A central topic in contemporary Arab thought is the concept of authenticity (asala). At first blush, this local intellectual preoccupation would appear to chime with Charles Taylor’s claim that modern man lives in an “age of authenticity.” When one digs deeper into what authenticity means in both contexts, however, it becomes clear that the meaning of authenticity differs. Whereas Taylor’s idea of authenticity stresses the authentically creative expression of the individual, Arab discourse on authenticity tends to treat it in culturalist terms, namely as the degree to which a group or society holds on to the elementary roots of its culture. The goal of this paper is to reconceptualize contemporary Arab thought by showing how these ostensibly disparate views of authenticity may be reconciled. First, it analyzes a talk given by the Egyptian literary critic Shukr? ?Ayy?d in 1971, in which he explores contradictory meanings of authenticity in Arab literature, revealing a more varied tradition of discussing authenticity in the Arab world. It then places these different interpretations of authenticity within a rich genealogy of thinking about authenticity that arose in Europe in the end of the 18th century in tandem with the advent of modern society. Combining these perspectives the paper suggests that the discussion of authenticity among Arab intellectuals can be seen as a local instantiation of a global discourse on authenticity that is inherent to modernity. In conclusion, this thesis will be illustrated by using the multifarious, genealogically informed notion of authenticity to suggest new ways of reading and classifying various contemporary Arab intellectuals. The upshot of this approach, besides offering an interesting re-assessment of Arab intellectual development in recent decades, is that it allows for a description of Arab thought that goes beyond a common narrative, which relies on an opposition between traditionalist thinkers who nostalgically yearn for their lost “authentic” heritage and modernizers who want to transform society along a Western model. Instead, it lays the groundwork for interpreting the writings of Arab intellectuals as vernacular attempts at coping with a central demand faced by all people in modern society, namely that of articulating an authentic sense of self. Not only does this perspective level the playing field somewhat for a global exchange of ideas, but it also proves to be a valuable contribution to the study of the concept of authenticity as such, which has largely focused on the European tradition.