Introduction: Arabic Intellectual History between the Postwar and the Postcolonial

[T]he struggle with tyranny that the Arab revolutions attempted . . . is fundamentally an intellectual struggle (siraʿ maʿrifi), a struggle that desires to return history to its historicity, to engage with the present in its contemporaneity, and to look towards the future as though it were a development accumulated from its pasts.1 Each generation must out of relative obscurity discover its mission, fulfill it, or betray it . . . We must rid ourselves of the habit, now that we are in the thick of the fight, of minimizing the action of our fathers or of feigning incomprehension when considering their silence and passivity. They fought as well as they could, with the arms they possessed then: and if the echoes of their struggle have not resounded in the international arena, we must realize that the reason for this silence lies less in their lack of heroism than in the fundamentally different international situation of our time.