ABSTRACT
The Fin-De-Siècle was a time of mixing, effervescence, experimentation, violent uprisings and bloodless coups in the Middle East. This chapter examines what a metropolitan paradigm of high modernity can offer towards understanding a semi-colonized region of the world that has endured much more than enjoyed the cultural products of the Fin-De-Siècle. Friedrich Nietzsche sought inspiration outside the Western philosophical canon in a vain attempt to transcend the good and evil dichotomy in European civilizational thought. Nietzsche's Islamophilia drew on a few Wahhabi texts and a misreading of Islam as a medieval and manly religion void of any spirituality whose approach merely inverted the negative stereotypes of the Orientalism into positive ones. The critical interventions of Jamal al-Din al-Afghani had bequeathed two Fin-De-Siècle movements of regeneration that confidently sought remedies for the apparent decline of Islam: pan-Islamism and Islamic modernism, or Muslim reformism. Max Nordau's Degeneration was emblematic of racist responses to cultural pessimism in Europe.
