Past Read: Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age, 1798-1939

Hourani, Albert. Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age, 1798-1939. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962)


Hourani’s book is known for its accessibility, combining sophisticated analysis and readable prose to make an excellent introductory work for a novice as well as a useful text for the more advanced scholar. Following the standard periodization for the modern period of the Middle East - and after a brief introductory primer on the Islamic state and the origins of the Ottoman Empire - Hourani begins with Napoleon’s 1798 invasion of Egypt and traces the rise of increased intercultural contact between Ottoman subjects and Europeans through the nineteenth century and up until the beginning of World War II. He focuses on “liberal thought,” including educational reform, the rise of Islamic modernism, the role of women, the rise of regional nationalisms (both Islamic and Arab), and more. (This period of rapid intellectual, scientific, and lexical expansion is commonly called the nahdah.) Hourani structures his book around key themes and thinkers, making nearly each chapter a biography of sorts.

Perhaps the most common criticism of Hourani’s text is his choice of the phrase “liberal thought” to characterize the nahdah period, due in part to the slippery nature of the word “liberal” in English, and in part, particularly in the post-Said era, to the subtle equation of “liberality” with “progress” and “improvement” (and “Europe”). Moreover, “liberal” is an unusual word to use in conjunction with groups like the Muslim Brotherhood.

Still, Hourani introduces the reader to the worlds of Tahtawi, Boutrous Bustani, al-Afghani, Muhammad Abduh, Taha Husayn, and more, highlighting the twin nahdah centers of Egypt and Lebanon, and underscoring the dramatic shifts from wonder and curiosity to selective embrace to cautious, defensive visions of Europe. Whereas in the early-to-mid-nineteenth century Arab thinkers were in large part keen to borrow the technological and scientific elements of European culture that they found appealing, and incorporate them into their own (largely Muslim) Ottoman traditions, by the late-nineteenth century more unsettling thoughts had taken root. Muslim thinkers questioned whether Islam was compatible with European Enlightenment thought, and, more insidiously, whether there were elements of European civilization that were inherently superior. If Muslims were to adopt political structures and philosophies that they were encountering from France and England, would so doing be an implicit acknowledgement of cultural inferiority? Anomie and uncertainty set in, as did the question of why Muslim cultures had not kept up with their European counterparts. Albert Hourani dates this shift to the time just after Muhammad Abduh disciple Rashid Rida (1865-1935), who “belonged to the last generation of those who could be fully educated and yet alive in a self-sufficient Islamic world of thought.”[1] The root issues described here – of cultural authenticity, of competition with and independence from Western cultural and economic power, of reconfiguring notions of self and of one’s history in the face of “modernity” – are all issues that extend into the present, still informing the debates of Arab intellectual thought.

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[1] Hourani, 235.