This article is part of the dossier The “New Contemporary”: Arab Thought Recasting Itself from 2011 to Gaza.
Intellectual historians tend to have a certain affinity for periodization, perhaps owing to the historicist roots of the discipline or the demands of academic publication. Thought—this elusive act of “sense making” as Elizabeth Suzanne Kassab defines it in Contemporary Arab Thought—has to be bound in the temporal confines of a period, delimited by a start date and an end date, in order to appear as an object that can be studied. Periodization is a boundary: it renders thought visible and observable as a unitary object, with its discrete assumptions and debates about influences and consequences—in other words, about its relation to what lies beyond those boundaries.
Periodization is what we are after in this current exchange. In her “Arab Spring as a Turning Point,” Kassab explores the impact that the 2011 revolutions had on the development of Arab thought, coining the term “new contemporary Arab thought” to describe the acts of sense-making that followed them. The present period is distinguished from the “contemporary Arab thought” that emerged in the wake of the 1967 defeat against Israel, with the uprisings themselves serving as the temporal boundary between the two.
Naming—and hence unifying thought under one heading—allows Kassab to make two critical moves. First, it allows her to probe the relationship between the two periods, which she characterizes as antagonistic: the present practices of sense-making reject the culturalist explanations of Arab malaise that defined the post-1967 generation. Second, it allows her to stake a claim about Arab intellectual production by naming its dominant preoccupations, which she finds to be more political, concrete, and diverse than the earlier logocentric and largely male-centered focus on the “culture of defeat.” Antagonism and dispersal of thought thus emerge as the two main conclusions drawn once a clear boundary is established between the two periods
I do not disagree with these insights. What I want to ask, however, is whether more is happening than the seasonal succession of intellectual periods. Taking my cue from Idriss Jebari’s rejoinder to Kassab—where he notes the similarity between Kassab’s “new contemporary Arab thought” and the (historicist) approach of organizing Arab thought according to distinct periods, separated from each other by a historical crisis (1798, 1948, 1967, 2011)—I want to question whether the will to periodize is precluding us from seeing other transformations taking place. The hypothesis I advance in this essay is whether “Arab thought,” understood as a unitary object, a reference towards which intellectual and cultural production are oriented, still forms today the main cadre or ground for organizing this production, for making sense of these acts of sense-making. In other words, I propose to shift the question from the contemporary/new contemporary pole to an investigation of “Arab thought” itself: that unquestioned ground on which intellectual debates seem to take place, the register toward which they are oriented, and which seems to have withered over the past decades.
“Arab thought” is not the sum of the thought produced in and about the Arab world over a certain period of time. Rather, it is a historiographical device used to make sense of these dispersed, contradictory, and elusive acts of sense-making, uniting them under one heading, with clear, albeit contested, temporal markers and intellectual characteristics. “Arab thought” is the result of a process of canonization, institutionalization, and classification that selected particular authors, promoting them to the status of “Arab” authors, each with a discrete claim, and all of them responding to somehow similar questions and themes. “Arab thought,” in other words, is not simply the aggregation of what has been produced, but more a way to orient the acts of sense-making toward a similar referent, hence creating a shared set of questions and concerns that renders the collective and disparate acts legible for study.
The process of canonization has many roots. We can find some of it in the survey books published on “Arab Thought,” such as Kassab’s own book published in 2010 or Abu-Ibrahim Rabi’s Contemporary Arab Thought: Studies in Post-1967 Arab Intellectual History, published in 2003, which have cemented its periodization, its main intellectual figures, and central questions. The two books were published at a time of growing renewed interest in the field of “Arab intellectual history,” understood as secular thought. Syllabi, publications, journals, and conferences similarly contributed to the construction of this field of study, and with it, of its object: “Arab thought.”
Many of the questions raised in the original essay by Kassab and subsequent responses to it stem from this manner of constructing our object of study. It is our historiographical concern with delimiting and identifying the Zeitgeist of a particular historical moment, of selecting the main representatives of that thought, and of promoting particular debates as foundational that led us to reproduce these questions regarding the present intellectual and cultural production. If the standard historiography has defined the various stages of that thought as the succession of a liberal Nahda, followed by a radical moment, then the defeat and its culturalist assumptions, how does the present intellectual production fit into this series?
But despite trying to provide answers to these questions, the present seems to be elusive to the requirements of canonization that made “Arab thought” a solid category. The present that emerges out of the exchange is “not” like the past. As Kassab notes, the present seems to be dispersed, both in terms of the questions it is addressing and the sociological composition of the successors of the “Arab intellectual”. It seems harder to distill from the present the same homogeneity that allowed the clear category of the past. But what if we reversed the direction of the comparison, and instead of noting the present dispersal, asked how the homogeneity of the past was produced? How did the dispersal of past acts of sense-making become legible through the unitary category of “Arab thought,” and for what intellectual and political project?
“Arab thought” is not simply the product of academic and institutional canon-making, but is an ideological object, produced by “Arab intellectuals,” with particular political and intellectual stakes attached to it. “Arab thought” developed as the referent for intellectuals in the wake of the demise of radical political ideologies, serving as their grounds of enunciation, the history of their present, and the form of their political project. In other words, “Arab thought” was the political horizon of the disillusioned militants turned intellectuals after the defeat of 1967.
“Arab thought” emerged as the ground for the intervention of intellectuals in the wake of the political disappointments of the second half of the twentieth century. The demise of the radical political projects, with its imagined audience and borrowed political agents, led a number of Arab intellectuals toward a culturalist turn that required the creation of the object of “Arab thought” as their ground of intervention and analysis. The Arab-Islamic tradition became their target, now that the political horizon has been closed off.
But “Arab thought” was not simply the shared object of intervention. It also fulfilled a second function, which was to provide the genealogy of a minoritarian tradition that consciously styled itself as the heirs of the Enlightenment at a time of the rise of the Islamic movements and thought in the Arab world. “Arab thought” became the historical lineage of the secular “Arab intellectuals,” with its by now well-known succession of the Nahda, the nationalist era, the radical era, the liberal era with the revival of the Nahda. It was the “proof” that this politically irrelevant tradition, cornered between authoritarian regimes and Islamic opposition, existed and had a certain solidity, albeit cultural.
Lastly, “Arab thought” played a political role too, in that it emerged as the counterpart of the Arab regimes and their closing off of the various political fields, leaving this “culturalist” frame as the sole space for intellectual work. Culturalism was the type of criticism that was allowed in Arab regimes, to some extent relieving them from their responsibilities in view of the “backwardness” of the whole Arab-Islamic culture. This is not to say that no voices were dissenting from that culturalist frame, but they were exactly that: dissenting voices from the dominant approach. “Arab thought,” with its intellectuals, became the impossible political “other” of Arab regimes and their societies alike.
Defined as the thought investigating the culture of the Arab-Islamic world, “Arab thought” forms the locus of enunciation and the ground on which contending intellectual battles could be fought. Its stake was the delineation of the inheritance of the Enlightenment, in a situation of dual rejections of regimes and societies alike. This project ended in 2011, as Kassab noted, but what also ended with it—at least this is the argument of the essay—is the category itself. In the wake of “Arab thought” is not another period that follows, a contemporary or “new contemporary,” with the fixed rhythm of the weeks in a syllabus or an additional chapter in a survey book. Rather, what seems to have ended in 2011, or what appeared as dead then, even though it long died before, was the idea of a unitary referent towards which Arab cultural and intellectual production were oriented, a referent that was folded in the political project of the Enlightenment.
Thinking the present acts of sense-making outside the frames of “Arab thought” suggests different moves. “Arab thought” has imposed a non-disciplinary take on the activities of cultural production, being the general and abstract theorization of cultural, theoretical, and intellectual development in the Arab world. “Arab thought” is not set within a defined discipline, even though it has affinities with cultural history, linguistics, semantics, and philosophy. It stands above any disciplinary investigations, as philosophy once stood over the social sciences. In its wake, academic disciplines, artistic fields, and particular intellectual traditions have acquired a history and solidity that cannot be subsumed under the temporalities of an unfolding “Arab thought.” They are oriented to their own questions, which mediate the general political questions. Devoid of any concrete grounding in a discipline and its temporality, “Arab thought” moves at the rhythm of historical crises. Disciplinary thought develops its own temporality, located in the autonomy of its field of knowledge production.
The dispersal of thought among particular traditions has its parallel in the demise of the “Arab intellectual” as the sole figure producing thought in the Arab world. Contemporary intellectual and cultural producers are not oriented toward this figure, nor do they try to draw their authority from it. The dispersal in the sociological makeup of that milieu, as Kassab has noted, is not simply the result of the growing role of the diaspora, the location of many cultural producers in Western universities or cultural institutions, the multiplicity of national fields and linguistic spaces, or the different cultural fields in which they move. It is also the result of the loss of investment in this figure of the “Arab intellectual” as the model of intellectual authority.
As a thought that saw itself as the alternative to the political regimes and the “backward” societies, positing culture against them, and intellectuals as the philosopher-kings, melancholia was not a passing affect, or one caused by the particular experience of political loss. Rather, it was an affect generated by the loss of political agency, a loss that structures the questioning of “Arab thought.” Melancholia is constitutive of “Arab thought,” the impossible mourning of an imagined loss. It is a particular manner of experiencing and making sense of defeat and disappointments, loss and catastrophe, but one that refuses to let go of the dead. And the dead, in this case, is the figure of the intellectual. “Arab thought” is the impossible mourning of that figure.
If 2011 was the sign of something, it was not that of the end of a period and the beginning of another in a series of succeeding moments, each with its own Zeitgeist. Rather, it signals that “Arab thought” as this unitary referent has ended, and with it the dominance of abstract thought over the lived nature of sense-making.
Samer Frangie is an Associate Professor of Political Studies and Public Administration at the American University of Beirut.
Cover photo: A man waits by a graffiti depicting silhouettes of a man metamorphosing into a bird symbolizing freedom, in Mohamed Bouazizi Square in the centre of the town of Sidi Bouzid in central Tunisia on October 27, 2020, the cradle of the 2011 Tunisian revolution. (Photo by Fethi Belaid / AFP)
Follow us on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn to see and interact with our latest contents.
If you like our stories, events, publications and dossiers, sign up for our newsletter (twice a month).