Trends and Issues in Contemporary Arab Thought

Beginning from the premise that "most-if not all-Arab thinkers are unhappy with the present conditions in the Arab world," Boullata surveys recent thinking on four major topics: the Arab heritage, Islam, cultural dependence, and the role of women. In the process, he provides a useful and well-organized summary of such contemporary thinkers as Mohammed Arkoun, Hasan Hanafi, Muhammad an-Nuwayhi, and Fu'ad Zakariya.

There are two problems with Boullata's study. By limiting himself to books and virtually ignoring the lively newspaper and magazine debates, he ignores a critical source of forward-looking ideas. Most thinking on such subjects as democracy, human rights, and the rule of law, for example, has taken place not in books but in just such short pieces.

Second, Boullata (who teaches Arabic literature and language at McGill University) only too predictably confirms the old saw about Marxism having become the opiate of English and comparative literature departments. His study is replete with "discourse analysis," dependency theory, and Michel Foucault, an underbrush which repeatedly trips up what otherwise would be a readable and reliable account. Would someone inform the professorate that, at a time when Marxist institutes are closing all over Eastern Europe, the day has come to abandon the intricacies of neo-Marxist thought, and return to the real world of politics and culture?

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