Secularism in the Arab World: Contexts, Ideas and Consequences

Description:

This book is a translation of Aziz al-Azmeh's seminal work Al-'Ilmaniya min mandhur mukhtalif that was first published in Beirut in 1992.

Brief description: Aziz Al-Azmeh is CEU University Professor Emeritus and Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Department of History, Central European University, Budapest, Hungary. Prior to that, he had taught at the University of Exeter and at the American University of Beirut, and been visiting professor at Columbia, Yale, Berkeley, Georgetown, ISTAC, and Distinguished Visiting Professor at the Institut d'Etudes Politiques, Paris. He was a long-term Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies, Berlin, and a Fellow at the Swedish Institute for Advanced Studies, Uppsala, the Kollegium Budapest, the Kaete Hamburger Kolleg, Bochum, and a Senior Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, University of Bonn, as well as a Resident Scholar at the Rockefeller Foundation Center for Scholars in Bellagio. Aziz Al-Azmeh held the Bourse Fernand Braudel over several terms as Directeur de Recherches Associé, Maison des Sciences de l'Homme, Paris.

Review Quotes:

Not only do I commend al-Azmeh for sifting through a complex historical process to demonstrate the ways in which "the subordination of liberal and Arab nationalist discourses to Islamic discourse" (420), but I also appreciate the arduous work of translation by David Bond. Mr. Bond smooths the long and often complex sentence structure of al-Azmeh's style, making it relatively easy to read this important contributor to the expanding Arab intellectual scene.