Tradition, Authenticity and Contemporaneity in Hussein Mroueh's The Materialist Tendencies in Arab-Islamic Philosophy

Abstract

In 1978, Hussein Mroueh published a four-volume history of medieval Islamic philosophy, an-nazaʿat al-maddiyya fi-l-falsafa al-ʿarabiyya al-islamiyya (The Materialist Tendencies in Arab-Islamic Philosophy), the pinnacle of his career as one of the leading intellectuals in Lebanon during the 20th century. This thesis is an attempt to draw out the political claims the author explicitly makes in his study, the significance of which has hitherto been ignored by the limited reception the work has received outside of the Arab world. Mroueh’s turn to the Arab-Islamic heritage (turath) and his desire to impart a sense of authenticity (asala) to the movement for Arab national liberation might bear the marks of a militant cultural nationalism, but I argue that his critique, reformulation and appropriation of these terms is the work’s most distinguishing feature. I arrive at this argument by way of a close textual analysis of the work’s introduction, along with an examination of the political and theoretical field in which the work was published. I then attempt to draw the philosophical and political-theoretical significance of Mroueh’s two most salient formulations: the role of the present in the production of tradition, and the notion of authenticity as a state of being determined by the contradictions inherent in any social structure. This final discussion is based on an alternative conceptual history of the terms Mroueh utilises, which will also lead to a consideration of how different accounts of the ‘transmission’ of the language of politics under colonialism determines readings of intellectual production in the postcolony.