Arabic Thought against the Authoritarian Age Towards an Intellectual History of the Present

In the wake of the Arab uprisings, the Middle East descended into a frenzy of political turmoil and unprecedented human tragedy which reinforced regrettable stereotypes about the moribund state of Arab intellectual and cultural life. This volume sheds important light on diverse facets of the post-war Arab world and its vibrant intellectual, literary and political history. Cutting-edge research is presented on such wide-ranging topics as poetry, intellectual history, political philosophy, and religious reform and cultural resilience all across the length and breadth of the Arab world, from Morocco to the Gulf States. This is an important statement of new directions in Middle East studies that challenges conventional thinking and has added relevance to the study of global intellectual history more broadly.

1. Introduction: towards a postwar intellectual history of the Arab world Max Weiss and Jens Hanssen; Part I. Arab Intellectuals in an Age of Decolonization: 2. Changing the Arab intellectual guard: on the fall of the udaba?, 1940–60 Yoav Di-Capua; 3. Arabic thought in the radical age: Emile Habibi, the Israeli communist party and the production of Arab Jewish radicalism, 1946–61 Orit Bashkin; 4. Political praxis in the Gulf: Ahmad al-Khatib and the movement of Arab nationalists, 1948–69 Abdel Razzaq Takriti; 5. Modernism in translation: poetry and intellectual history in Beirut Robyn Creswell; Part II. Culture and Ideology in the Shadow of Authoritarianism: 6. Regional specificities of modern Arab thought: Morocco since the liberal age Hosam Aboul-Ela; 7. Sidelining ideology: Arab theory in the metropole and periphery, circa 1977 Fadi Bardawil; 8. Mosaic, melting pot, pressure cooker: the religious, the secular, and the sectarian in twentieth-century Syrian social thought Max Weiss; 9. Looking for 'the women question' in Algeria and Tunisia: ideas, political language and female actors before and after independence Natalya Vince; Part III. From (Neo)Liberalism to the 'Arab Spring' and Beyond: 10. Egyptian workers in the 'liberal age' and beyond Joel Beinin; 11. The redemption of women's liberation: reviving Qasim Amin in contemporary Egypt Ellen McLarney; 12. Turath as critique: Hassan Hanafi and the political subject in modern Arabic thought Yasmeen Daifallah; 13. Summoning the spirit of Taha Husayn's enlightenment project: the Nahda revival of Qadaya wa-shahadat in the 1990s Suzanne Kassab; 14. Revolution as ready-made: art, aesthetics, Arab uprisings Negar Azimi; 15. For a third Nahda Elias Khoury; 16. Where are the intellectuals in the Syrian revolution? Rosa Yasin Hasan; 17. The intellectuals and the revolution in Syria Yasin al-Hajj Salih.

Jens Hanssen is Associate Professor of Arab Civilization, Middle Eastern and Mediterranean history at the University of Toronto and has held visiting professorships at the universities of Marburg and Göttingen. His book publications include Fin de Siècle Beirut (2005), and his translation of Nafir Suriyya (with Hicham Safieddine) is forthcoming. He is currently co-editing The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Middle Eastern and North African History with Amal Ghazal. His present Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) research project, which focuses on the intersections between German, Jewish and Arab intellectual histories, has yielded two articles, 'Kafka and Arabs' (Critical Inquiry, 2012), and 'Translating Revolution: Hannah Arendt and Arab Political Culture'.
Max Weiss is Associate Professor of History and Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University, New Jersey. He is the author of In the Shadow of Sectarianism: Law, Shi`ism, and the Making of Modern Lebanon (2010), co-editor (with Jens Hanssen) of Arabic Thought beyond the Liberal Age: Towards an Intellectual History of the Nahda (Cambridge, 2016), and translator, most recently, of Nihad Sirees, States of Passion (2018). He earned a Ph.D. in Modern Middle East History from Stanford University, held postdoctoral fellowships at Princeton University and the Harvard Society of Fellows, and his research has been supported by the Fulbright-Hays Commission, the Social Science Research Council, and the Carnegie Corporation. Currently, he is writing about the intellectual and cultural history of modern Syria, and translating several works of modern and contemporary Arabic literature.