Fathi Triki “Philosophy in the Arab and African worlds is now awakening to its own identity”

Dr. Fathi Triki is a Tunisian philosopher, president of the Tunisia Institute of Philosophy, and holder of the UNESCO Chair in Philosophy at the University of Tunis. He earned a doctorate in political philosophy from the Sorbonne in Paris and a higher doctorate in philosophy from the Faculty of Human and Social Sciences in Tunis. Over the course of his career, he has served as Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities in Sfax, visiting professor at Duke University and Paris 8, honorary professor at the University of Tunis, and director of the Philosophy Laboratory at the same university.

His works include ‘Reason and Freedom’, ‘Philosophy of Modernity’, ‘The Wandering Philosophy’, and ‘Readings in the Philosophy of Diversity’. He has also received several accolades, among them the Medal of Merit in Education and Science, the National Prize in Literature and Human Sciences, the Order of the Republic of Tunisia, and a diploma of scientific distinction from the Institute for the Promotion of Francophone Philosophy in Kinshasa.

Triki recently published a new book in French titled ‘Philosophizing in the Land of Islam’, in which he examines the contours and conceptions of philosophy in the Arab world and across Africa. In this exclusive interview with Geeska, he discussed the differences between philosophical traditions in the Arab and African spaces, arguing that both are experiencing a moment of awakening to their own identities through resistance to Western universalism, while remaining deeply complementary to each other.

Amina Jubran: Some researchers, upon examining your philosophical work, tend to affirm the alternative philosophical vision you offer as a Tunisian thinker, one centered on the spirit of critique, reasonableness, pluralism, and openness, calling for friendship, alterity, and shared living. Do you agree with this characterization, and could you elaborate on this vision for our readers?

Fathi Triki: I should note that I began thinking about the question of diversity as far back as the late 1970s, at a time when the prevailing political order was built on unity, in both thought and practice: a single party, a single ideology, rejecting any possibility of opposition. The same was true of the student and popular movements of the time, which also rested on closed theories and rigid positions that refused any possibility of pluralism or difference. My philosophy of diversity thus arose from a critique of both sides: a critique of monolithic thought and its political and social consequences, and equally a critique of the Marxist framework adopted by the Marxist left, which rejected dialogue and coexistence with the different. Thus, if there is an alternative philosophical vision in my work, it lies in this critique of dogmatic thought and the opening toward alterity and difference.

I believe this new theory sharpened debates and criticism on the Tunisian and Arab intellectual scene, and this critique bore upon a difficult paradox, the question: how can we agree on certain fundamental values necessary for living together, when we are different and diverse? In such a situation, some may commit the worst acts in the name of the right to difference and diversity. This drew me deeper into the problem and led me back to the philosophy of al-Farabi, from which I derived a new concept, that of ta'aqqul (reasonableness), and built a new philosophy I call ta'aqqliyya. The meaning is that the givens of our personal and collective lives must be governed by reason, both as a foundation for thinking and as something bound to action in general and to the ethics of conduct in particular.

Reason open to ethics, what I call reasonableness, can make diversity acceptable insofar as it is reasonable. Yet it appeared to me that this solution was insufficient, because reasonableness may not find its natural pathways in changing societies, operating only within educated elites. I therefore proposed a new idea to support my philosophies of diversity and reasonableness: the philosophy of living together, which we now call the philosophy of coexistence or shared living.

This philosophy affirms the right to diversity and difference, meaning that if we agree collectively on shared rules, norms, and values, we can live side by side despite our differences and our diversity, without violence dragging us into perpetual war. But this requires accepting shared values that we call "universal," and that led us to engage seriously with the idea of Western Universality and to dismantle its mechanisms. 

We had experienced it as an instrument of Western pressure in defense of interests that often conflict with ours, and dismantling this universality led us to propose what I call a “Plural Universality” (Universalité plurielle) -- one that would emerge from the interaction between our cultures in Africa and the Arab world and neighboring cultures. The merit of shared living is that it rests on the right to difference and respect for the other, while also resting on respect for dignity.

This new vision is thus built on a set of interlocking and mutually supporting concepts that represent the necessity of diversity and difference, the recognition of alterity, and the use of reason and reasonableness to arrive at a shared life grounded in dignity and peace. Like all philosophies, this vision is in part theoretical and utopian, but it can also be practical in another dimension, which is what led us to engage with the philosophy of everyday life, that life which is capable of embracing such a vision.

AJ: How do you assess the intellectual and philosophical landscape in the Arab world and in Africa? Are there differences between the philosophical traditions of these two spaces, and how do you see the possibility of building a complementarity between them?

FT: In my recent book Philosophizing in the Land of Islam, I analyze some of the features of philosophy in the Arab world and in Africa, opening the space for the reader to grasp the multiplicity of philosophy's forms and the different conditions of its presence in those countries. The Senegalese philosopher Abdoulaye Elimane Kane, for example, observes that Senegalese philosophy, when one analyzes its structure, reveals a founding paradox that marks the circulation and teaching of philosophy: the paradox of referential dependency set against the aspiration to root an African intellectual identity.

The works of French and Anglo-Saxon philosophers dominate, by a clear margin, the educational landscape across levels and institutions. This dominance is not only the product of some inherent theoretical superiority; it is the fruit of a long history of institutional and cultural entanglement between African and Western universities. The formation of a significant number of African professors within Western academic spaces has turned the Western philosophical reference from a conscious epistemological choice into an implicit horizon of thought and teaching.

The material infrastructure of knowledge circulation, from the availability of books in university libraries to the ease of purchasing them on the market, reproduces this centrality in an almost automatic manner. Philosophy in the Arab world and in the African world continues to suffer from this colonial dependency. Despite being rooted in the depths of African and Arab civilizations, it remains, in both worlds, caught between the search for its own identity and submission to Western frameworks.

Philosophy inevitably aspires toward universality; yet, this is only valid if such universality does not efface the diverse cultural contributions that constitute it. Western colonialism has imposed a narrative where ‘universality’ is framed as a strictly Western construct, demanding our total compliance -- lest we be labeled 'anti-universal.' This has compelled philosophers in Africa and the Arab world to re-examine the very concept of universality, asserting the African continent’s vital role in the genesis of global philosophical thought.

In this sense, philosophy in both worlds is now at a moment of awakening to its own identity, through struggle and resistance against the hegemony of Western universalism, and the two traditions are in a state of complementarity, all the more so when we consider that some have located the beginnings of philosophy in ancient Egypt, a country that is at once African, Arab, and Islamic.

AJ: You are known for your engagement with multiple questions as a Tunisian philosopher, and most notably with “the philosophy of the everyday,” which has occupied a special place in your philosophical activity. Why did you choose to focus on this particular philosophical dimension, and how did you develop your theory of shared living within the framework of dignity?

FK: I have partly answered this question already. But I will add here that the philosophy of everyday life is an attempt to open philosophizing onto the reality of countries and connect it to public debates in thought, culture, and politics. In truth, a philosophical approach to the everyday is rarely found in Arab philosophical thought. Why? Because philosophy in this world has been confined almost entirely to its own history, meaning that the Arab thinker repeats, parrot-like, what so-and-so said and how someone else understood it, what the value of that understanding is, and how we ought to understand, interpret, and explain what some philosopher said, and so on. At best it has become a subject taught in universities in this manner, and occasionally in secondary schools in Arab countries that embraced modernity. We do not at present have many genuine philosophical creations.

The strange thing is that those who occupy themselves with philosophy are themselves the first to resist anyone who attempts to move beyond the history of philosophy to create a concept or build a theory, insisting that we have no philosophers, as if echoing what the orientalist Renan said – that Arabs produce no thought.

Personally, I have focused on this creative dimension of philosophy and connected it to everyday life to demonstrate that we are in urgent need of philosophy that is genuinely productive in our thought and useful for our knowledge, not confined to an ivory tower whose contents only a tiny fraction of intellectuals can decipher.

We must of course study the history of philosophy, but we must also have the audacity to create concepts and frameworks. My book on everyday philosophy is an important moment in the emergence and development of my theory of “shared living” within the framework of dignity, because the philosophy of shared living requires engaging with living itself and with the everyday. The time has come to return to developing philosophy in its truest sense, the one al-Farabi describes as “attending first to theoretical virtues and then to practical ones.”

AJ: Do we find in Arab and African philosophical thought a philosophical approach to the everyday?

FT: We know that “the everyday” is often philosophically disdained, yet it is the most dangerous field of thought: it is where power conceals itself, where habits take root, and where freedom is either made or smothered. This is precisely why when philosophy engages with the everyday, it becomes dangerous, and that danger threatens philosophy's own existence. Those who work in philosophy today therefore tend to avoid working with concepts from the philosophy of everyday life.

That said, Arab thought did not theorize the everyday using the same modern terminology, such as “phenomenology of the everyday,” but it engaged with it implicitly. We find this in Ibn Khaldun's Muqaddima, which studies as a philosophical and anthropological matter the patterns of living: eating, clothing, habits, and so on, making the everyday a key to understanding history. We also find it in al-Ghazali, who transforms everyday acts like eating, sleeping, and working into acts with spiritual meaning, such that the ordinary act becomes a path to the absolute.

As for modern and contemporary Arab philosophy, we find very few philosophers who engaged with the everyday philosophically. I would exempt the phenomenologists and hermeneuticists, and I mention in particular Professor Muhammad Mahjoub, who published a book on this question. As for African philosophy, I should note that I am not a specialist in it, but by virtue of my position at the UNESCO Chair in Philosophy I have formed multiple research teams involving many African philosophers on various subjects, including shared living.

We must understand that philosophy, for many African cultures, is not only texts; it is almost a collective daily practice. This is exemplified by the concept of Ubuntu, found in South Africa, which is tied to the idea that I exist because we exist. Everyday relations, including greeting, sharing, and solidarity, constitute existence itself. We can speak here of an ontology of the everyday.

As for contemporary African philosophers, I will mention two: Paulin Hountondji and Achille Mbembe. The first, in criticizing the confinement of African thought to tradition, called for a philosophy that starts from people's everyday experience. The second, whose book on “necropolitics” was translated by our colleague Nadra Snousi, connects the understanding of everyday life to power, domination, and resistance.

AJ: You once stated that "the thought of modernity in Tunisia is essentially applied thinking, while in the Arab East it has remained theoretical with slow implementation. Could you share your views on the thought of modernity in Africa?

FT: The thought of modernity in Africa is highly diverse and differs from country to country. It is necessary here to correct some of the assumptions specific to the concept of modernity, which I have analyzed in my book Philosophy of Modernity. Modernity is not a particular period that arrived at our societies from the West. It is first and foremost an internal development within every culture, no matter how closed it may be, and this movement of development is sometimes slow and sometimes rapid.

But colonialism sought to exploit these cultures and civilizations intensively, eliminating original identities and attempting to replace them with its own culture in order to maintain its grip on those countries, calling this "modernity," when in reality, modernity is an internal movement of change that draws on cultural exchange and the encounter of cultures, and is sometimes accelerated through ruptures, shocks, transformations, and breaks.

I have always believed that the movement of modernity in Tunisia was built by reformers drawing first and foremost on what the country's original civilization had to offer, and that this reformist movement brought the new Tunisian identity out of obscurity into the light. The gestation of the Tunisian identity, what I have called in some of my work Tunisianness, began in the mid-nineteenth century and can be summarized briefly in the following elements: the abolition of slavery in 1846, achieved through juridical reasoning applied to religious sources and through cultural exchange; the founding of the Bardo Military School in 1842, a higher institution of technological studies using modern European methods, which produced an educated modernizing class that led political and social reforms; the establishment of the modern Sadiki School in 1875, alongside the development and renewal of the Zaytuna University curriculum.

Among the elements of modernization one must also mention the promulgation of a constitution regulating social and political relations in 1857 (the Fundamental Pact), a parliament (the Grand Council) in 1861, and public institutions known as the Tanzimat.

Yet this constitutional modernizing experiment did not last long, due to popular revolts that rejected the taxation system but also resisted the momentum of modernization. Those were the beginnings of the Tunisian reformist modernizing school, theorized by the work Aqwam al-Masalik, and continued through the national struggle against the French occupation and for a governing constitution, through the Young Tunisians, who published a French-Tunisian newspaper, Le Tunisien.

The elite continued to demand a constitution throughout the colonial period, linking the struggles for national liberation to constitutionalism and democracy, through the Young Tunisians movement of 1907, the Liberal Constitutional Party of 1920, the Tunisian Communist Party of 1920, the Neo-Destour Party of 1934, the General Union of Tunisian Workers of 1924, and the General Union of Tunisian Labor of 1944, all of which testify to the civic path this Tunisian school had taken.

To clarify the difference between modernity in Tunisia and modernity in the Arab East: virtually all thinkers in the Arab world, when they study Arab modernity in its formation and functioning, turn to Egyptian, Lebanese, and Syrian thinkers, rarely to Tunisian ones. It is true that you will not find in nineteenth-century Tunisia a thinker of the stature of Abd al-Rahman al-Kawakibi, one of the pioneers of modernity in the Arab world, but you do find thinkers such as Sheikh Salem Bouhajeb, one of the most prominent editors of Khayr al-Din's Aqwam al-Masalik, who offered not theories of modernity but practical guidance on how to reform and modernize the country.

This means that modernity in the Arab East remained theoretical, while in Tunisia the thinking about modernity was accompanied by an enormous process of practical reform. Tunisia was the first Arab country to abolish slavery definitively in 1846, before the international declaration issued in London in 1848. It had the first municipality in the Arab world, the municipality of Tunis, in 1858. It knew the first constitution in the Arab world with the Fundamental Pact of September 9, 1857, and the first parliament in 1861. Education was modernized from the mid-nineteenth century onward through the Bardo Technological School, the Sadiki School, and the Khalduniyya branch of the Zaytuna, which also taught sciences and modern knowledge.

I want to give another example. Qasim Amin is without doubt the pioneer of women's liberation in the Arab world, yet the application of his ideas has remained slow to this day. Tahar Haddad's book, by contrast, found full implementation shortly after Tunisian independence. When Nawal El Saadawi proposed that associations around women and democracy be organized across Arab countries, Tunisia had already, since independence, founded the Tunisian Women's Union, which despite its alignment with the ruling regime played a not inconsiderable role in implementing laws for women's liberation. Then, in 1988, the Tunisian Association of Democratic Women was formed, a feminist association working for full and effective equality between the sexes. Tunisian thought is a pragmatic thought that tends generally toward application, and that is its particularity.

AJ: As you’ve mentioned above, among the most prominent African philosophical currents is Ubuntu, which affirms that the self derives its existence from the existence of others. Do you believe your philosophical orientation toward "shared living" has African roots?

FT: In 1998, UNESCO published a book to mark the coming century, featuring texts by a group of active thinkers from across the world, most of them Nobel laureates or world leaders such as Yasser Arafat and Mandela, and I was personally among them. UNESCO asked us to write about what we deemed possible and what we hoped for regarding the twenty-first century in the domain of rights and freedoms. My contribution addressed shared living and dignity, and it earned the admiration of philosophers in Africa, bringing me that same year the Medal of Scientific Merit from the Francophone Philosophy Institute in Kinshasa, Congo.

It is well known that the UNESCO Chair in Philosophy in the Arab World, which I founded at the University of Tunis and led from 1997 to 2023, adopted "alterity" as its central problematic: the idea that existence is not, as first Greek philosophy proposed, existence in and of itself, but also a relation with the other's existence, with the other as such. This drew many African philosophers toward these questions, and in the early years of this century I organized a conference in Tunis gathering Francophone Africans around this problematic. That my thinking on shared living within dignity was influenced by African philosophy is beyond doubt, though I am not a specialist in it and do not know it academically with the depth it deserves.

What matters to me is that Ubuntu is not merely a word or a concept to be added to our philosophical vocabulary; it is a philosophical strike at the heart of modern individualism, if the expression is apt.

The West presented us with its individualism -- and built upon it entire systems of rights, duties, and responsibilities, indeed the entire architecture of human society, and imposed them on us in peace and in war. Africa proposed a radically opposing intellectual system, the system of Ubuntu, which says without equivocation: I exist because we exist. This means that your existence is not your own, because your humanity is made daily through others. If we use Derridean deconstruction, we see that Ubuntu has deconstructed the Western self that rests on "I think therefore I am," replacing it with this African philosophy's assertion: I am in relation with the other, therefore I exist.

Western existence is an individual consciousness, while in Africa it is a collective human consciousness. Whoever wishes to go deeper into this philosophy should look to the public intellectual debate that accompanied the process of reconciliation in South Africa after apartheid, and also at the political level, to how Nelson Mandela, after twenty-seven years in prison, governed the new state not through revenge, but through this philosophy, working to build a new "we," because the self is the we, and living is living together.

AJ: What is the relevance of philosophy today given the persistence of wars and conflicts and the spread of the phenomenon of closing in on the self? And how do you view the role of the contemporary philosopher?

FT: Wars are no longer ordinary wars in which armies face each other; they have become destructive, lethal to all, and genocidal, especially when those who decide them are politicians committed to commite genocide, as with America and Israel. Philosophically, war is an aggression and a crime against human nature. It has inaugurated the possibility of reinventing endless forms of excluding the other. What happened in Hiroshima reveals the cold, calculated ferocity of war. As for the Gulf Wars, prepared in advance within laboratories where the virtual is summoned to serve crime, they attest to a new political will among states to normalize terror, oppression, and intimidation.

Hiroshima, the Gulf Wars, and all those small yet ferociously brutal wars, including the genocides in Gaza, and today in Beirut, which keep erupting here and there and which characterize the current world order, all ultimately aim to eliminate the possibility of demanding the freedom and dignity that are fundamental to human nature, both of which have been confiscated by what I call the new masters of the world, by which I mean imperialism and Zionism. I personally consider Rosa Luxemburg correct when she asserts that capitalism cannot but be bloodstained. She writes that capital "comes into the world dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and filth" and continues to do so throughout its course across the world.

What role does philosophy play in this situation? Philosophy, in my view, especially when it is practical and concrete, becomes a necessary struggle through thought and critique and through various practices against these crimes, in search of the political, ethical, and even metaphysical meaning of the idea of shared living in dignity. Because shared living is not resignation and acceptance of what has been decreed, as some believe; it is now resistance against the financial mode of production that governs our world, and also rebellion against the wars of extermination directed against Arab and Islamic countries, which ultimatey reach third world countries.

The role of the philosopher today is no longer only to create concepts and frameworks; it is also continuous struggle. This philosophical struggle takes place first through thinking about the very substance and possibility of violence, crime, war, terror, exclusion, and every form of excess in politics; but it also takes place through the ever-renewed demand for human dignity, freedom, justice, equality, and all the values that some seek to file away as outdated relics consumed by time. This is where resistance against the inhuman and the unbearable begins – against that which transforms, through capital and for capital, into a self-sustaining order. Friedrich Nietzsche reminded us in The Gay Science that "all happiness on earth lies in struggle," The philosophy of shared living, that philosophy which, like nomads, travels in search of friendship, is a constant struggle and a continuous resistance, so that our world may be fit to live in.

AJ: As president of the Tunisia Institute of Philosophy, you are preparing to organize the Fourth Biennale Conference on Philosophy and Education in Africa. Could you share details about this upcoming event and its intellectual and cultural significance for Africa and Tunisia?

FT: The Tunisia Institute of Philosophy and the International Biennale Association on Philosophy and Educational Sciences in Africa (BIPSEFA) are organizing a conference on the theme of "Formation in the Common and the Building of the Universal: Educating Humanity to Come." It is the Fourth Biennale on Philosophy and Education in Africa. It will bring together a significant number of African philosophers around questions of great importance to us, centered on developing an African perspective on philosophical thought as it relates to formation and education, in service of a just humanity grounded in sharing, peace, and dignity, drawing on our African traditions and through cultural exchange and modernization. The conference will be held at the Cité de la Culture in Tunis between November 4 and 8, 2026, and is open to all.