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Kassab, Elizabeth Suzanne. Contemporary Arab Thought: Cultural Critique in Comparative Perspective. (New York: Columbia UP, 2010)
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Coming back to Elizabeth Kassab's Contemporary Arab Thought: Cultural Critique in Comparative Perspective (2010) after a break of a few months (I am updating this in July), I am struck by how truly extraordinary - and needed - this work is. After a brief nod to the nahda, included more to provide contextual grounding than to contribute fresh analysis to the subject, Kassab sketches out a historiography of the major themes that have animated Arab intellectual discourse throughout the twentieth century. This may not seem a Herculean task, but what hits me as I return, after having read many of the authors and books that she cites, is just how much information she manages to convey in the short space of a few hundred pages. This work is wide-ranging and impressively comprehensive.
Kassab’s Contemporary Arab Thought is an excellent, non-comprehensive primer to several major ideas and themes characterizing Arab thought post-1967. First, a couple of observations on the state of scholarship on contemporary Middle East intellectual history, typically periodized as starting with the dramatic epistemic shift the came in the wake of the 1967 Six-Day War – a shift that crossed all sections of Arab society: Although a flood of scholarship has been produced, much of it, as Elizabeth Suzanne Kassab highlights in her central argument of Contemporary Arab Thought (2010), can be summarized as thinkers becoming increasingly polarized between a search for “totalizing doctrines” like nationalism, socialism, or religion, and radical critique.[1] Many social and intellectual shifts took place as a result of the war, including a significant return to Islam for many - intellectuals and “common folk” alike - on a personal as well as academic level. There was, moreover, an unprecedented crisis on the Arab left, leading to sharply divergent analyses from various Marxist thinkers. Very few attempts have been made to broadly summarize, synthesize, or distill these various strains of thought. In English, two books make that attempt: Kassab’s, and a volumes by Ibrahim Abu-Rabi’, Contemporary Arab Thought: Studies in Post-1967 Arab Intellectual History (2003).
Kassab, after briefly introducing many of the key ideas of Hourani’s book to situate the reader, analyzes the proceedings of three major international Arab conferences (which took place in 1971, 1974, and 1984). She observes that each of these conferences centered upon issues of Arab huwiyya (identity) and turath (heritage), and hosted intellectuals who spoke openly of broad cultural malaise. She then moves to more recent sociocultural critiques made by Arab scholars: religious critique from both Muslims (e.g., Mohammed Arkoun) and Christians (Naim Ateek), and secular critique in the ideas of thinkers such as Fouad Zakariyya, Aziz al-Azmeh, and others. Finally, she concludes with a chapter on comparative postcolonial thought, comparing the approaches of the thinkers she reviewed with the approaches of scholars from India, Latin America, Europe, and more.
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