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

In the wake of the Arab uprisings, the Middle East descended into a frenzy of political turmoil and unprecedented human tragedy which reinforced regrettable stereotypes about the moribund state of Arab intellectual and cultural life. This volume sheds important light on diverse facets of the post-war Arab world and its vibrant intellectual, literary and political history. Cutting-edge research is presented on such wide-ranging topics as poetry, intellectual history, political philosophy, and religious reform and cultural resilience all across the length and breadth of the Arab world, from Morocco to the Gulf States. This is an important statement of new directions in Middle East studies that challenges conventional thinking and has added relevance to the study of global intellectual history more broadly.

What is the relationship between thought and practice in the domains of language, literature and politics? Is thought the only standard by which to measure intellectual history? How did Arab intellectuals change and affect political, social, cultural and economic developments from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries? This volume offers a fundamental overhaul and revival of modern Arab intellectual history. Using Hourani's Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age, 1798–1939 (Cambridge, 1962) as a starting point, it reassesses Arabic cultural production and political thought in the light of current scholarship and extends the analysis beyond Napoleon's invasion of Egypt and the outbreak of World War II. The chapters offer a mixture of broad-stroke history on the construction of 'the Muslim world', and the emergence of the rule of law and constitutionalism in the Ottoman empire, as well as case studies on individual Arab intellectuals that illuminate the transformation of modern Arabic thought.

Arab Modernism as World Cinema explores the radically beautiful films of Moroccan filmmaker Moumen Smihi, demonstrating the importance of Moroccan and Arab film cultures in histories of world cinema. Addressing the legacy of the Nahda or “Arab Renaissance” of the nineteenth and early twentieth century—when Arab writers and artists reenergized Arab culture by engaging with other languages and societies—Peter Limbrick argues that Smihi’s films take up the spirit of the Nahda for a new age. Examining Smihi’s oeuvre, which enacts an exchange of images and ideas between Arab and non-Arab cultures, Limbrick rethinks the relation of Arab cinema to modernism and further engages debates about the use of modernist forms by filmmakers in the Global South. This original study offers new routes for thinking about world cinema and modernism in the Middle East and North Africa, and about Arab cinema in the world.

The provides in-depth analysis of Arab liberalism, which, although lacking public appeal and a compelling political underpinning, still sustained viability over time and remained a constant part of the Arab landscape.

Leading scholars discuss ideology and hotly contested post-structuralist theory.

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. Contributors Deina Abdelkader, Nayla Abi Nader, Kholoud Al-Ajarma, Salah Basalamah, Mohamed Wajdi Ben Hammed, Sara Borrillo, Ibrahim Bouhaouliane, Tina Dransfeldt Christensen, Driss El Ghazouani, Brahim El Guabli, Abdennabi El Harri, Amin El-Yousfi, Francesca Forte, Fatma Gargouri, Wael Hallaq, Mohammed Hashas, Alma Rachel Heckman, Aziz Hlaoua, Abdellatif Kidai, Markus Kneer, Mohamed Lamallam, Khalid Lyamlahi, Juan A. Macías-Amoretti, Djelloul Magoura, Mohammed K. B. Rhazzali, Raja Rhouni, Nils Riecken, Fatima Sadiqi, Hamza Salih, Ari Schriber, Simone Sibilio, and Abdessalam Tawil.