Book Review: Yousef Ben Adi’s Review of Mohammed Al-Mesbahi’s The Self in Arab-Islamic Thought

Abstract

Mohammed Mesbahi’s The Self in Arab-Islamic Thought has accomplished two important feats. The first is illustrating the author’s ability to bring the writings of a wide range of Sufi mystics and other Muslim thinkers on the self under scrutiny. The second feat is that the book illustrates how limited our erstwhile conceptions of “the self” have been, whether on an ontological or semantic level. This limitedness was a necessary consequence of the desire to engage in the world of modernity and liberties. These earlier philosophical efforts utilized a specific set of tools, namely: material, image, action and mind. Al-Mesbahi’s book allows readers to see the crystallization of these differences in stark contrast, showing how the modern world can be cleaved away entirely from the pre-modern world.