For those who teach Arab intellectual history in Western universities, the Arab Spring has hung over the curriculum like the sword of Damocles. What meaning should we ascribe to this event? Does it follow logically from the previous episodes, their ideological themes, and intellectual figures? Or was it a revolutionary break of such magnitude that it risks rendering the whole course obsolete? In the age of “learning aims,” “real-world relevance,” and course evaluations, instructors have had to take a position, despite the ongoing and unresolved nature of the Arab Spring. Some disciplines, such as MENA politics, may have clearer ways of drawing conclusions about its repercussions. What of the Arab intellectual scene? The most convenient approach has been to leave the topic open to debate in the classroom. In my experience, however, this approach has rarely quenched the students’ desire for closure. Ending by noting that “Arab thought is not a fixed object, but an evolving entity shaped by its historical context” is so evident that it became a tautology. As such, the closing session of the syllabus on Arab intellectual history has long yearned for a sense-giving text, if only to alleviate the plight of its instructors.
Elizabeth Suzanne Kassab’s essay “The Arab Spring as a Turning Point” offers an opportunity to redress the way the syllabus of Arab intellectual history typically concludes. As a teaching text, it promises to spark fruitful conversations with students. Specifically, it qualifies 2011 as a “turning point” into the “new contemporary” Arab thought because it opens a stage in which its actors sought to reckon with and “create meaning” from the upheavals faced by the region—including the 2019 uprisings and the war in Gaza since 2023. Kassab’s approach has the benefit of integrating this entire aftermath into the present. Other scholars have already offered their responses to aspects of this essay. I reserve my remarks for its pedagogical implications, mirroring classroom discussions. While convinced by several aspects of the essay, I offer a counter-position. The year 2011 can also constitute a continuum—even a convergence point—with the preceding episodes in the syllabus of Arab intellectual history; at least, in terms of the tools we deploy to understand the event. Ironically, this “continuum-turning point” is what may safeguard the salience of Arab intellectual history for our students.
From the outset, I speak of the “syllabus of Arab intellectual history” to refer to a conventional way of teaching this topic. As I discovered when designing my first course, and through conversations with peers over the years, the syllabus writes itself in its broad strokes.[1] Inspired by Albert Hourani’s Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age (1962), an authoritative yet outdated volume, modern Arab thought contains a story of Arab reform and pursuit of modernity in contact with the West. Students appreciate this connecting thread throughout the centuries amid shifting geographies, chronologies, and a plethora of figures. This story is structured around a historical arc that starts with Napoleon’s arrival on the shores of Egypt in 1798, which “sparked” the Arab Renaissance. This “Nahda” ushered in efforts to reform and introduce modernity, overseeing a remarkable intellectual and literary renewal, political reforms, and the pursuit of national statehood. This historical arc continues with the tragedy of the Palestinian Nakba in 1948. Since then, Arab intellectual history has explored the 1967 crisis: an Arab military defeat against Israel with deep intellectual resonance. In the ensuing critical period of self-critique, Arab thinkers questioned their beliefs in the ideals of progress, modernity, and the unicity of the Arab experience. Different voices emerged across the Arab region and Arab societies, turning their attention to the urgency of social, cultural, and gender reform. Kassab is a leading figure of this historiography with her recently re-edited book, Contemporary Arab Thought: Cultural Critique in a Comparative Perspective.
The syllabus tends to stumble and fray at this point, especially as it wrestles with the ideological shift toward Islamic heritage and Islamist politics in the Arab region. Instructors treat the ensuing years differently, depending on their research and proclivities. Some focus most of their attention on the “culturalist” debates on turath (“heritage”). The borders of the discipline become blurrier with adjoining fields such as Islamic studies or MENA politics. Other instructors dip meekly into the study of Arab liberals, secularists, and democrats from the 1980s to the 2000s. For Kassab, these constitute the “minority report in the midst of the louder discourses on identity, tradition, and the West,” and in the face of authoritarianism and conservative Islamists. Arab liberals may receive a more prominent place in the syllabus than their actual influence on the Arab intellectual scene warrants. This stems from a desire to highlight non-extreme voices from the region, or those Western university students might recognize as their ideological counterparts, as noted by Christoph Schumann[2]. Perhaps Arab liberals, secularists, and democrats are in the syllabus to transition less abruptly to the events of the Arab Spring—events that are often presented without first being digested.
Kassab’s “new contemporary” promises to restore the historical arc in Arab intellectual history. For Kassab, 2011 was a turning point because it transformed the Arab intellectual sphere and ushered in new parameters of thought. This framework leaves behind those questions the field cared about, the dilemma of hadatha aw turath (“heritage or modernity”), and identifies a new core. The “new contemporary” now centers on efforts to grapple with the “meaning of atrocity,” “the limits of language,” and the West’s “loss of credibility.” This production appears as an organic response from Arab thinkers living under dictatorship, repression, and war across the region. It also appears as an organic response from Kassab as the observer of this shift in the Arab intellectual landscape, offering us a new phase with a well-defined conceptual and thematic orientation. From a pedagogical perspective, this is an exciting position. It gives students a different type of closure by shining a light on the Arab thinkers who were attuned to the concerns of their societies amid media coverage of war and authoritarian closure. Perhaps, some will continue consuming intellectual production from this region, equipped with the knowledge of its historical genealogy. For the instructor, the “new contemporary” makes it possible to integrate a range of voices into the syllabus that would previously have evaded classification as Arab thinkers (novelists, opinion leaders, artists) as representatives of the contemporary Arab intellectual history.
At this stage in the classroom discussion, I would engineer the conditions to spark a disagreement with Kassab’s position. If the Arab Spring constitutes a “turning point” into a “new contemporary,” why then does the author rely on the tools of the “old contemporary” in her analysis? Should the “new contemporary” not require an entirely new grammar and approach, if it departs from the “old contemporary” and its concerns with culturalist debates and omission of the political? Three such continuities appear in this essay.
First, Kassab argues that historical crises give meaning to Arab thinkers and their intellectual production. The 1967 crisis and the 2011 Arab Spring are both, on the surface, distinct points in time. They are “turning points” because they induced a change in the Arab intellectual scene—in its composition, methods, and key debates. In fact, the argument can be extended back to 1948 (the Palestinian Nakba), 1920 (European colonialism over the Arabs under the mandate system), or even 1798 (Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign), each one opening a new phase in Arab intellectual history. Logically, the same can be assumed for future dates in Arab history. As such, Arab intellectuals have been reactive to major events, and 2011 is no different. They process crises and determine their place in the world through these major events, as we relate in the syllabus.
Second, both the pre- and post-2011 periods in the discipline have largely been actor-centric. Our focus will remain on those who produce ideas. For Kassab, 2011 introduced a new archetype of actors and styles of intellectual practice: the “imposing major personalities” have passed away, and their “successors are rather a wide variety of intellectual workers, who dwell…on the margins of the main public sphere” and “publish in a host of alternative journalistic media.” Yet, a similar shift can be observed throughout the syllabus in the 20th century. Reformist graduates of al-Azhar left the mosque and entered the public debate in Egypt. Newspapers of the late 19th century facilitated the emergence of the effendiyya (the “educated bourgeoisie”). Ideologues operated within the parties of Arab nationalism in the interwar years. “Committed writers” (adab al-multazim or adab al-muqawama) inspired the struggle and often paid a heavy price for it. And after 1967, the critical academic arguably became the most common profile of the Arab intellectual. In other words, those whom Kassab labels “intellectual workers” may represent only a new form in a longer continuum, rather than an epistemic shift in how ideas are produced and consumed. They are still in written format, on some media support, in Arabic or largely directed at an Arab audience.
Third, ideological categories continue to guide how we approach the old and the new contemporary. Kassab notes that Arab intellectual debates between 1967 and 2011 have addressed the “wrong” questions: amid the “cultural turn, few voices directed attention to politics, rather to the lack thereof, i.e., to the absence of democracy and the exclusion of people from political life.” Then, the popular revolts demanded “freedom, dignity, accountability of rulers, and social justice.” In its wake, the “new contemporary” becomes one of reckoning with atrocity. Yet throughout the syllabus, we have applied a similar approach by naming a period under an ideological category and a dominant emotion. The excitement and discovery of the West shaped Arab reformism. The spread of Western imperialism inspired Arab nationalism. Arab socialism (or the Arab Left) developed as ideologies of state-building, of revolutionary aspirations, and political reform, before and after 1967. We have already mentioned the coverage of Arab Liberalism. These examples serve to show that we have—and will likely continue to—organize Arab intellectual history under a dominant ideology in each “age.” This may be a device to ensure legibility for students in Western universities. It may be the necessary compromises made when drawing up a syllabus for such rich subject matter. Regardless, Kassab’s “new contemporary” appears to continue this approach of naming the dominant ideological and emotional register of a phase in Arab intellectual production, as seen throughout the course.
Perhaps 2011 may not have been that much of a turning point as first announced, if the tools of the old still explain the new. Here comes the twist. Ironically, I believe that this continuity helps maintain the integrity of the syllabus and the relevance of the course of Arab intellectual history. In my experience, historical continuity into the present offers a greater source of validation for the students, especially toward non-Western topics. For better or worse, these courses serve to “explain the region” to those who are more likely to arrive with pre-existing knowledge on Edward Said rather than Muhammad Abduh or Tahar Haddad. Read this way, the “new contemporary” ensures that 2011 constitutes a “turning point” within a continuum, without bringing down the whole edifice of the syllabus of Arab intellectual history. Its instructors will be thankful for it, and work to engineer conversations on cross-historical comparisons, echoes, call-backs, and provocative speculation into future directions.
After ending the last class on this upbeat note, one question lingers: why did this framework only emerge now? Why was the “new contemporary” Arab intellectual history not recognized and labeled much sooner—if not in 2011, then in 2019 or in 2023? For Kassab, “it is indeed far too early…not least because we are still living in its intensity.” To be fair, “fifteen years is a short period of time for the features of an intellectual era to come to the fore.” Perhaps this impatience stems from the nature of the present, and my own desire for immediate answers and clear frameworks. Yet both Harald Viersen and Mohamed Hashas’s responses contain a desire for Arab intellectuals to be more forceful in taking positions, producing meaning about the present, and leading the way. Incidentally, all three of us formed our rapport with Arab intellectual history during these past fifteen years teaching in Western universities and publishing mostly in Western outlets.
Today, Arab intellectual history finds itself at an exciting turning point of its own. This makes it all the more important to remember what the discipline can and cannot do. As Kassab’s essay and re-edited book show, the discipline is above all one of history. It looks backwards and gives meaning to the past. It explains after the fact rather than equipping us with tools that preempt meaning or predict the future. That part will not be in the syllabus.
Idriss Jebari is an Assistant Professor in Middle East Studies at Trinity College Dublin. His upcoming monograph is Leaping Decolonization: North Africa in the Global Sixties and Seventies (Cambridge University Press, 2025)
[1] These markers constitute a relatively common and recurrent way of organizing this syllabus and do not preclude that certain instructors may offer some variation.
[2] Schumann, Christoph. “The “Failure” of Radical Nationalism and the “Silence” of Liberal Thought in the Arab World.” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, vol. 28 no. 3, 2008, p. 404-415.
Cover photo: courtesy of the author.
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