What should be done with religious heritage? That is the question Egyptian writer and journalist Ibrahim Essa takes up in his episode this week on Alhurra’s platforms, as he lays out an ongoing debate between those who argue for preserving religious—especially Islamic—heritage exactly as it is, and those who demand removing it entirely. Essa also sets out his own view on this contested issue.
Essa says many people will tell you, repeatedly, that religious heritage—Islamic heritage—must be preserved in full because it is part of a great Islamic civilization, indeed the civilization itself, and therefore must never be touched. On the other side, he says, there are those who insist the heritage must be removed because it is a major obstacle to progress and renewal—whether renewal of thought or even renewal of jurisprudence. In their view, Essa says, the only solution is to push heritage out of the picture.
Between these two approaches, Essa argues, there is a third position: to do both at once. Under this approach, he says, people read the heritage, live with it, study it, and respect it—but without sanctifying it, venerating it, glorifying it, magnifying it, or even making it an object of devotion within religion. At the same time, he says, they produce from that heritage different, renewed, reformist ideas that displace what is dark and obscured within it. In this way, Essa argues, heritage is preserved while it is also renewed and changed.
Essa frames the debate as three visions. The first vision is that heritage should remain as it is, to be sanctified and applied exactly as it came and as it was laid down; he identifies the proponents of this view as Salafists and traditionalists. The second vision, he says, is held by figures he describes as “very revolutionary” in how they understand religion and religious renewal; they believe that removing heritage and casting its burden off Muslims’ shoulders is what will save both the present and the future. The third view is a “reconciliatory” approach—Essa notes that some critics call it “patchwork” or opportunistic—in which heritage is combined with a modern reading. Under this view, he argues, heritage cannot be excluded or broken with entirely, because it is a human heritage: an accumulation of human intellect, thought and history.
Between “Ants” and “Bees”
Essa says advocates of the reconciliatory approach deal with heritage as if it were a “mine.” A mine, he argues, is something you enter to take rock and extract gold, copper, or other metals: heritage is the rock that contains valuable elements that can be drawn out of the stone or the mountain. But before that, he asks, what is “heritage” in the first place?
As an example, Essa cites the late Saudi cleric Abdul Aziz bin Baz, whom he describes as a major figure of Wahhabi Salafism. Bin Baz, Essa says, considered the Quran itself to be “heritage.” Bin Baz, he says, argued that there is no objection to calling the Quran and the Prophetic Sunnah “Islamic heritage,” because the Prophet “bequeathed” them to Muslims, and because God referred to the Quran as an “inheritance” in the verse: “Then We caused to inherit the Book those We have chosen of Our servants.” For Bin Baz, Essa says, “inheritance” is what the Prophet left behind.
Essa rejects that framing. In his view, it is not possible to treat a revealed, sanctified divine book—revealed by God—as a book of heritage or a part of heritage. The Book, he says, is divine and sacred. Heritage, by contrast, is everything connected to the Book in human terms: interpretation, hadith, jurisprudence, and the entire religious project that came afterward. All of that, he says, is heritage that those generations produced, compiled, recorded, and transmitted—an inheritance that later generations receive. But Essa argues that it must be understood clearly that this is not “religion” itself; rather, it is those generations’ understanding of religion.
For that reason, Essa says he leans toward the reconciliatory theory that looks at heritage—its ideas, fatwas, writings and perspectives—and draws out what is most precious, best, and most compatible with the Quran, reason, and the age, in order to produce a new heritage that is the child of the present era. He says this theory—“not mine alone,” he adds—is what he calls the “theory of ants and bees.”
Essa points to the Egyptian philosopher Zaki Naguib Mahmoud, who wrote in his book Qiyam Turathina (“The Values of Our Heritage”) about dealing with heritage either in the way of ants or the way of bees. Ants, Essa says, carry a piece of sugar from one place to storage in an orderly line—an intricate, automatic, tightly disciplined process. But, he argues, it does not transform what is carried into something else: the ant carries the sugar to its destination without changing it. This, he says, is the method of ants: a load that does not change the loaded object.
Bees, by contrast, go to flowers and blossoms and extract what they want. The bee does not take the flower and fly away, Essa says; it takes the nectar from the flower to produce honey. That, he argues, is the approach that should be followed with heritage—while Salafists, he says, operate in the manner of “ants.”
The Crime of Falsification
Essa says the central problem lies in turning heritage into an absolute reference, made sacred and venerated merely because it was written a thousand years ago or more. What was written, he argues, may be deeply backward, dark and obscure; the fact that it is “heritage” does not mean it should be esteemed—indeed, he says, sometimes it should be thrown out of people’s minds.
He also raises what he describes as a crucial issue: the belief among some that “purifying the heritage” means bringing a heritage book and deleting what one does not like from it.
Essa cites what he says some religious institutions in Egypt did when President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi called for renewing religious discourse: they went to the curricula taught in institutes and colleges and removed fatwas, including one that permitted eating the flesh of a captive if no food could be found, along with other strange and superstitious material. But Essa argues this is not renewal; there is no such thing, he says, as “purifying heritage” by crossing out what displeases the reader from a book.
Instead, he argues, the correct approach is to preserve the book and the heritage as historical value: the book remains as it is, the ideas remain as they are, the document remains as it is. He says he is completely against such “purification.”
Essa adds that a reverse “purification” has also occurred: everything that is enlightened was removed from Ibn Taymiyyah’s books when they were republished in a Salafi-Wahhabi form. Ibn Taymiyyah, Essa argues, has strange and wondrous aspects; in some matters, he says, Ibn Taymiyyah is very enlightened, while in others he is extremely dark, bloody, racist and fanatical. Salafists, he says, removed the “enlightened” parts of his works and republished them to circulate their own version of Ibn Taymiyyah.
Essa says he rejects both approaches. The book, he argues, should remain as it is as a historical document, but the content should be discussed openly—saying, for example, that a given passage is dark, does not belong to reason, and does not accord with the Quran. Do not purify, he argues; do not delete. The danger, he says, lies in confusing the religious with the historical: heritage is a human product, while the only divine religious product is the Holy Quran. A Quranic verse is divine, he says, but the interpretation of al-Tabari, Ibn Kathir, al-Zamakhshari, or Sayyid Qutb is human interpretation; he is bound by the verse, not by a human explanation.
The “Black Triangle”
When speaking about heritage, Essa argues, the issue is not only thought and jurisprudence. It is also a history that has been elevated to sanctity and veneration—presented as a “utopian city” or an ideal model. His problem, he says, with Salafists and traditionalists who claim moderation while sanctifying heritage is that they construct what he calls a “black triangle.”
Essa describes that black triangle as having three dark sides.
The first side, he says, is their belief that the past was great, glorious, virtuous and ideal—pure and spotless—a “golden past.” Essa argues this is not true and has no connection to reality: the past was human, he says, containing the bright as well as the bloody, the black, and the horrifying in its brutality. But glorifying heritage makes that side appear pure and venerated.
The second side, he argues, is the conclusion that if the past was great, it must return. From this comes, he says, the idea of “Salafism” and the return to the early forebears under the claim that “what made its beginning righteous will make its end righteous.” Which “first era” are they talking about, he asks, when the Companions fought each other and killed each other by the thousands in seditions and conflicts? He argues that those who speak of the greatness of heritage are also speaking of a history that includes events such as the massacre of the Barmakids, Karbala, and the violation of Medina for three days in the era of Yazid—so much so, he says, that it was said a thousand women became pregnant through rape. This is the past, Essa argues, that they insist must return.
The third side, he says, is that if that great past must return, then it must return “even by force”—and this is where terrorism appears. The terrorist, he argues, wants to return to that past he was told—through heritage—was great, glorifying imams, jurists, and the eras of conquests and occupation that were called “openings” and were based on dominant military force.
The “black catastrophe,” in Essa’s view, is presenting heritage as sacred in all its branches, details and history—leading to stagnation around old ideas and longing to return to them.
Essa argues that the solution is to return to heritage to read it, distinguish its light from its darkness, and determine what suits people today and what has nothing to do with them. Heritage is a human act, he says, and human effort deserves respect—but it does not weigh, in his words, “the weight of a mustard seed” before the Quran and reason.
He calls for producing a new project that develops and advances, with “enlightened” heritage in the background—and even “dark” heritage within the field of vision so it can be avoided, surpassed, critiqued, and removed from people’s conscience and minds. Returning to heritage, he argues, is necessary, but the question is: what kind of return, and by what method? Will it be the way of ants or the way of bees? For him, Essa concludes, it is the bees.
