Elizabeth Suzanne Kassab, Contemporary Arab Thought: Cultural Critique in Comparative Perspective, Second Edition (Columbia University Press, 2025).

Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book?

Elizabeth Suzanne Kassab (ESK): The first edition of this book appeared in 2010, on the eve of the momentous events that have since shaken the Arab region, from the massive popular revolts across countries to the Gaza war and the fall of the Assad regime. So a second edition was called for to try and take stock of the significant transformations that had taken place in the area, both on the historical and the intellectual level. Needless to say, I had been following the unfolding events both as a person living in the region and as a student of contemporary Arab thought, examining in particular the way intellectuals were interacting with and commenting on those events. The intensity and pace of events made that pursuit quite overwhelming but also extremely interesting. Fifteen years after the first edition it was also time for me to reflect on the methodological aspects of the work and ponder on ways in which the study of contemporary Arab thought could be developed further. The new introduction I wrote for the second edition articulated those reflections and tried to bring the book up to date, without altering the rest of the text, which in my opinion remains valid.

J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures does the book address?

ESK: The book offers a view of the major Arab intellectual debates that took place in the Arab region between 1967 and 2010, in the aftermath of the defeat of 1967, the establishment of the dictatorships, the defeat of the Left, and the rise of religious fundamentalism in the wake of the Iranian revolution. Its focus is on cultural malaise and cultural critique, and its emphasis is on critical thinkers, not ideologists, be they nationalists or Islamists. It examines some of the main Arab debates on culture, knowledge, religious thought, and democracy. Furthermore, it compares them with similar debates in Africa, Latin America, and Black and Native America, as well as presents the specificities of each set of debates in connection with its particular setting. By doing so it removes the alleged exceptionalism associated with some of those debates by placing them within the larger anti-colonial and post-colonial contexts. Finally, it underlines the historicity of the questions raised and the answers given to the challenges of Western hegemony and pitfalls of nativism. The contributions of those critical thinkers were in one sense my “minority report” on contemporary Arab thought.  

J: How does this book connect to and/or depart from your previous work?

ESK: In the new introduction, I reflect on some of the shortcomings of the first edition. I think that the first edition I produced was a book about books with few social historical studies that would have been necessary to frame those textual readings and produce a better understanding of those contemporary intellectual debates. The textual work was necessary but not sufficient. In my introduction to the second edition, I refer to the numerous studies that have appeared since the first edition and pinpoint the insights they offer on the socio-historical and economic factors that have shaped the Arab intellectual field in various parts of the region. I refer here to journal studies and social histories of cultural institutions, such as publishing houses and research centers. I also refer to power structures, including gendered ones, that have formed the field and its influential players, whether individual personalities or institutions. For me, there is clearly the need to open up the study of contemporary Arab thought to the neighboring fields of social history, contemporary Arab art history, Arab cultural studies, and gender studies. Comparative frameworks would also, in my opinion, widen the horizons of our reading of contemporary Arab thought: here I think of a reading that would compare Arab intellectual topics and approaches with those of contemporary Iran and Türkiye.

But then, what is the “contemporary” today, after so much has happened since the first publication in 2010? How is one to define our times in the midst of so much upheaval and traumatic experiences in the region? What light have the dramatic events shed on what we called “contemporary Arab thought” before 2010? What did the revolts reveal about the intellectual debates, especially the ones that dominated the mainstream intellectual space? So much of these debates turned around issues of identity, authenticity, tradition, and modernity. Whose issues were they? Who defined them and had a say in them? Were those issues the preoccupations of the people who took to the streets en masse in the various Arab cities and towns? Or were they discussion agendas set by particular thinkers and institutions? I think that one of the main questions that the massive revolts raised was the disconnect between much of what was considered to be the questions of contemporary Arab thought and what moved peoples and societies in the region. Interestingly, the “minority report” that I tried to cover in my book proved to be more in tune with people’s preoccupations. They privileged the political nature of the malaise, i.e., the questions of political participation and political accountability regarding corruption, power abuse, police brutality, state violence, and religious despotism. The critical thinkers whose work I covered in the book proved to be more in touch with their societies. They did not get drawn into the loud culturalist discourses that suited the powers to be, in that they did not raise the really disturbing questions of politics and economy.

Finally, in the new introduction I identify some of the new topics that have been emerging since 2010 on the Arab intellectual scene. It is no surprise that the questions of pain, loss, ruin, mourning, and affect come to the fore as central topics, and with them the questions of care, solidarity, community, and humanism. Ethical reflections on evil, atrocity, violence, and violation emerge as well as aesthetic reflections on the challenges of meaning production under conditions of material and moral devastation. Human dignity, freedom, democratization, and justice are central preoccupations and so are attempts to comprehend the nature of power and power abuse, be it in state or religious or gender structures. Finally, the whole question of values and universality takes prominence after the ongoing Gaza genocide and its handling by political, academic, and media institutions in the West. For many in the region and beyond, Gaza and the Western response to it was a shocking experience and a foundational turning point in the history of the region and probably also the world. All of these topics will no doubt stay with us and shape the new contemporary Arab thought.    

J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?

ESK: Soon after its first publication the book became a major reference on the subject. My hope is that it will remain relevant for new generations of readers and encourage further work in the field.

J: What other projects are you working on now?

ESK: Since the publication of the first edition, I have been interested to look at how contemporary Arab artists, particularly visual artists, including graphic designers, have been dealing with the same questions of modernity, change, tradition, authenticity and, after 2010, of rebellion, dignity, pain, and mourning. “Thought” for me can no longer be limited to “logos”, i.e., analytical writings and discourses. There is thought also in the visual arts and there are seminal studies of those arts coming out since the 2000s. Widening our understanding of “thought” through a contrapuntal reading of analytical and artistic productions is my current project. It is my contention that such a reading breaks the logocentrism of much of the analytical writings and provincializes the logocentric self-sufficiency and authoritarianism of their authors. It also widens the circle of contributors whose work make up contemporary Arab thought, limited hitherto largely to patriarchal figures. It would make room for a more inclusive and more diversified circle, especially regarding age and gender. 

Excerpt from the book

Introduction to the Second Edition

The Deferred Dream Explodes

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore—
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over—
like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

—Langston Hughes, “Harlem: A Dream Deferred”

…

Critique at the End of Time

… soon after the people spoke, the lid of fierce repression hit anew, and a formidable reign of silence was imposed again, with varying degrees of vindictiveness and brutality, by the surviving regimes. The violence left people, and the intellectuals among them, with an unspeakable pain that was both necessary and impossible to express. The well-known questions posed themselves anew: How was one to express the ineffable? How was one to think the atrocious? How was one to piece together what was so violently torn apart with so much brutality? What critique could be exercised, if at all, under such circumstances? As always in the aftermath of radical destruction, survivors needed to figure out forms of expression and forms of bridging the inhuman with human life again.

…

In his keynote speech at the sixth conference of the Arab Council for the Social Sciences, [Yassin] Haj Saleh defined the task of critique in our times as one focused on making the real credible, for what has been happening has been hard to believe, indeed unbelievable in its gratuitous evil. In normal times, he said, Enlightenment critique consisted in unveiling and rejecting superstitions and illusions, or false beliefs, which blur the sight of the true and the real. In times of atrocities like ours, however, the task of critique is to unveil the structures and forms of the powers that led to those atrocities and to bring them to light in order to build a more humane future. 

It is this critique, in and of the dark times, in which a good part of contemporaneous contemporary Arab thought is invested. It purports to understand the present, its genealogy and phenomenology, and to figure out life, even a good life, in the ruinous realities of an exploded dream. It includes a meditation on evil, horror, and disaster. It seeks an understanding of power and its multifaceted structures and mechanisms, with gender at the center of its workings and manifestations. It envisions democratic transitions and analyzes their many challenges. It gazes at despair, pain, and catastrophe and tries to imagine forms of humane life in the midst of unspeakable barbarity. This is what I call the new Arab critique and try to follow in current Arab discussions and expressions, both in analytic writings and in the visual arts, keeping an attentive eye on what is also being produced in literature and literary studies as well as in popular culture and its studies.

…

The 2023–2024 Gaza war erupted as I was writing this introduction. Its unfolding atrocities made us witness new levels of contempt for human life and dignity, or to be precise for some lives more than others, this time with wide moral, political, and military support provided by Western official institutions. War crimes and mass killings have been transmitted on mass media in real time for more than a year now, with some Western media and academia, in addition to governments, condoning the crimes in the name of unconditional support for Israel. This is clearly not the first time that people in the region have been faced with the moral double standards of the West. That the lives of Arabs/Palestinians/Muslims matter less than those of others, and that the weight of their suffering is not equivalent to that of others, are familiar givens for many. Still, witnessing the protracted war over months on end and seeing it not only permitted but also justified by Western powers constituted for a vast majority of people in the region, including thinkers and artists, a shocking experience and a profound turning point in the relationship with the West. Never had the discriminatory divide been so clear and so abysmal. For people in the region and beyond, this is a new fall of the West, another fall of European culture, of “universal” European intellectual and moral values, let alone universal human rights. Moreover, what aggravated the fall this time was the repression carried out within Europe, and the West in general, by official powers, including academic institutions, against the freedom of expression and of speech—freedoms that are/were at the core of what was deemed “European culture.” Numerous contemporary Western intellectual and moral references lost a considerable part of their authority through their participation in the stifling of rational public debate about the war and the forbidding of critical discussions of Israeli claims and actions, equating the critique of Zionism with anti-Semitism. For many if not a majority in the region, the credibility and authority of those references were irremediably damaged. They could no longer relate to them, even critically, as they did before the war. Clearly, in this relationship there will be a before and an after the Gaza war, and the new contemporary Arab thought will be a “post–Gaza genocide” one. The moral and intellectual consequences of this turn are yet to be fathomed. A whole literature has emerged around the various intellectual and moral positions that have accompanied this war, both within the West and beyond. An examination of such important debates would fall outside the scope of this introduction. Suffice it here to say that in the Arab region, and in many other places outside the West, the loss of that Western intellectual and moral authority has been perceived as a resounding fall of the West itself, or of the remnants of its claims to “universal European values.” These values, as was already well known, had been more readily applicable to white Westerners than to non-Europeans since their declaration in the West. Interestingly, those non-Europeans and non-Westerners have been absent from the critical European and Western traditions that have critiqued the flaws and falls of those “universal” European values, particularly in the devastating colonial and world wars carried out by European and Western powers.

Rethinking the universal will certainly belong to the new Arab critique: its meanings in a post-Gaza world and the challenges of translating those meanings into realities on the ground in a wasteland of destroyed cities and lifeworlds. The second large headline will be the ethical and existential questions born from the experience of extreme barbarity: the radical question of meaning creation in the face of so much annihilation, aggression, violence, evil, dehumanization, and destruction; questions of rehumanization, mourning, reconciliation, forgiveness, and healing; questions of community building around care, solidarity, mutual recognition, tolerance, peace, and justice. This leads to the third major set of issues that has been gaining prominence since the cataclysms of 2011: the formation of a functioning body politic and the vicissitudes of democratic transitions in each of the many affected areas, along with the central questions of power, in politics, religion, and gender, in the midst of massive societal transformations. Some aspects of these three sets of themes were already present in the pre-2011 critique: for instance, the destruction of the human in the Syrian Asad dictatorship, which I covered in my book on the Enlightenment debates; the quest for dignity and freedom, which predated the 2011 revolts, as I have shown elsewhere; and the demand for political participation, which I have documented in this book. All of these questions become increasingly radicalized with the unfolding cataclysms in the region and demand greater attention to their ethical and existential dimensions. This is already manifest in the writings referred to in this introduction. They announce further developments in the three thematic directions mentioned here. They attempt to weave meanings in the face of horror, knit communities of care after strife and war, and theorize the human anew from the abyss. They will be part and parcel of making human life possible again in the region. They will be worth following up, not only in the analytical register, but also in those of the arts and the social sciences.

Portrait of the Iraqi Person at the End of Time

I see him here, or there:
his eye wandering in the river of catastrophes
his nostrils rooted in the soil of massacres
his belly which ground the wheat of madness
in Babylon’s mills
for ten thousand years
I see his image, which has lost its frame
in history’s repeated explosions:
An enemy destroys Ur. Nippur’s ruin.
Destroys Nineveh. Babylon’s ruin.
Destroys Baghdad. Uruk’s ruin.
His image, which he retrieves
its features like a mirror
to surprise us every time
with its extravagant ability to squander
On his wrinkled forehead, like a screen,
you can see columns of invaders passing through
as if in a black and white film:
give him any prison or graveyard!
give him any exile
any “here” or “there”
You will see the catapults
pounding the walls
so that once again,
they rise in your face
With which face
will you come to us, O enemy?
With which face will you come to us, this time?

—Sargon Boulus, translated from the Arabic by Sinan Antoon