Mohammad Abed al-Jabiri, (1936-2010) was the first Ph.D. recipient that any academic institution in Morocco ever granted in philosophy (1970.) His dissertation marked the rise of a new generation of scholars from the margins; one that was animated by politics of decolonization. Though Jabiri is regarded as a western oriented scholar, his work mounts a defense of Arab Turath or its cultural heritage. He spent decades studying Western, and French philosophy in particular, only to end up deconstructing the ways Arab intellectuals condemned their past. His work, since the early 1980s, had done more than that of any living Arab intellectual to unsettle the traditional understanding of how current Arab peoples perceived their past. It had long been taken for granted, for example, that Arab past and history simply existed “out there” in the world before they were discovered by scholars. Jabiri turned this notion on its head. In a series of significant books in the 1980s, he argued that historical facts should instead be seen as products of intellectual inquiry. Both secular-nationalists and Islamists rejected Jabiri’s project. Islamists rejected him because his ideas undermine the objectiveness of historical facts. They asked: If historical knowledge was socially produced — and thus partial, fallible, contingent — how could that not weaken its claims on reality? For Secularists, on the other hand, Jabiri’s writings sent an alarming sign since they seem to discredit the intellectual record that was established since the nahda, i.e. brushing aside its most guarded principles of progress, modernity, Westernization, and secularism. Jabiri’s ideas are rarely aligns to the normal right verses left disagreement on cultural and historical orientation. In this paper, I argue against the current historiography that continue to see the raging debates that took place in the Arab world in the last few decades through secular/religious prism. I ask how the anxiety about the post-colonial conditions shaped the intellectual production in Morocco and North Africa in general? What kind of intellectual frameworks were appropriated in the endeavor to decolonize the Arab self? The case of Jabiri affords a rare window to peer at the recent angst with ideas like Arab authenticity and Turath around which much of the post-colonial debates are structured.