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This book offers the first comprehensive introduction to one of the most significant Arab thinkers of the late 20th century and the early 21st century: the Moroccan philosopher and social theorist Mohammed Abed al-Jabri. With his intellectual and political engagement, al-Jabri has influenced the development of a modern reading of the Islamic tradition in the broad Arab-Islamic world and has been, in recent years, subject to an increasing interest among Muslims and non-Muslim scholars, social activists and lay men. The contributors to this volume read al-Jabri with reference to prominent past Arab-Muslim scholars, such as Ibn Rushd, al-Ghazali, al-Shatibi, and Ibn Khaldun, as well as contemporary Arab philosophers, like Hassan Hanafi, Abdellah Laroui, George Tarabishi, Taha Abderrahmane; they engage with various aspects of his intellectual project, and trace his influence in non-Arab-Islamic lands, like Indonesia, as well. His analysis of Arab thought since the 1970s as a harbinger analysis of the ongoing “Arab Spring uprising” remains relevant for today's political challenges in the region.
Suspicions about the integration of Islam into European cultures have been steadily on the rise, and dramatically so since 9/11. One reason lies in the visibility of anti-Western Islamic discourses of salafi origin, which have monopolized the debate on the "true" Islam, not only among Muslims but also in the eyes of the general population across Europe; these discourses combined with Islamophobic discourses reinforce the so-called incompatibility between the West and Islam. This book breaks away from this clash between Islam and the West, by arguing that European Islam is possible. It analyzes the contribution that European Islam has made to the formation of an innovative Islamic theology th...
The author explores the role of journalism in Egypt in effecting and promoting the development of modern Arabic literature from its inception in the mid-nineteenth century to the present day. Remapping the literary scene in Egypt over recent decades, Kendall focuses on the independent, frequently dissident, journals that were the real hotbed of innovative literary activity and which made a lasting impact by propelling Arabic literature into the post-modern era.
Contemporary Moroccan Thought offers a new and broad coverage of the intellectual dynamics and scholarly output of what is presented here as the Rabat School since the 1950s. Geographically situated at the western edge of the classical Arab-Islamic world, Moroccan scholarship has made a belated yet vigorous comeback on the modern Arab intellectual scene, attracting wider reception beyond the Arabic-speaking world, through influential contributions in philosophical, theological, social and cultural studies. This volume sets a new standard in the study of Moroccan, North African, and Middle Eastern societies, and will undoubtedly remain an important scholarly reference for generations to come....
The first part of this work includes all the known works of the twelfth-century Andalusi author Ibn Quzmān, most of which are zajal poems composed in the colloquial dialect of Andalus. They have been edited in a Romanized transliteration, and are accompanied by a facing-page English prose translation, along with notes and commentaries intended to elucidate matters relevant to each poem. In the second part of the work, sixteen chapters are devoted to analyzing specific poems from a literary perspective, in order to delve into their meaning and, thereby, explain the poet’s literary goals.
The question of belonging has formed the basis of the political, religious and cultural tensions in Lebanon, to the point that sectarian conflict on the country's future contributed significantly to the outbreak of civil war in 1975. This book focuses on the development of the Phoenician-Lebanese movement that struggled against the hegemonic status of Arabic language and culture. The Phoenician-Lebanese were a predominantly Maronite Christian group who attempted to remove themselves from the Muslim and Arab world throughout the twentieth century. Their demands for self-definition as a nation and their desire to establish their own culture were rooted in the concept of their ancient Phoenicia...
By the beginning of the 1970s, the modernizing political and cultural movements that had dominated the postwar Arab world were collapsing. The postcolonial project they had fashioned, which sought to create a decolonized order and a new Arab man, had suffered a shattering defeat in the wake of the Arab-Israeli War in 1967. Disillusioned with modern ideologies that presented the past as a burden from which postcolonial societies must be liberated, a growing number of Arab thinkers began to reconsider their cultural heritage. The Politics of Arab Authenticity illuminates how Arab societies and their leading intellectuals responded to the collapse of the postcolonial project. Ahmad Agbaria tell...
The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences (AJISS), established in 1984, is a quarterly, double blind peer-reviewed and interdisciplinary journal, published by the International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT), and distributed worldwide. The journal showcases a wide variety of scholarly research on all facets of Islam and the Muslim world including subjects such as anthropology, history, philosophy and metaphysics, politics, psychology, religious law, and traditional Islam.
Recent Arab intellectual debates are often described as revolving around Arab-Islamic cultural heritage (turāth) and the role that it ought to play in modern society. This debate is standardly characterized as a confrontation between traditionalists and modernists, the former idolizing an 'authentic' heritage, the latter blaming traditionalism for Arab society's inability to 'modernize'. This study argues that this standard narrative has become overly dominant, making it impossible for different perspectives to be either voiced or heard. It calls for a critical review of how we think about contemporary Arab thought through an analysis of the progressive-linear temporal structure underlying ...