Contemporary Arab thought : cultural critique in comparative perspective / Elizabeth Suzanne Kassab.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Kassab, Elizabeth Suzanne

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Civilization, Arab--20th century.

Civilization, Arab.

Criticism (Philosophy).

Criticism--Arab countries.

Criticism.

Arab countries.

Physical Description:

xiv, 496 pages ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

New York : Columbia University Press, [2010]

Summary:

During the second half of the twentieth century, the Arab intellectual and political scene was polarized between a search for totalizing doctrines-nationalist, Marxist, and religious-and radical critique. Arab thinkers were reacting to the disenchantment experienced by postindependence Arab states, as well as to authoritarianism, intolerance, and failed development. They were also responding to successive defeats by Israel, humiliation, and injustice. The first book to take stock of these critical responses, this volume illuminates the relationship between cultural and political critique in the work of major Arab thinkers, and it connects Arab debates on cultural malaise, identity, and authenticity to the postcolonial issues of Latin America and Africa.

Contents:

Introduction: Cultural malaise and cultural identity in twentieth-century western, postcolonial, and Arab debates

The first modern Arab cultural Renaissance or Nahda : from the mid-nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century

Critique after the 1967 defeat

The existential dramatization of critique the day after the defeat : Saadallah Wannous's theatrical oeuvre

Humanistic nationalism and critical reason : Qustantin Zurayq

The critique of religious-metaphysical thought : Sadeq Jalal al-Azm

The critique of ideology and historicization : Abdallah Laroui

Gendering critique : Nawal el-Saadawi and the late-twentieth-century Arab feminists

The radicalization of critique and the call for democracy : reclaiming the individual's critical faculties

Marxist, epistemological, and psychological readings of major conferences on cultural decline, renewal, and authenticity

The Cairo Conference of 1971 : authenticity and renewal in contemporary Arab culture

The Kuwait conference of 1974 : the crisis of civilizational development in the Arab homeland

The Cairo Conference of 1984 : heritage and the challenges of the age in the Arab homeland : authenticity and contemporaneity

Critique in these conferences : the fixation on tradition and the intellectualization of the malaise

Critique in Islamic theology

From the unthought and the unthinkable to the thinkable : Mohammed Arkoun

The historicity of revelation and the struggle for thought in the time of Anathema : Nasr Hamid abu Zayd

Feminist historicization of religious traditions : Nazira Zain al-Din, Fatima Mernissi, and Leila Ahmed

An Islamic theology of liberation : the Islamic left of Hassan Hanafi

A Christian Arab theology of liberation : Naim Ateek and Mitri Raheb in Palestine-Israel

On the potential for critique in traditional Islam : Talal Asad's analysis of the public criticism by Ulemas in Saudi Arabia

Islamic critique and the cultural malaise

Secular critique

Critique of the exclusive monopoly over true Islam : Farag Fouda

The importance of keeping the debate on the human level : Fouad Zakariyya

Critique of the essentialist and romantic conception of identity : Aziz al-Azmeh

Critique of the Islamicization of knowledge and the quest for an indigenous social science : Bassam Tibi, Abdelkebir Khatibi, and Hisham Sharabi

Critique of the conciliatory pattern of thinking : Muhammad Jaber al-Ansari, Hisham Sharabi, and Nadeem Naimy

Secularism, democracy, and cultural critique

Recentering the historical, the human, and the partial : the secular call for democracy and human rights

Breaking the postcolonial solitude : Arab motifs in comparative perspective

The western debates

The non-western postcolonial debates

Common leitmotivs and Arab specificities

Shifting priorities

Conclusion: The new Nahda impulses, reclaiming the right to freedom and life.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780231144889

0231144881

9780231516174

0231516177

023114489X

9780231144896

OCLC:

320799236