The earthly paradise

This book was published only once in Beirut, in 1978; and it was not published again despite its great importance in shedding light on a pivotal stage in the life of its author, the scholar, and his intellectual development. This booklet is of immense value, small in size; it contains all the main sayings on which his colossal intellectual project was built, which a whole generation of Arab youth studied under. In this book, the professor uses all his tools to achieve his spiritual salvation: literary criticism, Marxist analysis, remnants of sociological religious teachings that he brought out of Damanhour, and his human instinct; all used with sincere and skillful passion. He not only rejects materialism but rejects all its manifestations, the most dangerous of which is utopia; or what he calls the earthly paradise. He rejects any final worldly salvation that undermines man. He rejects any external paradise in this world; for the true paradise is never external, but an internal paradise: "the heart’s paradise," which Al-Masiri discovered with Malcolm X; the paradise of faith. Abdel Wahab traversed through this book from materialism to humanity and Islam. Among what he mentioned, may God have mercy on him, in his biography, is that Malcolm X was his guide to Islam. And whoever reads the chapter that the professor dedicated to Hajj Malik Shabazz (Malcolm X) in the book in our hands will realize how Malcolm the American was Abdel Wahab’s entry point into Islam! If the intellectual biography of Al-Masiri traces the birth of his ideas and methodology, and his poetic biography sketches the transformations of his conscience, then this book—perhaps unintentionally—combines the intellectual and poetic biography. It is a painting in which thought and feeling merged in a unique human moment of transformation. It is a book written with the light of the heart and the ink of the mind together.