Analyses
Philosophy
Is “Arab Thought” Still a Meaningful Category?
Samer Frangie 9 January 2026
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.
  • Pluralism “Anchored in Islam”: A Tribute to Abdulaziz Sachedina
    Mohammed Hashas 15 December 2025
    On December 3, 2025, the international community of Islamic Studies lost one of its most erudite and humane members: Professor Abdulaziz Sachedina. Like many scholars, I first encountered Sachedina through his writings on Islamic pluralism and ethics—fields closely aligned with my own interest in modern and contemporary Islamic thought. His strong conviction that Islamic teachings are and will remain highly relevant for Muslim and non-Muslim societies, if reasonably and honestly contextualized, is evident in his major works. Among these are The Islamic Roots of Democratic Pluralism (2000), Islamic Biomedical Ethics (2009), and Islamic Ethics (2022).
  • Kassab: “After Gaza, the West is No Longer the Normative Center”
    Giancarlo Bosetti , Alessandra Tommasi 11 December 2025
    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.
  • Incorporating 2011 into the Syllabus of Arab Intellectual History
    Idriss Jebari 2 December 2025
    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?
  • On a Shifting Intellectual Scene: A Response to Elizabeth Suzanne Kassab
    Harald Viersen 21 November 2025
    In her recent contribution to Reset DOC, Elizabeth Suzanne Kassab echoes this sentiment, as she sketches an ambitious and important project to map the changes that the last decade and a half of upheaval in the Arab world has wrought in the intellectual scene. She describes what has been brewing in these circles as “new contemporary” Arab thought, contrasting it to the merely contemporary thought of the period between the 1960s and the beginnings of the Arab Spring in 2011 that she chronicled earlier in her comprehensive survey published in 2010.
  • ,
    When Habermas and Ratzinger Shared
    the Idea of a Post-Secular Age
    Giancarlo Bosetti 4 January 2023
    Ratzinger shared with Habermas a “post-secular” vision, namely the idea that for contemporary societies the classical narrative of modernity as secularization, disenchantment and the abandonment of religion to the margins of society, or its confinement to the private sphere, should be discarded. Both saw the value in the possibility that from a dialogue between public reason and faith, both sides could benefit or, going further, that processes of “mutual learning” could be initiated.
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