Center Journals

This article deals with the Arabic novel in times of social and cultural transformations over the last quarter of a century. It takes into account the significance of the transformations in novel writing across the Arab scene over this particularly sensitive period in modern Arab history – transformations that warrant serious study and analysis.

How can literature approach the Algerian tragedy? How can criticism deal with such literature? How can literature at such moments turn a blind eye to its tragic present and engage with the privilege of storytelling and the authenticity of imagination? These are the key questions raised by this study on Algerian literature in the 1990s, which sees that the narrative fabric of all this writing governed by its ability to be read from an objective viewpoint, and the specific subjects it deals with as a result, such as the intellectual and the crisis of the intellectual, the savagery of terrorism, the alienation and biases of exile, and the return to the beginnings of the Islamist surge. Writing, when it has to choose between representation and imagination, may find that representation is the artistic choice that reflects a vision of the function of writing and issues of genre more than it reveals a shortcoming in dealing with the components of writing and imagination.

This study investigates the state and social transformations after Libya's independence in 1951 by evaluating the structure and features of the Senussi monarchy and the regime that followed the military coup in 1969. The author makes clear that the regimes and ideologies that ruled successively in Libya changed according to changes in local economic, social, and cultural circumstances, and in line with changes to the surrounding regional and international context. The main reasons for the collapse of the Jamahiriya regime, he concludes, were hostility to institutions and the control of the security apparatus over the institutional structure. These two factors caused the alienation of the middle and lower classes, as well as the defection of many reformists, army officers, and diplomats, some of whom have become leaders of the current democratic uprising.

Laroui is well aware that Rousseau's positions on religion, knowledge, and progress are complex, and at times contradictory. In different contexts in his introduction Laroui points out the complex mixed nature of aspects of Rousseau's philosophy. This analysis explores whether Rousseau's aim in this recent translation is to defend the Rousseauian perspective on religion, which insists on the simplicity and instinctiveness of religiosity?

Identity, in its individual and collective dimensions, cannot be cloned across generations and historic eras. Cultural Interaction and borrowing are two vital factors for the formation of the collective identity of peoples as the product of a cumulative process that negates descriptions such as eternal, constant, and invariant. This study puts forward a comparative analysis of three approaches to cultural and national identity, and the interaction between Arabic and Western culture, prominent on the Arab scene since the beginning of the Nahda until the beginning of the 21st century. It also reviews an aspect of the challenges and problems that may confront the last of these approaches, which is the perspective of the national democratic struggle regarding what the Arab Spring may give birth to politically in the short term.

The dialectic between the evolution of language and "its use" by speakers is here discussed in order to highlight how the evolution of Arabic and that of Arabic knowledge and culture is inextricably linked with the role of translation into Arabic. The author concludes that knowledge alone, whether transferred from foreign or native thought, is not sufficient for Arabic to keep up with global civilization. If knowledge is not the means adopted by speakers of a language to create their own intellectual trends to circumscribe their culture and help build their identity, then transferred knowledge will remain hidden in books and not bear its expected fruits.

The author of "On the Arab Question: Foreword to a Manifesto for Arab Democracy" sets before us an open Arab "question" and a possible democratic choice, or a "national democratic question" in the words of Yassin al-Hafez, and not a call for democracy or simply a theoretical recommendation of Arab nationalism or democracy. This is because the issue requires a reasoned investigation of its origins and ramifications, the interrogation of its premises and assumptions, and of the conditions creating it in time and space, and the forms of its expression.

The Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies is organizing its first Annual Conference for Social Sciences and Humanities from March 24-26, 2012 in Doha. This year's conference will be organized through two parallel tracks, each focused on a particular topic. Topic One: From Hampered Growth to Sustainable Development: Which Socio-economic Policies for Arab Countries? , Topic Two: Identity and Language in the Arab Homeland .t

The project of modernity, as formulated by the philosophers of the Enlightenment in the 18th century, consists of the relentless development of the objectivizing sciences, of the universalistic foundations of morality and law, and of autonomous art, all in accord with their own immanent logic. But at the same time it also results in releasing the cognitive potentials accumulated in the process from their esoteric high forms and attempting to apply them in the sphere of praxis, that is, to encourage the rational organization of social relations.

In this study the author explores the meaning of identity and its dialectical relationship with language. Hanafi argues that identity metamorphoses into alienation when the self is internally divided between what it is and what it must become. He then differentiates between different forms of alienation, and emphasizes the strong relationship between identity and freedom, maintaining that the shift from linguistic pluralism to the level of culture leads to the disintegration of nations, unless these are absorbed into a wide-scale civilizational project that meets the historical challenge. Signs of this happening, he argues, were evident in the Arab revolutions that produced a new language that restored identity and put an end to alienation.