The Politics of Arab Authenticity: Challenges to Postcolonial Thought

This lucid and accessible volume lays bare the complex and contentious debates about culture and heritage in postcolonial Arab thought through the work of two major twentieth-century Arab intellectuals, the Moroccan educator and writer Mohammad Abed al-Jabiri and the Syrian translator and social critic Jurj Tarabishi. Both were early enthusiasts of postcolonial leftist politics and intimately familiar with the European Marxists and existentialists of the middle of the twentieth century. After the Arab defeat in the 1967 war with Israel, they shared in the widespread disenchantment with leftist nationalism. Jabiri came to argue that liberalism and Marxism alike were predicated on a conception of universal progress and a contempt for the past that were, in fact, culturally specific to the West. For Arabs to find a way forward, they would have to revisit their own past. This argument was enormously influential and often seen as encouraging the Islamist turn in the region’s politics, even though Jabiri himself opposed rigid deference to dogmatic interpretations of any kind. Tarabishi disagreed with the focus on heritage, countering that a preoccupation with the past was a route to medieval obscurantism, not authenticity. This debate over the uses and abuses of history is not over—see, for example, the current Saudi government’s vast investments in cultural heritage—making this book a useful guide to present-day debates.