As wars, repression, and social upheavals continue to reshape the Middle East, philosopher Elizabeth Suzanne Kassab of the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies argues that the region’s dominant intellectual traditions failed to grasp the needs and priorities of the societies they sought to interpret. For decades, leading Arab thinkers focused on questions of identity and heritage while citizens were confronting repression, economic hardship, and crumbling political structures. The 2011 uprisings exposed how wide this gap had grown—and the devastation of Gaza, Kassab warns, has made it impossible to ignore.

Prof. Kassab, you argue in your essay for Reset DOC that the dominant intellectual paradigms shaped—by figures such as Mohammed Arkoun, Hassan Hanafi, or Mohammed Abed al-Jabri—did not correspond to the demands that surfaced in 2011. That they remained absorbed in debates such as “Why is there no democracy in Islam?”

When we speak of “contemporary Arab thought,” the first question that arises is: whose thought is it? The 2011 uprisings made this especially clear. When people took to the streets, they voiced priorities that had little to do with the themes that had long preoccupied leading intellectuals. A clear gap emerged between what these figures identified as the central questions and what societies were actually experiencing.

What, in your view, were the main limitations—or mistakes—of that generation of thinkers?

Like in many other societies that endured Western cultural hegemony, Arab intellectuals got preoccupied with issues of identity, authenticity, and cultural protectionism, while their countries suffered from rising authoritarianism, repression, thwarted economic development, and increasing crises of political legitimacy. Most of the prominent thinkers remained focused on questions of identity and authenticity, and less so on those socio-economic problems. The works of Abdullah Laraoui, Arkoun, Jabri, and Hanafi remain significant, but contemporary Arab thought cannot be reduced to their writings.

There is also what I call a “minority report”: other voices, other milieus, often marginal or forgotten, which offered different readings of the region’s challenges, more concerned with the socio-political and economic challenges. Much of my work seeks to recover these perspectives, still largely absent from mainstream studies.

Moreover, our understanding of contemporary Arab thought needs to move beyond textual reading to benefit from the social histories of journals, intellectual circles, research centers, and publishing networks that are starting to come out recently. We still know too little about the contexts that shaped the contemporary Arab intellectual field between 1967 and 2010: who funded publishers, how certain figures became prominent, and who contributed to their visibility. Without this background, we cannot claim to have a full grasp of the Arab intellectual field. We know even less about the massive transformation of the public sphere that occurred after 2011.

Yet Hassan Hanafi urged people to stop blaming the West and confront their own responsibilities, and he remained engaged with social issues. Even Arkoun, though part of an elite, was attentive to the concerns of Muslim immigrant communities. Were they really as distant from society—as elitist—as you suggest?

Hanafi did attempt to formulate a kind of Marxist Islam or Islamic left, but it had virtually no resonance, and he eventually abandoned it. There is also a gap between what he advocated—paying attention to social and economic realities—and what he actually did, which was to continue producing textual analyses rooted in the heritage tradition. The same discrepancy appears in his Occidentalism: the idea was promising, but the introduction collapses into polemics rather than the objective approach he had announced.

More broadly, between 1967 and 2010, the dominant intellectual themes were identity, heritage, authenticity, and resisting cultural “invasion.” Thinkers like Jabri sought to locate rationalism within the Arab-Islamic tradition, back to Averroes. But were the most pressing issues in Arab societies? Much of the conversation was an internal dialogue among a small circle of men, while very different concerns animated other milieus.

In this long trajectory, is there a specific moment that marks a real turning point?

The decisive rupture is 2011. The uprisings, the fall of leaders, the repression that followed, and the wars in Sudan, Yemen, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Egypt, Lebanon, and, of course, Palestine have reshaped the region entirely. We are living amid immense social and political cataclysms: cities destroyed, mass atrocities committed, entire societies destabilized, and huge population displacements. We’re still in the grips of convulsive transformation, and everything is still in the making.

How do you integrate terrorism—ISIS, the Paris attacks, Charlie Hebdo, the Bataclan—and also Hamas into this picture? ISIS in particular emerged from the invasion of Iraq but adopted an explicitly Islamic vocabulary…

ISIS and other forms of internal violence, including the atrocities committed within our own societies, are part of the picture. Violence committed in the name of Islam, whether inside the region or abroad, troubled the region’s inhabitants, who had to deal with its implications on all levels, including the existential, intellectual, affective, and even spiritual. Violence experienced in the region, not only in the form of Islamist violence, but also of state violence and repression, often in the name of combating Islamism, police brutality, human rights violations, and corruption, was very much behind the eruption of the 2011 revolts. The protests were directed against local governments and their abuses before they were directed against the West, although no one was oblivious to the harmful consequences of Western and foreign interference.

And ISIS initially defined itself around the mission of killing Shia communities. Al-Baghdadi’s leadership began with that objective…

Yes, absolutely. Anyone living in the region has to grapple with the violence, the sectarianism, and the ideological claims ISIS put forward. But just as people began confronting these questions, new wars erupted, and repression intensified. Under such conditions, how can anyone have any meaningful debate about religious reform? The basic conditions for free and serious discussion simply do not exist.

This is why we no longer see figures like Jabri or Arkoun—thinkers with the time and space to digest events and produce major synthetic works. Still, under the most forbidding conditions, you find interesting work coming out in Islamic theology in Baghdad, for instance, in the writings of Abdul Jabbar al-Rifai.

How does the Gaza war affect your reading of this intellectual landscape?

Gaza represents an even deeper descent. We have moved far beyond the double standard problematic. During the Gaza war, Western governments, media, and academic institutions were not only indifferent—they actively participated in and justified the slaughter. This marks a qualitative shift, stripping away any remaining claim that the West embodies or practices universal values.

This is also seen in the repression within Western societies themselves: protests curtailed, people arrested for carrying a flag, voices silenced in countries that present themselves as liberal democracies. If such rights are denied to their own citizens, what can we expect for others, and what credibility is left to their claims? For many people around me and me, this is an unprecedented post-World War II turning point. The masks have irremediably fallen.

Cover photo: A man walks down a road in the Al-Saftawi neighborhood, west of Jabalia city in the northern Gaza Strip on December 10, 2025. (Photo by BASHAR TALEB / AFP)