Intellectuals of the Modern Arab World

Jens Hanssen

Professor of modern Middle Eastern History at the University of Toronto with publications focusing on the intersections between urban, intellectual and conceptual history. His overall research program explores the cultural entanglements between Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East since the 19^th century.

This article is an introduction to “The Arab Renaissance in Contemporary Eyes” project, which is the fruit of cooperation between Henna Platform and The Department of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations at the University of Toronto. In this project, Henna team provides editorial assistance to the graduate and undergraduate students to publish their final papers on Henna’s website. You read in this series of articles:Taha Hussein and the Dialectic of Arab Enlightenment by Quinn Teague-Colfer, The Arab Nahda from Feminist Perspective by Sara Molaie, Cultural Healing After Tragedy by Timothy Boudoumit, The Importance of Being Wrong by Shauna McLean, and Self-definition in Changing Worlds by Mosab Alnomire. 

Translated to Arabic by Mosab Alnomire

The Nahda has attracted graduates and undergraduates in my class “Intellectuals of the Modern Arab World” since I arrived at the University of Toronto in 2002. We have been studying how Arabs have interpreted and intervened in events, processes, and structures of concern over the last two hundred years. Approaching the nineteenth-century Arab reform and revival era in such a hermeneutic fashion is neither self-evident nor has it been the most common. Long hailed as a movement of intellectual pioneers in Arab state schools and universities, it was not uncommon to hear that it was no more than a derivative translation movement, at most of an antiquarian value, by the time I picked up the Nahda scent in late 1990s Beirut. But the academic jury remains split. On the one hand, the Nahda has been fiercely deconstructed as a source of Arab alienation brought on by Westernized elites who internalized Orientalist discourses about their society. On the other hand, the Nahda was cherished as an incomplete but ongoing struggle for emancipation and enlightenment. 

In the aftermath of 9/11 and during the American invasion of Afghanistan, one of the leading Arabic novelists and political commentators, Elias Khoury, forcefully called “For a Third Nahda” in the revived Arab Marxist journal al-Tariq. Khoury‘s seminal Arabic essay, recently translated into English (Weiss & Hanssen 2018), has served my course as an entry point and an overview to structure the weekly discussions and readings. Over the years, the Nahda has emerged as an Archimedean point of Arab modernity for me. One student suggested that perhaps the Nahda was like Benjamin’s dialectical image that reemerges in moments of danger. It certainly continues to serve as the intellectual foundation on which contemporary Arab history is staked in its global context. But the Nahda has also functioned as an archival filter through which the deeper past – antiquity’s prophet, poet, or scientist – has been diffracted to this day. 

I am grateful to the editors of Henna Platform for publishing these five student essays. They were written by the last Arab Intellectuals cohort I taught in Toronto before returning to Lebanon to direct the Orient Institute in Beirut. It has been a pleasure to see key texts on the syllabus work their magic on these beautiful essays. They evince the generosity of Eve Sedgwick’s “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading.” Saba Mahmood’s Politics of Pity also helped them overcome the hermeneutics of suspicion: “Critique is most powerful when it leaves open the possibility that we might also be remade in the process of engaging another’s worldview, that we might come to learn things that we did not already know before we undertook the engagement.” (Mahmood 2005, 36)

Students have adopted the problem-space argumentation proposed by David Scott. Scott and Benjamin have taught them to avoid the telos of progress and yet take the stakes of our inquiries in the present seriously, and they have considered the healing potential of theory espoused by bell hooks: if and “when our lived experience of theorizing is … linked to processes of self-discovery, of collective liberation, no gap exists between theory and practice.” (hooks 1991, 2) With Edward Said, they explored how representations of the intellectual can create publics where none existed before. 

In years of teaching “Intellectuals of the Arab World,” there have been regular starters on the syllabus. Beiruti scholar and teacher Butrus al-Bustani, has been featured regularly. The earliest interpellation of the need-for-Nahda I have spotted appeared in his 1849 lecture on the education of women: “The intention of this treatise is to stimulate (inhad) women’s determination to acquire knowledge so that they are treated with dignity…and perhaps to rally men to the same cause as well.” Fellow Nahda intellectual, peripatetic intellectual, and philological nemesis, Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq (d. 1888), echoed Bustani’s sentiment and insisted that “there is no Nahda without a women’s Nahda.” In this special issue, Sara Molaie explores how one of the female intellectuals of the Nahda, Esther Moyal, asserts herself against the misogyny of Nahda men of science. 

Jamal al-Din al-Afghani’s excruciating 1883 exchange with Ernest Renan on the compatibility of Islam and science in the Journal des Débats has been an instructive example of the early Nahdawis’ untimely optimism in their powers to make a difference. It is always hard to explain the inability of even the most seasoned Muslim anti-imperialist to decry the declensionist narrative of Islam, let alone to deconstruct this eminent French scholar’s evident racist epistemology. 

But this course has also rotated new monographs onto the syllabus. Thanks to Hussam R. Ahmad’s new study The Last Nahdawi: Taha Hussein and Institution Building in Egypt, four of the authors in this special Henna issue could ‘test-drive’ the intellectual-history methods introduced earlier with this iconic Egyptian polymath whose rarified and Europhile view of culture did not age well in times of committed literature, Arab socialism, Turathism, and colonial discourse analysis.  

Constantine Zurayk The Meaning of Disaster and Frances Hasso’s 2000 rejoinder “Modernity and Gender in Arab Accounts of the 1948 and 1967 Defeats“ have been permanent features with which to mark the rupture that the Palestinian Nakba presented for Arab intellectual history. The human aspect of Ghassan Kanafani’s short story Returning to Haifa always made a powerful impression on students. So, too, did Karma Nabulsi’s and Abdel Razzaq Takriti’s new Digital Humanities project on the Palestinian Revolution, which featured remarkable coming-of-age interviews with Palestinian cadres. 

Takriti, who was an undergraduate the first time I taught this course, also recently published Monsoon Revolution, an award-winning monograph on the Dhofar revolution. It has made it possible to connect the traditional terrains of Arabic thought to emancipatory struggles in the Arabian peninsula and the Indian Ocean. Yoav di Capua’s equally teachable recent book No Exit on Sartre, Arab existentialism and Palestine has got students to realize that for all the appeal of global intellectuals like Fanon, Sartre, or Said, “most Arab intellectuals … need to be brought back to life first,“ based on the vast, untapped library of their writings (di Capua 2018, 23) And Fadi Bardawil’s recent monograph Revolution & Disenchantment – an anthropological study of a small, highly theoretical group of radical Marxists in the 1960s and 70s Lebanon – has worked well to sensitize students to the significance of the location of critique. For it matters if you are theorizing in an ivy league university or while guarding a Maoist checkpoint in wartime Beirut.

In recent years a steady stream of new studies appeared that have helped us understand better the contemporary stakes of the Nahda. The Arab Spring has mobilized an unexpected level of transregional solidarity and political aspirations against Arab states. If the neoliberal dictatorships have brutalized leftist and Islamist dissent in defense of Nahda enlightenment, what are we to make of protesters carrying banners with portraits of misappropriated Nahda figures – Huda Sha’rawi and Sa’d Zaghloul – in Cairo, chanting lines from the Tunisian Nahdawi Abu al-Qasim al-Shabbi’s poem “The Will to Live;” and what of Syrian demonstrators spraying lines by the Aleppan Nahdawi ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Kawakibi on the walls of their towns? We have been debating if we have been witnessing Arabism without the state since 2011. 

In her The Unmaking of the Arab Intellectual: Prophecy, Exile, and the Nation, Zeina Halabi has eloquently argued that traditional radical intellectuals, like the states, are also no longer the gatekeepers of determining the Arab future. The age of modernist prophecy is over, she suggests. The future that mid-century vanguardists promised has not turned out to be our past. And the present is even bleaker. The brutal counter-revolutionary responses, especially in Syria, Bahrain, Egypt, and Yemen, made millions of survivors refugees in Europe and around the world. As a result, Arab cultural production and critical imagination are orphaned. Nevertheless, it thrives, against all odds, suspended between Cairo, Istanbul, Berlin, and Toronto. “You have not yet been defeated.”

Free Alaa!

Bibliography

Abd El-Fattah, Alaa, You Have not yet been Defeated (London: Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2022).

Ahmad, Hussam R., The Last Nahdawi: Taha Hussein and Institution Building in Egypt (Stanford, 2021).

Bardawil, Fadi, Revolution & Disenchantment: Arab Marxism and the Binds of Emancipation (Durham NC, 2020). 

Di-Capua, Yoav, No Exit: Arab Existentialism, Sartre and Decolonization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018).

Halabi, Zeina, The Unmaking of the Arab Intellectual: Prophecy, Exile and the Nation (Edinburgh, 2018).

Hanssen, Jens and Max Weiss (eds.), Arabic Thought against the Authoritarian Age: Towards an Intellectual History of the Present (Cambridge, 2018).

Hanssen, Jens and Max Weiss (eds.), Arabic Thought Beyond the Liberal Age: Towards and Intellectual History of the Nahda (Cambridge, 2016). 

Hasso, Frances, “Modernity and Gender in Arab Accounts of the 1948 and 1967 Defeats,” IJMES 32 (2000), 491-510. 

hooks, bell, “Theory as Liberatory Practice,”Yale Journal of Law & Feminism 4:1 (1991-2), 1-12.

Kanafani, Ghassan, “Returning to Haifa,” in Palestine’s Children; Returning to Haifa and Other Stories (Boulder, 2000), 149-96. 

Mahmood, Saba, The Politics of Piety (Princeton, 2005).

Said, Edward W., Representations of the Intellectual (London: Vintage, 1994).

Scott, David “Criticism after Postcoloniality,” Refashioning Futures (Princeton, 1999), 3-20.

Sedgwick, Eve, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading,” in Touching Feeling, ed. by Barale, Goldberg & Moon (Durham NC, 2002), 123-51.

Takriti, Abdel Razzaq, Monsoon Revolution: Republicans, Sultans & Empires in Oman, 1965-1976 (Oxford, 2013).

Weiss, Max, Revolutions Aesthetic: a Cultural History of Ba‘thist Syria (Stanford, 2022).

Zurayq, Costantine [1948], “The Meaning of the Disaster,” (Beirut, 1956).