Wednesday's Read: Arab Intellectuals and the West

  Sharabi, Hisham. Arab Intellectuals and the West: The Formative Years, 1875-1914. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1970)

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Modern Arab intellectual Dr. Hisham Sharabi (1927-2005) also takes up the issue of Islamic modernism in his Arab intellectuals and the West: the formative years, 1875-1914 (1970). Sharabi situates the Arab Awakening in sociological terms, seeking to do an intellectual history of the nahdah informed by climates of opinion. He analyzes three main groups: Christian Westernizers, Muslim reformers, and Muslim secularists, looking for overarching thematic issues that bound together these thinkers. The type of analysis that he pioneers in this slim volume is much expanded upon later in the work of social and cultural historians, as Gasper’s and Fahmy’s analyses (below) demonstrate. Furthermore, Sharabi’s work is all the more interesting because of the circumstances surrounding its writing; this was one of the first intellectual histories written by an Arab-American in the aftermath of the ’67 War. Thus his specific focus on understanding the psychology motivating certain communities and ideologies, especially after several decades of postcolonial disillusionment, is significant.