INTRODUCTION
After reading an Arabic translation of the American self-help pioneer Dale Carnegie's How to Stop Worrying and Start Living (1948) at the suggestion of a friend,Footnote 1 the Egyptian Muslim scholar and activist Muḥammad al-Ghazālī (1917–1996) recalled that he immediately set out to “return the book to its Islamic foundations.”Footnote 2 In 1956, he published the fruit of his efforts: a nearly 260-page commentary on Carnegie's text titled Jaddid ḥayātak or “Renew Your Life.” Ghazālī was a one-time leading intellectual of one of the most influential mass Islamic movements, the Muslim Brotherhood,Footnote 3 and a prominent Muslim thinker whose writings shaped the outlooks of some of today's foremost Islamic activists.Footnote 4 His many books included works on Islamic ethics, Sufism, Islam and socialism, the Qur'an and Sunna (Prophetic traditions), and political tracts.Footnote 5 The publication of Renew Your Life was perhaps the first manifestation of an influential genre of literature across the Islamic world today: “Islamic self-help.”Footnote 6 Indeed, Ghazālī’s commentary on Carnegie's text echoes in subsequent works of this genre, and since its publication Carnegie's works have enjoyed long afterlives in Islamic contexts, from Egypt, to Saudi Arabia, to Indonesia. Popular clerics such as the Egyptian Yūsuf al-Qaraḍāwī (b. 1926) and the Saudi Arabian ʻĀʼiḍ al-Qarnī (b. 1960) make use of Carnegie's text on worry in their own works of Islamic theological therapy and self-help.
With few exceptions,Footnote 7 scholars conventionally treat Islamic self-help as an effect of neoliberalism, which, they argue, reconfigures Islamic practices and ideas around logics of economic calculation, efficiency, productivity, and self-reliance.Footnote 8 This article seeks to reorient the study of Islamic self-help beyond neoliberalism. It homes in on Ghazālī’s commentary on this American self-help pioneer's work to explore the deeper history of Islamic self-help in Egypt and show that it emerged not as an effect of neoliberalism—the onset of which did not occur in Egypt until the late 1970s—but rather as a critique of the antiliberal, “high modernist” ideology of the postcolonial Egyptian state under Gamal Abdel Nasser (r. 1954–1970). High modernism is a political ideology based upon great faith in the capacity of the state and its experts to utilize science and technology to rationally engineer human society.Footnote 9 I will further show that Ghazālī’s early version of Islamic self-help was formed in dialogue with American metaphysical religion—a dialogue made possible by Carnegie's text. How to Stop Worrying and Start Living was, in large part, a synthesis of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century trends in American metaphysical religion, including mind-cure, New Thought, Christian Science, and other mind-over-matter religious currents like positive thinking.Footnote 10 Ghazālī did, in fact, think of How to Stop Worrying and Start Living as a book of American religion. Through it he encountered the religious thinking of Ralph Waldo Emerson, William James, Mary Baker Eddy, Norman Vincent Peale, and lesser-known thinkers. Ghazālī even came to think of American metaphysical religion as what he called “American Sufism,” and considered its exponents as something akin to “American Sufis.”Footnote 11
While in this article I reorient the study of Islamic self-help literature beyond neoliberalism, I nevertheless highlight how that literature can be read as a critique of neoliberal ethics. I do so out of recognition that both the Arabic Dale Carnegie's text and Ghazālī’s commentary on it are read in Egypt today,Footnote 12 that neoliberalism dominates Egypt's present political economy, and that self-help literature in Egypt has conventionally been discussed with reference to neoliberal ethics.Footnote 13 Furthermore, even though Carnegie's text was fashioned during an era of liberalism in the United States, the ethical sensibilities it promotes, including autonomy and self-reliance, are still very much championed by, and even amplified within, today's neoliberalism.Footnote 14 Although liberalism and neoliberalism are distinct political economies, they share much in their advocacy of free markets, limited government, and, especially, the types of political subjectivities they create.Footnote 15 Both depend upon the creation of citizens who understand themselves as subjects of freedom, though within neoliberalism the valorization of freedom is intensified.Footnote 16 This article thus attends to how Ghazālī’s Islamic self-help, particularly its critique of the ideal of human independence, interacts with multiple political ideologies, from liberalism, to high modernism, to neoliberalism.
Compared to other Arabic works that draw from How to Stop Worrying and Start Living, Ghazālī’s text was exceptional.Footnote 17 It was dedicated solely to commenting on Carnegie's book, whereas similar works like Qaraḍāwī’s al-Īmān wa-al-ḥayāh (Faith and life), and Qarnī’s La taḥzan (Don't be sad), draw from various Western self-help sources. Additionally, while American metaphysical religion is the central element within Ghazālī’s text, it is only one element among others within a work like Qaraḍāwī’s, for instance. Nevertheless, an analysis of how Ghazālī makes sense of Carnegie and his interlocutors’ metaphysical religious inclinations can clarify why How to Stop Worrying and Start Living is utilized within various forms of Islamic literature, including self-help, theological therapy, and popular science. Like Ghazālī, other Arabic writers often cite and comment on Carnegie and his interlocutors’ religious views.Footnote 18 This demands investigation into what kind of religion Carnegie and his interlocutors espoused. I call this religion “American metaphysical religion” because the scholars who have offered the most compelling theorizations of the types of religious trends that influenced people like Carnegie have termed it thusly.Footnote 19 Neither Ghazālī nor other Arabic writers use that term, however. Although I focus on the impact of American metaphysical religion on Egypt, metaphysical religion is a diverse phenomenon, deriving from European locales as well as American. It includes a range of religious movements such as spiritism and spiritualism, mesmerism, and Theosophy, which have impacted not only colonial and postcolonial Egypt, but also Iran and the Ottoman Empire.Footnote 20
There are three factors to bear in mind when considering how the religious views of American metaphysicals became integrated into Ghazālī’s Islamic self-help. First, as Catherine Albanese has shown, one of the primary threads running through metaphysical religion in the United States was the belief that the human mind, properly focused, could commune with a higher, cosmic power through which it could heal and transform peoples’ material and spiritual lives.Footnote 21 Second, American metaphysicals presented their beliefs as timeless and universal; that is, not tied to any particular tradition or institution.Footnote 22 And third, despite appearing unmarked and non-institutional, American metaphysical religion, in fact, emerged out of an “entanglement” with modern scientific, medical, therapeutic, and religious institutions.Footnote 23 An important legacy of this entanglement is that metaphysicals frequently touted the scientific grounding of their beliefs.Footnote 24 As a result of the unique genealogy and nature of American metaphysical religion, it appears, particularly in Arabic translation (more on this below),Footnote 25 as a deeply held but vaguely defined system of monotheistic beliefs, based more on modern scientific discoveries than on organized religion. That is why Ghazālī finds Carnegie's text so compelling and amenable to his purposes—he thinks of it as a work of scientifically informed religious faith, free of doctrine and tradition, and hence easily assimilable into Islamic self-help.
While charting Islamic self-help's early genealogy, this article will advance an argument about translation. The Islamic translation of Carnegie's text is part of the broader history of European colonialism, the expansion of global capitalism, and the advancement of print technologies, but it cannot be reduced to this history. It also depended upon the work of the first Arabic translator of that text, who edited it to fit his readers’ real or imagined religious sensibilities, and, I argue, upon a further set of “translations” by Ghazālī. These “translations” occurred when Ghazālī provided for his readers commentaries and glosses on the Arabic Dale Carnegie's words, connected them to Islamic revelation and ethical ideals, and used them to craft unique arguments about the self and society. In the process, Ghazālī redirected and modified elements of Carnegie's text to fit Islamic ethical and theological sensibilities. In his mind, these modifications produced an improved, more “true” vision of how to help self and society. In fact, within his text, the entire project of self-help, commonly understood as an endeavor aimed at achieving self-reliance and self-sufficiency, is inverted and becomes instead a quest for realizing one's essential insufficiency and dependence upon God. In other words, Ghazālī produced Islamic self-help. Paying attention to this inversion of Western self-help, I argue, has implications for understanding the colonial and postcolonial Islamic encounter with Euro-American thought. In particular, it pushes back against a narrative that holds that while contemporary Islamic thought may challenge modern hegemonic Western discourses on a rhetorical level, it invariably assents to their epistemological and ontological groundings.Footnote 26
In sum, the “translations” I explore in this article were not mechanical reproductions of the original, or what Walter Benjamin thought of as a bad translation. Nor did they perform what Benjamin argued good translation does: preserve a sense of the original's foreignness in the target language.Footnote 27 Rather, these translations covered up that foreignness by rendering the original familiar. Because Ghazālī’s commentary on Carnegie's text combined elements of both translation and critique, it is worth recalling Talal Asad's observations that a good translation—in the sense that Benjamin used it—should come before a critique.Footnote 28 Asad further noted that a good critique, on the other hand, is one that contributes to “a collective endeavor” and proceeds from “some shared understanding, or joint life, which it aims to enlarge and make more coherent.”Footnote 29 Whether or not we consider Ghazālī’s translation a good one, his criticism of Carnegie and his interlocutors’ religious views certainly shares the qualities of a good critique, in Asad's terms. As we will see, Ghazālī’s critique of Western self-help is compelling precisely because he presumed that he and Carnegie were fellow travelers, and that the self-help project was enriched when brought into conversation with Islamic revelation.
TRANSLATION AND MISTRANSLATION
Carnegie is considered the founder of the self-help movement in the United States.Footnote 30 He authored the popular How to Win Friends and Influence People (1936) and established the public speaking and human relations company Dale Carnegie Courses Inc. The historian Steven Watts argues that Carnegie's success in the United States derived from a late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century shift in American culture away from a Victorian “stern morality and studied self-control” toward “a new ethos of self-fulfillment”—a shift facilitated by the country's growing economic prosperity.Footnote 31 Nikolas Rose, on the other hand, argues that the proliferation of self-help and other therapeutic forms of knowledge infused with psychology—or “psy discourses”—in the United States during the twentieth century's second half is indicative less of the emancipation of selves than of the advent of more pervasive forms of political control that produce self-regulating and autonomous subjects who behave in line with the imperatives of liberal and neoliberal governance.Footnote 32
Scholars of Egypt understand the prevalence of self-help literature there as a result of neoliberalism.Footnote 33 Beginning with the economic liberalization of Anwar al-Sadat's (r. 1970–1981) government, the advent of neoliberalism in Egypt during the 1970s and 1980s marked a break with the country's socialist and high modernist past under Gamal Abdel Nasser, during which the state controlled economic development and protected Egyptian industry.Footnote 34 Sadat, in contrast, opened up the Egyptian economy to foreign trade and investment and reversed Nasser's development and social welfare policies.Footnote 35 Sadat's successor, Hosni Mubarak (r. 1981–2011), accelerated Egypt's economic liberalization.Footnote 36
While the scholarship on Arabic self-help has focused on its relationship to neoliberalism, Egyptian interest in Western self-help began during the pre-1952 colonial period. An early self-help text translated into Arabic, for instance, was a work by the British writer Samuel Smiles, called Self Help, which dealt with the importance of self-reliance and other industrious character traits for achieving success.Footnote 37 The book and its message of self-reliance became popular in Egypt and were championed by anticolonial nationalists.Footnote 38 Interest in Carnegie's work likewise dates from the colonial period. ‘Abd al-Mun‘im al-Ziyādī, the first Egyptian to translate How to Stop Worrying and Start Living into Arabic, did so in 1950,Footnote 39 and he translated into Arabic How to Win Friends and Influence People four years earlier.Footnote 40
Although Carnegie is best known in the United States for his earlier text, in Egypt his later text was more successful. Both were positively received, selling more copies than Ziyādī had anticipated.Footnote 41 But while How to Win Friends and Influence People had gone through six publications in its first fifteen years, How to Stop Worrying and Start Living was already in its fifth publication by 1956 and went through at least eleven more by 1994. During the 1950s and early 1960s Ziyādī translated numerous other self-help and popular psychology books, mostly written by American psychologists, psychiatrists, and medical doctors, including Louis E. Bisch's Be Glad You're Neurotic, William E. Henry's Exploring Your Personality, John A. Schindler's How to Live 365 Days a Year, Matthew N. Chapell's Worry and Its Control, Arnold S. Jackson's The Answer is Your Nerves, and W. Beran Wolfe's How to Be Happy Though Human.
According to Watts, the appeal of Carnegie's work in the United States “gained much of its power from a subtle appropriation of psychological perspectives and techniques.”Footnote 42 The same, I would argue, is true for Egypt. Carnegie frequently invokes the authority of psychology in his book on worry.Footnote 43 Ziyādī describes his selection of How to Stop Worrying and Start Living for translation as part of his own interest in this science.Footnote 44 He highlights the value of Carnegie's “practical” (amalī) approach to psychology, or what he describes as a point of view interested in the application of psychology to everyday life. He notes that because Carnegie adopts this practical perspective Egyptians can benefit from Carnegie's work whether they have formally studied psychology or not.Footnote 45
During the twentieth century, intellectuals in Iran and Egypt became interested in Western psychology and other social scientific disciplines because they saw in them a way to modernize the self and society and respond to the challenges of Euro-American imperialism.Footnote 46 Yet Ziyādī’s interest in Carnegie's psychology appears distinct from the broader nationalist appeal to science in Egypt and Iran in that he did not explicitly connect psychology to issues of political reform and social progress. Instead, it appears that Ziyādī viewed psychology primarily as a science that would help Egyptians achieve personal self-fulfillment. In his own self-help text entitled “Where Is Happiness?” Ziyādī, for instance, provided his readers with what he described as a road map to happiness and emotional wellbeing established by modern psychology. “Psychologists,” he writes, have discovered that each human has fundamental “needs” that must be met in order for him or her to achieve happiness, and “have concerned themselves with enumerating [those needs] and revealing the ways to fulfill them in a balanced way without distortion.”Footnote 47 Ziyādī’s roadmap revolves around the “needs” humans have for emotional and physical health, love, esteem, and success.Footnote 48 Subsequent chapters instruct on how to maintain health, make friends, establish an agreeable marriage, find a fulfilling job, deal with failure, and realize hopes.
While Ziyādī’s text does not mention Islam, that is not because he was unconcerned with religion. He in fact edited How to Stop Worrying and Start Living to fit what he perceived his readers’ religious sensibilities to be, and perhaps his own. The Arabic translation of Carnegie's text that Ghazālī read was thus not a literal translation.Footnote 49 When it came to translating anything religious, Ziyādī often added references to God or other theologically charged terms when they were absent in the English original, and in other instances he omitted mentions of Christianity. Carnegie, for instance, tells his readers about the practical benefits of prayer, and how he has become “tremendously interested in what religion does for me.”Footnote 50 In translating this sentence, Ziyādī leaves out “does for me,” and substitutes an Arabic word with Islamic theological overtones—ni‘am (blessings)—which refers to the blessings God bestows upon humans.Footnote 51 The Arabic version thus reads as if Carnegie is interested in the God-bestowed blessings of religion. Carnegie also notes that psychiatry “today is teaching what Jesus taught.”Footnote 52 In the Arabic version it instead reads that psychiatry “today proselytizes [yubashshir] with the principles of religion.”Footnote 53 Quickly after this, Carnegie writes in the original, “Yes, the Christian religion is an inspiring, health-giving activity,” and then goes on to highlight the virtues of Christianity.Footnote 54 But these mentions of Christianity are excised from the Arabic translation with nothing replacing them.Footnote 55 In another example, Carnegie speaks of the reassuring powers of “religious faith.” When translating Carnegie's words, Ziyādī renders the English “religious faith” into the Arabic “belief in God and dependence upon Him.”Footnote 56 On the same page, Carnegie cites William James and Ziyādī again makes a curious translation. He renders James's English phrase, “and to him who holds on to vaster more permanent realities,” into the Arabic, “and to him whose belief in God is deep.”Footnote 57
With these and other edits, Ziyādī partially rendered Carnegie and his interlocutors’ way of being religious into something more resembling an Islamic mold. That said, it is difficult to pinpoint to what extent they made How to Stop Worrying and Start Living more palatable to Egyptian Muslim readers. Within the original, Carnegie already appears as a genuine believer and ecumenical in his religious orientation. Ziyādī’s edits, therefore, were somewhat redundant. Furthermore, not all mentions of Christianity were excised from the Arabic version. There are still passages in which Carnegie praises his parents’ Christian faith,Footnote 58 as well as references to Jesus and citations of his words.Footnote 59 Ziyādī’s edits can even be read to amplify Carnegie's ecumenism and the extent to which he believed specifically in “God.”
ON HUMAN NATURE AND MODERN SCIENCE
The first question Ghazālī considers in his commentary on Carnegie's text relates to the status of the knowledge it conveys. Can the advice of Carnegie and the people he quotes be brought into meaningful relationship with Islamic revelation as conveyed by the Qur'an and the Sunna? Ghazālī asks whether doing so is an affront to God. He answers in the negative and makes his case by invoking the Islamic theological concept of fiṭra, meaning the “original disposition,” “natural constitution,” or “innate nature” of human beings.Footnote 60 This concept refers to the innate capacity of humans to know of God's existence. It “supports a theological vision whose basic thrust … is to argue for the convergence between the demands of faith and the demands of our being.”Footnote 61 For Ghazālī, it means that human nature is predisposed to Islam. Conversely, it means that humans can obtain ethical and theological knowledge independently of revelation that may, in fact, accord with knowledge made known by revelation. He writes, for instance, just as two people of sound mind provide the same answer to one question they are asked independently of each other, “the logic of sound human nature … unites with the logic of divine verses.”Footnote 62 Speaking of Carnegie's text, he adds that it records knowledge made known by “healthy human nature” and that such knowledge necessarily “concords with the divine revelation of heaven.”Footnote 63 One of the subtexts of Ghazālī’s opening discussion, as we will see presently, relates to the harmonious relationship it posits between the scientifically informed religious views of his American interlocutors and the Qur'an and the Sunna.
Ghazālī invokes fiṭra to argue that Carnegie's text is perfectly legitimate for Muslims to read. He also invokes it to make sense of how it is that his American interlocutors came to hold a strong, though imprecise monotheism, independently of (Jewish, Christian, and Islamic) revelation. Since Carnegie and the individuals who he cites frequently highlight the scientific groundings of their religious views, the correspondence between their religion and Islamic revelation is significant. Since the imposition of European colonial control over Muslim societies during the nineteenth century and the spread of modern Western scientific discourses to them, Arab intellectuals have debated whether religion and modern science are compatible.Footnote 64 Many have presumed that the unequal power relations between Muslim and Western societies derived from the alleged backwardness of Muslims in scientific knowledge. While some have argued that the Islamic religion was the cause of this backwardness, others have asserted that it was compatible with and, in fact, encouraged scientific exploration. Several American texts, including Carnegie's, were channeled into this debate. These include Henry C. Link's The Return to Religion,Footnote 65 John Clover Monsma's The Evidence of God in an Expanding Universe: Forty American Scientists Declare Their Affirmative Views on Religion,Footnote 66 and Abraham Cressy Morrison's Man Does Not Stand Alone,Footnote 67 all of which were translated into Arabic in Egypt during the mid-twentieth century for the purpose of refuting the claim that religion and modern science were incompatible.
Carnegie's text was singled out for this purpose by not only eminent Brotherhood affiliated intellectuals like Ghazālī and Yūsuf al-Qaraḍāwī, but also by the popular science writer ‘Abd al-Razzāq Nawfal (1917–1984), whose commentaries on spiritualism were widely read in Egypt.Footnote 68 Nawfal wrote books such as Islam and Modern Science, and The Qur'an and Modern Science. He drew from Carnegie's text to highlight the concord between Islam and science. He combs the book for evidence of this, for instance in Carnegie's quotes of well-known Western men of science asserting the compatibility of religion and science, and he compares these quotes with Islamic revelation.Footnote 69
Carnegie, for his part, presented himself and his interlocutors, like William James (d. 1910) and Alexis Carrel (d. 1944), as scientifically informed defenders of religion. In the course of his discussion of the relationship between religion and science, Carnegie introduces James as “the father of modern psychology,” who once observed that he “is less and less able to get along without God.”Footnote 70 A philosopher and psychologist, James is also considered an important theorist of religion. He was critical of the attempts of scholars of religion to reduce religion to social, biological, or psychological effects, and instead argued it was best understood as an individual “experience.”Footnote 71 He also approved of trends in metaphysical religion such as mind-cure and New Thought, and believed that others like spiritualism and psychical research deserved serious consideration.Footnote 72 Like metaphysicals generally, James sought to overcome the perceived conflict between religion and science.Footnote 73 Carrel, on the other hand, was a French-American mystic, cardiovascular surgeon, and Nobel Prize winner in medicine, who authored the popular science work and international bestseller Man, the Unknown (1935), which explored and defended the human spiritual potential and the existence of miracles against scientific materialism.Footnote 74
Carnegie also intervenes into the debate on the relationship between religion and science. At one point, he notes that although people view science as the antithesis of religion, that position is no longer tenable given that experts in various sciences—that is people like James and Carrel—advocate on behalf of religion. Carnegie writes, “I can remember the days when people talked about the conflict between religion and science. But no more. The newest of all the sciences—psychiatry—is teaching today what Jesus taught [Arabic: ‘proselytizes with the principles of religion’]. Why? Because psychiatrists realize that prayer and strong religious faith will banish the worries, the anxieties, the strains, and fears that cause more than half our ills.”Footnote 75 Carnegie exhorts his readers to try prayer and notes that one need not pay attention to churches and their doctrinal differences to benefit from religion.Footnote 76
A repeated theme in Catherine Albanese's history of metaphysical religion is how metaphysicals imagined their religious projects as scientifically informed, articulated them in scientific rhetoric, and thought of their endeavor as one of reconciling religion and science.Footnote 77 In her study of adherents of metaphysical religion in the United States, Courtney Bender likewise shows that they frequently legitimate their ideas and practices by discussing them in relationship to science and by arguing that science does, or will one day, prove the veracity of their beliefs.Footnote 78 Recent explorations of metaphysical religion in the Islamic world have similarly demonstrated that adherents of these novel spiritual forms frequently appeal to science to justify and make sense of religion.Footnote 79 It is thus not surprising to find Carnegie disputing the alleged conflict between science and religion and claiming his religious convictions have a scientific basis. Nor is it hard to imagine that Egyptian writers were drawn to Carnegie's text because it did so.
I will return to Carnegie's metaphysical religion and how Ghazālī responds to it presently, but first I want to note how scholars of Muslim societies have treated debates about the relationship between Islam and science. Scholars might label a writer like Nawfal, for instance, a “modernist” because he asserts the compatibility between Islamic teachings and the modern sciences and endeavors to find an Islamic pedigree for them. One critique that scholars have leveled at the attempts of modernists in the Global South to find culturally “authentic” precedents for various scientific positions is that, in attempting to do so, they radically, though perhaps unwittingly, altered their intellectual traditions to make them fit the demands of the modern sciences.Footnote 80 The scholarly critique of the modernist position is not unlike Partha Chatterjee's critique of anticolonial nationalist thought, which, he asserted, was fundamentally a “derivative discourse.” He argued that while anticolonial nationalists were critics of Western colonialism, they adopted a nationalist framework to frame their demands for independence and thereby remained indebted to the colonizers’ intellectual traditions, which gave rise to nationalism, as well as the colonizers’ vision of political organization.Footnote 81 Along similar lines, Charles Tripp maintains that although modern Muslim critics of Western capitalism and imperialism endeavored to elaborate a “distinctive Islamic order” as an alternative to modern capitalism, “their reasoning was often vulnerable to the influence of that which they were seeking to criticize.” Indeed, he adds, like “other proposed alternatives to capitalism, their vision seemed less like radical alternatives, and more like projects competing on the same terrain, judged therefore by broadly similar criteria.”Footnote 82
Ghazālī’s commentary on Carnegie's text was certainly part of the debate about the relationship between Islam and science, but Ghazālī goes well beyond modernism. While at first glance his opening discussion appears to proceed along modernist grounds, he was doing something far more interesting, and indeed radical. By invoking the Islamic concept of human nature in this way, Ghazālī effectively renders his American interlocutors proto-Muslims, and thereby engages and critiques their religious views on Islamic epistemological and ontological grounds. Consider, for instance, how he describes these Americans’ religion and its relationship to Islam in one of his commentary's closing chapters: Carnegie and his interlocutors may have turned their backs on established religion as they know it—that is Judaism and Christianity—but they still possess “a strong feeling that the world has an exalted Lord.”Footnote 83 They are content with this minimal “stage of belief” and have not sought to go beyond it by becoming formal members in an established religion. How could they, Ghazālī asks, given the corruption of Western “churches?”Footnote 84 Rather than affiliating with the religion of “the monks and priests,” they follow “what they have become reassured is sound through their experience and thinking.”Footnote 85 “The important thing,” he continues, “is that belief in God as the creator of the heavens and earth remains … in their souls, as does the high voice of fiṭra.… This belief is [but] the outermost part of the truth whose perfection is reached in Islam.”Footnote 86
Carnegie and the American metaphysicals he cites are not yet Muslims, but on an initial stage of the stages that eventually should lead to Islam. Summing up his reading of Carnegie's text, Ghazālī confidently reassures his readers that these learned Westerners are not “unbelievers” (kuffār) but are operating totally within the “laws of fiṭra.”Footnote 87 He adds that, although most of them are ignorant of true Islam, they are closer to it than any other religion. In rendering these Americans unwitting Muslims, Ghazālī renders their religion an affirmation of Islamic truth, albeit an imperfect affirmation that, as we will see, demands Islamic correction. To put it another way, according to Ghazālī, these Americans may imagine that they are articulating alternatives to God's revelation, but they are merely affirming the truths about human nature that it makes known.
Ghazālī understands Carnegie and his interlocutors to be unaffiliated with the West's established religions, but nevertheless believers in the existence of a higher power, which he calls God. He often highlights for his readers the way these Americans find healing and comfort in God during their hardship.Footnote 88 American metaphysical religion, as Albanese reminds us, is indeed concerned with healing broken lives and worlds.Footnote 89 Thus it is not surprising that Carnegie's text emphasizes the healing, life-affirming powers of religion. He even urges his readers to pray whether they believe in God or not, because, he says, prayer provides “practical” benefits, like clarity of mind, comfort, and resolve.Footnote 90 Here Carnegie quotes Alexis Carrel, who says, “Prayer is the most powerful form of energy one can generate.” “So why not benefit from it?” asks Carnegie. “Call it God or Allah or Spirit [Arabic: ‘Call the Creator the Lord, or call Him Allah, or call Him the Spirit’]—why quarrel with definitions as long as the mysterious powers of nature take us in hand?”Footnote 91 On his own religious beliefs Carnegie says that he has “gone forward to a new concept of religion,” one which is “no longer concerned with the differences in creed that divide the Churches,” but rather interested “in what religion does for me [Arabic: ‘in the blessings religion confers to me’], just as I am interested in what electricity, good food and water do for me. They help me to lead a richer, fuller, happier life. But religion does far more than that. It brings me spiritual values. It gives me, as William James put it, ‘a new zest for life … more life, a larger, richer, more satisfying life.’ It gives me faith, hope and courage. It banishes tensions, anxieties, fears, and worries. It gives purpose to my life—and direction.”Footnote 92
To seek God for wellbeing and comfort in life's hardships is not just legitimate, but an Islamic thing to do, says Ghazālī. But, he adds—here outlining some limits to his appreciation of his American interlocutors’ religion—God must be approached in the appropriate way. “We cannot approach Him in a way He detests, nor can we attribute to Him, purposely or innocently, that which He is free of!”Footnote 93 Yes, many great men of the West have a firm belief in God, but this “firmness may be tarnished by a naïve concept or simple mistake.”Footnote 94 The fundamental purpose of Islam, he continues, is to correct mistaken views about God.Footnote 95 Still Ghazālī has no problem citing William James's thoughts on the therapeutic powers of prayer and religion. James, who is Ghazālī’s favorite person to cite out of those quoted by Carnegie, tells us: “We and God have business with each other; and in opening ourselves to his influence our deepest destiny is fulfilled.”Footnote 96 And later, he again cites James, who says: “The turbulent billows of the fretful surface leave the deep parts of the ocean undisturbed; and to him who has a hold on vaster and more permanent realities [Arabic: ‘and to him whose belief in God is deep’]; the hourly vicissitudes of his personal destiny seem relatively insignificant things. The really religious person is accordingly unshakeable and full of equanimity, and calmly ready for any duty that the day may bring forth.”Footnote 97
After adding to these statements a number of supplicatory prayers (sing.: du‘ā’) attributed to the Prophet Muhammad, Ghazālī, however, also provides his own Islamic correction to his American interlocutors’ belief in the therapeutic powers of prayer and religion. The point for Ghazālī is that prayer and religion are not means, and cannot be thought of as means, for realizing human self-sufficiency. Rather prayer is a means for humans to enact their insufficiency and need for God's intervention into their affairs. It is for this reason that Ghazālī’s commentary on these supplicatory prayers foregrounds God's agency, and not the believer's, in effectuating the spiritual and material wellbeing prayer is said to procure. He thus closes the chapter asserting, “God, the Exalted, loves when His servant requests for what he wishes from Him and asks for His grace, as he wishes. Verily, He warns the human from being content with his own capabilities! Such a shortcoming deprives him of the blessings of God's sublime assistance and imprisons him for life within the limits of his weakness and ignorance.”Footnote 98 While Western self-help and “psy discourses,” as Rose observes, promise that “you can change, you can achieve self-mastery, you can control your own destiny, you can truly be autonomous,”Footnote 99 Islamic self-help, as Ghazālī articulated it, rebuffs the notions that humans can control their destinies and should seek autonomy. It is God who heals and transforms, says Ghazālī; humans should not rely upon themselves, but upon God, he adds.
While part of a broader debate about the relationship between Islam and modern science, there were also geopolitical issues at stake in Ghazālī’s commentary on this American icon's text. During the mid-1950s, as Ghazālī penned his commentary, many countries across the globe were polarizing along Cold War lines. Egypt, then lead by Gamal Abdel Nasser, was at the forefront of a movement to remain non-aligned, a position that greatly displeased the Eisenhower administration. The United States sought to compel the Nasser government to support its policy of isolating the Soviet Union's influence in the Middle East. In 1956, as part of this effort, the administration withdrew its offer to help Egypt fund the construction of a high dam at Aswan. This led Nasser to nationalize the Suez Canal to pay for the dam's construction and began a chain of events that eventually led to the Suez War of 1956.Footnote 100 Thus, at the very moment in which the Egyptian and U.S. governments were at loggerheads, Ghazālī was holding up an American icon for Egyptians to learn from. Moreover, just a few years prior to his publication of Renew Your Life, one of Ghazālī’s former Brotherhood colleagues, Sayyid Quṭb (1906–1966), published a scathing critique of American culture and society. Quṭb, who is commonly depicted as the founder of radical Islamism,Footnote 101 journeyed to the United States in the late 1940s as part of an Egyptian educational mission. Upon returning to Egypt after an extended stay in Greeley, Colorado, he wrote an account of what he perceived as American depravity.Footnote 102 Ghazālī’s appreciation of this icon of American popular culture thus stands out as a counterpoint to the Egyptian government's critique of U.S. politics and Quṭb's critique of American society. It further points to the problem of treating contemporary politically engaged manifestations of Islam as inherently anti-Western and uninterested in anything non-Islamic.Footnote 103
Since Ghazālī’s publication of Renew Your Life, Carnegie's works have become fixtures within Islamic self-help. As one scholar notes, “Carnegie's books have gone through a number of translations in Egypt, and they are often cited in Egyptian self-help books.”Footnote 104 Early on in Renew Your Life, Ghazālī laments his “ignorance of foreign languages” and dependence upon translators, observing that “perhaps there exist other fruits of sound human nature that deserve commendation and praise.”Footnote 105 Some decades after Ghazālī published his book, an Islamic television station ran a thirty-part series on it that consisted of interviews with Ghazālī conducted by the Egyptian media personality, Kārīmān Ḥamza.Footnote 106 In the opening episode of “The Renew Your Life Program” (my translation), Ghazālī returns to the concept of fiṭra and emphasizes the Islamic essence of Carnegie's book. Speaking of Carnegie's text, he notes, “Had the author of the book been a Muslim or had he been acquainted with Islamic culture he would have found within God's book and within the traditions of His prophet … what would have made him transmit much [of it] together with what he recorded in his book.”Footnote 107 Ghazālī clearly saw himself and Carnegie as fellow travelers. His comments here underscore that he saw his work as not simply making use of Carnegie's text, but rather as contributing to the broader self-help project of which it was a part. As we have seen, Ghazālī was in fact invested in correcting and improving Carnegie's self-help.
AMERICAN SUFISM
Ghazālī describes his American interlocutors as exponents of “American Sufism,” or al-taṣawwuf al-amrīkī. He uses this term because he perceives a great deal of “resonance” between the mind-over-matter convictions of these Americans and the modes of moral self-cultivation taught by Muslim Sufis, as well as the tales of the wonder working powers of Sufi shaykhs.Footnote 108 By resonance here I mean that Ghazālī posits convergences between Sufi ethical sensibilities and certain aspects of American metaphysical religion. More broadly, he speaks of the way Carnegie's text and Islamic teachings are in “accordance” (ittifāq), and in “congruence” (taṭābuq) and mutual approximation” (taqārub) with each other.Footnote 109
Ghazālī introduces American Sufism in a chapter titled, “Your Life Is a Creation of Your Thoughts” (Ḥayātak min ṣuna‘ afkārak), during the course of his discussion of the life and career of the founder of Christian Science, Mary Baker Eddy (d. 1910), as related by Carnegie. Ghazālī not only thinks of the religion of his American interlocutors as a monotheistic, non-denominational belief system supported by science, but also as a type of “mysticism.” As Leigh Eric Schmidt has shown, the valorization of mysticism as the personal, experiential core of religion was integral to how spirituality seekers in the United States conceived “religion.”Footnote 110 The religion of Carnegie's interlocutors indeed appears solitary and experience-based. The normative concept of “mysticism,” which had been traditionally applied to Sufism by Western academics,Footnote 111 migrated to mid-twentieth-century Egypt when Egyptian scholars, drawing on Western scholarship, began to discuss Sufism as the “Islamic” example of the universal religious phenomenon of “mysticism.”Footnote 112
Ghazālī’s term “American Sufism” is rooted in the transformations in the meaning of taṣawwuf, which made it possible to think of Sufism in comparative terms, as well as in how American metaphysical religion appears as personal, experiential, and ethically transformative in Carnegie's text. However, given the ambiguity of the word taṣawwuf in this context, one might ask whether al-taṣawwuf al-amrīkī would be better translated as “American Mysticism” as opposed to “American Sufism.” I have chosen the latter for several reasons. First, it aligns with the tenor of Ghazālī’s text, especially the way in which he consistently endeavors to render his American interlocutors’ religious views familiar to his readers. Second, at around the same time Ghazālī published his text, Egyptian intellectuals had only just begun to categorize Sufism as a type of “mysticism” and compare it with other mysticisms. The notion that Sufism was the Islamic example of “mysticism” was limited to the writings of Egyptian academics and their students, and not widely disseminated.Footnote 113 It is thus unclear to what extent Ghazālī’s readers would have understood Sufism as a form of “mysticism.” A third reason, related to this point, is that the term appears in Ghazālī’s text abruptly and he does not clarify it for his readers. This contrasts with what he did some eleven years later when he clarified for his readers that Sufism (al-taṣawwuf) was actually very similar to a form of religious life common to many religions, called “mysticism” (also al-taṣawwuf).Footnote 114 Rather than universalizing mysticism in Renew Your Life, Ghazālī appears to be universalizing Sufism. This universalization was not unprecedented: according to Ata Anzali, during the early twentieth century the Iranian scholar and writer Keyvan Qazvini argued that “Sufis” could be found in all religions and even deemed Theosophy to be a form of “theoretical Sufism.”Footnote 115
Ghazālī was an admirer of Sufism and, although he was also critical of aspects of it, he was a Sufi at heart.Footnote 116 Because of his affection for Sufism, his Egyptian contemporaries and biographers regarded him as a maverick.Footnote 117 During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, for instance, many Egyptian modernists, reformers, and state officials deemed Sufi orders, practices, and intellectual traditions too heterodox, irrational, and otherwise incompatible with the modern Egyptian society they wished to build. Sufism was subjected to both sustained critique and state sponsored reform efforts.Footnote 118 Renew Your Life, though, is both a commentary on American metaphysical religion and a tribute to Sufism.
Like the metaphysicals he cites in his book, Carnegie believed that physical and material conditions were products of mental states. He discusses at length the power of the mind to shape one's life. Along the way he quotes Ralph Waldo Emerson, who wrote, “A man is what he thinks about all day long”; the Roman emperor, Marcus Aurelius, who said, “Our life is what our thoughts make it”; and Norman Vincent Peal, who declared, “You are not what you think you are; but what you think, you are.”Footnote 119 To further draw out the power of one's “mental attitude,” Carnegie relates the story of Mary Baker Eddy's discovery of “the science of mind healing.”Footnote 120 During the course of his commentary on Carnegie's chapter, Ghazālī relates these quotes and stories to his readers, but first asserts what he perceives as the main point of resonance between Carnegie's account and Islamic discourses: “The happiness, pain, worry, and tranquility of the human come forth from within the person himself alone.”Footnote 121 He goes on to add a number of the Prophet Muhammad's statements that affirm this fact.
Continuing, Ghazālī asserts that what he variously describes as “the states of the soul,” “thoughts,” and “feelings” exhibit enormous impact on the course of human lives.Footnote 122 For that reason, says Ghazālī, God has said that He “changes not what is in a people, until they change what is in themselves” (Qur'an 13:11, Arberry translation). To this, Ghazālī adds another Qur'anic verse which ends with the declaration, “God would never change His favor that He conferred on a people until they changed what was within themselves” (Qur'an 8:53, Arberry translation). Commenting on these verses, Ghazālī says that they underline the link between “purity of soul and purity of living, between beauty of character and beauty of life,” and affirm that God brings His blessings down as grace to the god-fearing and those who do good, just as He brings down wrath upon the impious.Footnote 123 Similarly, out of recognition of the life determining power of the soul, “the earliest Islamic moral self-cultivation” (al-tarbiya al-islāmīya al-ūlā), which Ghazālī attributes to Sufis, gave great attention to “studying souls and their states, hearts and their conditions” and demonstrated that “the greatest happiness comes forth from inside the human and not outside him, and [incited] one to expect within the horizons of the soul alone … good fortune, prosperity, and pleasure.”Footnote 124
While Muslim Sufis excelled in the study and training of the soul, some have erroneously come to think that they might perceive through their investigations of the human interior “natural truths of the universe and life.”Footnote 125 Ghazālī here turns to a comparison between “American Sufism” and “Islamic Sufism” (al-taṣawwuf al-islāmī). He relates the story of Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science, who was said to have healed herself through the power of her belief.Footnote 126 He describes his own inclination to believe such “curious tales,” as well as other accounts of “wonder workings” (al-khawāriq).Footnote 127 “Verily, the high aspiring powers of the soul create marvels [al-ajā’ib].”Footnote 128 However, the existence of such marvels, he asserts, should not be taken as “general material laws,” but rather should be understood to have a more limited applicability.Footnote 129 His point seems to be that while people might heal themselves through their faith, faith-based healing should not be taken as the basis of medicine. Indeed, he exclaims, Americans, like Eddy, did not take these miracles to be the basis of science, production, and industry. But in Egypt, where such “legends” abound, people have used them to disregard “God's laws” (sunnat allāh).Footnote 130 Ghazālī’s attempt here to valorize tales of wondering workings, while limiting the extent to which they can be taken to invalidate science, indicates that he was invested in navigating an evolving relationship between religion and science. This is to say that, while Ghazālī’s views obviously cannot be reduced to modernism, he nevertheless shared with modernists this broader concern.
Ghazālī closes the chapter with a quote from James Allen, the British mind-cure advocate and self-help writer influenced by New Thought. Prior to citing Allen, he provides for his readers the proper framework within which they should understand Allen's words. He warns that while they should trust the seemingly miraculous powers of the human interior, they can contravene neither the God-willed laws of the universe nor the normative regulations for religious and ethical conduct established by the sharī‘a (which may be imperfectly glossed as “Islamic law”), something which Sufis were often criticized for doing. Ghazālī then quotes Allen:
A man will find as he alters his thoughts toward things and other people, things and other people will alter towards him.… Let a man radically alter his thoughts, and he will be astonished at the rapid transformation it will effect in the material conditions of his life. Men do not attract what they want, but that which they are.… The divinity [Arabic: “al-qudra al-ilāhīya”] that shapes our ends is in ourselves. It is our very self [Arabic: “bal hiya anfusunā dhātuhā”].… All that a man achieves is the direct result of his own thoughts.… A man can only rise, conquer and achieve by lifting up his thoughts. He can only remain weak and abject and miserable by refusing to lift up his thoughts.Footnote 131
Ghazālī’s effort to provide an interpretive framework for Allen's words exemplifies a broader tension within his text, evident in how he not only identifies with the mind-over-matter convictions of Carnegie and his interlocutors but is also suspicious of how some of these convictions are not sufficiently constrained by divine normativity. It is for this reason, as we see here, that he delimits the applicability of his British interlocutor's words.
SUFISM AND SELF-HELP
The resonance between Sufism and Carnegie's text is one of the major themes of Renew Your Life, and Sufism looms large in Ghazālī’s Islamic self-help. His Sufism, however, is not the timeless, formless, solitary “mysticism” that American metaphysicals touted as the root of religion, but is instead part of a system of rituals, corporate activities, established doctrines, and authoritative texts and commentaries. It is, in other words, a “tradition” as discussed by Talal Asad and thus not a form of self-invention made possible by a market society in which individuals appear autonomous.Footnote 132 The difference between self-invention and Islamic forms of self-discipline is that the former is “subject to the individual's choice and responsibility,” whereas the latter is “the discipline of the self whose experience and authority lie in tradition.” “The former rests on the assumption that the self is self-contained … and the latter on the recognition that it overlaps with, and contains, other selves.”Footnote 133 Consider, for example, Ghazālī’s discussion of the title of his text, Renew Your Life (jaddid ḥayātak), which at first glance appears rather self-helpish. But the title is ultimately a reference to the traditional Sufi virtue of “repentance” (tawba), one discussed at length by classical Sufi authorities such as, al-Makkī (d. 996), al-Qushayrī (d. 1072), and Abū Ḥamid al-Ghazālī (d. 1111).Footnote 134 It is the first stage on the Sufi path of spiritual purification and is, therefore, the subject of Ghazālī’s first chapter. Renew yourself, instructs Ghazālī, by renewing your link to God through repenting your sins.Footnote 135 Likewise, while discussing Carnegie's belief that the best way to make oneself happy is by being kind to others, Ghazālī responds by invoking the Sufi authority, al-Makkī. Behave kindly towards others, he says, as al-Makkī told Sufis to behave toward each other in his discussion of “the etiquette of brotherhood,” a passage from which Ghazālī then cites.Footnote 136
Nevertheless, even though his Sufism is part of a tradition, Ghazālī finds much resonance between Sufi practices and ideas and bits and pieces of American ethical and religious wisdom as related by Carnegie. The latter, for instance, tells his readers about the importance of keeping a written record of one's flaws and mistakes, and of reviewing them so that one might improve oneself. He recounts his own practice of self-examination and how Benjamin Franklin also advocated this practice.Footnote 137 According to Ghazālī, Carnegie's advice is akin to the Islamic practice of “holding the self accountable” (muḥāsabat al-nafs), something at which Sufis traditionally excelled, he says. Indeed, “Dale Carnegie is like the wise ones of the Sufis when he draws attention to the necessity of holding the self accountable.”Footnote 138 In another instance, Carnegie tells his readers about how, when asked whether or not he worried, the American businessman, Henry Ford, reported that he trusted that God was always managing his affairs for the better: “So what is there to worry about?”Footnote 139 This American businessman's trust in God, says Ghazālī, is akin to the words of the thirteenth-century Sufi master, Ibn ʻAṭāʼ Allāh al-Sikandarī (d. 1309), who tells his readers to trust in God's management of their affairs. “Is Ford Ibn ʻAṭāʼ Allāh al-Sikandarī’s companion in this logic full of acceptance of and trust in what fate will bring?”Footnote 140 “Even though Mr. Ford neither knew of Ibn ʻAṭāʼ Allāh nor borrowed from him,” there is a strong “resemblance” (shabah) in his words and the words of this Sufi master, who likewise “incites resignation to God” (yaḥuḍḍ ‘alā taslīm li-allāh).Footnote 141
Ghazālī’s valorization of resigning oneself to God and trusting in his will is one of the Sufi ethical sensibilities that pervades his text. These sensibilities are clustered around the Islamic, but particularly Sufi, virtue of tawakkul—meaning “reliance on” or “trust in” God—which Ghazālī frequently invokes.Footnote 142 Throughout the twentieth century, however, Egyptian modernists, reformers, and state officials attacked this virtue as an example of Sufism's alleged fatalism and incompatibility with progress and productivity.Footnote 143 In valorizing tawakkul, Ghazālī understood he was walking a delicate line. Thus, for instance, after citing Ibn ʻAṭāʼ Allāh, who countenances believers to trust that God will always provide for their welfare, Ghazālī warns his readers not to misconstrue this Sufi master's words as encouraging defeatism. Nevertheless, he adds, while humans should not be fatalistic, they must still recognize that the sphere in which their will and actions are effective is far limited when compared with the sphere in which God's will effectively operates. Regarding the “means” (al-asbāb) for achieving human welfare, Ghazālī says that “most of the time we have no power over them.”Footnote 144 Humans are thus always dependent on the divine and can never truly become self-sufficient. If they aspire to self-sufficiency, they are condemned to failure. As Ghazālī notes in his discussion of tawba (repentance), whatever talents a human may possess, they “all transform into trials and tribulations when stripped of God-willed success [tawfīq] and deprived of His blessings.”Footnote 145
One of the fascinating aspects of his text is that while Western self-help encourages humans to take charge of their destinies and realize their essential self-sufficiency, Ghazālī’s Sufi inspired Islamic self-help emphasizes instead human insufficiency and dependence on God. Accordingly, his Islamic self-help can be read as a critique of the liberal and neoliberal ethics of self-reliance and autonomy. In the context of mid-twentieth-century Egypt, though, Ghazālī’s message of Islamic self-help also constituted a critique of the dominant political ideology in Egypt at the time, under Gamal Abdel Nasser. That ideology was a variant of what the anthropologist and comparative political theorist James C. Scott has described as “high modernism.”Footnote 146 High modernism is based upon the belief that through the combination of science, technology, and state power humans can rationally engineer the future. As Scott shows, high modernist regimes across the globe have utilized state institutions to implement large-scale social engineering initiatives and development schemes aimed at transforming their countries from backward nations into economically productive and rationally planned societies.Footnote 147 Ghazālī was a critic of the Nasser regime, especially for its leftist leanings,Footnote 148 and his Islamic self-help contested the regime's high modernism on two fronts: First, it clearly rejected the notion that humans are ultimately the masters of their fates; and second, it positioned the self and the human interior, as opposed to the state and its institutions, as the engine of ethical and collective reform.Footnote 149 As mentioned in the previous section, Ghazālī’s Islamic self-help was concerned with not simply individual ethical matters but also broader political and social issues. He alludes to this in his introduction. The “social fog” prevalent in Arab countries cannot be dispelled unless reformers delve into “personal problems and character flaws.”Footnote 150 Although political parties on the right and left may despise the type of book he is writing, says Ghazālī, “I do not write to satisfy some trivial scholarly concern,” but rather “to rectify mistaken views and unjust conditions.”Footnote 151
While Ghazālī’s blending of Sufism and self-help was not followed by other Arab writers, Sufism is an integral element of Islamic self-help literature in Indonesia, as James B. Hoesterey has observed.Footnote 152 One aspect of Ghazālī’s Sufi-inspired Islamic self-help that still resonates today is its critique of the state, as well as its positioning of the self as the locus of ethical reform. It is because Islamic self-help both emphasizes the self and seeks to go beyond the state that it has been construed as an effect of neoliberalism, which likewise emphasizes self over state.Footnote 153 Yet, the selves of neoliberalism and some strands of Islamic self-help, including Ghazālī’s, are quite different.Footnote 154 The self-valorized is in the former imagined to be unbound, autonomous, and animated by rational economic calculation, while in the latter the self is conceived as bound by other selves, including God's, and not by rational economic calculation. That said, there was clearly some common ground between Carnegie's ethics of the self and Ghazālī’s. Ghazālī could channel Carnegie's text into his own critique of the high modernist state precisely because liberal self-help promotes a vision of ethical reform as beginning with the self.
THEOLOGIES AND THERAPEUTICS
Ghazālī’s Islamic self-help may take many of its cues from Sufism, but it is also imbued with elements that have historically derived from the Islamic philosophical, medical, and theological traditions. These traditions are not entirely distinct from one another, and they in fact very much overlap. Connecting elements include the notions that the soul can, like the body, become sick, and that the soul's health is part and parcel of the body's health.Footnote 155 The twelfth-century theologian Ibn al-Jawzī (d. 1200), for instance, wrote a tract entitled “Spiritual Medicine,” which provided theological lessons on how to accept God's will so that one might cast out the diseases of grief (ghamm, ḥuzn) and worry (hamm).Footnote 156 Another genre of writing worthy of note in this context is “Prophetic Medicine”—a type of Islamic medical literature that draws upon the Prophet Muhammad's words and accounts of his deeds to prescribe remedies to physical and spiritual sicknesses.Footnote 157 In one famous tract, Ibn Qayyim al-Jawzīya (d. 1350), a fourteenth-century theologian and jurist, dwells on afflictions of the soul and provides theological contemplations and Prophet-approved prayers to dispel grief and worry.Footnote 158 From the Ottoman period up through the twentieth century, the idea that ethics was a type of medicine remained common within Islamic thought.Footnote 159
Various Islamic discourses have thus dealt with the means of dealing with worry, grief, and sorrow. These discourses are foundational to Islamic ethical thought and, although Ghazālī does not cite them, they certainly inform his Islamic self-help.Footnote 160 As he makes clear in Renew Your Life, worry, for him, is a matter wrapped up in a range of theological concerns, including understanding how God's will and power manifest in the world, the nature of good and evil, and the purposes of human life. At one point in Carnegie's text, the American self-help pioneer conveys to his readers a strategy to “banish” worry. He tells them to rely upon the statistical likelihood that most of their worries will never materialize.Footnote 161 For Ghazālī, however, Carnegie's advice is a poor substitute for the Islamic understanding of God's will and fate. After relating Carnegie's advice, Ghazālī laments that “modern civilization” has such poor knowledge of God that it must rely upon such techniques to avoid worry.Footnote 162 For him, statistics do not convey the truth of the way the world works; they might be helpful briefly, but most helpful is to understand that the misfortunes of life are all subject to divine will.Footnote 163 For believers, hardship should become a reminder of the divine will and thereby strengthen their reliance on God. In that way, says Ghazālī, “the ailment becomes the cure.”Footnote 164
Ghazālī’s critique of Carnegie's views on worry and the therapy for it has parallels in the critique leveled at Carnegie by other, far less sympathetic Arabic commentators. ʻAbd al-Ghanī ʻAbbūd, for example, an Islamist writer of 1970s Egypt, penned a text that was quite critical of the underpinnings of Carnegie's belief in the therapeutic powers of religion. ʻAbbūd, like other Egyptian intellectuals, was familiar with Carnegie's work. He encountered it during the summer of 1956 (not coincidentally, the same year Ghazālī published Renew Your Life). Both of Carnegie's texts, says ʻAbbūd, “changed the course of my life,” as they did for many others. At the time, he believed that what was in these books was “a picture of what appeared in our Islamic heritage.”Footnote 165 Nevertheless, after re-reading them some twenty years later, he came to see Carnegie's views as theologically suspect. ʻAbbūd takes issue with what he perceives as Carnegie's instrumentalization of belief in God. Carnegie, according to him, finds religious belief valuable only because it helps with worry and provides emotional, psychological, and physical wellbeing. ʻAbbūd agrees that these benefits follow from belief in God, but, he says, belief is not a “mere means” to these ends.Footnote 166 In other words, even though Carnegie's book on worry promotes “the wisdom of humans submitting their affairs to God,” it does so for the wrong purposes.Footnote 167 It is for this reason, asserts ʻAbbūd, that Carnegie's book, unlike Islamic teachings, is unable to return to its readers their “humanity” and fully conquer worry.Footnote 168
CONCLUSION
Ghazālī’s Islamic self-help constituted a radical reconfiguration of Western self-help, one that critically engaged not only its liberal ethical sensibilities but also the antiliberal ideology of the socialist, high modernist state under Nasser. Although I have focused less on the question of how the Islamic tradition changed through the encounter with Western self-help, this is not because I believe there exists some timeless, authentic Islam that is impervious to change. Other studies have already shown that, within certain formulations of Islamic self-help, Islamic practices and ideas have been reconfigured to fit the demands of neoliberal governance.Footnote 169 More broadly, the dominant approach among scholars of contemporary Islam has been to analyze the fruits of the Islamic encounter with Euro-American thought, institutions, and practices primarily from the perspective of how Islam has been fundamentally reshaped by the engines of modernity—the state, global capitalism, and science.Footnote 170 My concern in this article has been with a different question. Taking a cue from Shahab Ahmed, I have sought throughout to use the word “Islamic” together with “self-help” in a meaningful way.Footnote 171 The question that interests me is not how does Islam become neoliberal, but rather how does self-help—and for that matter any other novel intellectual trend, cultural form, or practice—become Islamic? By drawing upon the work of an American self-help pioneer to make an argument about the Qur'an, the Sunna, and Sufism, Ghazālī was, of course, working with a historically evolving understanding of Islam. But again, what is undertheorized and less understood, is how a novel cultural form, in this case self-help, becomes Islamic. Part of answering this question, as I have argued, entails paying attention to the ontological divides embedded within Islamic and Western discourses that are not always reconciled—nor even intended to be reconciled—by the translative work of Muslim intellectuals of the Global South.Footnote 172 But more than that, it also requires analyzing how the objects of these intellectuals’ translations are reconfigured, modified, critiqued, and, at times, radically inverted, though always enriched.
