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Arab and Islamic History and Thought
In her groundbreaking new work, Contemporary Arab Thought, Elizabeth Suzanne Kassab charts out the major thinkers of the Arab world in the post-1967 period. The major work on Arab intellectual history, Albert Hourani's Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962), which mapped the dominant intellectual trends of the nahda and interwar period, was written in 1962. Some fifty years after the publication of this seminal work, historians, philosophers, and political theorists have begun to identify the intellectuals who followed in the footsteps of those whom Hourani identified and so brilliantly analyzed. Who were the leading intellectuals of the 1960s through the 1990s? What were the philosophical, sociological, and political trends that shaped their thinking in regard to nationalism, revival, and cultural malaise? How did they relate to the generation of the nahda? Who, in other words, were Hourani's Arab contemporaries, and how do we evaluate their contributions today?
Elizabeth Suzanne Kassab attempts to answer these questions. She does so with much nuance and sophistication. Her book is thus a very important contribution to the field of Arab intellectual history, exposing a new generation of Arab thinkers whose stories have not been told despite their being at the core of the major intellectual debates of the 1960s and 1970s. Inspired by the writings of such theoreticians as Shohat and Memmi, Kassab deftly analyzes crucial intellectual debates and significant conferences on the anticolonial struggle, feminist criticism, secularism, Marxism, liberation, modernization, Westernization, decolonization, reform, and the state of the Arab world. She convincingly argues that despite oppressive military regimes, conservative Gulf sheikhdoms, and lack of democracy, original and pioneering thought never ceased to exist in the Arab world. Kassab read, and integrated into her work, an incredible amount of material, and her book offers innovative analyses of extremely interesting intellectuals and their works. Moreover, Kassab's definition of the Arab intellectual is wide enough to include...