ABSTRACT
Since the glorious era of Arab intellectual and scientific ferment in the Middle Ages when the Europeans seemed so hopelessly behind, little has come out from the Arab world that has struck a universal chord anywhere, or caused inquisitive minds across the far reaches of the globe to quiver with anticipation. One prominent pioneer in introducing young Arab university students and budding intellectuals to the summits of Western philosophy, including Kierkegaard, was the Lebanese thinker and diplomat Charles Malik. No treatment of the Arab reception of Kierkegaard's thought would be complete without some attention being given to the Egyptian philosophical thinker Abd al-Rahman Badawi. Badawi was the closest that a Muslim Arab philosopher came to wrestling with the Kierkegaard corpus and its empirical life implications. But Kierkegaard has also received some attention from another quarter within the Arab world, that of the scholars and academicians.
