Amman – the compass

On Thursday evening, the Association for Islamic Studies and Research held a dialogue on “Arab and Islamic Thought”, during which it hosted the Arab thinker Professor Dr. Fahmy Jadaan.

Jadaan touched on a number of ideas and concepts of Arab and Islamic philosophy on a number of issues that preoccupied Arabs and Muslims for more than half a century.

He pointed out that these issues relate to religion, heritage, history, and contemporary ideological systems related to Islamists, secularists, liberals, and nationalists, all of which Jadaan links to what he called “moral and human values.”

He explained that for him, it represents justice, freedom, rational doctrines, and philosophical and religious overlaps. Here he means the religious and philosophical problem, as he put it.

Jadaan said that, after researching, he came up with a number of concepts and a number of terms that have practically become his guide in everything he writes and everything his thoughts revolve around, and he called it the term: “Integrative critical rationality.”

He pointed out that it brings together what the philosophical space calls the cognitive mind and the emotional mind within the framework of a comprehensive perspective of the set of ideas in which it fluctuates, as he described it.

He explained that it is rational, subject to openness, and rational, ethical, faith-based in its general framework, and this is what crystallized for him in the end, in his book “The Meaning of Things… A Message in the Essential of Our Direct Existence,” which is the book recently published by Jadaan by the “Arab Institute for Studies and Publishing.” Where he raises several questions, such as “What (saying) can the thinker, within the limits of his contemplative, cognitive, and sentimental mind, send it, regarding the extent of survival or loss, so that the city does not remain without walls, and so that the life that was will be?”

Jadaan indicated that his latest book is the summation of what he concluded in issues of man, religion, history, heritage, prevailing ideological systems, our relationship with the West, and the values ​​in which he sees them as the ruling values ​​of our thought and behavior.

The thinker and philosopher limited these issues to justice, freedom, reason, and faith, and added to them a concept that many did not talk about, which is the “value of mercy.”

He pointed out that this value is an Islamic value first and a human value second, stressing that if the world today needs a high-class human value, then it needs this value (mercy).

Jadaan concluded his speech by emphasizing that he is not a liberal secularist, as some think, nor an Islamist, as others think, indicating that he may be “somewhere between the two.”

For his part, the presenter of the dialogue, Dr. Amer Al-Hafi, praised what the thinker and philosopher, Dr. Fahmy Jadaan, presented of urgent issues affecting the thought of the Arab and Muslim person, and the problems that disturb his societal thought.

Dr. Fathi Malkawi thanked Jadaan for accepting the invitation, stressing that his refined thought and real reviews in his latest book represent a state of sophistication that you do not find in many philosophers and thinkers.

At the end of the dialogue, Jadaan answered a number of questions from the audience, which centered on his intellectual productions and what is related to modern ideological systems and their relationship with the West, and criticism of all that is imported today from the West of individual and abnormal values ​​that oppose the thought of society, religion and human civilization.