Description
Book SynopsisAhmad Agbaria tells the story of a generation of postcolonial thinkers and activists who came to question their modernist commitments. He analyzes the heated cultural and intellectual debates that overtook the Arab world in the 1970s, uncovering why major figures turned to tradition in search of solutions to postcolonial predicaments.
Trade ReviewAn extraordinary accomplishment, illuminating and thought-provoking. In
The Politics of Arab Authenticity, Agbaria characterizes the postrevolutionary and postcolonial era as a new age of Arab thought, shaped by intellectuals' intensive search for Arab authenticity. By reclaiming and negotiating Arab cultural heritage, this creative intellectual community not only thought to imbue the present with some sense of the past, but, more importantly, also found the past’s heritage meaningful and useful for the present and future. This book provides one of the most insightful maps of contemporary Arab intellectual thinking. -- Israel Gershoni, author of
Arab Responses to Fascism and Nazism: Attraction and RepulsionAgbaria's argument is that Jabiri's and Tarabishi's differentiated but monumental projects captured the dynamism of Arab intellectual landscapes and encapsulated not only the intracultural war over the meaning of history and cultural time but also this meaning's relevance to Arab futures. A lucid, analytically profound, and brilliantly cast narrative, an essential read for all those interested in the modern Arab world. -- Wael Hallaq, author of
Reforming Modernity: Ethics and the New Human in the Philosophy of Abdurrahman TahaIn this well-researched book, Agbaria analyzes one of the most central debates in contemporary Arab thought: the debate around heritage. He argues against viewing the debate as a secularist-religious opposition, instead telling a much more complex and interesting story.
The Politics of Arab Authenticity is necessary reading for anyone interested in contemporary Arab intellectual debates. -- Elizabeth Suzanne Kassab, author of
Contemporary Arab Thought: Cultural Critique in Comparative PerspectiveAhmad Agbaria challenges conventional narratives of Arab intellectual history through a bold reinterpretation of postcolonial thought in the Middle East and North Africa. Packed with fresh insights about far-reaching debates across the Arabic-speaking world around modernity and tradition, secularism and religion, and revolution and reform,
The Politics of Arab Authenticity is essential reading. -- Max Weiss, coeditor of
Arabic Thought Against the Authoritarian Age: Towards an Intellectual History of the PresentTable of ContentsPreface and Acknowledgments
Introduction: Voicing the Past
I: Foundations1. The Emergence of a New Field
2. The Great Cultural War: The Social and Connected Critics
II: Curators3. Jabiri as a Thinker of (Internal) Decolonization
4. Restating Turath in the Postcolonial Age
III: Backlash5. The Making of a Social Critic: Jurj Tarabishi
6. A Crack in the Edifice of the Social Critic: From Thawra to Nahda
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index
