Changing the Arab Intellectual Guard

5. The Meanings, Forms and Exercise of ‘Freedom’

“…Ironically, as Yoav Di-Capua notes, 'in warning the young of the dangers of commitment, Taha Husayn gave this burgeoning intellectual movement its Arabic name'. 24 When the Egyptian critic Salama Musa (1887Musa ( -1958 adopted socialist theories and the Beirut-based periodical Al-Ādāb became 'the mouthpiece of a whole generation of committed writers and poets', the idea of a committed literature (al-adab al-multazim) took a more leftist hue, and as such came to dominate the Tunisian and pan-Arabic field in the 1950s and 1960s. 25 The first 1959 issue of al-Fikr, for example, was devoted to the social role of universities, with essays comparing the state of higher education and the role of intellectuals in Asian, African and European countries and the Arab world.…”

Afterword

“…Apart from one exception, celebrated writer Nirmal Varma's translations from Czech, stories translated in the magazines were never published in book form and left no trace in terms of the migration of books or 'bibliomigrancy' through libraries or publishers' catalogues. 24 Rather, they were often plucked out of other magazines, collections and anthologies to be translated as stand-alone pieces. Did these magazine translations leave a lasting impression on readers, did they create a habitus for world literature, and a lasting archive?…”

7. The Poetics and Politics of Solidarity

“…In the preface of his seminal book Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age, 1998-1939 Hourani stresses the need to study how literature functioned as a vector to disseminate Arab intellectuals' thoughts to larger audiences. 24 I am also inspired by Jacques Rancière's idea that aesthetics and politics are intertwined and are not autonomous spheres. 25 Politics for Rancière is a 'dissensus' from a normative 'partition of the sensible', that is, a practice that is deeply disruptive of the normalized conceptual underpinnings of hierarchical social orders and forms of domination.…”