UC Berkeley

This dissertation is an examination of the work of three twentieth century Arab thinkers and the significance of their thought to questions of political subjectivity and consciousness in political theory. The project analyzes the oeuvres of the Moroccan historian Abdullah Laroui, the Egyptian philosopher Hassan Hanafi, and the Moroccan philosopher Mohamed Abed al-Jabiri for the purpose of understanding how contemporary critiques of Arab-Islamic cultural heritage and ideology constitute a political theoretical tradition aimed at reforming the Arab political subject. Each thinker locates the consciousness of "the Arab self" at the heart of the troubled "Arab condition;" each conceives social and political progress as dependent upon the transformation of that consciousness. Thus, I argue that much of what usually passes as "cultural critique" in contemporary Arab thought should rather be considered as a critical examination of the formation of the Arab self carried out in the registers of cultural history, revisionist theology and ideology critique.

By examining three quite different intellectual figures, I am able to show that the trend to identify the Arab self as the locus of Arab political problems, and to critique that self through an examination of the Arab-Islamic cultural tradition, is not limited to any single ideological current, but is practiced across contemporary Arab political thought. What varies among these thinkers is how they diagnose, characterize and attempt to redress this tradition. Whereas Laroui's critique culminates in a call for rupture with the tradition, Hanafi attempts its reconstruction and Jabiri offers a deconstruction aimed at sifting out and making use of its potentially progressive elements. Common to these various mobilizations of historical tradition is a modernist conception of history as necessarily progressive and as driven by a subject capable of shaping the future. Thus I argue that these thinkers and contemporary Arab thought more generally, inhabit an understanding that is counter-colonial but not yet postcolonial, one that is aware of the historicity of the Arab self and the profound influence of colonialism on its formation, yet is absent any critique of universalist and other conceits of Western modernity and democracy.