Undoubtedly, 2011 was a turning point in the history of the Arab region. Since that date, radical upheavals have been shaking its countries and societies and leading to profound transformations. Popular uprisings, the toppling of long-time autocrats, civil strife, economic collapse, unprecedented repression, increased state and non-state violence, incarceration, torture, forced disappearance, massive population displacement, wide-scale destruction, and external aggressions have all changed large parts of the region beyond recognition. The 2011 popular uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Sudan, Libya, Syria, and, to a lesser extent, Morocco, were followed by another wave of such uprisings in Algeria, Iraq, and Lebanon in 2019. The genocidal war raging in Gaza since 2023 has taken the region to a yet deeper abyss in existential, moral, political, and economic terms. The popular revolts that broke out from the pre-2011 deep sense of failure, helplessness, and suffering were met with even greater injustice and pain. So how have thinkers of the region been interacting with these upheavals? How have these dramatic events impacted the intellectual scene of the region?
Making sense of these events has been quite a daunting task for people affected by them in view of their severity and pace, let alone in the absence of true respites. Coping with severe life disruptions and seeking safety for oneself and loved ones have taken priority. Nevertheless, the need to create meaning and explanation has also become urgent, no matter how daunting in the face of so much destruction, brutality, and annihilation. Reflecting on the formidable difficulties that this “meaning creation” faces is indeed one of the major new themes of what I call the “new contemporary” Arab thought. Why “new contemporary?” It is my contention that 2011 was a turning point, not only for the region in general, but also for its intellectual history. Changes can be observed in many aspects, from the identity of its actors to the modes of publication as well as its dominating themes.
First of all, we’ve witnessed the passing of major figures of the generation of thinkers that shaped contemporary thought in the second half of the twentieth century, such as Moroccan Mohammed Abed al-Jabiri (1935-2010), Algerian Mohammad Arkoun (1928-2010), Moroccan Fatima Mernissi (1940-2015), Egyptian Nawal el-Saadawi (1931-2021), Tunisian Hicham Djait (1935-2021) and Egyptian Hassan Hanafi (1935-2021). They haven’t yet been replaced by a new generation of imposing major personalities in the old style of their predecessors, and they might never be replaced by people of similar profiles. Their successors are rather a wide variety of intellectual workers, who dwell in their great majority on the margins of the main public sphere and who publish in a host of alternative journalistic media, many of which are, for the most part, digital, as well as in new publishing houses. They are younger, less centered in academia, and with gender profiles that are more diversified. Studies of transformations of the Arab public discursive sphere have yet to be undertaken. They would reveal some of the profound changes that have been developing recently in the public sphere of the region.
Moreover, the eruption of the popular revolts raised new questions about the pre-2011 debates. So many of them centered around questions of heritage, tradition, modernity, and identity, themes that turned out to be largely absent in peoples’ demands as expressed in the streets of Tunis, Cairo, Sanaa, Khartoum, Damascus, Baghdad, and Beirut. In fact, the revolts revealed a clear disconnect between much of what established thinkers said were the main issues of Arab thought and what people at large were preoccupied with, to the point of voicing them in the face of their police states known for their ruthless brutality. Whose issues were those then? And what does the disconnect tell us about the intellectual discourses that prevailed in the region before the revolts? It should be added here that there were, throughout the decades preceding 2011, a number of thinkers who were sensitive to the precise concerns that were heard in the uprisings, basically concerns with dignity, freedom, and justice. Those thinkers did identify such concerns and recognized them as the fundamental aspects of the prevailing malaise. In so doing, they also braved repression and despair. Their reading of the malaise was, in that sense, political rather than cultural and/or culturalist. I have described it as the minority report in the midst of the louder discourses on identity, tradition, and the West.
The “old” contemporary Arab thought, the one that I broadly located between 1967 and 2011, emerged as a reaction to the humiliating defeat of the Arab armies by Israel in 1967. The post-1967 writings tried to analyze and explain the defeat in a soul-searching mood oriented in the first place to self-critique. What could have led to the devastating defeat? Much of the attention went to the modes of thinking that might have been the cause of the debacle: not rational enough, not scientific enough, not modern enough, too traditional, or too modernized to the point of alienation. Mostly, the root causes were searched in culture, and “cultural malaise” became a “ubiquitous” topic. What were the cultural ailments that impeded success, progress, and development: was it Islam? The absence of reformation? Fundamentalism? Or was it secularism and the estrangement from religious traditions? Was it patriarchy? Was it Western “cultural invasion” and the loss of cultural authenticity? Was it the failure to resolve the tension between modernity and authenticity? While these questions often took a culturalist 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. That again is what I call the minority report. The 1967 defeat was followed by the rise of Islamist trends, inspired and encouraged by the Iranian revolution. Moreover, the period of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s witnessed the consolidation of dictatorships and various forms of authoritarianism across the region, with several failed attempts at reform led by civil society organizations. Finally, the region witnessed the devastating USA-led invasion of Iraq and the continued practices of Israel in the occupied Palestinian territories.
All these factors and more led to the outbreak of the popular revolts demanding freedom, dignity, accountability of rulers, and social justice. They were followed, as mentioned above, by increased repression, brutality, wars, chaos, and the genocide in Gaza. Is it the scope of the upheavals that makes me speak of a “new” contemporary thought? If the 1967 defeat was a humiliating shock, the 2011 uprisings were at first a total pleasant surprise. They inspired pride and hope, but that didn’t last long. The soul-searching that followed had to reckon with the most brutal defeat of the uprisings: was it worth the unspeakable pain, destruction, and chaos that it ended up causing? Who was to be held responsible for them? Soon, dealing with the pain and the destruction itself became one of the prime preoccupations of the period for people in general and thinkers in particular. The experience of atrocity and the challenge of creating meaning in the midst of extreme brutality became major topics of post-2011 writings. This body, in general, and the torn, crushed, and tortured body in particular, as well as their representation or representativity in art and literature, came to occupy a central place. The limits of language, as well as the difficulties of defining and representing the new times, started to be seen as formidable challenges. So were the possibilities of caring, healing, and recreating bonds of solidarity and community. Ethics gained in importance due to the need to rethink values and humanism.
The very meaning of thinking and critique could no longer to be taken for granted: What did critique mean in dark times during which things happened that were unbelievable? The main goal of critique seemed to be shifting from the debunking of illusions to the stating of the real that was unbelievable. Categories of thought, such as universality, were profoundly shaken and needed to be re-addressed. The whole claim of “European” or “Western” civilization to universal categories and values collapsed irremediably in the genocide in Gaza. This time, it was no longer the well-known problem of “double-standards” but the total loss of intellectual and moral credibility. After the abyss of Gaza, universality and humanism had to be thought anew. In its rubbles, a new impetus was given to Palestinian liberation theology that came out to challenge the claims of a supposedly universal Christianity. Finally, power, be it that of institutional religion, state or gender, started to be questioned and challenged in novel ways.
It is indeed far too early to draw the contours of this “new” contemporary in Arab thought, not least because we are still living it in its intensity. On the one hand, a convulsing region is still in flux, and on the other, fifteen years is a short period of time for the features of an intellectual era to come to the fore. Nonetheless, certain trends and preoccupations can be recognized, such as those concerned with the body, with atrocity, extreme pain, destruction, loss, language, community, care, ethics, universality, and power that had relatively and comparatively speaking less or little prominence in the pre-2011 era. The task ahead will be to observe and analyze these developing themes in the various writings and debates.
Cover photo: This combination of pictures shows a general view of Cairo’s Tahrir Square on February 18, 2011 as it is filled with protesters celebrating the ouster of former president Hosni Mubarak a week after the massive protests against him; and the same view almost ten years later on November 11, 2020. (Photo by Khaled Desouki and Pedro Ugarte / AFP)
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