Hassan Hanafi (Arabic: حسن حنفي; 23 February 1935 – 21 October 2021) was a professor and chaired the philosophy department at Cairo University.
[2][3] As a young man motivated by a revolutionary political activism, Hanafi associated with the Muslim Brotherhood.
[4] Hanafi was a disciple of the phenomenologist Osman Amin,[6] and published a trilogy[7] in which he used Husserl's methods to reconstruct classic Islamic philosophy and to critique the sources and development of European consciousness.
1935), as part of his project 'the third way' of reading the tradition and modernity, a way that is neither fully Euro-modern nor fully Islamico-traditionalist; it is implicitly secular-mundane, since it reads the sacred in the light of the sociopolitical needs of people; it is creed revolutionized to be lived (mina-lʻaqīda ilā thawra), as one of the volumes of the project is entitled" (2018, 271).
He was one of the original signatories of A Common Word Between Us and You, an open letter by Islamic scholars to Christian leaders, calling for peace and understanding.
he declared that his main disciples in Egypt are Nasr Abu Zayd, Ali Mabrouk, and Kareem Essayyad.