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.