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Omnia El Shakry's The Arabic Freud focuses on the creative encounter between Islam and psychoanalysis in mid-twentieth-century Egypt. It is an extraordinary study of post-colonial thought and of the history of psychology, which takes seriously psychoanalytic thought produced in a non-western society. This study therefore has analytic implications for our understanding of the globalization of psychoanalysis in the twentieth century; and also for our understanding of the intellectual history of mid-twentieth-century Egypt - both before and after the 1952 revolution. El Shakry uniquely uses psychoanalysis to examine the continuities and ruptures of post-colonial thought. At the same time, she questions our assumptions regarding the secularity of the analyst and the analysand and allows her historical subjects to weave Sufi thought into our understanding of psychology. Her book is therefore an exemplary study of the integration of western science into non-western intellectual contexts. It is not merely a contextualization of Egyptian readings of psychoanalysis, but also a profound philosophical engagement with the implications of this intellectual encounter.
The Arabic Freud is a valuable contribution to two bodies of literature. One is the history of non-western science - which explores how science was understood, consumed and produced in non-western societies, and particularly in colonial and post-colonial ones. Gyan Prakash's Another Reason (1999) comes to mind in this context; in the Middle East, El Shakry's brilliant first book The Great Social Laboratory (2007), the equally brilliant Reading Darwin in Arabic (2014) by Marwa Elshakry (and her more conceptual articles), and Cyrus Schayegh's excellent Who Is Knowledgeable Is Strong (2009); and finally my own research on sexology speaks to this body of literature and was included in Sexology and Translation, edited by Heike Bauer (2015), alongside European and non-European case studies. This body of scholarship, in Mid