Afghani mapped professions onto body organs to claim philosophy’s authority

Evidence

Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, the Iranian-born scholar and political activist who was teaching in Egypt at the same time as Marsafi, also used the living body to express the nature of social life. Every organ and limb corresponded to a particular profession or trade, the social groupings to which individuals all belonged. Government, which was one such profession, could be considered the brain, ironsmithing the upper arms, agriculture the liver, seamanship the legs, and so on. This provided a powerful expression of the order of the social world and the authority of different groups within it, and its power was employed frequently in political debate. When Afghani was invited in 1870 to give an address in Istanbul at the inauguration of the new university, he argued for the importance in society of philosophical thought by suggesting that the bodily location of philosophy as a profession was alongside prophecy, in the position of the soul. This attempt to give the practice of philosophy an authoritative position in the social order, expressed in terms of the parts of the body, provoked a storm in Istanbul’s scholarly and religious establishment, and Afghani was expelled from the country. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 486

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the organicist political metaphor tradition (e.g. Menenius Agrippa’s belly fable) and the general pre-modern whole-body imagery of social order that Mitchell is tracking against new colonial techniques.
• CANDY: Afghani got expelled from Istanbul partly for claiming philosophy’s place in the social body was next to prophecy, at the soul’s seat.