The Great Intellectual Odyssey of Husayn Muruwwa He was one of the most versatile Arab intellectuals of the twentieth century. Destined since the age of eight to became a Shi`i cleric, Husayn Muruwwa, left the poor south Lebanese village of Hadatha to Najaf. Studying logic and law his heart was in poetry. While still a student he was accidentally exposed to the great Egyptian liberal texts of the 1930s. Torn between Cairo and Najaf, and unsure which world to embrace, he had a nervous breakdown. After recovering, he left Najaf and flirted briefly with liberal Iraqi politics. Then he read Marx and Lenin and joined the Iraqi communists. He became a staunch activist and was deported from Iraq. Settling in Beirut he became a powerful literary critic and the first to write a coherent manifesto of Socialist Realism. In the 1950s and 1960s he was at the vanguard of the post-colonial intelligentsia and its search for a new Arab culture. Over the years, his critical voice, as well as his poetry, earned him much respect but also some enemies. In 1987 he was gunned down in Beirut. He was 77 year old. How should historians approach such an odyssey and what does it tell us about modern Arab thought? Much of what was written about Husayn Muruwwa's life is divorced from the historical circumstances of his time and emphasis polarization, namely: from the village to the city, from religion to a secularism and so on. However, as this paper shows, Husayn Muruwwa, and dozens of others like him, never disowned who he was. He never left religion and religion never left him. Likewise, his Marxism was heavily informed by the lives of the peasants in his childhood village. Rather than shifting positions, or "converting," Muruwwa kept adding layer after layer to what became a complex intellectual identity that simultaneously drew on several traditions and intellectual genealogies. More broadly, a close analysis of Muruwwa's career reveals the common trajectory of the post-colonial intelligentsia as a whole. As the first ideological generation in the Arab world who were decisively influenced by global events such as the economic crisis of the 1930s and WW II, this generation sought to establish a workable synthesis and a healthy dialectic between several seemingly contradictory local and foreign worlds.

In many respects, Hamad al-Jasir (1908-2000) was the most prominent Saudi historian of the twentieth century. Yet despite the hundreds of news articles and scores of books he authored in his lifetime, little has been written in the academic literature about al-Jasir and his significance to modern Saudi political and social life. In 1980, after a lengthy and colorful career in education, journalism, and scholarship, al-Jasir embarked on what would become his most influential project, the documenting of the lineages of the tribes and families of Saudi Arabia. For the final two decades of his life, al-Jasir would devote much of his al-'Arab literary journal as well as several monographs to the recording of genealogical information about the kingdom’s inhabitants. Inside the high walls of his home in the al-Wurud neighborhood of Riyadh, al-Jasir stewarded a quiet revolution in modern Saudi consciousness, greeting hundreds of petitioners and inquirers who’d come to the Shaykh with genealogical queries or challenges to his documented findings. Al-Jasir’s turn to genealogical studies generated a tremendous amount of interest and controversy among Saudis, whose reactions are captured in the thousands of letters preserved in the scholar’s private library. While abridgments of some letters have been published in al-'Arab, many of these correspondences are unpublished and have never before been accessed by researchers. Hamad al-Jasir’s genealogical correspondences thus provide a rare and previously unexplored window into a Saudi society in the throes of rapid change. This paper will discuss the dominant themes that emerge from the correspondences, including the search for tribal belonging by non-tribal Saudis, the state’s uneasy relationship with tribalism, and the connection between genealogy and marriage patterns.

This paper explores the literary project of Mahmud al-Mas'adi, one of Tunisia’s most renowned public intellectuals. Al-Mas'adi was a writer, trade unionist, educator, Minister of Cultural Affairs, Speaker of Parliament, as well as the architect of Tunisia’s educational policy following independence in 1956. In addition to serving as Editor in Chief of the renowned journal al-Mabahith [Investigations], al-Mas'adi wrote a series of stories, novels and plays between 1938 and 1941 – including: Hadath Abu Harira qal [Abu Harira spoke, saying…], al-Sudd [The Dam] and Mawlid al-Nisyan [The Genesis of Forgetfulness]. Written in a non-realist and highly symbolic style, al-Mas'adi’s fiction avoids any direct references to Tunisia’s social or political context. His works seem mythical in nature, staged outside of time and space and devoid of any markers of historical, geographical, social or political specificity. It is the absence of a clearly delineated anti-colonialist or nationalist agenda in particular that has perplexed and even angered Arab critics over the years, including the “Dean of Arabic Literature” Taha Husayn. This paper seeks to bridge al-Mas'adi’s role as a public intellectual and policy maker with his theory of literature and cultural production. In addition to situating al-Mas'adi within the broader Tunisian and Arab literary scene of the period, I explore his engagement with early Arab and Islamic Thought (Mansur al-Hallaj, Abu al-'Ala' al-Ma'arri, Abu Hamid al-Ghazali and Muhammad Ibn Arabi), as well as Existentialist philosophy and literature (Goethe, Dostoevsky, Camus and Sartre). I demonstrate that his literary project is rooted in an understanding of creation and existence inflected by Sufi conceptualizations of the Self. I argue that al-Mas'adi’s fiction enacts an Islamic Poiesis – namely, an aesthetic engagement with Islamic Thought that expands the horizons of artistic representation as a mode of creation. I am interested in demonstrating how the intertextuality between Sufism and Existentialism on the one hand, as well as Islam and Arabic Literary discourse on the other, serves to complicate the boundary between ‘secular’ and ‘religious’ thought.

The twenty-two historical novels of Jurji Zaidan (1861-1914) never went out of style and continued to be republished in Arabic throughout the twentieth century. For the past thirty years, Thomas Philipp's scholarship provided an understanding of Zaidan's work to readers of English. Recent years, however, have seen a revitalized interest in this foundational nahda figure in the West. Anne-Laure Dupont published a major biography of Zaidan in 2006. Samah Selim won the University of Arkansas Arabic Translation prize in 2011 for her translation of Zaidan's _Shajarat al-Durr_. In addition, the Zaidan Foundation, recently established and based in Maryland, has commissioned English translations of five of Zaydan's novels. The first of these translations, Roger Allen's _The Conquest of Andalusia_, is currently available. I propose to analyze themes from five of Zaydan's novels that relate to the issue of Christian-Muslim relations. Zaydan was writing in the shadow of the 1860 sectarian violence in Mount Lebanon and Damascus, and his biography reveals that he personally experienced the effects of sectarian tension, especially in the rescinding of his appointment as the first professor of Islamic history at the Egyptian University before he had even begun to teach. I have selected five novels that depict conflict between Christians and Muslims: _Armanusa, the Egyptian_; _The Ghassanid Girl_; _The Conquest of Andalusia_; _Charles and Abd al-Rahman_; and _Ahmad bin Tulun_. I will show that Zaidan used potentially inflammatory narratives of the Muslim conquests in Syria, Egypt, and al-Andalus to suggest ways that Christian and Muslim Arabs could form a peaceful and tolerant community of mutual respect. My close reading of the texts identifies ways that Zaidan built an argument for Christian-Muslim unity through a common language, shared political interests, and theological compatibility. At the same time, I note tensions in that project, due to Zaidan's ambiguous depiction of outsiders (such as Berbers or Jews), the inequitable political position of Christians under Muslim rule, and the constraints that historical texts (such as treaties or speeches) could pose to Zaidan's purpose.