Table of Contents

Preface and Acknowledgments
Introduction: Voicing the Past
I: Foundations
1. The Emergence of a New Field
2. The Great Cultural War: The Social and Connected Critics
II: Curators
3. Jabiri as a Thinker of (Internal) Decolonization
4. Restating Turath in the Postcolonial Age
III: Backlash
5. The Making of a Social Critic: Jurj Tarabishi
6. A Crack in the Edifice of the Social Critic: From Thawra to Nahda
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index

About the Author

Ahmad Agbaria is assistant professor of instruction at the University of Texas at Austin.

Reviews

An extraordinary accomplishment, illuminating and thought-provoking. In The Politics of Arab Authenticity, Agbaria characterizes the postrevolutionary and postcolonial era as a new age of Arab thought, shaped by intellectuals' intensive search for Arab authenticity. By reclaiming and negotiating Arab cultural heritage, this creative intellectual community not only thought to imbue the present with some sense of the past, but, more importantly, also found the past’s heritage meaningful and useful for the present and future. This book provides one of the most insightful maps of contemporary Arab intellectual thinking.
*Israel Gershoni, author of Arab Responses to Fascism and Nazism: Attraction and Repulsion*

Agbaria's argument is that Jabiri's and Tarabishi's differentiated but monumental projects captured the dynamism of Arab intellectual landscapes and encapsulated not only the intracultural war over the meaning of history and cultural time but also this meaning's relevance to Arab futures. A lucid, analytically profound, and brilliantly cast narrative, an essential read for all those interested in the modern Arab world.
*Wael Hallaq, author of Reforming Modernity: Ethics and the New Human in the Philosophy of Abdurrahman Taha*

In this well-researched book, Agbaria analyzes one of the most central debates in contemporary Arab thought: the debate around heritage. He argues against viewing the debate as a secularist-religious opposition, instead telling a much more complex and interesting story. The Politics of Arab Authenticity is necessary reading for anyone interested in contemporary Arab intellectual debates.
*Elizabeth Suzanne Kassab, author of Contemporary Arab Thought: Cultural Critique in Comparative Perspective*

Ahmad Agbaria challenges conventional narratives of Arab intellectual history through a bold reinterpretation of postcolonial thought in the Middle East and North Africa. Packed with fresh insights about far-reaching debates across the Arabic-speaking world around modernity and tradition, secularism and religion, and revolution and reform, The Politics of Arab Authenticity is essential reading.
*Max Weiss, coeditor of Arabic Thought Against the Authoritarian Age: Towards an Intellectual History of the Present*

The book will be read with great profit by all those interested in the current intellectual and sociopolitical landscape of the Arab world.
*The Muslim World Book Review*