Faculty Member, History
Assistant Professor
About
My field of inquiry is Modern Arab intellectual history. It is a relatively small academic province whose parishioners map the Arab experience of Enlightenment. Intellectual historians of the Middle East study and document abstractions, and given their engagement with a huge topic such as Enlightenment, they have a very broad scholarly mandate. Initially the field focused almost exclusively on the study of nationalism and the elusive question of collective identity. Much attention was given to the formation process of ideologies and to key individual thinkers. Moving beyond political thought, and taking their cues from post-modernism, a new group of scholars has evinced interest in how entire modern categories of knowledge have been transplanted into the region, at the expense of indigenous modes of comprehension. I identify with this research agenda.
In my first significant work I examine the universality of Western historical thought by looking at how the modern idea of history was acculturated in Egypt during the past century. Among my aims is to understand how and why historicism defeated Islamic historiography and evaluate the significance of this process for Egypt’s experience of modernity. The findings of this study are summarized in my book, Gatekeepers of the Arab Past: Historians and History Writing in 20th Century Egypt (Berkeley: University Press of California, 2009).
http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/11221.php
My current research, “Arab Thought on the Eve of Dystopia, 1945-1967” is a collective intellectual biography of the post-colonial generation. This was an optimistic group of secular and religious thinkers, members of the “proud generation” who sought to re-invent a new Arab subject: confident, modern, independent, self-sufficient, and, above all, free. Yet, after two decades of intense public involvement, many of its members experienced intellectual life as a process that involved alienation, suppression, statelessness, besiegement, material poverty and disillusionment with the political process. By delving into their collective experience I hope to provide not only a rich and detailed account of mid-twentieth century Arab thought but also inquire into the limitations of the Arab secular tradition. The picture which already emerges from this study casts doubt on the accepted rise and fall story of Pan Arabism and endeavors to substitute for it a more complete intellectual history of 1967.
The first publication from this new project is an article on the "Arab Experience of Existentialism."
On a more amateurish and less committed level I am also interested in the history of sport and technology.
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