An exceptional man has just left us this week after prolonged suffering. He left us in a moment when Aleppo is witnessing the most vicious human disaster, while the “civilized” modern world remains silently gazing, obsessed only with erecting walls and consolidating borders.
He left us in the midst of a decomposing, disoriented, and absurd Arab World, about which he has been soothsaying for several decades. A myriad of his predictions, or possibly his nightmares, which he prophesied with a startling clarity, have turned into a bleak daily reality. Sadek Jalal al-‘Azm has left us without being able to realize his dream of a more humane and dignified life in our part of the world. Perhaps, too, Sadek could not take it any more; the inferno of this impossible war in his home country, Syria, has reached a climax. Perhaps, too, his last station in Berlin, as an intellectual in exile, was a blessing in disguise.
I am certain that countless obituaries will be written about Sadek Jalal al-‘Azm’s life and his invaluable humanist worldview, which touched not only the Arab world but the larger cosmopolitan milieux in which he moved with elegance. Sadek was a visionary whose unique way of writing, his courageous political and progressive stands, the cause célèbre he became after the publication of his famed book “Critique of Religious Thought,” [1] in which he criticized the instrumentalisation of religion for political and material ends; his acknowledging of first and foremost an internal defeat, a defeat of a mindset as significant as any military one, will all be evoked time and again, remembered and valued in the years to come.
