This panel considers the "missing middle" in the history of contemporary Arab thought: the critical school of thinkers writing on Arab modernity in response to the challenge of cultural heritage (turath) in the 1970s and 1980s. Nestled between attempts to salvage the Nahda paradigm after 1967 and Arab liberal thought in the 1990s, Arab thinkers have tackled this topic in a series of publications and internal debates that captivated the pan-Arab intelligentsia and their audiences across the region. In the process, they made a seminal and under-studied epistemological contribution to debates on Arab modernity.
The main approach in Arab intellectual history considers the 1967 Arab defeat as a watershed moment for intellectual renewal towards the safeguarding of the Nahda's modernist message from the 19th century. The same narrative frames Arab liberal thought in the 1990s as a statement of failure of the post-1967 generation: recognizing the impossibility of their predecessors' total revolutionary designs, Arab liberals embraced the reform of and within existing structures (political, cultural, religious). Others continued to be influenced by radical traditions often associated with the left, they eluded too easy association with liberalism and/or conceptions of a new or old Left.
This historical narrative neglects the "missing middle": those who engaged with the critics of modernist Arab thought and sought to update this body of ideas through a renewed reading of Islamic cultural heritage. Facing a "crisis" of public support, and writing under the double threat of political repression and Islamist scrutiny, these Arab intellectuals wrote under less visible circumstances.
Nonetheless, several thinkers embraced the criticism that Arab thought had been too focused on the European experience of modernity and neglected Islamic cultural heritage. They engaged in innovative methodologies and epistemological innovations that often combined postmodern frameworks with a new reading of the Islamic heritage.
This panel will consider several experiences of such epistemological innovations during this missing episode of contemporary Arab thought in order to better understand how Arab intellectuals have broadened the Arab modernist project following the challenge of turath. It places considerable focus on the geographical location of these forms of renewal indicating how renewal emerged from the margins (of the Arab world and the intellectual-ideological map) and made its way to the center. The outcome of this panel is a more comprehensive history of Arab thought that integrates the role of pan-Arab movement and sheds light on underplayed epistemological adaptations.
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Dr. Michaelle L. Browers
The idea of a “New” as opposed to an “Old” Left is that the former is understood to be self-consciously defining itself against the latter--that is, against dogmatic Marxists—while at the same time distinguishing itself from other so-called “mainstream” or “reactionary” forces with an explicitly progressive and activist orientation. Both in their focused appropriation of a distinctly Marxist method of historical materialism and in their self-conscious application of that method to an intellectual project aimed at critically rereading the Islamic tradition (turath) in new ways, thinkers like Husayn Muruwwa (1910-1987) and Tayyib Tizini (b. 1938) defy easy association with either Old or New. Why does the heritage become an object of study in the 1970s? What is to be gained from a dialectical materialist account of history? How does is this intellectual project intended to relate to the political projects in which these figures were embedded? The methods and arguments champions of these two figures (as well as others of the time) drew criticism both from the Arab left and Islamic right. These controversies, while sometimes seeming to miss the mark, help uncover at least part of what was at stake in this period. I argue that the debates over method facilitated a novel understanding of the socio-political position a revolutionary intellectual should occupy in relationship to past, present and future while it simultaneously called into question many of the other projects that were seeking to use what went by the names of “heritage” and “modern” for other (in the views of Muruwwa and Tizini, less-progressive) purposes. Their return to the Arab-Islamic heritage with a materialist approach is aimed at the study of history not for its own sake such that it would render that history obsolete or unbridle its hold on the present, nor for its instrumentalist value in some sort of vulgar attempt to make it serve one’s own practical, political ends in the present. Muruwwa and Tizini are perhaps most concerned with the way in which heritage is being marshalled as such to serve the ends of the ruling class and other reactionary forces. Instead, a materialist reading of the heritage is intended to actualize a dynamic praxis, attuned to the way in which human beings create and are created by the external world but capable of bringing about progressive social change to counteract the material-ideational dynamics that weigh upon the present.
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Prof. Elizabeth Suzanne Kassab
The two decades that preceded the 2011 Arab revolts witnessed animated debates on Enlightenment (Tanwir) both in Egypt and Syria. I argue that the concerns and issues expressed in these debates are a further articulation of the themes that dominated post-1967 Arab critical thought, namely the prioritization of politics and the failure of the brutality of the late 20th century Arab state. The tanwir debates turn away from the 1980s culturalist preoccupation with turath and emphasize the wide-ranging damage caused by the absence of accountability in Arab regimes. The debates call on the urgency of reconstructing the human intellectually, morally and politically, in the midst of the overwhelming ruin and recall the Nahda as a source of renewed inspiration. The re-establishment of the connection with the Nahda becomes for those tanwiris an essential tool for constructing a future different from the realities imposed by the regimes. The latter had severed the connection with the emancipatory legacy of the Nahda and the tanwiris saw the necessity of reconnecting with that legacy. By reconstructing modern Arab intellectual history they hoped to provide the elements for a new Arab future.
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Dr. Mohammed Hashas
Arab scholarship post-1967 marks Arab thought with diversity and profundity, which the previous projects of the avant-gardists of the Nahda till then lacked. The tendencies of socialists-Marxists, liberals, secularists, salafis, or “seculareligionists” have merged at times and diverged at others, depending on the national, regional and international affairs. At the heart of the debate of these tendencies stands the question of ethics as the dividing line. Contemporary Moroccan thought has experienced the debates the general Arab thought has raised. Two of its major philosophers are also widely read in the Arab world, i.e. Mohammed Abed al-Jabri (1935-2010) and Taha Abderrahmane (d. 1944). Through his famous Critique of Arab Reason (in four volumes) al-Jabri presented Arab ethical mind in a form that stirred controversy and disapproval among scholars. Taha Abderrahmane built his project partly as a reply to, or critique of, al-Jabri’s overall project of reform, and has made of (religious) ethics the heart of his reform project, which he calls, in his late works, “trusteeship paradigm” or “trusteeship critique.” This paper-presentation tries to outline the major differences between the reform projects of the two Arab philosophers. It argues that while al-Jabri was critical of the West he still worked within its modern paradigm of the secular/religious that he saw the Arab tradition has always experienced, though in merged and intertwining forms that he attempted to dissect and re-structure. As to Abderrahmane, he sees that this forced Western division does not stand when applied to the Arab-Islamic tradition, which he examines wholly, and not reductively, as he accuses al-Jabri of doing. Abderrahmane proposes that trusteeship paradigm does not only serve for reforming the Arab world but for reforming Western modernity as well; he applies his trusteeship critique to politics, religion, the family, the individual, medical sciences, and the media. Unlike the liberals and seculars, and unlike conservative religionists, or Islamic leftism, Abderrahmane appears to have built a full-fledged theory of ethics that is unprecedented in Arab thought, a new paradigm that deserves to be examined comparatively.
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Dr. Yasmeen Daifallah
How do anticolonial Arab intellectuals inhabit postcolonial time, a time when, to borrow David Scott’s words, “anticolonial utopias have gradually withered into postcolonial nightmares” (2004, 2)? How do these thinkers try to carve a political vision at a moment when grand theoretical narratives have failed to account for and/or transform social and political reality, but when their end goals (for self-government, political equality, social justice, economic sufficiency, etc.) still define the horizon of political aspiration? Stated somewhat differently, how do these thinkers bridge their mounting sense of doubt about the universal applicability of revolutionary theories, with their continued certainty about the modernist ends advocated by these theories?
This paper explores how a prominent contemporary Arab thinker, Abdullah Laroui (b. 1933), inhabits and thinks through this intellectual-historical moment. Through examining his writings in the 1980s and the 1990s, and contrasting them with his earlier revolutionary writings from the 1960s and 1970s, it suggests that Laroui’s strategy for tackling this post-decolonial moment is to embark on a pedagogical mission. If the Laroui of the late 1960s addressed himself to the revolutionary intellectual and leader and theorized about the unique character of revolutionary thought in Arab societies, the Laroui of the 1980s and 1990s directs his speech at a more general Arab readership, and seeks to transform the foundations of its understanding of the Arab political condition since the colonial period. Contra an early Laroui who uses theoretical shorthand, the late Laroui launches a slow, definitional, historically-informed analysis of what he takes to be the central concepts underlying the being and functioning of modern society such as freedom, the state, ideology, reason and history. He then rhetorically performs the rupture such concepts promulgate with their premodern counterparts, most especially concepts associated with the Islamic tradition. In doing so, I suggest, Laroui tries to produce an “Arab self” that is critically proud of its cultural heritage, but fully aware of that heritage’s epistemological distinction from modern understandings of the natural and social worlds. Like the revolutionary Laroui of the 1960s and 1970s, the point of this exercise is to persuade the Arab reader that only a critical awareness of that distinction, and an equally critical adaptation of these modern concepts, could guide successful political practice in a world where modern Euro-American ideas and polities still hold sway.
