Reading of The Book “Pulse of Thought” by Salah Hashem
Written by: Dr. Saeed Al-Hussein Abdali
About the book and the writer: the book “the pulse of the imagination“, although the author considered it to be from the category of autobiography, It exceeded this limit a lot, it was as close as possible to the style of Abdullah ibn al-Muqaffa in” Kalila and Damna ” and true to the style of Gramsci in criticism and commitment to community issues. It is a book that exceeded its numerical size by 66 pages, so it was much larger when we reflect on the issues raised by him, which spanned over 13 scenes.
“The pulse of thought ” was published by Atlas publishing and distribution house by the writer Salah Hashem, an author who holds more than 16 books as well as articles and studies, is a professor of development and planning at Fayoum University in Egypt.
The content of the book
It consists of an opening and 13 scenes that express Egyptian life as the writer experienced it in the society in which he grew up: God, fate, life, death, love, friendship, mother, homeland, justice, freedom, knowledge, poverty and corruption. Such titles are almost the same concerns as every person in the Arab environment, not just Egypt. The writer here traveled with his memory, full of love and pain at the same time, throughout all parts of Egypt, so he says, “I was faithful in conveying the thoughts and feelings of those with whom I interacted throughout my past life, just as I was faithful in monitoring their pains that their tongues were unable to express at the time, and I was also keen to express them.” “To convey my observations on governments’ policies regarding their dealings with the issue of poverty and the concerns of the poor, in the hope of changing their policies for the better, for the sake of a strong state based on peace and fair dialogue between the government and the people.”
Thus, he transferred people’s pain and suffering and portrayed all this in a persistent and spontaneous form away from excessive rhetoric and freeing himself as much as possible from the restraint of traditional writing, which necessitates enriching the text with evidence from other studies. Imagination and insight were enough for the writer Salah Hashim to paint the suffering of the poor, fragile groups and even the marginal ones, which he called the oral language in which he grew up.
This book has a range between the language of conscience and reason. When a writer is a part of the suffering of people, of whom he himself was one, and I made him loyal, passionate about championing them, he considers them a part of himself..But soon the language of reason and science comes to mind, and the situation is that the specialist in the field of development and planning sees him from time to time to download these scenes according to their cognitive contexts, enthusiastic about the need to make them in the priorities of reform and development, even he considers that fighting poverty is an absolute priority without which development and the Egyptian leap cannot be achieved, and therefore he says:” the rivers of poverty will not stop flowing unless the state adopts policies that stimulate the poor to work and produce, and the government Justice, and stop the hands of those responsible for corruption”
This book dealt with the concept of Egyptian humanism, humanism as the most important concepts used in the Arab sociological field, as we read in Bhudia’s book labeled “humanism in Islam” and went through a number of misconceptions in our Arab society, such as those addressed by Salah Hashim, especially in the scene of fate and God..“If you want to be a human being, let you have a heart filled with the swings of children, and a mind inhabited by the wisdom of elders…fill your patients with Love, Love is the charity of lovers”..And the “zakat” of the overbearing and the poor ” thus founded the philosophy of love as a savior from death far from all the meanings of the yellow culture that touched even the representation of religion and its teachings, life and death.
This book is an adventure in new thinking in order to convey the concerns of society and the perceptions of its members, in which the writer hinted at what should be. The language of the wise and the sincere Patriot stood out, he is, in the words of Gramsci, that committed intellectual. Perhaps this is the justification for Dr. Salah’s “madness” with love for his homeland: ” my beloved homeland ..I’m not that far from you..Only between us is a raging” sea ” inhabited by snakes..(..) Egypt is a great country.. Do not live inside “dwarfs”..(…) Egypt is stronger and larger than its population.
Do not accept that it is ruled by weak people, or inhabited by bloodsuckers..”This love, as I understood it in the writer’s soul, is that he wants to ward off from Egypt all that is flawed and discouraging its development, especially poverty, which is the main concern of the writer Salah Hashem, especially through his victory for the category of the poor, and he boldly calls for overcoming some of the outdated contents of the heritage, which whenever he reviews it in a sarcastic“..We again need to restructure religious education within the framework of a proper reading of the Koran and the Sunnah. Far from hyperbole And militancy.
We do not need new “victims” of a false religious “understanding”.. “Here he is highlighted by his bold calls for reform, calling for renewal in a highly transformed world in order to achieve the desired and achieve prosperity, because according to him,” the only thing you have to die for is the homeland..If the country lives, all those you love will live in it..And if it burns..The vessel in which you are fused with your loved one burned out.. (…) When God wants us to rise up, he will give us faith in work, and he likes us to pray in the fields, to remember on the Gears of production machines, and officials live the happiness of work in love for the fatherland, and not in building personal glories.. “And such a thing he worked to dismantle in his book called”the new Poor”.
This book is an enrichment for the Arab library because it is the book of the sought-after Arab man away from all the projections of ideology and this is no stranger to the thought of the writer Salah Hashem, whom I had the honor to meet and enjoy his lectures in Tunisia. he tirelessly calls for renewal and renunciation of the yellow culture, the culture of death. Man, society and renewal are a triad component of the writer’s thought as we understood it in the pulse of the mind.
