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.
