Arabic and Islamic Studies

In the autumn of 1959, the Iraqi modernist poet Badr Shākir al-Sayyāb (1926–1964) published a series of perplexing autobiographical vignettes entitled I Used to be a Communist (Kuntu shiyū‘iyyan) in the Baghdad daily, Al-Ḥurriyya (Freedom). For 17 weeks, al-Sayyāb detailed his involvement with the Iraqi Communist Party (ICP), his decision to leave in 1954 and his reflections on the present state of Iraqi culture and politics. Al-Sayyāb’s writing attempts to settle personal scores and reveal uncomfortable secrets, but it does more than that—it serves to plant al-Sayyāb’s flag within a Cold War that is as local as it is global. Indeed, its publication took place in the shadow of al-Sayyāb’s emerging relation with the Central Intelligence Agency front organization, the Congress for Cultural Freedom. Kuntu shiyū‘iyyan is more than a key document in the shifting political tides of 1959; it is also a literary-critical work, and indeed the only major prose work by one of modern Iraq’s most important poets.

Background: We aimed to explore the efficacy and safety profile of preoperative neoadjuvant chemoradiation (NACRT) in locally advanced rectal cancer (LARC) in upper rectum versus middle/lower rectum. Methods: The study included 173 patients with stage II or III (T2-4b, N0-2b) LARC who underwent NACRT followed by total mesorectal excision (TME) between January 2011 and October 2016. Cox regression, log-rank test, and Kaplan-Meier curves were calculated. Results: Among the 173 patients, 58 had lesions in the upper rectum and 115 patients had lesions in middle/lower rectum. In a median follow-up of 35 months (range, 6-73 months), the 5-year disease-free survival (DFS) and overall survival (OS) were 84% and 88% for the patients with upper rectal cancer and 77% and 68% for those with middle/lower rectal cancer (P = 0.251 and P = 0.058, respectively). The 5-year DFS (P = 0.012) and OS (P = 0.003) were better in the NACRT responders [tumor regression grade (TRG) 0 or 1] compared with nonresponders (TRG 2 or 3). The independent prognostic factor of favorable response to NACRT was the FOLFOX regimen (P = 0.004). Conclusions: Patients with LARC in the upper rectum who underwent NACRT followed by TME had similar DFS and a trend toward longer OS, compared with those who had middle/lower rectal lesions. Furthermore, FOLFOX may yield superior results than fluoropyrimidine based regimen during NACRT. NACRT might be an alternative option for patients with LARC in the upper rectum as it has a favorable pathological complete response rate and comparable clinical outcomes when compared with patients with LARC in middle/lower rectum.

Early Orientalist legal scholarship understood Islamic law as an imposed, ethical code of behavior. The common perception was that the Prophet Mu _ hammad did not originate a new legal system, but rather came to teach the new community how to act based on moral and religious standards. This meant that Islamic law had as its foundation a religious taxonomy based on textual references to morality rather than juridical categories.  Linked to divinely ordained directives, this moral dimension ascribed an idealistic value to religious law, removing it from the contingencies of political realities.  Working from this assumption, many attributed to the divine law a conclusive and immutable character,  implicitly denying that Islamic law could play a role in any open-ended philosophical reflection on law and good governance.  In the case of Averroes, it has been supposed that since he too understood the law to be irrevocable, he refrained from philosophizing about iteven if he also professed its harmony with philosophy, so as to prove the philosophers' orthodoxy.  Recently, though, * This chapter is based on my dissertation research. I extend my deepest gratitude to my supervisors Emma Gannagé and Felicitas Opwis. A special thanks goes to Baber Johansen and Maroun Aouad for their generous support. Also, I thank Nadja Germann and Ziad Bou Akl for their comments on the earlier versions of this chapter. Finally, I thank Peter Adamson and Matteo Di Giovanni for their extensive feedback and support.  This position is reflected in Schacht : -. For a critical assessment of Orientalist position on Islamic law, cf. Johansen : -.  Cf. Hallaq a: .  For more positions on the absence of natural law theory or practical ethic in Islamic law, see Brunschvig : ; Gibb : ; Makdisi : . For a counter argument, see Emon .  This is typical of the approach adopted by Leo Strauss and his followers. For Strauss (: -), Jewish and Muslim philosophers were bound by the authority of the revealed law, hence their endorsement of an ideal Platonic state with a prophet-philosopher-king. See further Strauss : - (cf. Strauss : -) as well as the works of Charles Butterworth, who adopted the Straussian approach in his study of Averroes' theory of rhetoric (Butterworth , , , and ). For a critique, see Gutas : -.  For early examples of this tendency, see Renan ; Gauthier .

Looking at the reception of Aristotle’s Rhetoric in the Arabic tradition, particularly Averroes’ Middle commentary on Aristotle’s Rhetoric (Talḫīṣ al-ḫaṭāba), I discern the impact of the Islamic legal context on the commentator’s reading of Aristotle’s theory of rhetoric. Placing Averroes’ interpretive enterprise within the context of Islamic governance has already been highlighted, particularly the role of Islamic law in his conception of the political role of rhetoric. Such attention to Islamic law, however, has often been conceived in a theoretical fashion, without attesting to the concrete and epistemological basis of legal practices of the courts. Focusing on Averroes’ discus- sion of the role of rhetoric in the judicial discourse, I address the impact of Islamic legal procedures known as the rules of evidence: witnesses and oaths and their modus operandi in the court, in shaping Averroes’ conception of the political role of rhetoric. Accounting for Islamic rules of evidence, I argue that Averroes ascribes a practical role to rhetoric in the court in order to establish a consensus in the implementation of justice. In so doing, Averroes oversteps his role as commentator and rather draws from his own practical concerns over the implementation of justice in the court as a legal practitioner: the Qāḍī of Cordova.

This is a reference to the scriptural verse from the Quran 2:31, which states that God revealed language as names (asmāʾ) to Adam: "And He taught Adam all the names (asmāʾ), then showed them to the angels, saying: inform me of the names of these, if ye are truthful." Those who advocated that language is divinely revealed often quote this verse in Muslim discussions. All the Quranic verses provided in this paper will be based on the Muhammad Abdel Haleem's translation (See Abdel Haleem 2010). 12 Druart 2015, 7.

The notions of good and bad/evil in Islamic thought carries multifarious overtones, and their conceptual and linguistic translatability cannot be limited to gauging human conducts. The complexity of these notions is rooted in the interpretive associations of good and evil (khayr and sharr) to different domains of ethical reflections, which range from aesthetic undertones reflected in the Arabic terms qabīḥ and ḥasan (ugly and beautiful) and connotations to truth and falsehood associated to terms like ḥaqq and bāṭil but also to communal basis of what is praised and what is blamed such as mamdūḥ and madhmūm, as well as the legal spectrum of norms which includes the obligatory wājib, forbidden ḥarām as well as what is recommended mandūb and finally the metaphysical connotations associated to existence found in philosophical discussions of concepts such as the notion of the ultimate good al-khayr al-maḥḍ or khayriyyat al-wujūd. All these nuances deserve close attention when tackling Islamic ethics. This diversity is also captured in the nature of the reflection found in queries related to the ontology of good and evil, the nature/moral character of human and divine actions, the basis of normativity and the methods of norms construction in relation to scripture and communal practice, the origin of moral agency and responsibility in this world, the concept of happiness and misery and its realization both in this world and the hereafter, virtues and vices as well as theological and philosophical positions on theodicy, God’s moral code, the nature of creation, providence and the problem of evil, the nature of poetic discourse and its ethical dimension, as well as the psychological role of good and bad actions on the purification of the soul and its rapport to mystical aims. This conference is the first attempt to tap into the different conceptual discussions on the notion of good and evil in the variegated areas of knowledge production in Islam ranging from: philosophy, theology, jurisprudence, Sufism, Quranic exegesis, Hadith, and adab, and political thought in both classical and modern period.

Philosophical and theological ethics in the Islamic tradition tend to be appraised on the basis of a unilateral perspective, which circumvents a moral rational approach to intuition. On this account, moral knowledge is expected to rest on intuitive judgments, which are universally accessible to human beings. Looking at moral ontology and epistemology in Arabic philosophy, I demonstrate that taking intuitionism as the only valid rational discourse to ethics needs to be challenged. In fact, Arabic philosophers do not subscribe to a realist view of the good and evil in relation to human actions, and rather admit a division between cosmic values in metaphysics and moral values in ethics. In so doing, they show how metaphysics ascribes a substantial view to good in existence and a negative theory to evil, while the science of ethics admits a teleological and relative view of the good. Overall, the falāsifa remain committed to Aristotle’s premise that ethics does not rely on abstraction and emphasized the role of experience too. But, they seem to be also attentive to the dialectical nature of Islamic jurisprudence in producing norms considering both principles of the law and its particular application. This is also clear in their epistemology of ethical judgments such as the maxim justice is good. While they ascribe a universal status to ethical maxims, they preclude from granting them an absolute status over the authority of norms construction. Instead, philosophers attribute a dialectical role to ethical maxims to guarantee both consensus over norms and the possibility to produce truthful opinions.

Philosophical and theological ethics in the Islamic tradition tend to be appraised on the basis of a unilateral perspective, which circumvents a moral rational approach to intuition. On this account, moral knowledge is expected to rest on intuitive judgments, which are universally accessible to human beings. Looking at moral ontology and epistemology in Arabic philosophy, I demonstrate that taking intuitionism as the only valid rational discourse to ethics needs to be challenged. In fact, Arabic philosophers do not subscribe to a realist view of the good and evil in relation to human actions, and rather admit a division between cosmic values in metaphysics and moral values in ethics. In so doing, they show how metaphysics ascribes a substantial view to good in existence and a negative theory to evil, while the science of ethics admits a teleological and relative view of the good. Overall, the falāsifa remain committed to Aristotle’s premise that ethics does not rely on abstraction a...

Al-Razi" in the series "Great Medieval Thinkers" and has edited or co-edited many books, including The Cambridge Companion to Arabic Philosophy and Interpreting Avicenna: Critical Essays. He is also the host of the History of Philosophy podcast (www.historyofphilosophy.net), which appears as a series of books with Oxford University Press.