Center Journals

The Cultural Village Foundation Katara in Doha organized a Katara Arts Forum from April 1-2, 2014 entitled "Architecture and Arts: The Energy of the Place as a Creative Momentum for the Artist" in collaboration with researchers and academics from a number of Arab states and international institutions.

To mark the seventh Arab day for comparative literature and dialogue between cultures, and pursuant to the recommendations of the sixth Arab day for comparative literature and dialogue between cultures, held in Rabat in 2013, an international seminar was held in Tunis from April 28-30, 2014. The seminar was supported by the Tunisian Association for Science, Literature, and the Arts—Beit al-Hikma—in Carthage and the Tunisian Comparative Literature Society (SOTLIC) —Jamam—based at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Tunis.

Burhan Ghalioun presented a unique discourse on the critique of Arab modernity and the Modern Arab Nation state amidst the major intellectual review imposed by the calamity of June 1967, which constituted a defeat for Arab intellectuals. Contrary to modernists, who attributed the crisis to the dominance of tradition, and traditionalists who blamed it on the modernists’ abandonment of their heritage and religious identity, Ghalioun’s critique was directed at the strategy of modernization itself as theorized by the Arab elite and implemented by the Arab nation state. Ghalioun’s first book, Manifesto for Democracy, which appeared in 1978 and represented his basic intellectual intuition, included all the subjects of his critique, which he went on to expand and deepen in the rest of his oeuvre. He established a new theory in Arab thought that academics cannot ignore though it remains a perspective marred by the influence of dependency theory and the vestiges of class analysis in what concerns democracy.