Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age 1798–1939

"Albert Hourani was one of my mentors at Oxford . Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age is a classic, not just in relation to what it tells us about the Arab world, but also in relation to the encounter between the Arab world and Europe. Hourani spent his academic life examining relations between the Arab peoples, societies and thinkers and European scholars, societies and ideas. This book has withstood the test of time, surviving through the agonies and the tragedies of history. The book is a history of ideas. It’s an intellectual journey into the ideas and thinkers of the Arab world, and the impact they had on their own societies from 1798 to the beginning of World War II . It’s about intellectual renewal and cross-cultural fertilisation. Hourani examines how Arab thinkers were very interested in the potential for renewal in Arabic and Islamic societies and thought. Two themes particularly permeate the book. First, the encounter with the West and Western ideas and, second, the search for authenticity. In this sense, the year 1798 was a pivotal moment for Arab and Islamic thinkers. It was the year when Napoleon invaded Egypt. That invasion came as a psychological shock for Arab thinkers, seeing a Western army occupying Egypt, the heart of Arabia and the Islamic world. The book is about the rising West, and the declining East and the way that the leading Arab and Islamic thinkers tried to understand what it was about the West that has allowed it to rise and prosper, not just materially and scientifically, but in particular, intellectually and socially. “The 19th century was a century of hope and great expectations for Arabic and Islamic thinkers” What fascinates me about the text is that the 19th century was a century of hope and great expectations for Arabic and Islamic thinkers. The leading thinkers that Albert Hourani examines, believed they could integrate the great ideas in Europe, around social change, technology, logic, rationality, into the Islamic tradition and create a synthesis—one that is authentic and addresses the particularities of the Arab condition. Arab and Islamic thinkers sought to create a synthesis, while preserving their own authenticity. There was a widespread belief among these scholars that somehow there could be an intellectual and philosophical compromise between Islamic thought and Western-Christian ideas. That’s why the 19th century was a moment of hope and intellectual fertilisation. Sadly, in the early part of the 20th century, this moment of hope turned into despair and sustained opposition and resistance. Colonisation and imperialism poisoned the well springs between the Arab people and the ‘West’. The first part of the 20th century witnessed the rise of radical and revolutionary ideologies like Arab nationalism, political Islam, and anti-colonialism. The rising and dominant ideologies became fixated on political and cultural emancipation and liberation, as well as on ‘who we are’, on communitarian ideas. This wonderful book is a journey about the fertilisation of ideas in the Arab and Islamic world, and how Arab thinkers dealt with the rise of the West, the decline of the East and the search for authenticity. The book provides the context for the rise of Arab nationalism, Islamic reform and the resurgence of radical, or revolutionary, Islamism. The importance of the book lies in more than just a compilation of ideas by prominent Arab thinkers. It helps the reader to understand why nationalism became dominant in the 20th century, why Islamic reform was crushed, and why revolutionary Islamism replaced Islamic liberalism and reformism as the dominant force. Arabic Thought maps the dominant ideologies in the 19th and 20th centuries. The colonial moment marked a rupture in relations between the Arab peoples and Europe. Capturing the imagination of Arab thinkers, European imperialism created anti-hegemonic ideologies like Arab nationalism and political Islam. Far from a benign force designed to lend a helping hand to local people to govern themselves, colonialism was seen as synonymous with Westernization, domination, and subjugation. As Hourani shows, earlier thought in the 19th century was very much interested in how to borrow ideas from Europe and integrate. During the colonial period the dominant trend in colonised countries was how to expel foreign influence, how to emancipate the self from the colonial ‘other’. Imperialism alienated Arab thinkers from Western liberal ideas. It is no wonder then that Arab nationalist thinkers did not borrow liberal nationalist ideas from Britain and France. Instead, they used German and Italian anti-democratic nationalist ideas. That’s why colonialism was such an influential force, in radically changing the dominant intellectual and political landscape in the region, empowering radical ideologies and anti-democratic ideologies."