It is hard to make sense of the past, but even harder to make sense of the present. This does not mean, however, that we should not try to make sense of our present, regardless of the missteps that we are likely to make in the process.
In her recent contribution to Reset DOC, Elizabeth Suzanne Kassab echoes this sentiment, as she sketches an ambitious and important project to map the changes that the last decade and a half of upheaval in the Arab world has wrought in the intellectual scene. She describes what has been brewing in these circles as “new contemporary” Arab thought, contrasting it to the merely contemporary thought of the period between the 1960s and the beginnings of the Arab Spring in 2011 that she chronicled earlier in her comprehensive survey published in 2010.
What characterizes this new wave of Arab thought is not quite clear—it is precisely that which Kassab argues we need to find out. What is rather more clear, is what this post-revolutionary intellectual discourse is against, what it rejects as outdated. It rejects the dominance of the issues that characterized the pre-Spring Arab intellectual scene; the problematic of authenticity versus modernity, the culturalist bent of Arab thought, the neglect of social and political issues—calls for “bread, freedom and social justice”—that would become the core slogans of the revolutions, the lingering infatuations with supposedly universal Western concepts and ideals. This last point is particularly present right now. More than the double standards that have long been evident in European and later American involvement in the Middle East or the treatment of non-Western refugees, it is the breakdown of the West’s moral compass, the “total loss of intellectual and moral credibility” in light of the genocidal violence in Palestine that, according to Kassab, has done irreparable damage to its image as a universal beacon of humanist values. It is this demasqué of the West as well as of the established Arab intellectual and political class that now provides the ferment for new directions in Arab thought.
I have little to add to this picture. Indeed, the deafening silence of many (though not all) Western intellectuals and politicians in relation to the increasingly unrestrained retributive violence of the Israeli army against the Palestinian population is a travesty that has not gone unnoticed in the Arab, in the Muslim, or indeed in the entire world. As for the pre-2011 era, while I have argued that it is possible to reconceptualize and read in a different light the ossified and stale discourse that developed within the dominant authenticity-modernity paradigm of late 20th-century Arab thought, I can see why a more radical break with these debates about authenticity and heritage would be like a breath of fresh air to a younger generation.
In other words, I am looking forward to hearing what Kassab and others find out as they venture into the shifting sands of the intellectual history of the Arab present. What I would like to do is to add two considerations on the task that Kassab has set herself, namely “to observe and analyze these developing themes in the various writings and debates.” One is about the position that she or anyone else can take with regard to the new contemporary Arab thought. The other is about the position that this thought itself may or perhaps should take up in the world.
To start with the first point, it is generally accepted that the work of academics and specifically of historians is essentially descriptive; a matter of observing and analyzing phenomena. Academics may notice certain changes like a shift in the social, political, or intellectual environment, and try to make sense of what causes these changes and what they mean for the societies, traditions, or people concerned with them. Of course, not all academics indeed view their own work in this way. Engaged scholarship has a long tradition, but even if it is engaged in agitating for particular forms of change, the principal idea is that fact-based scholarship undergirds the positions that scholars take up in their advocacy.
Maintaining this descriptive-normative divide is not easy, however, and it is hardest when it concerns intellectual discourse that is being made in the present. As a scholar of Arab thought, as someone who engages, discusses with, draws attention to, or withholds attention from people who are at work developing new contemporary Arab thought, a historian of the present like Kassab may herself reasonably be seen as an actor in this subject that she proposes to research.
Now, there is nothing in principle to keep her from doing this. The idea of completely detached scholarship is, to my mind, unfeasible, as any description of any debate, text, or discourse requires making choices that can reasonably be regarded as expressing a stance. The difference in this case is not one in kind, but one of degree. It is particularly hard to position oneself as an intellectual historian vis-à-vis contemporary intellectual developments. More than is the case with describing historical eras that we can observe with the clarity of hindsight, observers may be drawn into the debates themselves or sideline aspects with which they are less in tune, in particular when we take the necessary step of considering how and where ideas are produced outside the traditional confines of university faculties or ritualized debates at academic conferences. It makes for a more exciting field of study, but also one that is several shades murkier, as one’s particular position in the present is likely to influence what one notices about what is going on right now, and especially what current intellectual developments one does not perceive or value.
Writing about what is currently going on in the Arab world on every level is essential, and this certainly includes the exciting prospect of a new contemporary Arab thought indicated by Kassab. However, it also begs the question of how academics reporting on it position themselves. I do not have any clear answer to this. Perhaps it calls for a more explicit discussion of the researchers’ own proclivities, or perhaps it puts a burden on them to critique their interlocutors more forcefully, or to bring them into conversation with other currents that do not clearly align, either within Arabic discourse or beyond. For now, I will leave this question open for Kassab and others to discuss, but I do think it is an important preliminary question to any study of current Arab intellectual history-in-the-making.
My second consideration relates not so much to how researchers ought to relate to Arab thought, but what the position of this new contemporary Arab thought ought to take up in the world. Kassab herself already did something similar when, in the final chapter of her book “Contemporary Arab Thought,” she considers how the debates that she chronicled in the preceding chapters may be viewed in relation to modern philosophical discourses the world over, from 19th-century German Lebensphilosophie to Latin American postcolonial thought.
Extending this way of positioning Arab thought on a global stage to the current theme of new contemporary Arab thought, we ought to ask not just how the radical changes that have shaken the Arab world since 2011 (and arguably the decade before that as well) are important to Arab societies. Rather, our task should be to translate the fruits of these experiences into different languages, to connect them to different discourses, to see how they fare in different situations. As Kassab showed earlier, Arab thought in the modern age was not created in isolation but in conversation with other traditions. Moreover, it was able to enter into these conversations, because all these trends developed in reaction to a set of similar problems and opportunities presented by our modern lives, lived out in modern societies. They could interact and learn from each other on the basis of their shared predicament.
It is this measure of global significance that I believe the study of new contemporary Arab thought should take as its aim. Of course, this requires a firm grasp of what Arab intellectuals are talking, writing, painting, sculpting, podcasting, or making music about. However, if the Arab world continues to be embedded in larger, global debates, dealing with shared problems; and if what is happening in the Arab world really does constitute a break with the past as well as a break with previous paradigms, then its lessons should not be contained. Rather, it should develop into a hotbed of intellectual innovation and show its worth on the global stage. If anything, it is this positioning of Arab thought as a local tradition embedded in global intellectual discourse that would constitute a true break with the provincial, parochial earlier phase of discussing different variations of reading the Arab-Islamic heritage.
Cover photo: A combination of pictures created on November 18, 2020 shows Tunisians walking at Habib Bourguiba street in Regueb near Sidi Bouzid on October 27, 2020 and a Tunisian demostrator throwing a rock during clashes between demonstrators and security forces on January 10, 2011 at the same place. (Photo by FETHI BELAID / AFP)
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