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Cutting-edge scholarship on post-war Arab intellectual history that challenges conventional thinking about authoritarianism, religion and revolution in the modern Middle East.
List of contents
1. Introduction: towards a postwar intellectual history of the Arab world Max Weiss and Jens Hanssen; Part I. Arab Intellectuals in an Age of Decolonization: 2. Changing the Arab intellectual guard: on the fall of the udaba , 1940-60 Yoav Di-Capua; 3. Arabic thought in the radical age: Emile Habibi, the Israeli communist party and the production of Arab Jewish radicalism, 1946-61 Orit Bashkin; 4. Political praxis in the Gulf: Ahmad al-Khatib and the movement of Arab nationalists, 1948-69 Abdel Razzaq Takriti; 5. Modernism in translation: poetry and intellectual history in Beirut Robyn Creswell; Part II. Culture and Ideology in the Shadow of Authoritarianism: 6. Regional specificities of modern Arab thought: Morocco since the liberal age Hosam Aboul-Ela; 7. Sidelining ideology: Arab theory in the metropole and periphery, circa 1977 Fadi Bardawil; 8. Mosaic, melting pot, pressure cooker: the religious, the secular, and the sectarian in twentieth-century Syrian social thought Max Weiss; 9. Looking for 'the women question' in Algeria and Tunisia: ideas, political language and female actors before and after independence Natalya Vince; Part III. From (Neo)Liberalism to the 'Arab Spring' and Beyond: 10. Egyptian workers in the 'liberal age' and beyond Joel Beinin; 11. The redemption of women's liberation: reviving Qasim Amin in contemporary Egypt Ellen McLarney; 12. Turath as critique: Hassan Hanafi and the political subject in modern Arabic thought Yasmeen Daifallah; 13. Summoning the spirit of Taha Husayn's enlightenment project: the Nahda revival of Qadaya wa-shahadat in the 1990s Suzanne Kassab; 14. Revolution as ready-made: art, aesthetics, Arab uprisings Negar Azimi; 15. For a third Nahda Elias Khoury; 16. Where are the intellectuals in the Syrian revolution? Rosa Yasin Hasan; 17. The intellectuals and the revolution in Syria Yasin al-Hajj Salih.
About the author
Jens Hanssen is Associate Professor of Arab Civilization, Middle Eastern and Mediterranean history at the University of Toronto and has held visiting professorships at the universities of Marburg and Göttingen. His book publications include Fin de Siècle Beirut (2005), and his translation of Nafir Suriyya (with Hicham Safieddine) is forthcoming. He is currently co-editing The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Middle Eastern and North African History with Amal Ghazal. His present Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) research project, which focuses on the intersections between German, Jewish and Arab intellectual histories, has yielded two articles, 'Kafka and Arabs' (Critical Inquiry, 2012), and 'Translating Revolution: Hannah Arendt and Arab Political Culture'.Max Weiss is Associate Professor of History and Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University, New Jersey. He is the author of In the Shadow of Sectarianism: Law, Shi`ism, and the Making of Modern Lebanon (2010), co-editor (with Jens Hanssen) of Arabic Thought beyond the Liberal Age: Towards an Intellectual History of the Nahda (Cambridge, 2016), and translator, most recently, of Nihad Sirees, States of Passion (2018). He earned a Ph.D. in Modern Middle East History from Stanford University, held postdoctoral fellowships at Princeton University and the Harvard Society of Fellows, and his research has been supported by the Fulbright-Hays Commission, the Social Science Research Council, and the Carnegie Corporation. Currently, he is writing about the intellectual and cultural history of modern Syria, and translating several works of modern and contemporary Arabic literature.
Summary
The Middle East is often depicted as a landscape of war, authoritarianism, and social unrest. This book, full of cutting-edge scholarship, illuminates underappreciated aspects of the intellectual and cultural history of the post-war Arab world and explores the contributions of Arab writers, poets, and intellectuals to politics, culture and social change.
Report
'A much needed addition to our understanding of the Arab uprisings, their causes, and their meaning. While the political, social, economic, and cultural dimensions of the uprisings have been well explored, this book is unique inasmuch as it probes the overlooked role played by intellectuals in interpreting the Arab condition and articulating the complaints and demands of activists.' James L. Gelvin, University of California, Los Angeles, and author of The New Middle East: What Everyone Needs to Know.
