[ Buchtipp von Tarik Bary ] This book is a good read for all those interested in the modern history of the Arab world and its relationship with the West.

For nearly four centuries, between the publication of Ibn Khaldun great History and the rise of the modernist movement in Arabic Islam late in the nineteenth century, the Muslim-Arab world remained in a state of intellectual and literary dearth matched only by its material and political decline. Then, toward the end of the century Muslim Arabs started to respond to the many challenges posed to them by the modern world in a new and energetic way. This book traces the various forms this response has taken and the phases through which it has passed since Jamal al-Din al-Afghani and his disciple Muhammad 'Abduh appeared on the scene with their call to revitalize Islam and adapt it to the needs of a changed world. The first three chapters survey the four types of Muslim-Arab reaction to the new realities and bring the account up to the mid-1960s:
1. The initial theological-political teachings of Afghani and ' Abduh, the acknowledged fathers of the modernist movement in Arabic Islam.
2. The ways in which these teachings were to be translated into coherent political, social, cultural, and theological concepts, especially in Egypt. This section covers the work of such opinion-leaders as Rashid Rida, Qasim Amin, Lutfi al-Sayyid, ' Ali 'Abd al-Raziq, and Taha Husain--as well as political activists like Zaghlul and Kamil.
3. The rise of Muslim militancy, partly in reaction to the failure of many of the modernists to reconcile their religious convictions with the demands of modern life. This chapter deals mainly with the Muslim Brethren and contains a comprehensive summary of the teachings of its founders and leaders.
4. Along with Muslim militancy came another, secular, response that took the form of a nationalist movement. This, in turn, was roughly of two types--the ethnic and the territorial, depending on how the
term Arab was to be defined. This chapter is devoted to an analysis of the ideology of Pan-Arab nationalism, which reached its peak with the emergence of Jamal 'Abd al-Nasser to a position of leadership in the Arab world in the mid-1960s.
Three more chapters bring the account up to the late 1980s: The defeat of the Egyptian, Syrian, and Jordanian armies in the Six-Day War in June 1967 and the subsequent decline in the fortunes of Nasserism gave rise to a variety of violent intellectual reactions. These encompassed the literary, cultural, and religious fields, as well as the political ones. Chapter 5, "The Shock of 1967," offers a survey of these reactions in various parts of the Arab world.
A wider-ranging, deeper, and more searching set of responses followed these largely emotional reactions. In chapter 6 a number of Arab leaders of opinion examine such basic questions as the nature of Westernization and its effects, the main features of Arab civilization and the reasons why it failed to face Europe's onslaught, and the deeply ambiguous attitude toward the West this conflict brought with it -- an ambivalence here illustrated in a survey of the works of Muhammad Wahbi and Hisham Sharabi, among others.
The October (Yom Kippur) War of 1973, in which the Muslim-Arab world takes pride and which served to restore some of the dignity and self esteem lost in the Six-Day War, is taken in chapter 7 as the occasion for a comprehensive summing-up, bringing the account to the mid-1980s. A number of basic issues in Muslim-Arab intellectual history are examined: The decline and fall of the Nasserist ideology; Egypt's Arab identity; a much more relaxed literary-cultural scene; historicism versus Islamic traditionalism; and the emergence of a new Islamic militancy. Chapter 8, "The Shifting Nineties," brings the account up to our own day.
While based on solid research and much original scholarship, Arabs Face the Modern World can also be viewed as a work of popularization, addressed to the enlightened general reader as well as to the student of the modern Middle East.

[ Info ] Rejwan, Nissim: Arabs Face the Modern World: Religious, Cultural, and Political Responses to the West. University Press of Florida., Gainesville, FL. Publication 199 . ISBN: 0813015596.