Arab Modernities - Jaafar Aksikas Kartoniert (TB)

Arab Modernities is a critical interrogation of some of the ideologies of so-called modernity and modernization in the post-colonial Arab world with a specific focus on three political ideologies: liberalism nationalism and Islamism. By providing a critical analysis of the work of major Arab intellectuals activists (namely Abdallah Laroui Mohamed Abed al-Jabri and Abdessalam Yassine) Arab Modernities brings together three political ideologies that have hitherto been considered competing and even incompatible in the Arab world. This much-needed intervention is also best understood as an inquiry into one of the central paradoxes of post-colonial Arab societies (and Middle Eastern societies more generally): the rise of Islamism and Islamist fundamentalism at a time when global neo-liberalism has declared «the end of history». Arab Modernities is a sophisticated attempt to «name» contemporary Islamism and Arab nationalism and liberalism - to delineate the social cultural economic and political conditions under which they first emerged evolved and ultimately failed and thereby to shed light on Arab-Islamic societies at the current historical conjuncture. Arab Modernities argues against facile analyses that attribute the rise and subsequent decline of liberalism and nationalism as well as the current rise of Islamism to purely cultural religious or ideological factors and provides a rigorous complex materialist critique where Arab ideologies of modernity are placed in the context of the particular historical formation within which they have developed and to which they have responded.