The Politics of Arab Authenticity by Ahmad Agbaria

Author:Ahmad Agbaria
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Columbia University Press

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The distinctive positionality of the connected critic fashioned by Jabiri provides an alternative avenue to narrate the history of contemporary Arab thought. Neither traditionalist in its view nor modernist, Jabiri bestowed the intellectual persona of the connected critic with new content, which turned it into a fixture of the Arab intellectual landscape. Unlike any formal intellectual persona in the Arab world, the connected critic emblematized by Jabiri drew on turath without bogging itself down in past traditions; he believed that rationality can’t and shouldn’t be borrowed, but should emerge naturally from the past. The vast Arab-Islamic history that harbors many traditions has spawned one school that Jabiri saw as relevant in the present day, made of “free philosophers like Ibn Hazm and Ibn Rushd who left their rational-critical mark on the Cordoba School, and who passed down a tradition of free thinking which we are in desperate need to attend to for inspiration.”50

To Jabiri, the challenge is to entrench the idea that no social change can take place without a preceding shift in cultural symbols: naming, language, narration, taxonomy and categories. Once readers take stock of the Arab cultural repertoire, once they comprehend the merits of connecting to past traditions, they will realize that changing the present cannot proceed without returning to turath. Though Jabiri has been critical of the nahdawis, Arab intelligentsia, Marxists, and Islamists, his critique never amounted to a total rejection of these intellectuals and their experiments. His work was informed by Ibn Rushd’s “critical realism,” which deconstructs the discourse to lay bare its false dichotomies. Jabiri demonstrated the ways in which many of the dualities and dichotomies that make up the nahda and contemporary Arab discourses are false and misleading. Speaking of Jabiri as a different kind of scholar, and accounting for his difference, remain challenges with which students of Arab thought must come to grips as they try to reckon with his unparalleled oeuvre.

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