Abstract
The sense of crisis (’azma) that permeated Arab political thought after the 1967 defeat became infused with a consciousness of the great power of the Islamist appeal in the 1970s and 1980s. In his attempt to quantify the preoccupations of this period, John Donohue found an increasing interest in questions of cultural authenticity and a growing prominence granted to Islam in discussions of identity in popular and intellectual Arabic reviews.1 Intellectuals who wish to counter this trend of crisis must also face the issues of mu’asara (contemporaneity), hadatha (modernity), and asala (authenticity)—that is, the basic problem of how to catch up or rebuild Arab thought while maintaining an “authentic” connection between self, community, and tradition. In fact, “crisis,” “contemporaneity,” and “authenticity” are concepts that commonly occur together in Arab political discourse. To some extent these preoccupations reflect Islamist concerns that came to the forefront during that period.
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Notes
John J. Donohue, “Islam and the Search for Identity in the Arab World,” in Voices of Resurgent Islam, ed. John L. Esposito (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), pp. 50–51.
See, for example, Sadiq Jalal al-’Azm, al-Naqd al-dhati ba’da al-hazima (Beirut: Dar al-Tali’a, 1968) and Naqd al-fikr al-dini (Beirut: Dar al-Tali’a, 1969).
Günter H. Lenz and Antje Dallmann, “Introduction,” in Justice, Governance, Cosmopolitanism, and the Politics of Difference Reconfigurations in a Transnational World, ed. Kwame Anthony Appiah et al. (Berlin: Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, 2007), p. 5.
Ibrahim M. Abu-Rabi’, “Is Liberalism in the Muslim Middle East Viable? A Critical Essay on Leonard Binder’s Islamic Liberalism: A Critique of Development Ideologies,” Hamdard Islamicus 12/4 (1989), pp. 22, 28.
For early debates in Arabic over the concept of civil society and its relationship to post-1989 debates over democratization, see Michaelle Browers, Democracy and Civil Society in Arab Political Thought: Transcultural Possibilities (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2006).
For the idea of cooperation between Islamists and leftists in the Arab region see Michaelle Browers, Political Ideology in the Arab World: Accommodation and Transformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
Elizabeth Suzanne Kassab, Contemporary Arab Thought (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010) offers an excellent overview of the ideas and politics that engaged Arab intellectual forums during this period.
Issa J. Boullata, Trends and Issues in Contemporary Arab Thought (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990), p. 13.
Ibid., pp. 14–15. Rich discussions of the contemporaneity-authenticity tension in Islamic thought and its comparison to similar tensions in Western political thought can be found in Robert D. Lee, Overcoming Tradition and Modernity: The Search for Islamic Authenticity (Oxford: Westview, 1997)
and Armando Salvatore, Islam and the Political Discourse of Modernity (Reading, Berkshire: Ithaca Press, 1997).
Tayyib Tizini, Mashru’ ru’ya jadida li’l-fikr al-’arabi fi’l-’asr al-wasit (Damascus: Dar Dimashq, 1971);
Tayyib Tizini, Min al-turath ila al-thawra (Beirut: Dar Ibn Khaldun, 1976).
Mahdi ‘Amil, Azamat al-hadara al-’arabiyya am azama al-burjwaziyya al-’arabiyya? (Beirut: Dar al-Farabi, 1974).
Mona Abaza, Debates on Islam and Knowledge in Malaysia and Egypt: Shifting Worlds (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 22.
See Mohammed Abed al-Jabri’s autobiography, Hafriyat fi’l-dhakira min ba’id (Beirut: Center for Arab Unity Studies, 1997).
Mohammed Abed al-Jabri, “Ishkaliyyat al-asala wa’l-mu’asara fi’l-fikr al-’arabi al-hadith wa’l-mu’asir: sira tabaqi am mushkil thaqafi?” in al-Turath wa tahad-diyyat al-’asr fi’l-watan al-’arabi: al-asala wa’l-mu’asara, ed. al-Sayyid Yasin (Beirut: Dirasat al-Wahda al-’Arabiyya, 1985), p. 35.
Tariq al-Bishri, Mahiyyat al-mu’asira (Cairo: Dar al-Shuruq, 1996). While this essay was not published in book form until 1996, al-Bishri notes that it was first submitted to a February 1983 conference organized by the National Center for Sociological and Criminal Studies (al-Markaz al-Qawmi li’l-Buhuth al-Ijitma’iyya wa’l-Jana’iyya) in Cairo on the topic “The Problematic of the Social Sciences in the Arab Nation” and appeared in two volumes of al-Ahali, a weekly political newspaper published by Egypt’s National Union Party.
Mohammed Abed al-Jabri, Takwin al-’aql al-’arabi (Beirut: Dar al-Tali’a, 1984), p. 15.
Mohammed Abed al-Jabri, Bunyat al-’aql al-’arabi: dirasa tahliliyya naqdiyya li-nuzm al-ma’rifa fi’l-thaqafa al-’arabiyya (Casablanca: al-Markaz al-Thaqafi al-’Arabi, 1986), pp. 555–573.
Nelly Lahoud, Political Thought in Islam: A Study in Intellectual Boundaries (New York: Routledge Curzon, 2005), p. 33.
Mohammed Abed al-Jabri, Nahnu wa’l-turath (Beirut: Dar al-Tiba’a li’l-Tanwir wa’l-Nashr, 1980), p. 70.
See, for example, Mohammed Abed al-Jabri, al-Dimuqratiyya wa’l-huquq al-Islam (Beirut: Dirasat al-Wahda al-’Arabiyya, 1994);
Mohammed Abed al-Jabri, Qadaya fi’l al-fikr al-mu’asir (Beirut: Dirasat al-Wahda al-’Arabiyya, 1997).
Mohammed Abed al-Jabri, Democracy, Human Rights and Law in Islamic Thought (London: I. B. Tauris, 2009), p. 55.
Al-Jabri in Mohammed Abed al-Jabri and Hasan Hanafi, Hiwar al-mashriq al-maghrib: talih silsila al-rudud wa’l-munaqashat (Casablanca: Dar al-Tubqal, 1990), pp. 45–49.
Alasdair MacIntyre, Whose Justice, Which Rationality? (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988), p. 350.
Jurj Tarabishi, Madhbaha al-turath fi’l-thaqafa al-’arabiyya al-mu’asira (London: Riyad al-Rayyis, 1991).
Jurj Tarabishi, al-Muthaqafun al-’arab wa’l-turath (London: Riyad El-Rayyis, 1991).
Jurj Tarabishi, Izdiwajiyyat al-’aql: dirasa tahliliyya nafsiyya li-kitabat Hasan Hanafi (Damascus: Dar Petra, 2005).
Sadiq al-’Azm, “Orientalism and Orientalism in Reverse,” Khamsin 8 (1981), p. 22.
Fouad Zakariyya, Myth and Reality in the Contemporary Islamist Movement (London: Pluto Press, 2005), p. 33.
Jurj Tarabishi, Naqd al-’aql al-’arabi (Beirut: Dar al-Saqi, 1996).
Asef Bayat, Making Islam Democratic: Social Movements and the Post-Islamist Turn (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007), p. 11.
Christoph Schumman, “Introduction,” in Nationalism and Liberal Thought in the Arab East: Ideology and Practice, ed. Christoph Schumann (London: Routledge, 2010), p. 9.
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© 2015 Meir Hatina and Christoph Schumann
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Browers, M. (2015). From “New Partisans of the Heritage” to Post-Secularism: Mohammed Abed al-Jabri and the Development of Arab Liberal Communitarian Thought in the 1980s. In: Hatina, M., Schumann, C. (eds) Arab Liberal Thought after 1967. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137551412_8
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