Postwar Beirut conjures up contradictory images of remarkable openness and inconceivable violence, of great antiquity and a bright future. The Lebanese capital stands for Arab cosmopolitanism and cultural effervescence but also for its tragedies of destruction. This book examines the historical formation of Beirut as a multiply contested Mediterranean city.
Fin de Siecle Beirut is a landmark contribution to the growing literature in Ottoman studies, in Arab cultural history and on Mediterranean cities. Combining urban theory, particularly Henri Lefebvre's work on cities and capitalism,...

What is the relationship between thought and practice in the domains of language, literature and politics? Is thought the only standard by which to measure intellectual history? How did Arab intellectuals change and affect political, social, cultural and economic developments from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries? This volume offers a fundamental overhaul and revival of modern Arab intellectual history. Using Hourani's Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age, 1798-1939 (Cambridge, 1962) as a starting point, it reassesses Arabic cultural production and political thought in the light of...

Cutting-edge scholarship on post-war Arab intellectual history that challenges conventional thinking about authoritarianism, religion and revolution in the modern Middle East.

The Middle East is often depicted as a landscape of war, authoritarianism, and social unrest. This book, full of cutting-edge scholarship, illuminates underappreciated aspects of the intellectual and cultural history of the post-war Arab world and explores the contributions of Arab writers, poets, and intellectuals to politics, culture and social change.