The reasonable and the unreasonable in our intellectual heritage, author: Zaki Naguib Mahmoud

We write these pages from this book to clarify that in the old Arab culture, which is "our heritage," there are cases of the unreasonable that we should not close our eyes to. The stance on Arab heritage has formed a major intellectual dilemma not only for Dr. Zaki Naguib Mahmoud but also for many thinkers; between calls to demolish the heritage and others calling for its sanctification, the author stands as a researcher and examiner. This book represents a fundamental change in the author's attitude towards the heritage, as while he previously called — in writings such as "The Myth of Metaphysics" and "Towards a Scientific Philosophy" — for excluding Arab heritage from the intellectual renaissance due to its superstitions, he has now retreated from this stance after realizing that heritage can be taken from and benefited from what is reasonable in it, and what aligns with reason and logic, without forcing the reader to accept his opinion. He left the freedom of choice to the reader when he included in his book what is reasonable and what is unreasonable from his perspective in our Arab intellectual heritage. Number of pages: 505