Rethinking Arab Intellectual History: Epistemology, Historicism, Secularism

Abstract

Arab intellectual history has been experiencing a resurgence of late, positioned as it is between the ascendancy of global intellectual history and the continued resilience of area studies. Such a precipitous conjuncture has led to a proliferation of Arab intellectual histories that belie the orientalist fallacy of the region as a “no idea producing area,” as once infelicitously described by Charles F. Gallagher. And yet the task of scholars of the Arab world is surely more complex than merely adding intellectuals and writers who have heretofore been ignored to the catalogue of intellectual history.

Sovereignty and Nationalism in Contemporary Iraq through the Memory of the 1991 Uprising

“…Here, my interviewees demonstrated a sensitivity to historical context in their discussions of Iraqi nationalism. 37 One interviewee, a teacher who participated in the 1991 uprising in Diwaniya, elaborated on the historical meanings of the Iran-Iraq War and linked it to the question of sovereignty. He argued that Iraq succeeded when it had strong ties with Iran and claimed that groups such as ISIS emerged because Iran was unable to defeat Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq War:…”

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“…One problematic aspect of this view on historical culture that has been noted in research, is that it tends to present a rather limited view of the past: history is presented mostly in terms of the positive aspects of past societies and actors, which in turn leads to a highly selective history that gives rise to an incomplete and potentially misleading understanding of history among the public and its leaders (Shalak, 1994). Hence, some historians and opinion leaders have attributed the failure of the attempts of renaissance in the Arab world to the absence of an historical culture that wholly embraces the past in order to avoid presenting an idealised and nostalgic version of it (Shakry, 2021).…”

Hassan Hanafi's Reformation in The Islamic World

“…The first is our attitude towards old traditions. Hassan Hanafi wants to reform Islamic thought by revitalizing classical texts and reconstructing them so that they are not obsolete and are helpful for the present (Tahir, 2021;Shakry, 2021). However, on the other hand, western culture has hegemonized the lives of Muslims, so there are many people who have Westernized Islam.…”