This article is part of the dossier The “New Contemporary”: Arab Thought Recasting Itself from 2011 to Gaza.
In a recent essay published by Reset Dialogues on Civilizations, Elizabeth Suzanne Kassab called on scholars to attend closely to the forms and concerns that shape contemporary Arab thought, locating its newness in the uprisings of 2011 and the ruptures that followed. In his response, included in the broader dossier, Samer Frangie cautioned that the category of “Arab thought” functions as a “historiographical device,” one that has brought together “dispersed, contradictory, and elusive acts of” intellectual production under a shared political horizon. He thus reorients the question towards periodization: is it still meaningful—and for whom—to reinvigorate this category as a way of making sense of the present?
My response reframes Arab thought as an influential memory of shared horizons, genres, affects, and political commitments. This memory lingers in a ruptured global environment where art, culture, and ideas in Arabic are produced alongside political and intellectual engagements with topics like emancipation, justice, and reform. As long as such gestures invoke—or even merely recall, for their makers and/or audiences—the past horizon of Arab thought, the category remains useful. Still, it neither exhausts the causes and imaginaries towards which people are working today nor provides sufficient conceptual tools for apprehending the stakes, affects, and material conditions of intellectual and creative work today.
That present, I suggest from Berlin, is marked by fractured publics, digital mediation, and increasing precarity. In this city, where I have conducted research on Syrian prison narratives since 2020, Arabic-language creators of thought operate amid profound uncertainty regarding both their audiences and the grounds of political struggle. Neither the invocation of a shared Arab intellectual tradition nor the declaration of new, replacement traditions appear to offer refuge. Instead, I observe a series of experiments that can include partial inheritances of the post-1967 tradition but more often venture into new territories—prompting me to ask, in closing, whether the study of Arab thought today might explore more hybrid, situated (e.g., Syrian-German) categories.
To that end, I introduce three analytical lenses—practices, locations of thought, and siloed publics—drawn from my Berlin-based research, which follows individuals and organizations that have pursued the horizon of justice and freedom in Syria. Their work stretches across diverse fields and media, extending beyond the traditional bounds of intellectual life: thinkers like Yassin al-Haj Saleh, co-founder of the online journal al-Jumhuriya; writers like Rasha Abbas and Mohammad al-Attar; filmmakers like Guevara Namer, Anis Hamdoun, and Talal Derki; artists like Khaled Barakeh, founder of the coculture collective; activist individuals and organizations like Wafa Mustafa, Fadwa Mahmoud (co-founder of Families for Freedom), the Caesar Families Association, and Women Now for Development; and legal initiatives like the Syrian Center for Legal Studies and Research. This list could be extended considerably.
Since 2015, Berlin has been home to a vibrant, multigenerational, and multilingual world of anti-Assad activism and thought. Its participants are not bound by profession or affiliation, and they are far from homogeneous in their political beliefs or intellectual preferences. Especially prior to 2024, it was the shared horizon of revolution in Syria that gathered together, in Berlin and other locations, a diverse and at times contradictory set of intellectual, creative, and political practices.
Few of the individuals I have listed would identify themselves with the Arab intellectual of the post-1967 tradition. In their affects, gestures, and structural conditions, many of Berlin’s Syrian thinkers and activists are closer to Kassab’s post-2011 “intellectual workers”: figures who occupy “the margins of the main public sphere” and publish across a range of alternative—usually digital—media. Moreover, as Kassab notes, “they are younger, less centered in academia, and with gender profiles that are more diversified.”
One consequence of this shift is the heightened relevance of intellectual and creative practice as a scholarly lens. This approach centers lived acts—such as writing, uploading, translating, and organizing—along with attendant infrastructures, relations, and affects. Within Berlin’s project-based economy, Syrian practitioners have tended to work across multiple projects, fields, and funding sources, often at the same time. They have assembled livelihoods that span months or years, often interrupted by shifts in international and domestic politics that shape funding priorities—for example, the decline in resources for Syrian intellectual workers following the war in Ukraine.
An attention to practice also lets us name the continuing echoes of post-1967 Arab thought without submitting contemporary intellectual life to its re-periodization. For instance, on the digital media platform al-Jumhuriya, the long-form essay remains the primary vehicle of social and political critique. Echoing the post-1967 tradition, this genre signals theoretical rigor and ethical-intellectual gravity through the first-person voice of the intellectual. My observation does not imply that al-Jumhuriya, or any long-form critical essay, should be reclassified “as” Arab thought in the present. Intellectual and creative practices can be put to evolving or completely new ends; as literary scholars often note, the uptake of a genre can evoke a tradition and its affective gestures without being oriented toward it as past.
Thought, understood as a lived practice of “sense-making”, also has a location. In established approaches to Arab thought, intellectual practice—whether produced in the region or in exile—could be understood as part of one corpus, with place largely incidental to its study. Today, this disembodied approach falls short of the concerns reflected in contemporary intellectual and cultural practices.
My work with Berlin-based individuals and organizations who engage with prison and forced disappearance in Syria illustrates this shift. The material circumstances of being located in Berlin have meaningfully shaped the textures, rhythms, and polemics of their thought. In the conversation “Presenting Absence,” for example, artists Barakeh and Namer criticized German funders for incentivizing Syrians to frame their creative practices through the lenses of refugeehood and war. Recent debates among intellectual workers have addressed the impact of short-term funding cycles on intellectual life, as well as the “NGO-ization” of knowledge about Syria. Simultaneously, NGOs such as Women Now for Development have engaged reflexively with decolonial and feminist methodologies, reflecting a preoccupation with the politics of knowledge production that animates Syrian thought in Berlin.
These concerns have moved in step with solidarities, friendships, and collaborations with Berlin-based peers from Egypt, Palestine, and Lebanon. By contrast, intellectual alliances with Maghrebi peers have been largely absent.
Moreover, even as they continued to address the horizon of justice in Syria, Syrian intellectual workers have been acutely aware of politics in Germany. They have navigated anti-migrant racism, participated in public protests—especially after October 7, 2023—and penned essays and literature reflecting on European life and thought. These practices overlap with, rather than replace, a Syrian-revolutionary orientation. Arabic has remained the dominant language of expression, even when addressing new audiences and engaging new topics. Returning to a practice-centered approach, this can be read as Syrian activists and artists mobilizing a repertoire honed during the 2011 uprising to advocate within German institutions and spaces—most famously at the 2020 Koblenz trial.
At what point, then, does it become meaningful to speak of Syrian-German—or other hyphenated— expressions of intellectual and creative practices that might once have been periodized under Arab thought? We are thus returned to familiar questions: meaningful for whom, and to what ends? For over a decade, Syrian texts have been translated into German and performed in German theaters; Syrians have acquired citizenship and built careers and families in Germany. Yet Berlin’s Syrian intellectual workers rarely consume materials in German. They remain epistemologically and institutionally marginalized, with the richness and stakes of their intellectual lives largely invisible to German-speaking citizens. Media consumption about Syria among these publics continues to rely on hegemonic, German-language sources that filter Syrian practices through the tropes of asylum, integration, and the so-called “migration issue.”
I call this phenomenon siloed publics. Siloing is commonly used to describe social media bubbles and the polarization of U.S. and European societies, often framed as unprecedented threats to civic life. Far from being unique to Berlin, the siloing of publics—communities that may share physical locations but not intellectual, creative, or even civic worlds—is growing as a feature of societies worldwide.
Building on Harald Viersen’s call to situate contemporary Arab thought on a global stage, I propose that we consider how intellectual and creative practices are being transformed as they intervene within this fractured context—one marked by siloed publics and the rise of right-wing forces that are dismantling the institutions, alliances, and norms that underpinned the international order of the late twentieth century. Within it, much remains uncertain. New digital infrastructures, for example, can serve both to entrench older forms of marginalization and racism but also to foster communities of care and solidarity.
Since the fall of the Assad regime, leading intellectuals such as al-Haj Saleh and al-Attar have openly expressed their disorientation: what reference points and grounds for intellectual practice and political struggle come after “eternity”? This question is not just about Syrian futures. It underscores the fraught stakes of labeling intellectual and creative practices—whether as exilic, Syrian, or Syrian-German—when these are understood, as Arab thought once was, to instantiate shared political horizons.
It is perhaps in this common-sense notion of what thought does—namely, affirm a common ground and futurity—that the memory of Arab thought continues to linger, among practitioners and scholars alike. After all, scholars are not external observers: we, too, inhabit the condition of global fragmentation we seek to describe. In this light, questions like, “Is Arab thought still meaningful as a category?” and “Will Syrian thought produced outside during the war years be meaningful inside a post-liberation Syria?” or even, “Should we assign permanent names to new, perhaps fleeting traditions of thought?” are efforts to stabilize the uncertain ground beneath our feet. My modest suggestion—echoing feminist scholarship—is to develop tools and capacities to stay with the uncertainty.
Anne-Marie McManus holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature (Yale University). She currently heads the ERC-funded project SYRASP (“The Prison Narratives of Assad’s Syria”) at the Forum Transregionale Studien in Berlin, Germany.
Cover photo: Members of the Syrian community wave Syrian flags as they attend a rally on December 8, 2024 in Berlin, Germany, to celebrate the end of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad’s rule after rebel fighters took control of the Syrian capital Damascus overnight. (Photo by Ralf Hirschberger / AFP)
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