Elegy for the Intellectual

Chapter 2 turns to a critical moment in postwar Lebanon in which the novelist Elias Khoury wrote tirelessly against the systematic erasure of collective memory and conceived the intellectual’s word as the remaining hope for salvation in obituaries and interviews in the literary journal al-Mulhaq. While it mobilized the postwar intellectual scene, Khoury’s dominant discourse on collective memory was the object of the emerging novelist Rabee Jaber’s critique. This chapter shows how Jaber reconfigured the suicide of a prominent Lebanese intellectual from a messianic gesture to a deeply personal act, challenging thereby the politicization of the intellectual’s death.

The Political Remains

Chapter 5 shows how the literary unmaking of the intellectual is not an eschewal of the political, but rather a move to redefine and recode the political in ways that are congruent with the contemporary political moment. Specifically, it points to the ways in which the displacement of canonical tropes associated with the archetype of the prophetic Arab intellectual is not a necessary process of destruction and elimination, but rather a means to make visible the complexities and fault lines of the modernist discourse of Arabic literature since the nahḍa. Finally, it briefly probes the ongoing Arab uprisings and ask whether the radical critical and political discourse they have engendered rejected further the archetype of the modernist Arab intellectual or, on the contrary, rearticulated it as an indispensable catalyst for change.

The Banality of Exile

Chapter 3 revisits the archetype of the exilic intellectual. Jabra Ibrahim Jabra had conceived of exile, particularly that of the Palestinian intellectual, as a tragic state of individual displacement that simultaneously works as a catalyst for modernization and change. Jabra’s romanticization of the exilic intellectual, which Said later channelled in his conception of exile and secular criticism, was transgressed by Rawi Hage and Elia Suleiman. This unlikely transnational, cross-generational, and multidisciplinary exchange between Jabra and Said on the one hand and Suleiman and Hage on the other, reveals the ways the contemporary novelist and cineaste turn to metafiction, irony, and play as strategies that ultimately demystify the Arab intellectual in exile.

Ruins of Secular Nationalism

Chapter 4 addresses the legacy of the Arab modernist intellectual by examining his striking absence. Specifically, it takes issue with the dismissive, essentialist, and Orientalist critical interpretations of Seba al-Herz’s The Others and reads it as a novel that stages a unique exploration of the psychological and physical traces of three decades of political violence within the Shiʿi community of Saudi Arabia. As it discusses the emergence of a Shiʿi sectarian transnational rhetoric that challenges the secular-nationalist identity of the modernist intellectual, the chapter points to the pervasiveness of the political critique inherent in what has been indiscriminately branded ‘Saudi women’s literature’.

Requiem for the Enlightenment

Chapter 1 examines the contemporary reconfiguration of the East/West and modernity/tradition binaries that framed critical discourse pertaining to the nahḍa intellectual. True to his self-reflexive narratives, the disenchanted novelist Rashid al-Daif fictionalizes in Tablit al-Bahr (Paving the sea, 2012), the consecrated nahḍa intellectual Jurji Zaidan in a historical metafiction about a nineteenth-century Syrian intellectual and his troubled encounter with Western modernity. Countering the tepid reception of the novel, which missed the nature of al-Daif’s critique, the chapter reveals the ways in which al-Daif articulates contemporary ambivalence toward hegemonic historical narratives by displacing Zaidan’s secular, nationalist, and modernist legacy.

Introduction: In the Beginning was the Word

The introduction elaborates on the “contemporary,” as a notion that sets the historical and theoretical framework of the book. It identifies the 1990s as a critical historical juncture of suspended hopes and disenchantment, following which writers began displacing the figure of the intellectual-prophet that had governed Arabic literature since the Nahda. It begins by exploring the canonization of the Palestinian intellectual Mahmoud Darwish in Simon Bitton’s documentary, poetry readings, and interviews that portray him as a nationalist, prophetic, and exilic figure. It embeds the depiction of the Arab intellectual in theoretical frameworks pertaining to temporality, power, and exile on the one hand and recent works in modern Arab thought, on the other.