PRE-PAPER JAIS INTERNET CONSCIENCE IN ARABIC AND THE SEMANTIC HISTORY OF ḌAMĪR

With regard to research on the notion of ḍamīr in the religious and philoso-phical works of some modern Muslim writers in Egypt, this article investi-gates the semantic history of the word. Classical Islamic usages are examined as well as medieval and modern Bible Arabic. The author finds that in the coining of ḍamīr as the preferred word for conscience in modern Arabic, Islamic and Christian impulses have interacted – with develop-ments in Christian Arabic in the nineteenth century as a major influence. The context of the current investigation into the semantics of ḍamīr is a broader analysis of the notion of conscience in the works of three mod-ern Egyptian writers. Writing in the 1950s and 60s, the Muslim intellec-tuals ʿAbbās Maḥmūd al-ʿAqqād (d. 1964), Kāmil Ḥusayn (d. 1977) and Khālid Muḥammad Khālid (d. 1996) put the notion of ḍamīr at the centre of their works about Islamic ethics, moral philosophy, and the relation between Muḥammad and Christ (Leirvik 2006). The extensive use of ḍamīr by these authors to express a uniting bon