confirm but subverts taken-for-granted forms of life. In
that sense, the Nazis were right to see it as a threat to order, as a threat to
the capitalist order they were dedicated to saving from ‘Jewish Bolshevism’ or
‘Judeo-Bolshevism’, their specific formulation to describe the enemy.
Psychoanalysis did then break into mainstream culture in the West, through
sensationalist mistranslations of Freud’s work into English, through the arrival in
the United States, and other parts of the world, of psychoanalysts, many of them
Jewish, fleeing Nazism, and through the popularisation of themes of the ego
and the id and dreams and the unconscious through literature and film which
was suited to its more surrealist aspects. And, paradoxically, at the very moment
that Christian culture was becoming secularised, psychoanalysis as a secular
practice had to adapt itself to that culture. That adaptation to US culture,
which then became one of the transmission belts for the popularisation of
psychoanalysis throughout much of the rest of the world, involved the suppres-
sion of many of Freud’s colleagues’ links with the political left, what was
referred to as ‘the repression of psychoanalysis’. What was accepted, though,
was rendered acceptable and tailored to a culture that was still by default
Christian.
Some forms of psychoanalysis fared better than others, and one complaint
levelled against Jacques Lacan in France, who became popular in a culture that
was ostensibly secular, but still suffused with Christian imagery and institutions,
was that he Christianised psychoanalysis. Then we come in a loop back to
where I started, for it was that Lacanian psychoanalysis that pitted itself against
the predominantly Jewish International Psychoanalytical Association and that
arrived in Brazil to become so influential there. Of course, things play out
differently in other parts of the world, and that is where the suspicion that
psychoanalysis is part of a colonial and then postcolonial globalisation of
Western culture takes root. Whether or not Freud himself was or was not
really European, and whether or not psychoanalysts endorsed either the ideolo-
gical compromise formation sometimes named as ‘Judeo-Christian’ culture,
which is actually one in which Judaism is explicitly or implicitly assumed to
xii Foreword

have been superseded by Christianity, or the tradition of the Western Enlight-

enment that likes to pretend that it has transcended both Judaism and Christianity,
is rather beside the point.
The point is that psychoanalysis is hosted by and carries with it a complex series
of debates around these questions, a package structured by those oppositions, and
Western cultural preoccupations. Then the standard mode of engagement with the
rest of the world and with other cultures by psychoanalysis tends to be structured
by, and work alongside, so-called ‘transcultural psychiatry’ or ‘intercultural
psychotherapy’. That is, when psychoanalysts reflect on the dangers of the colonial
imposition of their frame of reference as if it was a worldview, they often replace it
with an attempt to translate their practice into the terms used in other cultures or
respectfully accede to other frameworks. Incidentally, Freud himself never saw
psychoanalysis as a worldview, but as closest to the worldview of science, which,
given the role that scientific rationality has played in versions of the Western
Enlightenment, does not solve but rather gives another twist to the problem.
Coming back to the question of transcultural psychiatry or intercultural psychother-
apy, this is precisely one of the reasons why we did not frame the title of this book
in terms of a simple combination of psychoanalysis and Islam, as if the task was
simply one of conjoining the two, respecting each, and leaving both intact.
Instead, for all of the problems of recuperation, the neutralisation and absorp-
tion of versions of psychoanalysis by its host cultures – something I have stressed
so far in my narrative about the development of psychoanalysis in relation to
Judaism and Christianity – we first of all hold to the critically reflexive and even
subversive nature of psychoanalysis. And, just as psychoanalysis worked because it
was inside as well as outside its host cultures, our bet is that something more
radical can be produced by active engagement now with Islam as something that
operates adjacent to and against ‘Judeo-Christian’ culture and secular forms
psychoanalysis, ‘outwith’ both. Just as Islamic science, the mathematics and
medicine of the Islamic Golden Age, was crucial to the development of what
we like to think of as ‘Western’ science, so we wager that asking what Islamic
psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic Islam might look like forces a question not
about others, the rest of the world, but about us.
I say ‘us’ advisedly. This conference took place in Britain in 2017 with
international visitors to help us work on these questions at times of the increased
segregation of communities, of what we often refer to using the psychologised
shorthand term ‘Islamophobia’. When we discussed the idea for this conference in
the College of Psychoanalysts there was some anxiety. Someone suggested that it
might be provocative, and another suggested that we invite the police. We
discussed, along the way, how this might be complemented by another con-
ference which engaged with the neuropsychological turn and concern with an
evidence-based practice called ‘Scientific Psychoanalysis/Psychoanalytic Science’.
That too would serve to force a question through the compression of terms, to
make visible connections that usually operate outside our immediate awareness,
but operate nonetheless.
 Foreword xiii

The conjunctions and compressions that we posed in the title of the con-
ference and now this book are designed to avoid either the usual attempts to give
psychoanalytic readings of Islam or to invite Islamic scholars to tell us what is
wrong with psychoanalysis. Rather, the task is much more difficult, and perhaps
it is impossible, and none the worse for being impossible – remember that
psychoanalysis is an impossible profession – to do at least two things. First, and
there are political stakes to this, to welcome into psychoanalysis Islamic traditions
and reflections on tradition, not as complementary but as intimately part of the
project of psychoanalysis as a critical description and transformation of contem-
porary subjectivity. And, second, to ask whether the next historic wave of
psychoanalytic work, after the first two waves of Jewish and Christian-inflected
theory, will come from Islam as a growing cultural force.
CONTRIBUTORS

Maryam Aslzaker is a Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist. She graduated in Clinical

Psychology from the University of Social Welfare and Rehabilitation Sciences.
She is Assistant Professor of Clinical Psychology in Shahid Beheshti University of
Medical Sciences (SBUM) where she teaches psychotherapy and developmental
psychopathology to postgraduate students of Clinical Psychology. She has been in
the Persian translation team for analytic books such as The Patient and the Analyst
by Joseph Sandler and Freud and Beyond by Stephen Mitchell.

Robert K. Beshara is a Critical Psychologist, interested in theorising subjectivity

vis-à-vis ideology through radical qualitative research (e.g., discourse analysis). In
addition to being a scholar-activist, he is a fine artist with a background in film,
theatre, and music. He holds two terminal degrees: a Ph.D. in Psychology:
Consciousness and Society from the University of West Georgia and an M.F.A.
in Independent Film and Digital Imaging from Governors State University. He
currently works as an Assistant Professor of Psychology at Northern New Mexico
College. For more information, kindly visit: www.robertbeshara.com

Julia Borossa is an Associate Professor, and the Director of the Centre for
Psychoanalysis, Middlesex University. She is the author of Hysteria (2001) and the
editor of Sandor Ferenczi: Selected Writings (1999) and (with Ivan Ward) of Psycho-
analysis, Fascism, Fundamentalism (2009). Her numerous essays on the histories and
politics of psychoanalysis have appeared in edited collections and journals including
the Journal of European Studies and the Journal of Postcolonial Writing. She is a group
analyst and a member of the College of Psychoanalysts-UK.

Forough Edrissi received her Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from Shahid Beheshti
University of Medical Sciences (SBUM), she wrote her doctoral dissertation on
 Contributors xv

‘Efficacy of tuning in to kids program on parent socialization and anxiety

symptoms in preschool children’. She works as a Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist
in private practice in Tehran and the focus of her studies is on Object Relation
schools. She is the author and translator of some papers and books.

Nathan Gorelick is Associate Professor of English at Utah Valley University. His

work has appeared in several journals of literary theory and Continental
philosophy, including Continental Thought and Theory, CR: The New Centennial
Review, Discourse, Theory & Event, Umbr(a): A Journal of the Unconscious, and
SCTIW Review – the journal of the Society for Contemporary Thought and the
Islamicate World. He was also managing editor of the 2009 issue of Umbr(a) on
Islam and psychoanalysis. He is a founding member of the Buffalo Group for
the Application of Psychoanalysis, the only non-clinical research circle of the
École freudienne du Québec.

Shifa Haq is an Assistant Professor (Psychology-Psychotherapy) at the School of

Human Studies, Ambedkar University Delhi. She also works as a Psychoanalytic
Psychotherapist at the Centre of Psychotherapy and Clinical Research, Ambedkar
University Delhi. Her research interests include mourning in the context of
disappearances in Kashmir, gender, and psychoanalysis.

Gohar Homayounpour is a Psychoanalyst, member of the International Psycho-

analytic Association, Training and Supervising Psychoanalyst of the Freudian
Group of Tehran, a Lecturer at Shahid Beheshti University, and author of Doing
Psychoanalysis in Tehran (MIT Press, 2013). She is also a member of the scientific
board of the Freud Museum in Vienna.

Farshid Kazemi is a Ph.D. Candidate at the Department of Islamic and Middle

Eastern Studies, University of Edinburgh, UK. He received his B.A. in English
Literature from the University of British Columbia, Canada. His monograph uses
Lacanian psychoanalytic theory and feminist film theory to theorise the structure
of desire and sexuality in post-revolutionary Iranian cinema.

Zehra Mehdi works on communal violence, political identity, and psycho-

analysis in the twenty-first century, India. Her ongoing doctoral research at the
Department of Religion, Columbia University, New York, is on the politics of
gender, Muslim identity, and Nationalism in North India. Her Ph.D. explores
the links between a gendered narrative of religion in Post Partition India and its
political manifestations and psychic identifications. She is also a psychoanalytical
psychotherapist trained in India and writes on how questions of religious
difference enter the clinic, with a particular focus on transference and counter-
transference processes. She has published papers in the American Journal of
Applied Psychoanalytic Studies, as well as with Karnac, Palgrave Macmillan,
Rowman, and Littlefield.
xvi Contributors

Ian Parker is a Psychoanalyst and Researcher in Manchester, with Visiting

Professorships at the University of Manchester and universities in Belgium,
Brazil, South Africa, and Spain. His books include Lacanian Psychoanalysis:
Revolutions in Subjectivity (Routledge, 2011). He was co-founder (with Erica
Burman) of the Discourse Unit (www.discourseunit.com). He is editor of the
Lines of the Symbolic in Psychoanalysis book series for Routledge.

Chiara Sebastiani (University of Bologna, CIPA, IAAP) is a Sociologist, Political

Scientist and Jungian Analyst based in Rome. Her current interests focus on the
relationship between the urban environment, religion and the psyche: on this, she
has presented papers at several international conferences. Among her works:
‘Psiche nella città’ (with A. Connolly, in La Psiche nell’Epoca dell Tecnica, Milano:
Vivarium, 2007); ‘The Gendered Dimension of Public Spaces: a Cross-Cultural
Perspective’ (Temperanter, n.1/2, 2011); Una città una rivoluzione. Tunisi e la
riconquista dello spazio pubblico (Cosenza: Pellegrini Editore, 2014); La sfida delle
parole (Bologna: Editrice Socialmente, 2014). She has translated and edited, in
Italian, Max Weber’s Sociology of Religion (Sociologia delle religioni, a cura di Chiara
Sebastiani, Torino: Utet, vol. 2, 2008). She currently coordinates and supervises a
Jungian developing group in Belarus.

Sabah Siddiqui is a Researcher at the University of Manchester. Her research is

on the subjects and the ghosts of contemporary mental health discourse that is
informed by postcolonial, feminist, and psychoanalytic methods. She was trained
clinically as a Psychodynamic Psychotherapist in Delhi and has authored the book
Religion and Psychoanalysis in India: Critical Clinical Practice (Routledge, 2016).
Sabah co-edited a special issue for the Annual Review of Critical Psychology in
2018 on Sex and Power in the University. She would like to believe that instead of
disciplines, she is more interested in methodologies.

Eva Tepest completed her bachelor’s degree in Arab Studies at Leipzig University,
Germany, and Ain Shams University, Cairo, Egypt, as well as a master’s degree in
Middle Eastern Studies at Lund University, Sweden and University College of
London Qatar. She is currently a Freelance Writer and Journalist based in Berlin.
Her research interests include gender and sexuality non-conforming identities,
politics of the Syrian uprising, and feminist and social movements in North Africa
and West Asia.

Amal Treacher Kabesh is an Associate Professor at the School of Sociology and

Social Policy, University of Nottingham, and author of Postcolonial Masculinities:
Emotions, Histories and Ethics (Ashgate, 2013) and Egyptian Revolutions: Repetition,
Conflict, Identification (Rowman and Littlefield, 2017).
INTRODUCTION
Sabah Siddiqui

The coming together of Islam and psychoanalysis should be cataclysmic . . . if popular

discourse on either topic is anything to go by. At the Islamic Psychoanalysis/
Psychoanalytic Islam Conference at the University of Manchester on the 26th and
27th of June 2017, we had a different experience. Some 100 participants from
11 countries participated in a convivial discussion on psychoanalysis in Islamicate
countries, Islam through a psychoanalytic lens, the practices of psychoanalytically-
trained Muslim therapists, and the psychoanalysis of Muslim analysands.
In the months preceding the conference, in a casual conversation, I found out
that a friend was concerned that whether holding this event was ‘safe’. She had
asked me if we had requested for extra ‘security’ on the days of the conference. It
was not obvious to me who would be needing security and from whom. We had
not arranged for extra security from the police or the university. Were we trying
to protect our delegates, the university, society, or the state? Who should we have
been looking out for? Certainly, psychoanalysts are not the most loved in
psychology departments, but their presence has never incited the university com-
munity to violence. She was surely referring to the other aspect of the title: Islam, a
topic that features far more in the public opinion of the UK and beyond than
psychoanalysis. Would the mention of Islam draw out a predictable violence?
In our experience, the organising of the conference of the College of Psycho-
analysis, London, met with no challenges to safety at the University of Manchester,
to our person or to the event. We applied for funding and administrative support
and received both. In the months leading up to the conference, if I spoke about the
event within the university, the response I met with was usually polite disinterest: it
was to be another conference in the busy calendar of an internationally acclaimed
university. Once the call for the conference was out, one of our biggest concerns
was whether all our international delegates for the conference would be able to
secure a visa for permission to enter the United Kingdom. In fact, not everybody
2 Sabah Siddiqui

did, and the names of delegates who were unable to attend due to travel restrictions
were remembered and repeated at the conference. After the conference, I remem-
bered the conversation I had on the safety of holding a conference on such a topic
with a sense of amusement, and of relief, but also a little bit of disappointment. The
university is a space that academizes speech, and the conventions of academic
writing and presenting cool hot tempers: the measured speech of conference
delegates, the hallowed references to scholarship, and the control of time-keeping
and the chairing of sessions keeps unbridled passion in check. We sat and spoke and
ate. There were several calls to make this discussion a regular occurrence, but when
we parted ways at the end of the two days, after sixteen papers presented and four
plenary sessions, for the moment, we had had enough of all talk concerned with
Islam and psychoanalysis. Some of the attendees who had travelled far to be there
spoke about their plans to tour the United Kingdom or meet friends and family
residing here. My friend, if she had attended the conference, may have been bored
with the lack of violence.
Some of the disparity between expectation and reality may stem from the
conflation between the terms of ‘Islam’ and ‘Muslim’. Quite naturally, the talk
about Islam refers to Muslims. Yet we need to be cautious when one is used to
refer to the other. In 2010, according to the Pew Research Center, Islam had a
global following of 1.6 billion people, spread across the world, who self-identified
as Muslims. An immediate association of ‘Muslim’ is with ‘Arab’ but as the Pew
Research Center report states,

Muslims are concentrated in the Asia-Pacific region, where six-in-ten

(62%) of all Muslims reside. Many Muslims also live in the Middle East
and North Africa (20%) and sub-Saharan Africa (16%). The remainder of
the world’s Muslim population is in Europe (3%), North America (less than
1%) and Latin America and the Caribbean (also less than 1%).
(2012: 21)

Despite its historical origin being in present-day Saudi Arabia, the largest
number of Muslims reside in Indonesia. By region, it is South Asia that has the
highest number of Muslims spread between Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh.
Although the language of the Quran is Arabic, by the geographical spread of the
adherents of Islam, it is obvious that the first language of most Muslims in the
world is not Arabic. Furthermore, the original language of the Quran is old
Arabic, the parlance of which is not common amongst Arabic speakers today.
To add to this, there are several internal schisms within Islam with Sunnism
and Shi’ism being two major divisions (Sufism and Kharijism are two other
ideological schisms within Islam), which then further break down into smaller
sub-sects. Each sect differently interprets the discursive traditions of Islam.
While any attempt to describe Islam in its entirety is challenging, it is very
easy to state that Muslims do not share a homogenous identity. When we move
to the question of subjectivity, it should be equally easy to state that a Muslim’s
 Introduction 3

subjectivity may be constituted through more than their ascription to a religious

identity; there are the considerations of race, nationality, language, culture,
political affiliations, etc. Then there are even more subjective factors such as
family history, upbringing, and personal experience. The intersection between
what Islam ‘says’ and what Muslims ‘do’ could be witnessed at the conference as
well. This is not surprising as the terms draw upon each other. So, the chapters
in this edited volume constitute a collective dialogue on both Islam and
Muslims.
This brings us to the topic at hand: Islamic psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic
Islam. Is there an Islamic psychoanalysis? Can Islam be understood through a
psychoanalytic perspective? Or does modernity keep the two apart, where
psychoanalysis is a product of modernity and of European Enlightenment, and
Islam is the undying monstrosity from before the dark ages and the beyond of
Western civilization? The fabled ‘clash of civilizations’ that peaked at the turn of
the millennium spun thousands of media reports asking the question: Is Islam
incompatible with the West? After the violent demolition of the Twin Towers
in the United States of America in 2001, followed by the NATO-backed ‘War
on Terror’ conducted within the regions of Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, and
Pakistan, there have been a slew of events that have invoked the trope of the
clash of civilizations, too many to enumerate here, each one feeding the frenzy
of imagining an imminent apocalypse. Thus, it would seem that bringing a
product of modernity to a fossilized religion should meet with a great deal of
resistance. After all, psychoanalysis born at the beginning of the twentieth
century in Europe should be far removed from a 1,400-year-old theology
originating in the Middle East.
In this book, Islam and psychoanalysis come together . . . much too simply if the
theories of the great divide between Islam and the West is to be believed. The
possibility that modernism has already met with Islam, as it did with Christianity, is
not entertained. Perhaps the opposition between Islam and the West may not be of
rational science against blind faith but of Western modernity against Islamic
modernity. After all, critical theory has only recently begun to venture into the
Islamic discursive traditions, a growing body of work in psychoanalysis with
contributions from Salman Akhtar, Fethi Benslama, Omnia El Shakry, Andrea
Mura, Stefania Pandolfo, Moustapha Safouan, and Slavoj Žižek (by no means an
exhaustive list).
The outcome of the encounter is uncanny. The chapters in this book attest to
the fact that the encounter throws up interesting and unexpected challenges to
psychoanalytic theory and practice. What this book does is start a conversation in
order to demystify a subject caught between Islam and psychoanalysis, the
strangeness of whom is less shocking than we thought it would be. Our
contributors explore if Islam and psychoanalysis have an ‘epistemological reso-
nance’ (El Shakry, 2017) that breathes life into an Islamic psychoanalysis and a
psychoanalytic Islam. Perhaps the psychoanalytic subject and the Islamic subject
find something familiar, though not the same, in the other.
4 Sabah Siddiqui

References
El Shakry, O. (2017). The Arabic Freud: Psychoanalysis and Islam in Modern Egypt. Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press.
Pew Research Center (2012). The Global Religious Landscape: A Report on the Size and
Distribution of the World’s Major Religious Groups as of 2010. Washington, DC: Pew
Research Center. Retrieved from www.pewforum.org/2012/12/18/global-religious-land
scape-exec/.