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Joseph Massad notes at the beginning of his chapter, ‘Psychoanalysis, “Islam,” and the Other of Liberalism’ in Islam and Liberalism (2015), that, ‘historically, psychoanalysis did not take “Islam” as an object of study, as a concern, or as a problem’ (p. 275). Islam emerged as a question for psychoanalysis within contemporary Islamist movements, primarily in response to the assumptions about the inherent incompatibility of Islam with western liberal values. Spurred by the desire to ameliorate Islam's negative image, Massad maintains, a group of psychoanalysts and psychoanalytical thinkers from Muslim backgrounds - including Moustapha Safouan (Egypt), Fethi Benslama (Tunisia), Adnan Houbballah (Lebanon), Khatibi (Morocco) and Tarabishi (Syria) - employed psychoanalysis as a means to bring Muslim subjectivity closer to European democratic standards, driven by a personal agenda to assert the Europeanness of their identities in contradistinction to the Islamists. In this way, as Stephania Pandolfo argues, psychoanalysis served ‘as a pedagogical rampart in the age of political religion, to promote what was described as more tolerant, critical, and open Islam’ (2018: p. 125).
Early attempts to examine the interconnections between Europe and Islamism through psychoanalysis opened a productive dialogue between psychoanalytic and Islamic discourses, bringing together two fields that were traditionally thought to be irreconcilable. However, in such works, analysts often viewed psychoanalysis as a product of modernity and of European Enlightenment, and sought to make Islam (or, more precisely, the Islam of the Islamists) ascend to the same level of sophistication and originality. But as critics like Massad have noted, this priority committed them to ‘a hegemonic form of liberal epistemology whose aim is the assimilation of the world in its own image’ (p. 287). Benslama's Psychoanalysis and the Challenge of Islam (2009[2002]) best exemplifies this position since it presents, as