المستخلص: |
Abdallah Saaf is not only a great Arab thinker and author of a very impressive body of work, from politics to literature, but also an intellectual “engage”, in the great tradition of the Mediterranean. It is for me a great privilege to be his friend and complicit in so many intellectual adventures. Of all the intellectual conversations of my life, one of most permanent and enriching has been with my good friend, Abdallah. We have discussed almost everything from Marxism, our common political heritage, to identity, democracy and islamophobia, our present common concern. We have co-authored a number of papers, report and manifestos, have launched a number of initiatives and co-organized a large number of debates on important issues of our time. We have spent hours discussing cinema or literature, walking in many cities of the world, from Lisbon to Rabat to Istanbul, and always in Paris, going from bookshop in bookshop; in the 1970s, without knowing each other, we certainly met several times in Editions Maspero. We have travelled with the same authors in our baggage, whether Jorge Luis Borges or Ismail Kadare. We have discovered over the years that in the “plurality of our affiliation” we shared not only common values but the same conviction that we should fight for them; that we were part of the same common humanity and we could not accept the doctrines of cultural relativism and the politics of identity.
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