Arabic Thought Beyond The Liberal Age

A fundamental overhaul of modern Arab intellectual history, reassessing cultural production and political thought in the light of current scholarship.

This book is a most comprehensive study of the modernizing trend of political and social thought in the Arab Middle East.

Cutting-edge scholarship on post-war Arab intellectual history that challenges conventional thinking about authoritarianism, religion and revolution in the modern Middle East.

Arabic thought in the liberal cage / Hussein Omar -- Corrupting politics / Nadia Bou Ali -- Illiberal Islam / Faisal Devji -- Postcolonial prophets: Islam in the liberal academy / Neguin Yavari -- A new deal between mankind and its gods / Abdennour Bidar -- The dissonant politics of religion, circulation, and civility in the sociology of Islam / Armando Salvatore -- Islamic democracy by numbers / Zaheer Kazmir -- Bourgeois Islam and Muslims without Mosques / Carool Kersten -- Islamic secularism and the question of freedom / Arshin Adib-Moghaddam -- Militancy, monarchy and the struggle to desacralise kingship in Arabia / Ahmed Dailami -- Islamotopia: revival, reform, and American exceptionalism / Michael Muhammad Knight -- Preliminary thoughts on art and society / Sadia Abbas -- The political meanings of Elijah Muhammad's Nation of Islam / Edward E. Curtis IV -- Post-Islamism as neoliberalism / Peter Mandaville

Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age 1798–1939 is the most comprehensive study of the modernizing trend of political and social thought in the Arab Middle East. Albert Hourani studies the way in which ideas about politics and society changed during the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth centuries, in response to the expanding influence of Europe. His main attention is given to the movement of ideas in Egypt and Lebanon. He shows how two streams of thought, the one aiming to restate the social principles of Islam, and the other to justify the separation of religion from politics, flowed into each other to create the Egyptian and Arab nationalisms of the present century. The last chapter of the book surveys the main tendencies of thought in the post-war years. Since its publication in 1962, this book has been regarded as a modern classic of interpretation. It was reissued by the Cambridge University Press in 1983 and has subsequently sold over 8000 copies.

A preoccupation with the subject of freedom became a core issue in the construction of all modern political ideologies. Here, Wael Abu-'Uksa examines the development of the concept of freedom (hurriyya) in nineteenth-century Arab political thought, its ideological offshoots, their modes, and their substance as they developed the dynamics of the Arabic language. Abu-'Uksa traces the transition of the idea of freedom from a term used in a predominantly non-political way, through to its popularity and near ubiquity at the dawn of the twentieth century. Through this, he also analyzes the importance of associated concepts such as liberalism, socialism, progress, rationalism, secularism, and citizenship. He employs a close analysis of the development of the language, whilst at the same time examining the wider historical context within which these semantic shifts occurred: the rise of nationalism, the power of the Ottoman court, and the state of relations with Europe.

Explores the many facets of Arab political thought from the nineteenth century to the present day.