ABSTRACT
I would like to begin by situating the new discourse of realism within the larger sphere of Arab intellectual production. For the past century, the two major currents in modern and contemporary Arab thought have been al-salafiyyah
(traditionalism) and al-nahdawiyyah (renaissance thinking). Central to both currents are the notions of the authentic (al-asalah) and the contemporary (al-mu‘asarah). As Muhammad ‘Abid al-Jabiri has shown, both currents are part of the same modernist discourse whose model of future Arab society has as its paradigms the Arab-Islamic past, the post-Enlightenment European present, or a combination of the two.6 Although the nineteenth-century renaissance thinkers gave way to the emergence of the thinkers of revolution (both nationalist and Marxist) in the post-Second World War era, the problematic of the authentic and the contemporary remained the fulcrum around which Arab thought continued to revolve, with no resolution in sight. The questions of what to preserve from the Arab-Islamic past and what to adopt from the modern European present continued to pose themselves insistently, without any acknowledgment of the existing reality of what actually has been preserved from the Arab past and what actually has been adopted from the European present.
