The Making of the Arab Intellectual: Empire, Public Sphere and the Colonial Coordinates of Selfhood.

• Author: Anas, Omair
• Position: Book review

The Making of the Arab Intellectual

Empire, Public Sphere and the Colonial Coordinates of Selfhood

Edited by Dyala Hamzah

London: Routledge Tylor and Francis Group, 2014, 277 pages, ISBN 9780415488341.

History of Arab intellectuals has received a renewed academic attention after the Arab world demonstrated its ability to go through the democratization process without it being imposed from outside. The Arab public sphere is still not a theme much researched in Middle Eastern scholarship. This volume is an effort to re-read history of Arab intellectuals within the theory of the public sphere. Dyala Hamza and contributors have tried to look beyond Albert Hourani's thesis and have produced this insightful analytical account of Arab intellectuals during the Ottoman and colonial period.

Intellectual movements in the Arab world have had pan-Arab influences for generations. After the Tanzimat was introduced, a new class of religious leaders started emerging. The Arab nations struggle for independence had to fight on two fronts: they had to edify themselves in the wake of the gradually crumbling Ottoman Empire while fighting against the imposition of European colonial intervention and imperiaslim. The conflicting nature of this struggle had a lasting impact on Arab intellectuals. So much so that the Middle East's intellectual history never recovered as a paradigm (p. 3). This predicament resulted in the failure of post-colonial Arab states to contain Arab intellectuals. Both Pan-Arabism and Pan-Islamism remained popular but failed in realizing their inclusive ambitions (p. 2). Challenging Albert Hourani's thesis of 'derivative liberalism,' Dayala argues that failure of 'Middle East intellectual history' to recover as a paradigm is also because Arabic thoughts remained locked within dialectics of impact and reaction (p. 3).

The 'Middle Eastern Public Sphere' is described within three transformative stages of empire, colony, and, the nation state. This transformation was rather a complex one as the Nahdawis appeared apologetic and states refused the containment of Pan Arabism (p 8). The public sphere as a "legal political site which is bound territorially by the nation state and sanctioned by law" theoretically does not fit with the the Middle Eastern public sphere. Emergence and transformation of the 'Middle Eastern Public Sphere' from Ottoman Arab to colonial and then to Bath regimes in Syria and Iraq is the main subject of this edited volume. It...