In the aftermath of the Arab Spring of 2011, what formative lessons can be drawn on an epistemological level? What can these uprisings stand to teach us about Arab thought more broadly, its historical underpinnings, and especially, what the revolutionary rupture with the past portends for the future of the Arab world and its politics? Indeed, much ink has been spilled in attempting to wrestle with these existential concerns. For instance, in his Arab Spring: The End of Postcolonialism, Hamid Dabashi stresses that the Arab uprisings, in their transnational spirit, drive us to analyze the Arab consciousness, or rather the transformation of it, against the ‘mystified consciousness’ fixated to it by colonial powers. This transcendent spirit catalyzes a quest for ‘new metaphors’ beyond the world of sheer binarism that marks the condition of postcoloniality, ‘the false dawn of liberation from European colonialism and the decline of the Ottoman Empire’, and its ideological formations and structures of domination. Under this Arab mode of defiance or protest, Dabashi’s argument would go, national boundaries thaw and transnational connections reconfigure accordingly. Much like socialism, nationalism and Islamism are ideological formations inherited from colonial rule, which coalesce to produce the hegemonic center-periphery illusion of the West and the Rest.