Contemporary Arab Thought is a complex term, encompassing a constellation of social, political, religious and ideological ideas that have evolved over the past two hundred years — ideas that represent the leading positions of the social classes in modern and contemporary Arab societies.

Distinguished Islamic scholar Ibrahim Abu-Rabi‘ addresses such questions as the Shari‘ah, human rights, civil society, secularism and globalization. This is complimented by a focused discussion on the writings of key Arab thinkers who represent established trends of thought in the Arab world, including Muhammad ‘Abid al-Jabiri, Adallah Laroui, Muhammad al-Ghazali, Rashid al-Ghannoushi, Qutatnine Zurayk, Mahdi ‘Amil and many others.

Before 1967, some Arab countries launched hopeful programmes of modernisation. After the 1967 defeat with Israel, many of these hopes were dashed. This book retraces the Arab world’s aborted modernity of recent decades. Abu-Rabi‘ explores the development of contemporary Arab thought against the historical background of the rise of modern Islamism, and the impact of the West on the modern Arab world.

In Enacting Decolonization, Yasmeen Daifallah examines the forms that intellectual decolonization takes after the demise of anticolonial revolutions. Daifallah argues that rather than crafting political visions, decolonization operates through anticolonial thinkers’ efforts to cultivate a political subjectivity capable of mastering and critically reworking a colonially imparted modernity. She recovers this argument through Abdallah Laroui and Mohammed Abed al-Jabri, two of the most consequential Arab thinkers of the twentieth century. Typically read as opponents over the fate of the Islamic tradition, Daifallah argues that they share a diagnosis: colonialism produced an epistemological rupture that cannot be wished away. What differs is the ecology of critique each cultivates in response. Laroui wields Marxist historicism to submit anticolonial Arab thought to critique, recovering its possibilities for a subject capable of contesting the postcolonial present, while al-Jabri deploys structuralism to reinterpret the Islamic tradition, modeling a relationship of command and critical distance toward it. Through close readings of their work, Daifallah shows how these thinkers inventively weave conceptual and rhetorical devices to bring decolonized political subjects into being.