Arab Existentialism: An Invisible Chapter in The Intellectual History of Decolonization

Arab Existentialism: An Invisible Chapter in the
Intellectual History of Decolonization
YOAV DI-CAPUA
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IN MAY 1944, WHEN THE EGYPTIAN philosopher Abd al-Rahman Badawi defended
his dissertation on existential time, Taha Husayn, the doyen of modern Arab letters,
declared it the birth of modern Arab philosophy. The defense was a national event,
and the widely distributed Egyptian daily al-Ahram immediately shared the news with
its readers.1 Six years later, Badawi announced that he had devised a new philosophy
for “our generation.” He called it existentialism (wujudiya), and though it shared the
name of the European movement, it was not simply a carbon copy of it, but rather
a series of formulations and adaptations that collectively sought to create a new
postcolonial Arab subject: confident, politically involved, independent, self-suffi-
cient, and above all liberated. Whether in its Heideggerian or its Sartrean form, we
normally think of existentialism solely as a chapter in European intellectual history.
Yet in the context of decolonization, Arab intellectuals processed the ideas of Martin
Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre into an entirely new intellectual tradition that was
European in origin and Middle Eastern by design. What began as an esoteric ex-
periment on a philosopher’s desk grew into a decentralized yet influential intellectual
movement with meaningful global connections. By the early 1960s, Arab culture was
dominated by the language, assumptions, and politics of existentialism. Yet this story
has thus far remained an invisible chapter in the intellectual history of decoloni-
zation.
The emergence of Arab existentialism as a major category of Arab thought co-
incided with the worldwide process of decolonization and the rise of the first gen-
eration of Third World regimes.2 Between the end of World War II, when pro-co-
lonial Arab monarchies teetered, and the 1967 Six-Day War, when the revolutionary
Arab states that had replaced the monarchies were defeated, a young generation of
I wish to thank the National History Center and the faculty and participants in the Center’s 2009 De-
colonization Seminar, which was held in Washington, D.C., for their intellectual leadership. My research
was also generously supported by the University of Texas Humanities Research Award. An earlier ver-
sion of this article was presented as a paper at New York University’s Kevorkian Research Workshop
Series as well as at the University of Texas. I thank my colleagues for their critical contribution. Mostly,
I am indebted to the AHR ’s external reviewers, in particular to the anonymous “Reviewer 2,” who, it
seems, specializes in Arabic literature.
1 Badawi’s Ph.D. oral exam lasted a full six hours and was attended by hundreds of onlookers,
students, teachers, and journalists who came to celebrate a national event. “Duktura fi-l-Falsafa,” al-
Ahram, May 30, 1944, 2.
2 Even though major texts on decolonization do not focus on the Middle East, it was nonetheless
an essential player in this process. Mark T. Berger, “After the Third World? History, Destiny and the
Fate of Third Worldism,” Third World Quarterly 25, no. 1 (2004): 9–39.
1061
1062 Yoav Di-Capua
Arab intellectuals employed variants of existentialism in order to meet the multiple

challenges of decolonization: cultural contradictions, uneven development and the
consequent social injustice, a struggle for full physical liberation, and the derivative
search for an alternative Cold War political space.
This process triggered a set of pressing questions: Who is the Arab subject in the

wake of the colonial experience? Can this subject think of himself or herself in terms
and language that would be organic to his or her history? Can Arabs have an au-
thentic existence, and is it possible for them to become modern on their own terms?
On the eve of decolonization, in the Indian subcontinent, Africa, and East Asia, a
host of intellectuals, writing in multiple languages, were asking the same questions.3
These concerns conditioned the work of Badawi’s existentialist generation, people
such as the Egyptian Marxist critic Mahmud Amin al-Alim, the journalist Lutfi al-
Khuli, the Lebanese man of letters Suhayl Idris, the Iraqi poet Abd al-Wahhab
al-Bayati, and hundreds of other intellectuals who were born in the early 1920s. Yet
a decade later, following the combined tragedy of the 1967 War and Sartre’s un-
expected betrayal of the Arabs, Arab existentialism was for the most part dead.
Given that existentialism was instrumental to decolonization, it is striking that
there is no literature that situates the intellectual generation of Arab existentialists
within the global historical context of their time. This absence is part of a larger lack
within what might be called the intellectual history of decolonization. How Third
World intellectuals and their ideas informed decolonization, and how in turn they
were shaped by it, is an important question, yet it remains largely unanswered in spite
of a proliferation of studies on decolonization and postcolonialism.
On the basis of existing historiography, it appears that scholars have largely
avoided this question. Early scholarship on decolonization focused on the “transfer
of power” as a unidirectional process that extended from the metropole to the pe-
riphery in the face of the so-called “onslaught of nationalism.”4 For obvious reasons,
much of this work came from scholars of the British Empire. A later variant of this
literature illustrated how power was not simply “transferred,” but in fact demanded,
even taken by force.5 This process was further explained in terms of provincial an-
ticolonial nationalisms (freedom movements) and higher-level political solidarity
(Pan-Asian, Pan-Arab). But solidarity and resistance have functioned largely as
tropes rather than empirical points of reference, with scholars generally assuming
that anticolonial nationalism was similarly constituted whenever and wherever it
occurred.6 The best indication of the ubiquity of this assumption can be found in
surveys of the state of the field of decolonization studies. From John Darwin’s 1988
3 For instance, Mahatma Gandhi, Albert Memmi, Léopold Sédar Senghor, Frantz Fanon, Aimé
Césaire, and Wa Thiong’o Ngũgı̃.

4 For a critical summary of this idea, see John Darwin, The End of the British Empire: The Historical
Debate (Oxford, 1991).

5 Recent examples of this established historiographical pedigree include Raymond F. Betts, De-
colonization (New York, 1998); David Birmingham, The Decolonization of Africa (London, 1995); John
Springhall, Decolonization since 1945: The Collapse of European Overseas Empires (New York, 2001); and
Martin Shipway, Decolonization and Its Impact: A Comparative Approach to the End of the Colonial
Empires (Malden, Mass., 2008).
6 Taking solidarity and resistance to colonial Europe as the overarching subject matter of their
books, scholars of Third-Worldism further reduced the complex process of decolonization to the level
of a power struggle. See, for instance, Vijay Prashad, The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third
World (New York, 2007).
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW OCTOBER 2012

Arab Existentialism 1063
pioneering call for research on the “very underdeveloped” subject of decolonization

to A. G. Hopkins’s 2008 extensive rethinking of the field, an impressive line of writers
and editors, including Robert Young, Dietmar Rothermund, and to a lesser extent
Prasenjit Duara, have been comfortable with the assumption that the history of an-
ticolonial nationalism accounts for the role of ideas during this era.7

Indeed, even postcolonial studies, a field that has made a point of studying the
“decolonization of the mind,” has done little to rehabilitate local thought and its
global context. While it offers an important corrective to Eurocentric scholarship on
empire as well as a critique of the practices of the nation-state, the realities of col-
onized peoples are almost always projected against the essentialized epistemology
of colonial Europe, with the ultimate goal of investigating the persistence of “co-
lonial discourse.” With a rarefied and far from rigorous historical method that uses
epistemology as the omnipresent referent for all forms of thought, we are left with
the false notion that colonialism was uninterrupted by the process of decolonization.
While postcolonial studies provides us with invaluable insights and a critical eman-
cipation of marginal historical subjects, it has done little to date by way of presenting
a systematic and comprehensive account of how people put their thoughts together.8
Even as scholarship on labor, Third World diplomacy, race (négritude), and gender
is beginning to break new ground, the ongoing absence of intellectual history calls
attention to itself.9
7 A. G. Hopkins, “Rethinking Decolonization,” Past & Present 200, no. 1 (August 2008): 211–247;
John Darwin, Britain and Decolonisation: The Retreat from Empire in the Post-War World (New York,
1988); Dietmar Rothermund, The Routledge Companion to Decolonization (Hoboken, N.J., 2006); Pra-
senjit Duara, ed., Decolonization: Perspectives from Now and Then (London, 2004); James D. Le Sueur,
ed., The Decolonization Reader (New York, 2003); Robert J. C. Young, Postcolonialism: An Historical
Introduction (Oxford, 2001); Christopher E. Goscha and Christian Ostermann, eds., Connecting His-
tories: Decolonization and the Cold War in Southeast Asia, 1945–1962 (Stanford, Calif., 2009). However,
for some attempts to account for the role of ideas beyond anticolonial nationalism, see Clive J. Christie,
Ideology and Revolution in Southeast Asia, 1900–1980: Political Ideas of the Anti-Colonial Era (Richmond,
UK, 2001); and James D. Le Sueur, Uncivil War: Intellectuals and Identity Politics during the Decolo-
nization of Algeria (Philadelphia, 2001).
8 As one critic put it, “It would be useful if post-colonial scholarship made more effort to situate
these writers within the class structure of their home societies and the cultural context of a transnational
intelligentsia so as to avoid simplistic generalizations that their work embodies some nationalist or ‘Third
World’ essence.” Dane Kennedy, “Imperial History and Post-Colonial Theory,” in James D. Le Sueur,
ed., The Decolonization Reader (New York, 2003), 1–22, here 17. Having said that, the Subaltern Studies
Group and a few others in South Asia have tried to “rehabilitate” local thought and capture the mental/
spiritual world of the subaltern. Their consequent claim was that the subaltern did not behave as a
colonized subject and retained his or her own notions of community, politics, and culture. Hence their
argument that colonialism involved dominance without hegemony. Ranajit Guha, Dominance without
Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India (Cambridge, Mass., 1997); Sudipta Kaviraj, The Unhappy
Consciousness: Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay and the Formation of Nationalist Discourse in India (Delhi,
1995).
9 Tackling some of the same problems, Frederick Cooper observed that “Colonial history in the
era of decolonization suffered a double form of occlusion. From the 1950s into the 1970s, the idea of
modernization occluded the colonial. In the 1980s and 1990s the idea of modernity occluded history.”
Cooper, Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History (Berkeley, Calif., 2005), 53. Recent schol-
arship includes Piero Gleijeses, Conflicting Missions: Havana, Washington, and Africa, 1959–1976 (Cha-
pel Hill, N.C., 2002); Matthew Connelly, A Diplomatic Revolution: Algeria’s Fight for Independence and
the Origins of the Post–Cold War Era (Oxford, 2002); Todd Shepard, The Invention of Decolonization:
The Algerian War and the Remaking of France (Ithaca, N.Y., 2006); Frederick Cooper, Decolonization
and African Society: The Labor Question in French and British Africa (Cambridge, 1996); Gary Wilder,
The French Imperial Nation-State: Negritude and Colonial Humanism between the Two World Wars (Chi-
cago, 2005); and Karen Bouwer, Gender and Decolonization in the Congo: The Legacy of Patrice Lumumba
(New York, 2010).

1064 Yoav Di-Capua
This lacuna in the historiography notwithstanding, Arab intellectuals did in fact

devise a local existentialist tradition that transcended the narrow purview of anti-
colonial nationalism, with its focus on physical liberation from foreign rule and a
general sense of collectivity. Arab existentialism thus fulfilled a dual role: First, it
framed decolonization as a process with an extremely broad cultural and intellectual

spectrum, ranging from the ontology of modern Arab subjectivity and the balance
between local and universal culture (e.g., the problem of authenticity) to the nexus
between politics and culture and the desired contract between state and society.
Second, drawing on this elementary mapping, it helped to create a new intellectual
space, which gave rise to an assertive Third World Arab intelligentsia. Arab exis-
tentialism functioned as a potent tool for social, political, and cultural self-criticism
and was an important element in forging extra-regional alliances with the global front
against imperialism. In addition, it aspired to ground the project of reinventing a new
Arab self within a new philosophical framework. Yet while it was involved to some
extent with all of these tasks, Arab existentialism emerged not as a unified and ac-
cumulative phenomenon but as a multifocal intellectual system.
Thus, interestingly, the fragmented nature of existentialism was not the result of
a weak “borrowing” or “adaptation,” but rather a multilayered cross-cultural process
in which European existentialism lost its original meaning at the very same moment
in which it was fused with local Arab thought and created anew. Out of this process,
Arab existentialism emerged as a nuanced, complex, and at times contradictory phe-
nomenon. It thus should be seen not as a “poor application” of an original European
idea, but as a salient characteristic of transnational thought as such, in which ideas
are made legible across cultural borders and rendered culturally functional through
creative translation, and not through intellectual fidelity to provenance.
In keeping with this “messy” process, the story of Arab existentialism begins with
Badawi’s promise to liberate the Arab self from the constraints of colonial culture
by fusing European existentialism with Islamic philosophy. It continues with the
efforts of Suhayl Idris and Mahmud Amin al-Alim to forge a revolutionary and
politicized understanding of existentialism and use it to marginalize the old-guard
intelligentsia. In the 1960s, Arab intellectuals saw existentialism as a way to connect
with the global culture of resistance. However, inasmuch as it was deployed as a
constructive collective tool, Arab minorities such as Palestinians, women, and Iraqi
dissidents used it to offer a penetrating critique of the Arab project of liberation.
While the “end” of Arab existentialism was related to some extent to its appropri-
ation by such critics, this intellectual tradition would be driven to its conclusion by
none other than Sartre himself. On the eve of the 1967 War, shortly after he and
Simone de Beauvoir made their celebrated visit to Egypt, the French philosopher
abruptly withdrew his support from his Arab interlocutors and sided with Israel.
Thereafter, his name became synonymous with betrayal, and his legacy was left to
languish.
Taken as a whole, these multiple existentialist variants shed new light on what
decolonization meant to people on the ground and how they thought about reacting
to it and participating in it. Thus, the history of Arab existentialism suggests that
beyond anticolonial nationalism and the straitjacket of “ideology” (Marxist, liberal,

socialist, etc.), decolonization does indeed have a meaningful intellectual history

worthy of investigation.
AS GERMAN FORCES HEADED TOWARD Paris in June 1940, the Russian émigré phi-

losopher Alexandre Koyré left France and crossed the Mediterranean, hoping to
enlist with the British army in Egypt or, alternatively, with the newly organized Free
French Forces.10 Instead, he settled for less action as a professor of philosophy at
Cairo’s Fuad University, where he had taught for several years during the 1930s.
André Lalande (1867–1963), a Sorbonne retiree and one of Koyré’s former pro-
fessors, was also on the faculty of this young and highly ambitious university.11 In-
deed, students at Fuad took classes with some of the most accomplished European
scholars and often traveled to the Continent in search of knowledge.12 Upon his
arrival in Egypt, Koyré began working with Abd al-Rahman Badawi, an advanced
graduate student. Their work would critically influence the reception and reinven-
tion of existentialism in the Middle East.13 While anchored in the local scholarly
tradition, this reception also mirrors critical shifts in European philosophy, for in-
stance with regard to epistemology.
Until the 1930s, epistemology, represented in France by Henri Bergson, had been
the central branch of philosophy, dealing with what we can know and with what
degree of certainty. Existentialism, by contrast, prioritized the problem of being at
the expense of knowing.14 Before moving to France in 1912, Koyré had been a mem-
ber of Edmund Husserl’s phenomenological circle in Göttingen. He thus “served as
a bridge between Germany and France and between Husserl and Bergson.”15 He was
10 Jean Hering, “In Memoriam: Alexander Koyré,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 25,
no. 3 (March 1965): 453– 454, here 454.

11 Having taught in Cairo from 1926 to 1930, Lalande returned to Fuad University in October 1937,
where he joined an established cohort of French scholars, including Émile Bréhier and Louis Rougier.
This time he would stay until 1940. As a token of recognition for Lalande’s unflinching commitment to
Egyptian education, the Islamic philosopher Mustafa Abd al-Raziq conceded the position of chair to
him. Abd al-Rahman Badawi, Sirat Hayati, 2 vols. (Beirut, 2000), 1: 61–62; Muhammad Mubarak, al-
Jabiri: Bayna Turuhat Lalande wa Jan-Biyajih (Beirut, 2000).
12 After becoming public in 1925, Fuad University voraciously absorbed new academic disciplines
and experienced a rapid process of academic professionalization. Donald Malcolm Reid, Cairo University
and the Making of Modern Egypt (Cambridge, 1990).
13 Given his status as a foreign intellectual whose major academic degrees were from Germany,
Koyré was unable to find a permanent position at a major French university. This was one of the reasons
why he, and many other European intellectuals, periodically traveled to teach in Egypt. This was the
third time that Koyré had been invited to teach in the university’s Department of Philosophy. While in
Egypt he worked for the Comité national d’Égypte de la France libre. Badawi, Sirat Hayati, 1: 62. For
Koyré’s biography, see the online archive of the Centre Alexandre Koyré at the École des hautes études
en sciences sociales, www.koyre.cnrs.fr. Ethan Kleinberg, Generation Existential: Heidegger’s Philosophy
in France, 1927–1961 (Ithaca, N.Y., 2005), 59.
14 The phenomenological open-ended manner of thinking departed significantly from the theoret-
ical cognition of knowledge and moved toward the practical concerns of everyday life. This shift was
entirely new to French philosophy of the 1930s, which was still focused on Bergson. Indeed, aspiring
intellectuals such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Raymond Aron were bored by Bergsonian philosophy
and were ill-prepared, philosophically speaking, to deal with the realities of the 1930s. As Aron succinctly
put it, in German philosophy he “found everything I could not find in France.” Kleinberg, Generation
Existential, 89. J. J. K. [Joseph J. Kockelmans], “Phenomenology,” in Robert Audi, ed., The Cambridge
Dictionary of Philosophy (Cambridge, 1999), 664 –666.
15 Koyré later held a position at the École pratiques des hautes études. Kleinberg, Generation Ex-
istential, 59.

1066 Yoav Di-Capua
also a follower of Heidegger’s existentialism, believing strongly that “[Heidegger’s]

‘philosophy of existence’ would not only determine a new stage of the development
of Western philosophy but would form the departure point for an entirely new cy-
cle.”16 As part of his effort to expose French intellectuals to contemporary German
philosophy, Koyré started a journal (Recherches philosophiques) and a seminar.17

Among the participants in this vibrant and experimental forum were Alexandre
Kojève and Henry Corbin. Kojève was a Russian émigré who studied with Karl Jas-
pers and after 1932 was responsible for systematically introducing Hegel and
Heidegger to French thought.18 Corbin was an Orientalist and the first French trans-
lator of Heidegger’s Being and Time and other seminal texts for which Koyré wrote
prefaces. Raymond Aron, who introduced Sartre to phenomenology and Heidegger,
was also a member of this circle. For reasons that are not entirely clear, in 1933 Koyré
departed Paris for his first academic year in Cairo, leaving the seminar in the skilled
hands of Kojève.19 He took with him to Egypt a familiarity with the newest and most
innovative philosophy.
For his part, following a 1937 visit to Germany, Badawi was ready to write about
“Death in Existential Philosophy,” a topic about which Koyré had much to say.20
Indeed, he received from Koyré a new philosophical frame of reference: Max
Scheler, Karl Jaspers, Martin Heidegger, Gabriel Marcel, Jean Wahl, and Emmanuel
Lévinas. These thinkers fostered the rise of Arab phenomenology and taught Badawi
that death is not simply an event that happens at the end of one’s life, but rather
an experience that shapes one’s entire way of being and, especially, illuminates the
condition of authenticity upon the eventual encounter with death itself.21
He also began to think in Heideggerian terms, attempting to explain existence
in terms of time and to understand it from a circumstantial perspective in which it
is not historical, linear, or continuous, but fragmented, ruptured, and synchronic. In
16 Quoted in Tom Rockmore, Heidegger and French Philosophy: Humanism, Antihumanism and Being
(London, 1995), xii.

17 The seminar focused on Heidegger but also offered a new reading of Hegel, who until that point
had been seen in France as an outdated romantic philosopher. Koyré’s journal covered the same terrain.
He was aided by other graduates of Husserl’s circle, including Jean Hering, and by Émile Bréhier, who
also taught in Cairo. Michael S. Roth, Knowing and History: Appropriations of Hegel in Twentieth Century
France (Ithaca, N.Y., 1988), 2–9, 97.
18 On Alexandre Kojève, see Vincent Descombes, Modern French Philosophy, trans. L. Scott-Fox and
J. M. Harding (Cambridge, 1998), 9– 48; Roth, Knowing and History, 83–146.

19 Other participating members during the 1930s would become the who’s who of French thought
of the 1950s and 1960s: Georges Bataille, Jacques Lacan, Raymond Queneau, Maurice Merleau-Ponty,
Eric Weil, André Breton, and Emmanuel Lévinas. “What happened in that seminar between 1933 and
1939 changed the face of modern French philosophy”; Kleinberg, Generation Existential, 65–66, 69.
20 Originally, Badawi worked with Lalande, who was still committed to Bergson’s philosophy. La-
lande hoped that by teaching his Les théories de l’induction et de l’expérimentation (Paris, 1929), he could
steer the scholarly habits and intellectual orientation of students toward a pre–World War I French
philosophical tradition. When Badawi evinced an interest in existentialism, Lalande instructed him to
shy away from the “moda” of Heidegger and Jaspers and settle for a more canonical topic. After some
negotiation, Lalande reluctantly agreed on “Death in Contemporary Philosophy.” Yet with war raging
in Europe, Lalande decided to leave for France, and Koyré took over his post. Badawi, Sirat Hayati, 1:
63.
21 Hassan Hanafi, “Phenomenology and Islamic Philosophy,” in Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, ed., Phe-
nomenology World-Wide: Foundations, Expanding Dynamisms, Life-Engagements—A Guide for Research

and Study (Dordrecht, 2002), 318–321. Badawi’s M.A. thesis was what works of this kind often are: an
exercise. Written in French, it was eventually published in 1964. Abdurahman Badawi, Le problème de
la mort dans la philosophie existentielle (Le Caire, 1964).

other words, Badawi subscribed to two of the main themes of existentialism: first,
existence precedes essence (i.e., who a human being is [his or her essence] is the result
of his or her choices [existence]); and second, time is of the essence (i.e., human beings
are time-bound, and the lived time that they experience is different from measured
clock time).22 Yet by the time Badawi had come around to this new way of thinking,

Koyré had abruptly left Egypt for New York City, where he would reinvent himself
as a historian of science.23
As an intimate insider of the Franco-German philosophical scene, Koyré had
brought an incredible heritage to Cairo. What he left behind was ultimately a func-
tion of a simple one-on-one philosophical transaction between himself and Badawi.
Badawi credited Koyré with shaping his methodology, introducing him to modern
philosophical notions and the contemporary philosophical scene, teaching him phe-
nomenology (which was new to the Arab world and was given the name ilm al-
zahriyat ), and, most importantly, encouraging him to draw a link between existen-
tialism and Sufism.24 Four months after Koyré’s departure, Badawi submitted his
master’s thesis.25 He was now ready for his Ph.D. His ability to practice philosophy
at the highest level was not in question.
Badawi’s dissertation, titled al-Zaman al-Wujudi (Existential Time), investigated
how time shapes individual existence. It argued that “true existence is that of the
individual. The individual is the subject that necessitates freedom. The meaning of
this freedom is the very existence of possibility.”26 He then followed a classic Heideg-
gerian interpretation of subjectivity and embraced Heidegger’s key concept, Dasein,
which denotes not a conscious subject, politically or otherwise, but the way human
beings (both as real people and in the abstract form of “being human”) are in the
world among things.27 In doing so, he embraced two more axioms of existential phi-
losophy: radical individualism (i.e., a humanistic focus on the individual’s quest for
meaning and identity) and freedom (i.e., the only guarantee of individualistic self-
22 Although Badawi’s notion of time is reminiscent of Bergson’s notion of durée as an exploration
of “real” time that eludes mathematics and science and inner life as a kind of duration, the two differed
markedly in terms of their understanding of human subjectivity as the vessel of time. Characteristically
immodest, Badawi preferred to think of his work as “complementary to that of Heidegger.” Badawi, Sirat
Hayati, 1: 179–180. See Badawi, Le problème de la mort dans la philosophie existentielle, 1–7.
23 In July 1941, Charles de Gaulle visited Cairo and enlisted Koyré in the effort to represent the
cause of a free France in the United States. Koyré later held a one-year position at the Institute of
Advanced Studies at Princeton University. He never returned to teach in the Middle East. I. Bernard
Cohen and Marshall Clagett, “Alexandre Koyré (1892–1964): Commemoration,” Isis 57, no. 2 (Summer
1966): 157–166; John Herivel, “Alexandre Koyré (1892–1964),” British Journal for the History of Science
2, no. 3 (June 1965): 257–259; John E. Murdoch, “Alexandre Koyré, 1892–1964,” Proceedings and Ad-
dresses of the American Philosophical Association 38 (1964 –1965): 98–99.
24 Some of Koyré’s colleagues, including Heidegger’s translator Henry Corbin, were Orientalists,
and the possibility of making such intellectual connections was viewed with excitement. Badawi, Sirat
Hayati, 1: 63–65.
25 Ibid., 1: 153–155.
26 Badawi also published a short essay that was based on his dissertation and summarized his phi-
losophy in accessible terms: Abd al-Rahman Badawi, “Khulasat Madhhabina al-Wujudi: al-Zaman al-
Wujudi,” in Badawi, Dirasat fi-l-Falsafa al-Wujudiya (Cairo, 1966), 236–263, here 236.
27 “ . . . in which a relationship is not that of one subject to another or between the subject and things
but a relationship between the subject and itself.” Ibid., 239. See also Abd al-Rahman Badawi, al-Zaman
al-Wujudi (Cairo, 1955), 153–239. Interestingly, with the approval of Taha Husayn, Badawi used the
medieval Islamic term Aniya to Arabize Heidegger’s Dasein.

1068 Yoav Di-Capua
reflection and responsibility). By the time Badawi had been awarded his doctorate,
he was already being celebrated as Egypt’s first modern philosopher.
It was now 1944, and Badawi was a busy man, traveling, lecturing, and publishing
at an incredible pace. His major project was aimed at achieving an intellectual syn-
thesis between Sufism and existential philosophy.28 He viewed both systems of

thought as predicated on individual subjectivity, which is to say that we are in the
world by means of a relationship of being in which the subject is our body, our world,
and our situation. Like Koyré, Badawi believed that existentialism was the future of
post–World War II European philosophy. Thus he thought that by fusing it with
Sufism, he would instantly bring Arab philosophy up to a level of parity with Heideg-
gerian thought.29 If that could be achieved, the postcolonial Arab generation could
join the modern world on equal philosophical terms.30
To make this fusion happen, Badawi sought to update the medieval Sufi doctrine
of the “Perfect Man” (al-Insan al-Kamil ) as an “isthmus (barzah) between necessity
(wujub) and possibility (imkan), . . . which combines the attributes of eternity and
its laws with the attributes of the generation of being.”31 He went on to mine this
mystical doctrine for the key principles and concepts of Heideggerian existentialism,
arguing that he was drawing on medieval Sufism exactly as Heidegger had built on
Søren Kierkegaard. He promised his readers that this exercise would result in noth-
ing less than the birth of a new Arab subject and “a comprehensive philosophy for
our generation.”32
In hindsight, however, Badawi was in the same boat with the Chinese and es-
pecially Japanese philosophers who had “discovered” Heidegger in the 1920s, finding
his work highly suggestive in terms of its relation to mysticism. In the East Asian
context, Heidegger’s widely noticed compatibility with Daoism boiled down to mere
“correspondences, congruencies and resonances,” something well short of synthe-
sis.33 This was also the case with Sufism. For all of his work, Badawi’s search for
28 Badawi also studied with Mustafa Abd al-Raziq, a towering figure of Islamic thought. The latter
taught logic in the tradition of Ibn Sina (980–1037) and offered close, and sometime excessive, readings
of original texts. He was also interested in mysticism, or Sufism, a topic that Badawi would later explore
in connection with existential philosophy. In a way, by attempting to fuse existentialism with Sufism,
Badawi sought to bring his two mentors, Abd al-Raziq and Koyré, together. For Abd al-Raziq’s bi-
ography, see Ahmad Zakariyya al-Shalaq, al-Shaykh Mustafa Abd al-Raziq wa Mudhakaratihi: Aql Mus-
tanir Tahta al-Amama (Cairo, 2006), 13–56. Ibrahim Madkur, “Mustafa Abd al-Raziq: Rais Madrasa,”
in al-Majlis al-Ala li-l- Thaqafa, al-Shaykh al-Akbar Mustafa Abd al-Raziq: Mufakiran wa Adabiyan wa
Muslihan (Cairo, 1982), 7–11, here 8; Badawi, Sirat Hayati, 1: 58–59.
29 Simultaneously, he also perceived individual subjectivity as a starting point for philosophy and,
more broadly, as “the only true existence.” Although up until this point Bergson was quite influential
in Arab intellectual circles, Badawi parted with Bergsonian philosophy, aspects of which he now crit-
icized as mere “logical formulations” of existence. Abd al-Rahman Badawi, al-Insaniyya wa-l-Wujudiya
fi-l-Fikr al-Arabi (Cairo, 1947), 68, 94 –95; Charles D. Smith, Islam and the Search for Social Order in
Modern Egypt: A Biography of Muhammad Husayn Haykal (Albany, N.Y., 1983), especially chap. 6.
30 In Badawi’s words, the goal was to “establish a comprehensive philosophy for our generation.”
Al-Insaniyya wa-l-Wujudiya, 103.

31 R. Arnaldez, “al-Insa ៮ n al-Ka៮ mil,” in P. Bearman, Th. Bianquis, C. E. Bosworth, E. van Donzel,
and W. P. Heinrichs, eds., Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd ed. (2011), Brill Online, http://referenceworks
.brillonline.com/browse/encyclopaedia-of-islam-2.
32 From this standpoint, Sufism was not merely an exercise in individual self-awareness but a full-
fledged analysis of subjectivity. Badawi, al-Insaniya wa-l-Wujudiya, 68–71, 96–97, 103–104, 107–140. See
also his exploration of the “Perfect Man” doctrine in al-Insan al-Kamil fi-l-Islam (Cairo, 1950).
33 The first substantial commentary on Heidegger in any language was written in Japan. Ko ៮ ichi
Tsujimura, “Martin Heidegger’s Thinking and Japanese Philosophy,” Epoché: A Journal for the History

philosophical synthesis resulted only in the discovery of Heideggerian and phenom-

enological categories of thought in Sufism. There never was an actual merging of
these spheres in a fashion that, to borrow from Nietzsche, would have allowed Arab
philosophy as a whole “a past a posteriori from which [it] might spring, as against that
from which [it] do[es] spring.”34 Indeed, years later, a former student mused that he

“lived” two distinct forms of existentialism (Western and Sufi) rather than one.35
The Lebanese philosopher Charles Malik taught Heidegger in Beirut and had
even studied under him at the University of Freiburg, but it was Badawi who dom-
inated the philosophical discussions of his day with this promise of a new philos-
ophy.36 By 1950, young Arab intellectuals who wanted to read about existentialism
in Arabic found Badawi’s work about individualism, authenticity, angst, responsi-
bility, and freedom readily available.37
Yet despite existentialism’s philosophical promise to liberate Arab subjectivity
from the constraints of European cosmology, it was not clear what young people
could do with it. Even though, during the 1950s and 1960s, Badawi was the most
serious existentialist philosopher in the region, seeing it largely as an academic pur-
suit for its own sake, his existentialism was not, so to speak, “operational” enough,
for it lacked a real-life application and a political and ethical community to support
it.38 It was, as the philosophy itself held, a one-man project of radical individualism
that eventually functioned primarily as an important philosophical reference source
for future writers in the Arab world as well as in Africa.39 And there was also another
problem: Badawi had nothing to say yet about “commitment” and Sartre, the “other”
existentialist.40
Indeed, while Badawi’s existentialism was making its very slow debut as a general
frame of reference, the storm of Sartrean existentialism was gathering in the East.
Having arrived in the Arab world on the eve of an intellectual changing of the guard,
of Philosophy 12, no. 2 (2008): 349–357. For a revisionist assessment of the relationship between
Heidegger, East Asian thought, and comparative philosophy, see Stella Sandford, “Going Back:
Heidegger, East Asia and ‘the West,’ ” Radical Philosophy 120 (July/August 2003): 11–22.
34 Philosophical and legal synthesis had been on the minds of Arab intellectuals since the 1890s
and was especially promoted by the famous reformist Shaykh Muhammad Abduh (d. 1905). Friedrich
Nietzsche, The Use and Abuse of History (New York, 1957), 21–22.
35 “Hiwar ma al-Mufakkir al-Taqaddumi Mahmud Amin al-Alim,” Adab wa Naqd 1, no. 21 (1986):
99–117, here, 102.

36 Charles Malik of the American University of Beirut was a graduate of Harvard. He taught modern
philosophy and was not concerned with the issue of synthesis and compatibility with Islamic philosophy.
While serving as a diplomat during the late 1940s, he assisted Eleanor Roosevelt in drafting the United
Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Habib C. Malik, “The Reception of Kierkegaard in
the Arab World,” in Jon Stewart, ed., Kierkegaard’s International Reception, vol. 3: The Near East, Asia,
Australia and the Americas (Farnham, UK, 2009), 39–95, here 41– 49. For other young Arab philosophers
who applied phenomenology to Islamic philosophy, see Hanafi, “Phenomenology and Islamic Philos-
ophy.”
37 By 1950, Badawi had published fourteen short books on philosophy. His most popular book was
al-Insaniyya wa-l-Wujudiya.
38 The great irony was that in his personal life during the 1940s, Badawi was heavily involved in
radical, and sometimes violent, nationalist organizations. By his own admission, he was a member of the
semi-fascist “Young Egypt,” and early on he had been a Nazi sympathizer. Badawi, Sirat Hayati, 1:
213–223.
39 Mourad Wahba, “Contemporary Moslem Philosophies in North Africa,” in Emmanuel Chukwudi
Eze, ed., African Philosophy: An Anthology (Oxford, 2000), 50–55.

40 Badawi did not write about commitment. Later in life, he argued that Sartre had nothing to offer
by way of philosophy and added: “I do not appreciate him at all philosophically.” Sirat Hayati, 1: 183.

1070 Yoav Di-Capua
it was initially met with skepticism by established writers. The text that represented
Sartre in the Middle East was not his major philosophical oeuvre, Being and Noth-
ingness (1943), which was not even translated until 1966, but his 1945 contributions
to Les Temps modernes, which were later delivered as public lectures and published
as Qu’est-ce que la littérature?41 As far as mainstream Arab thinkers were concerned,

Sartre’s politicization of culture was a threat that required their immediate attention.
As one of the foremost late architects and bearers of modern Arab culture (the
nahda), the prolific Taha Husayn was the first to grasp the intellectual appeal of
Sartre’s articles in Les Temps modernes, and he reacted to them with a clear sense
of urgency.42 In Husayn’s view, Qu’est-ce que la littérature? critically examined the
relationship between the writer and society, making the argument that since writing
is a consequential form of acting/being, intellectuals should assume political respon-
sibility for their work and the circumstances that condition it. This call for respon-
sibility-cum-professional action was conjoined in Sartre’s concept of commitment
(engagement ). Although the philosophical concern of commitment was human free-
dom and authentic existence, its practical application was “something for which [one]
is prepared to die.”43 This “something” was widely understood as a political cause,
and almost overnight, commitment as total submersion in the political became a
mainstay of Sartrean existentialism.44
In dealing with the enormous potential appeal of commitment to disillusioned
young Arabs, Husayn argued that, historically speaking, writers had always had more
options to choose from than the alleged two Sartrean choices of engaged/progressive
versus detached/reactionary. He also maintained that engagement was a specific re-
sponse to the unique European realities of the 1930s and to the much-regretted
passivity of Sartre’s generation prior to the war. Since these European circumstances
had no parallel in the Middle East, Sartre’s notion of commitment was culturally
void.45 In his lengthy meditation on Sartre’s concerns (what we write, why we write,
and to whom we write), Husayn invoked his generation’s apolitical notion of liter-
ature as “art for art’s sake.” In the mid-1950s, this specific conception of intellectual
41 However, in a series of critical essays on Sartre’s existential philosophy, Naguib Baladi referred
to Being and Nothingness. Baladi, “Jean-Paul Sartre wa mawaqifuhu,” al-Katib al-Misri, April 1946, 427–
434. See also the subsequent articles in June and July 1946, 50–59 and 277–283 respectively.
42 The nahda (Renaissance) was a mid-nineteenth-century project of cultural modernization. Arab
intellectual intellectuals later expanded its meaning to cover the Arab experience of modernity as a
whole. The history, meaning, and scope of the nahda are currently being reevaluated to the extent that
Arab intellectuals often speak of various nahdas. For a standard, but entirely outdated, history of the
nahda, see Albert Hourani, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age, 1798–1939 (1962; rev. ed., Cambridge,
1989). See also Elizabeth Suzanne Kassab, Contemporary Arab Thought: Cultural Critique in Contem-
porary Perspective (New York, 2009), chap. 1.
43 In Sartre’s classic existentialist novel The Age of Reason (1945), the protagonist, Mathieu, fa-
mously exclaims: “I am not proud of my life, and I’m penniless. My freedom? It’s a burden to me; for
years past I have been free, and to no purpose. I simply long to exchange it for a good sound certainty
. . . I agree with you that no one can be a man who has not discovered something for which he is prepared
to die.” The novel is indebted to the main ideas of Being and Nothingness. Jean-Paul Sartre, The Age
of Reason, trans. Eric Sutton (1947; repr., New York, 2001), 122.
44 Even though it is often understood in this way, Sartre’s notion of commitment was far from a
straightforward call for politics. In fact, it was just one of the essential elements in his quest for au-
thenticity or, in his words, the “complete consciousness of being embarked.” Nonetheless, because Sartre
led a politically engaged life, his non-political meanings of existentialism were easy to ignore. David E.
Cooper, Existentialism: A Reconstruction (Oxford, 1990), 172–177.
45 Taha Husayn, “al-Adab bayna al-Itisal wa-l-Infisal,” al-Katib al-Misri, August 1946, 373–388.

labor was to become the focus of a fierce generational debate. Lastly, maintaining
his focus on his mission to discredit committed literature, Husayn criticized Sartre’s
unfortunate exclusion of poetry and the visual arts from the categories of committed
literary engagement.46
But Husayn also ventured into the political sphere. The overwhelming demand

for action and its manifestation in the political violence of the mid-1940s—specif-
ically the murder of the Egyptian prime minister, Mahmud Fahmi al-Nuqrashi, in
1949; three consecutive military coups in Syria; urban riots in Iraq; and mass student
demonstrations in Egypt—indicated that young people did not believe in separating
the intellectual from the political. They wanted ideas to instigate real and immediate
change, and they rejected the ineffectiveness of corrupt democratic institutions and
their tendency to engage in endless deliberations. As a senior member of a gener-
ation of old udaba, or cultural luminaries, who perceived politics as an indirect ex-
tension of culture, Husayn feared the potential of commitment to embed the cultural
in the political. Commitment was therefore a cultural menace.47
Husayn’s fear of commitment was prophetic, but not all of the members of his
generation viewed Sartre’s existentialism in the same light. Salama Musa, an Egyp-
tian Fabian ideologue who was no stranger to a prison cell, published Literature to
the Masses (al-Adab li-l-shab) in 1961, a text that embraced Sartre and challenged
Husayn to answer the question “What is his message, and how does it serve hu-
manity?”48 Abbas Mahmud al-Aqqad, a prolific humanist, rejected the individu-
alism of existentialism, but commended its protection of freedom. He also reminded
his readers that beyond Sartre, existentialism was a substantial and complex phil-
osophical tradition.49 Somewhat ironically, in warning the young about the dangers
of commitment, Husayn gave this burgeoning intellectual movement its Arabic
name: iltizam.50 Young Arab decolonizers were now free to use it as they saw fit.
IF BADAWI PROMOTED THE deeply philosophical and politically disinterested brand of

existentialism, the journalist, literary critic, and novelist Suhayl Idris endorsed Sar-
46 For reasons that had to do with philosophy of language and representation, Sartre excluded poetry
(as well as other non-representational arts, including music) from the list of committed modes of ex-
pression. Although he later reversed his position, Arab critics of all stripes found the omission of po-
etry—historically a major form of committed expression in Islamic culture—incomprehensible. Anwar
al-Maddawi and Abd al-Wahhab al-Bayati were among those who critiqued Sartre. Al-Maddawi, “al-
Adab al-Multazim,” al-Adab, February 1953, 14 –15; Barada, “Tahawwulat mafhum al-iltizam fi-l-adab
al-Arabi al-hadith,” in Barada, ed., Tahawwulat Mafhum al-Iltizam fi-l-Adab al-Arabi al-Hadith (Beirut,
2003), 8– 47, here 37; Abd al-Wahhab al-Bayati, Tajribati al-shiriya (Beirut, 1968), 37.
47 Husayn never acknowledged the limitations of the nahda to engender positive political change
through ordinary parliamentary life. He had already published Mustaqbal al-Thaqafa fi Misr (The Future
of Culture in Egypt ) (Cairo, 1938), a daring defense of the nahda that was nonetheless oblivious of the
main problems of the postcolonial era. This blindness characterized other nahdawi figures as well and
put them on a collision course with the younger generation, whose belief in democratic constitutional
life was gradually eroding.
48 Salama Musa saw Sartre’s commitment as a model for intellectual action, which he himself prac-
ticed throughout his life. His systematic criticism of the monarchy landed him in jail. Musa, Haula
alamuni (Cairo, 1966), 271–280; Musa, al-Adab li-l-Shab (Cairo, 1961), 12–13.
49 Abbas Mahmud al-Aqqad, Aqaid al-Mufakkirin fi-l- Qarn al-Ishrin (Cairo, 1968), 141–155. See
a reprint of two essays from the late 1940s, al-Aqqad, Bayna al-Kutub wa-l-Nas (Beirut, 1966), 15–33.
50 Originally coined as the Arabic term for the French engagement, iltizam ultimately prevailed at
the expense of the term indiwa. Husayn, “al-Adab bayna al-Itisal wa-l-Infisal.”

1072 Yoav Di-Capua
tre’s political existentialism.51 By the mid-1950s, it overshadowed Badawi’s enter-

prise, signifying the triumph of literature over philosophy as a vehicle for postco-
lonial thought. Born in Beirut in 1923 to a lower-middle-class Sunni family, Idris
grew up in a colonial atmosphere in which the urban middle class tried to appropriate
the culture of the French occupiers while, paradoxically, also resisting it. This ex-

plains how he matured as both a Francophone and an avid nationalist who system-
atically nurtured two paths: the universal and the particular.
Idris’s gift for letters became evident at an early age, and against all odds, es-
pecially financial ones, he pursued his passion all the way to the Sorbonne, where
he earned his doctorate. There, between 1949 and 1952, he would write one of the
first studies of the Arabic short story. When Idris arrived in Paris, existentialism was
in full flower. He found a city that was dominated by the literature and theater of
the existentialists and whose young intellectuals had become increasingly committed
to the Sartrean idea that words are action. Impressed by this scene, he and other
Arab intellectuals set out to create a corresponding literature for their own gen-
eration. As the Egyptian economist, political prisoner, and future Third World ac-
tivist Ismail Sabri Abdallah explained, “The important thing in the late 1940s was
not only to free our country, but to acquire the knowledge to do so.”52
As the Arab world entered the phase of decolonization, an entire cohort of young
intellectuals flocked to the city, choosing the freedom of Paris for their project of
emancipating Arab culture. Powered by sugar and caffeine, the phenomenon of
Third-Worldism gained momentum in Europe’s cafés.53 Indeed, no one who visited
Paris following World War II could avoid seeing that cafés were the focal point of
intellectual exchange, social happenings, and exhibitionist behavior.54 Around 1950,
a short visit to the Café Dupont, a local favorite of Arab students, was all that was
needed to meet the next generation of Arab intellectuals.55 It was an international
scene where they could interact with like-minded people from places such as Congo,
Senegal, Cameroon, Togo, Upper Volta, and Cambodia. As the developmental econ-
omist Samir Amin later noted, he and his peers shared not only in the association
of freedom with personal and collective dignity, but in something that would come
to be called a Third World condition.56
In the eyes of a foreigner such as Idris, existentialism was not simply an idea or
a philosophy but an active scene, a daily performance of people who did things like
sex, jazz, and wild dancing. The sharp contrast between the lived freedom of Paris
51 After the 1952 Revolution in Egypt, however, Badawi was asked to serve on the committee that
drafted the new constitution and contribute his ideas about freedom and duties. That was his only
political engagement with Egypt’s revolutionary regime. This constitution was never implemented.
Malik, “The Reception of Kierkegaard in the Arab World,” 62.
52 David Tresilian, “Ismail Sabri Abdullah: Mapping the Arab Future,” al-Ahram Weekly, July 4,
1991.
53 Contrary to many studies on Third-Worldism, the movement did not simply start with the drama
of Bandung; it began with the formation of an international intelligentsia based in Europe. See, for
instance, Prashad, The Darker Nations.
54 For café existentialism, see Cooper, Existentialism, 2, 12, 96, 170, 171.
55 For example, from Tunisia, al-Shadhali al-Qalibi (future minister of culture), Ahmad bin Salif
(minister of finance), and Mahmud Masadi (playwright and future minister of education); from Mo-
rocco, Abdallah Ibrahim (future prime minister). Badawi, Sirat Hayati, 2: 195.
56 For the postcolonial generation and the Third World, see Samir Amin, Mudhakkirati (Beirut,
2006), 75–89.

and the strict code of social, and in particular sexual, behavior at home periodically
surfaced in his correspondence. In December 1949, he wrote to his Egyptian col-
league Anwar al-Maddawi: “Here they cherish affection and love as part of their
life, whereas we in the East renounce this quality.”57 Visibly scandalized, a group of
visiting Egyptian journalists wrote home that existentialism was not so much a phi-

losophy as it was a platform for moral laxity and sexual misconduct.58 The father of
a young Egyptian girl by the name of Liliane refused to let her leave for this city of
sin “where people kissed one another in the streets.”59 Those who were opposed to
such conduct associated it with existentialism and believed that it would bring noth-
ing but egotistic indifference and social decay.60
In this atmosphere of existentialism as performance, Idris took the unexpected
personal freedom that he experienced as representative of the philosophy of exis-
tentialism as a whole and as a model for a collective cultural renaissance at home.
“Life here,” he wrote to al-Maddawi, “is characterized by a kind of freedom that
has no parallel in the East. We are in need of such freedom. Freedom in our lands
is suffocated . . . In Paris people can say and do whatever they want . . . and live
humanism to its fullest extent . . . However, our freedom of speech is repressed, the
freedom of thought is massacred, and the freedom of life outside the boundaries of
inherited tradition is virtually nonexistent. We need to learn from the West the love
of freedom as it is this love alone that would guarantee us the freedom we yearn
for.”61 Prioritizing this sense of freedom at the expense of systematic thought, he was
intellectually selective. Although he was well aware that Sartre was primarily a phi-
losopher, he ignored his philosophical works and read only plays and novels.62 For
instance, he never ventured into Being and Nothingness or into the work of Gabriel
Marcel, the person who coined the term “existentialism.” Even Sartre’s Réflexions
sur la question juive, a text that could have helped to expose his staunch, if well-
hidden, support of Zionism, was not approached and was never translated.
In 1953, having returned to Beirut as Dr. Idris, he published his semi-autobio-
graphical novel al-Hayy al-Latini (The Latin Quarter ). In this self-described exis-
tentialist work, he deals with the individualistic anxiety and conflicts of an Arab
intellectual who is torn between East and West, tradition and modernity.63 The sim-
ilarities to Sartre’s La nausée (1938), which also focuses on an individual faced with
an overwhelming dilemma, are clear. With such “immediate” sources of inspiration
and with so many young Arabs in search of a new tomorrow, some attempts at literary
renewal were comical. Such was the case with a young Syrian named Abd al-Rahim
al-Shalabi, who sought to “create an entirely new literature that emerged from his
specific experience of life.” He worked on this novel for close to a decade. It sold
57 Ahmad Muhammad, Anwar al-Maddawi: Asruhu al-Adabi wa Asrar Masatih (al-Riyad, 1988),
193, 209. See also Suhayl Idris, Dhikrayat al-Adab wa-l-Hubb (Beirut, 2002), 85–87.
58 Badawi, Sirat Hayati, 2: 184.
59 Simone de Beauvoir, All Said and Done (New York, 1974), 378.
60 For a debate on this issue, see “Marakat al-Wujudiya,” al-Adab, November 1955, 72–73.
61 His letters gave his friends the impression that Paris was an endless carnival. Al-Maddawi half-
jokingly inquired: “Are you spending your time in the nests of the existentialists, have you seen Simone
de Beauvoir, have you walked behind the coffin of André Gide?” Muhammad, Anwar al-Maddawi, 190;
Idris, Dhikrayat al-adab wa-l-Hubb, 103.
62 Muhammad, Anwar al-Maddawi, 196, 207, 210; Idris, Dhikrayat al-Adab wa-l-Hubb, 106.
63 M. M. Badawi, A Short History of Modern Arabic Literature (Oxford, 1993).

1074 Yoav Di-Capua
two copies. Badawi, who recorded this episode, took it as an example—actually,

more of a caricature—of compatriots who lived existentialism as style without con-
tent and as practice without philosophy.64 It was Paris’s carnival that mattered most.
Idris had also been making plans to publish a literary magazine, with an agenda
modeled on Sartrean existentialism. In August 1952, he wrote to al-Maddawi, “we

are aiming for literature that is called ‘iltizam’ or ‘indiwa’ ”—committed literature.65
A year later, the first issue of al-Adab came out. It immediately became a cultural
touchstone, prioritizing existentialism as literary action. This groundbreaking mag-
azine would remain the key literary venue for decades to come. Its bold mission
statement reads like the creed of an entire generation:
The present situation of Arab countries makes it imperative for every citizen, each in his own
field, to mobilize all his efforts for the express object of liberating the homeland, raising its
political, social and intellectual level. In order that literature may be truthful it is essential
that it should not be isolated from the society in which it exists . . . The kind of literature which
this Review calls for and encourages is the literature of commitment (iltizam) which issues
from Arab society and pours back into it.66
A near-copy of Sartre’s agenda for Les Tempes modernes, al-Adab’s message spread
through Cairo, Baghdad, and other intellectual centers with incredible speed. Its
premise was that Arab culture was in a state of deep crisis, and that intellectuals
could change that situation through writing.67
One of the most important expressions of these concerns, and the one that Hu-
sayn feared the most, was the accusation by young writers that members of the old-
guard udaba were living in an ivory tower. Over the next two years, a specific debate
about the difference between writers’ “detachment,” “involvement,” and “engage-
ment” would take place in the Arab world.68 As part of their plan for cultural re-
newal, the younger generation reintroduced Sartre’s old question: What do we write,
why, and for whom? In December 1954, Idris invited Husayn to publicly debate these
questions.69
Husayn accepted the invitation and arrived in Beirut for what would prove to be
a famous debate with the literary critic Raif Khuri. They delivered separate lectures:
in “The Man of Letters Writes to the Masses,” Khuri preached iltizam and popular
action, while in “The Man of Letters Writes to the Elite,” Husayn endorsed political
64 Badawi, Sirat Hayati, 2: 194.
65 Muhammad, Anwar al-Maddawi, 231–232.
66 Other parts of the manifesto read: “It is the conviction of this Review that literature is an in-
tellectual activity directed to a great and noble end, which is that of effective literature that interacts
with society: it influences society just as much as it is influenced by it . . . The main aim of this Review
is to provide a platform for those fully conscious writers who live the experience of their age and who
could be regarded as its witness. In reflecting the needs of Arab society and in expressing its preoc-
cupations they pave the way for the reformers to put things right with all the effective means available.”
Quoted in M. M. Badawi, “Commitment in Contemporary Arabic Literature,” Cahiers d’histoire mon-
diale 14, no. 4 (1972): 858–879, here 868.
67 “Mihnat al-Adab,” al-Adab, April 1953, 70–71; “Shakawa al-Adab al-Arabi al-Hadith,” al-Adab,
May 1953, 1–5; “Azmat al-Majallat al-Adabiyya fi-l-Alam al-Arabi,” al-Adab, October 1953, 12–16;
Raja al-Naqqash, “fi Azmat al-Naqd al-Arabi al-Muasir,” al-Adab, November 1954, 8–10, 63–66.
68 For a review of the Iraqi debate in the newspaper al-Naba, see “Muhimat al-Adab wa Wajib
al-Adib,” al-Adab, January 1953, 74.

69 Muhammad Sabir Arab and Ahmad Zakariyya al-Shalaq, eds., Awraq Taha Husayn wa Muras-
alatahu, 2 vols. (Cairo, 2007), 1: 266.

neutrality and what he called elitism.70 Husayn conceded the debate, and the triumph
of iltizam and, respectively, of Idris’s journal was secured. This event also signified
the marginalization of the old-guard intelligentsia and its two leading periodicals,
al-Risala and al-Thaqafa, which ceased publication around that time. With this shift,
there was talk of Beirut’s becoming the capital of Arab thought, at the expense of

Cairo, the battered nahda’s center.71
With iltizam as an occupational and ethical habit, al-Adab’s community was now
at the forefront of nationalist culture, thus symbolizing a certain marginalization of
philosophy. In 1955, when Badawi pointed out this weakness, he was immediately
dismissed by literary existentialists.72 But he had a point. Qu’est-ce que la littérature?,
the key text from which Idris’s existentialists borrowed their active world view, was
poorly translated into Arabic, by a high school student, no less, and not until 1963—a
decade too late.73 As the thinker Jurj Tarabishi retrospectively observed, the dom-
inant intellectual pattern of the time was one of consumption, proliferation, and
action prior to translation and reflection. And he had a unique perspective on the
matter: as he shamefully admitted in 2003, it was he who, as a teenager, had produced
the poor 1963 translation of Qu’est-ce que la littérature?74
The dire circumstances of a younger generation who needed to radically and
quickly transform their colonial environment undoubtedly led them to embrace a
mode of action that divorced existentialism from its ontological context and phil-
osophical origins as outlined by Badawi.75 In old age, Idris acknowledged the prob-
lem:
As for me, I did not understand existentialism as a philosophy but as a social and political
doctrine which put the values of liberty and responsibility, so urgently needed in the Arab
world, into the center of ethical behavior.76
The radical reduction of existentialism to iltizam would prompt Marxists to invest

iltizam with their own political meaning.
AS LONG AS IN MOST Arab states a sizable peasantry was still exploited by landed
elites—as long, that is, as social justice was still a central concern—Marxism and
70 For the complete texts, see the May 1955 special issue of al-Adab. See also the discussion in Salma
Jayyusi, Trends and Movements in Modern Arabic Poetry, 2 vols. (Leiden, 1977), 2: 576.
71 “Liman wa Limadha Naktub?,” al-Adab, November 1954, 4 –7; “al-Zaama al-Adabiyya bayna
Bayrut wa-l-Qahira,” al-Adab, February 1954, 69–70; “al-Masuliyya fi-l-Adab,” al-Adab, August 1954,
17.
72 Al-Adab, November 1955, 72–73.
73 For a critical review of the translation, see Halil al-Hindawi, “Ma Huwa al-Adab?,” al-Adab,
February 1963, 49–50.

74 Jurj Tarabishi, “Shahadat Nasir Sabiq li-l-Iltizam,” in Barada, Tahawwulat mafhum al-Iltizam
fi-l-Adab al-Arabi al-Hadith, 60–69, here 61.

75 In an attempt to compensate for the missing philosophy, the journal eclectically published phil-
osophical works in translation. See, for instance, “Falsafat al-Zawahir,” al-Adab, August 1953, 52–60;
Renè Habashi, “Thalathat Rijal iza al-Abth,” al-Adab, March 1954, 10–15.
76 Verena Klemm, “Different Notions of Commitment (Iltiza ៮ m) and Committed Literature (al-adab
al-multazim) in the Literary Circles of the Mashriq,” Middle Eastern Literatures 3, no. 1 (January 2000):
51–62, here 55. Yet in 2003 he defended the reduction of existentialism to iltizam. Suhayl Idris, “Abtal
Sartre: Laysu Kainat Tajridiyya,” in Barada, Tahawwulat Mafhum al-Iltizam fi-l-Adab al-Arabi
al-Hadith, 48–59.

1076 Yoav Di-Capua
communism remained highly potent forces. Although Marxism was often repressed
and was politically outlawed in Egypt, Syria, and Iraq, it had a solid base of support
among the literary elite.77 Thus it was only a matter of time until these thinkers
reacted to the tide of al-Adab’s existentialism, and to a lesser extent to that of
Badawi. Their reaction was to appropriate existentialism and change its meaning,

coloring it red.
One book captured the nature of this response. In 1955, the Marxist literary critic
Mahmud Amin al-Alim and the mathematician-turned-literary critic Abd al-Azim
Anis launched an unprecedented assault on the established literary class in Egypt.78
As part of the power grab by Egypt’s new revolutionary regime, al-Alim and Anis
had been included in the March 1954 purge of university professors. Dispossessed
by the regime, unlike Idris, al-Alim and Anis wanted radical change and thus sought
not to inherit the mantle of their elderly peers but to burn it.79 With On Egyptian
Culture (Fi-l-thaqafa al-Misriyya), they hoped to accomplish two things: first, to har-
ness the prevailing sense of commitment to social causes and translate this bond into
the new language of socialist realism; and second, to detach commitment from rad-
ical individualism and rearticulate it in terms of class.80 This generational debate
used literature to stake out a new political position.
From its inception, On Egyptian Culture dismissed the udaba’s notion of literature
as mired in passivity and submission to colonialism. It argued that the modern uni-
versalism of Husayn and his peers was naı̈ve and elitist, lacked cultural specificity,
and did not reflect Arabs’ historical experience.81 By this point, the role of the udaba
as a generation that “was dedicated to the spread of enlightenment to the masses
and convinced that when this was done the masses would inevitably be one with it”
was widely criticized.82
Although the authors’ comprehensive diagnosis focused on Egyptian intellec-
tuals, it was valid elsewhere in the Arab East as well and was heavily debated in
Beirut, Damascus, and Baghdad.83 In place of the udaba’s “art for art’s sake” per-
spective, al-Alim and Anis aggressively promoted the view that art, literature, and
culture should be authentic expressions of “the social.” In their words, “culture is
not built on a single firm foundation; it is the result of a complex interactive process
involving society as a whole.”84 Thus they expected writers to find the “social” in the
“literary.” As Abd al-Wahhab al-Bayati put it, “The search for poetic form, which
77 Orit Bashkin, The Other Iraq: Pluralism and Culture in Hashemite Iraq (Stanford, Calif., 2009),
73–85; Joel Beinin and Zachary Lockman, Workers on the Nile: Nationalism, Islam and the Egyptian
Working Class, 1882–1954 (Princeton, N.J., 1987), 310–362; Selma Botman, The Rise of Egyptian Com-
munism, 1939–1970 (Syracuse, N.Y., 1988).
78 See Sulayman al-Hakim, Itirafat Shaykh al-Shuyuiyin al-Arab Mahmud Amin al-Alim (Cairo,
2006), 36.
79 For Idris’s invitation letters to Husayn, see Sabir Arab and Shalaq, Awraq Taha Husayn, 1: 246,
255, 264, 280.

80 This title paraphrased, and thus dismissed, the above-mentioned 1938 blueprint Mustaqbal al-
Thaqafa fi-Misr by Husayn.

81 Mahmud Amin al-Alim and Abd al-Azim Anis, Fi-l-Thaqafa al-Misriyya, 2nd ed. (Rabat, 1988),
17–37, 56–63. See also the introduction by the Marxist Lebanese critic Husayn Muruwa, 5–15.
82 Pierre Cachia, An Overview of Modern Arabic Literature (Edinburgh, 1990), 18–19.
83 The book was originally published in Beirut and was extensively debated there. The first edition
by an Egyptian publisher appeared only in 1989.

84 They considered religion of secondary importance. Al-Alim and Anis, Fi-l Thaqafa al-Misriyya,
17–19.

did not exist in our old poetry, and the metaphysical revolt against reality as a whole
. . . led us to discover the wretched reality in which the masses live.”85
This discovery prompted Marxists to argue that socially committed literary con-
tent overrode the uncommitted and free-floating nature of intellectual activity and
thus necessitated a new form of expression—namely, socialist realism. A year later,

al-Alim wrote: “The new realism adopts an attitude to life and clearly distinguishes
itself by the strong bond between the writer’s participation in the events that take
place and their treatment.”86 To those who were well versed in the intellectual world
of the mid-1950s, the conceptual proximity of Marxist iltizam to al-Adab’s Sartrean
existentialism was quite evident.
Al-Alim and Anis’s next step was to attack Badawi’s Heideggerian existentialism
as the alleged intellectual forerunner of radical individualism.87 While they admitted
that it was a significant school of thought with indigenous foundations in Islamic
mysticism, they found it ethically flawed because it promoted a self-centered and
socially alienated human being with no sense of social responsibility.88 They agreed
that individualism was a valid value, “yet not as a detached and entirely indepen-
dent entity but as an element of a socioeconomic reality.”89 For them, therefore,
“[Badawi’s] existentialism was a profoundly individualistic philosophy that denied
the objective truthfulness of human reality.”90
Badawi’s existentialism was indeed apolitical, as it was a pledge to one’s authentic
way of being, which, modeled on Heidegger, was antithetical to “a self-imposed com-
mitment to attitude and action.”91 Since Badawi was the only Arab writer who wrote
regularly on existentialism, al-Alim and Anis treated him as the official represen-
tative of the existentialist line of thought as a whole. This was intellectually dishonest,
and it was based on a misreading of the differences between Sartrean and Heideg-
gerian existentialism.92 Yet such technicalities made little difference. In their in-
fluential book, al-Alim and Anis replaced the individual in existentialism with so-
ciety and harnessed it to their cause. In keeping with this intellectual “takeover,”
al-Alim, who had previously contributed to al-Adab, left the journal.93
The response? Almost no one among the marginalized old-guard intelligentsia
rebutted the book.94 Al-Aqqad said that he did not debate with communists, but
85 Bayati, Tajribati al-Shiriya, 20.

86 Quoted in Mahmud Ghanayim, “Between Politics and Literary Criticism,” Poetics Today 15, no.
2 (Summer 1994): 321–338, here 327.
87 At the same time, they ignored the many poets and writers who began taking Sartre’s and Albert
Camus’s individualism to heart, such as Badr Shakir al-Sayyab, Khalil al-Khuri, and Adunis. Jayyusi,
Trends and Movements in Modern Arabic Poetry, 2: 644 –648.
88 Al-Alim and Anis, Fi-l-Thaqafa al-Misriyya, 63–64.
89 Ibid., 67.
90 The holistic and all-encompassing terms of discussion (“objective truthfulness of human reality”)
illustrate the high intellectual stakes involved in these debates. Ibid.

91 Cooper, Existentialism, 72.
92 The cause for this misreading was that whereas for Sartre Dasein was a conscious subject, for
Badawi (and of course for Heidegger himself) Dasein was an un-conscious subject and a way of being.
In his 1947 Letter on Humanism, Heidegger strongly disapproved of Sartre’s reading of Dasein. Klein-
berg, Generation Existential, 18.
93 He joined al-Thaqafa al-Watanaiyya. Klemm, “Different Notions of Commitment,” 56.
94 Husayn reiterated a standard nahdawi view according to which literary form (shakl ) is indepen-
dent of theme and content (madmun) and must remain that way. His article “Surat al-Adab” was orig-
inally published in the daily newspaper al-Jumhuriya on June 5, 1954. It was republished in Taha Husayn,

1078 Yoav Di-Capua
Tawfiq al-Hakim, who was the subject of much criticism, made one last call for rea-
son, balance, and moderation.95 His plea went unanswered.96 For its part, al-Adab’s
editorial line was critical of the Marxist attempt to appropriate iltizam, diminishing
the importance of the individual and using class, and class warfare, as the ultimate
bearers of iltizam.97 Thereafter, the meaning of iltizam, and of existentialism more

broadly, diverged, becoming tied in with multiple internal and external projects.
Chief among them was the Third World revolt of the 1960s.98
WITH THE CHANGING OF THE intellectual guard in the early 1950s, it dawned on young
Arab intellectuals that they were part of a Third World community of fate, with a
shared set of cultural, socioeconomic, and political challenges. However, even after
the Third World discovered itself at the 1955 Bandung Conference, its existence as
a viable community was almost entirely rhetorical. Separated geographically and
facing the multiple political challenges of the Cold War, until 1960 it existed mainly
as a community of speeches.99 Egypt’s revolutionary radio station Sawt al-Arab, “the
Voice of the Arabs,” was the ultimate manifestation of this rhetorical existence. All
of that changed with the Algerian War of Independence, which gave Third-Worldism
a healthy dose of reality and a unity of global purpose. At the center of this de-
velopment was the Arab intelligentsia, which now used the legacy of iltizam in con-
junction with Third-Worldism to articulate the Arab experience of decolonization
in global terms. Sartre’s enthusiastic involvement in this movement created the il-
lusion of a united front bound by his ideas and their creative reformulations in the
Arab lands.
Early on in the process of decolonization, Jawaharlal Nehru, Gamal Abd al-
Nasser, Sukarno, and Kwame Nkrumah spoke often of responsibility, sacrifice, and
freedom. These familiar themes indeed underlined the Third World struggle for
liberation, but they were intellectually tied to particular projects of nationalism,
Khisam wa Naqd (Beirut, 1977), 72–79. Richard Jacquemond, Conscience of the Nation: Writers, State,
and Society in Modern Egypt, trans. David Tresilian (Cairo, 2008).
95 Ibrahim Fathi, “al-Sira al-Dhatiya al-Siyasiya li-Abd al-Azim Anis,” Alif: Journal of Comparative
Poetics, no. 22 (2002): 76–93, here 90.

96 Al-Hakim made an attempt to market the soft liberal humanism of the nahda as a workable answer
to the cultural needs of the young: “[My usage of] the word equilibrium should not be taken here literally,
to mean balance, symmetry, or even moderation and intermediateness . . . [Rather], in this book, equi-
librium means the movement of both acceptance and opposition to another [human] undertaking.”
Tawfiq al-Hakim, al-Taduliya: Madhhabi fi al-Haya wa-l-Fann (The Equilibrium: My Creed in Life and
Art ) (Cairo, 1955), 121.
97 Al-Adab’s editors had been aware of the Marxist interest in existentialism since 1953. Anwar
al-Maddawi, “al-Adab al-Multazam,” al-Adab, February 1953, 12–15.

98 Thereafter, there were at least two prominent and competing conceptions of commitment in the
postcolonial mashriq (East). Verena Klemm, “Ideals and Reality: The Adaption of European Ideas of
Literary Commitment in the Post-Colonial Middle East—The Case of Abdalwahha៮ b al-Baya៮ tı៮,” in
Stephan Guth, Priska Furrer, and Johann Christoph Bürgel, eds., Conscious Voices: Concepts of Writing
in the Middle East (Beirut, 1999), 143–152, here 147. Many young intellectuals, including the would-be
judge and critical thinker Tariq al-Bishri, found their inspiration in Marxist iltizam and readily tied their
political future to it. Al-Bishri, Shakhsiyat wa Qadaya Muasira (Cairo, 2002), 71–75.
99 Emphasizing the rhetorical existence of Third World political solidarity and its struggle to come
into its own does not mean that their Cold War challenges with regard to capital, goods, expertise,
armaments, and political backing were not real and meaningful.

which only atomized the experience of decolonization rather than expanding it. In-
deed, until 1962, when Sartre, Fanon, and others invented an “analytic strategy of
moving from the Algerian situation to the universal struggle between colonized and
colonizer,” there was not much to hold on to by way of forging an integrated in-
ternational front for decolonization.100

Instead, there was nationally based anticolonial action, which only intensified the
need for a comprehensive theory—a theology, in fact—of struggle and liberation.
Iran’s failed nationalization of its oil resources and similar, yet less pronounced,
developments in Venezuela and Mexico are famous examples of atomized action,
as is Vietnam’s 1954 victory over the French at Dien Bien Phu. Later came Nasser’s
astonishing 1956 stand in Suez, and his successful survival of the last spasm of co-
lonial “gunboat diplomacy.” Nasser the man inspired the Pan-Arab movement of
Nasserism, following a pattern that articulated a new standard for resistance.101 But
as he realized early on in his career, the search for grand collective designs such as
Pan-Arab unity was heavily dependent on an Afro-Asian horizon of action.102 And
so, however successful the local struggles of the 1950s may have been, it was the
Algerian War of Independence—what one author characterizes as “The Call from
Algeria”—that brought the Non-Aligned Movement and Third-Worldism into sharp
focus.103
But which exact combination of ideas moved the Third World from the Algerian
situation to the universal one? First, Sartre’s 1960 Critique de la raison dialectique
fused Marxism with existentialism and harnessed this new perspective on behalf of
Algeria and the Third World.104 It also elaborated a theory of collective “otherness”
that resonated well with Third World intellectuals.105 His practical perspective was
that “Tiers-mondisme looked to ‘the colonized’ much as Marxism looked to ‘the
working class.’ ”106 As far as the Arab world was concerned, this synthesis defused
some of the tensions of the 1950s and helped to close the ranks between Marxists
such as al-Alim and the revolutionary individualism of Idris.107 CIA analysts noted
that Sartre’s synthesis of existentialism and Marxism “appears to be consolidating
its foothold and continues to give cause for serious concern.”108 Second, Sartre’s
100 Shepard, The Invention of Decolonization, 72. For existing alternative models of decolonization,
one American and the other Leninist, see Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World In-
terventions and the Making of Our Times (New York, 2005), 8–72.
101 For Nasser’s grip on Middle East politics and “his threat” to U.S. interests, see Salim Yaqub,
Containing Arab Nationalism: The Eisenhower Doctrine and the Middle East (Durham, N.C., 2004).
102 Gamal Abdel Nasser, The Philosophy of the Revolution (Cairo, 1955).
103 Robert Malley, The Call from Algeria: Third Worldism, Revolution, and the Turn to Islam (Berkeley,
Calif., 1996). For the impact of the Algerian revolution elsewhere in the international arena, see Con-
nelly, A Diplomatic Revolution.
104 Sartre’s goal was not to illustrate how existentialism was compatible with orthodox Marxism but
to offer a slight correction to Marxist ideology and show how ideas about freedom and individualism
could reinvigorate it. For the Arab understanding of this move, see Muta Safadi, “Sartir bayna al-
Wujudiya wa-l-Markisiyya,” al-Adab, December 1964, 4 –6, 73–74. See also “Jawlat al-Fikr,” al-Jum-
huriya, March 2, 1967, 16.
105 Paige Arthur, Unfinished Projects: Decolonization and the Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre (New
York, 2010), pt. 2.

106 Shepard, The Invention of Decolonization, 72.
107 Jean-Paul Sartre, al-Markisiya wa-l-Thawra (Cairo, 1962); Jurj Tarabishi, Sartir wa-l-Markisiya
(Beirut, 1964).
108 The report focused on Poland. “Communist Revisionism and Dissidence,” U.S. National Archives
and Records Administration [hereafter NARA], CIA-RDP78-00915R001200120007-8.

1080 Yoav Di-Capua
groundbreaking work on neocolonialism showed people in politically liberated areas,

including the entire Arab East after 1956, that the struggle for decolonization did
not end with the technical transfer of power.109 Decolonization was rather an on-
going process—a way of being. Third, the publication of Fanon’s The Wretched of
the Earth in 1961 elevated the discussion to a universal level by detailing the psy-

chological makeup of a Third World condition and prompting the colonized to re-
deem themselves through anticolonial violence.110 Sartre’s riveting 1961 meeting
with Fanon opened the way for successful, albeit short-lived, cooperation.111
Through his inflammatory preface to Fanon’s book, Sartre succeeded in bringing
metropolitan public opinion on board with the process of decolonization.112 Taken
in their entirety, these developments articulated the global ambition of Third-World-
ism. In Europe, “Student radicals hoped that Third-World radicalism would inject
meaning and substance into an otherwise moribund global revolutionary project,”
thus strengthening the bond between two previously unequal partners.113 The fact
that it happened because of an Arab struggle in a place where (a certain version of)
existentialism and a vibrant intellectual scene were already in operation explains
why, by 1962, major sections of the Arab (as well as Iranian) intelligentsia found
themselves speaking in Sartre’s Third World voice.114
Third-Worldism was surely understood differently around the globe, but it could
not have become prominent in the Arab arena without rigorous intellectual labor.115
There were many kinds of intellectuals (Marxist, socialist, communist, and liberal)
engaged in various ideological pursuits and offering different readings of iltizam,
but it was this specific tradition that allowed Third-Worldist ideas to gain salience
in the Arab world. Drawing on the resources of the Arab state, which misleadingly
presented itself as the ultimate enabler of both individual and collective freedom,
intellectuals of all stripes spoke of commitment to a revolutionary situation.116
Nasser’s engagement with African struggles, such as that of Congo, illustrated the
state’s commitment to the ethos of revolution. From an intellectual point of view,
109 See the Arabic translation of Sartre’s Colonialisme et néo-colonialisme : Jean-Paul Sartre, al-
Istimar al-Jadid (Beirut, 1964).

110 Fanon’s work was immediately translated into Arabic. See also a translation of Sartre’s review
of Fanon: “Mudhabu al-Ard,” al-Adab, February 1962, 2– 4, 49–53.

111 The meeting between Fanon, Sartre, and Beauvoir was arranged by Claude Lanzmann, who wrote:
“I have never seen Sartre so fascinated and moved by a man.” Fanon died from leukemia six months
later. Lanzmann, Le lièvre de Patagonie (Paris, 2009), 363.
112 In his Sartre on Cuba (Westport, Conn., 1961), Sartre brought the Caribbean and Latin America
on board with this process. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York, 1963); see Sartre’s
introduction, 7. Noureddine Lamouchi, Jean-Paul Sartre et le Tiers-Monde: Rhétorique d’un discours an-
ticolonialiste (Paris, 1996).
113 Richard Wolin, The Wind from the East: French Intellectuals, the Cultural Revolution, and the
Legacy of the 1960s (Princeton, N.J., 2010), 29.

114 Suhayl Idris, “Nahnu wa Sartir,” al-Adab, December 1964, 1. See also the February 1967 special
issue of al-Hilal. For an analogous understanding of Sartre and Fanon and the role of the Third World
intellectual in Iran, see Negin Nabavi, Intellectuals and the State in Iran: Politics, Discourse, and the
Dilemma of Authenticity (Gainesville, Fla., 2003), 67–106; Hamid Dabashi, “The Poetics of Politics:
Commitment in Modern Persian Literature,” Iranian Studies 18, no. 2/4 (Spring–Autumn 1985): 147–
188.
115 As an Arab revolutionary put it, “a revolution without thought and ethics is nothing but chaotic
terrorism.” Muta Safadi, “Mitafisiqat al-Thawra,” al-Adab, September 1964, 67.

116 Muhammad Mandur, “Thawrat al-Adab wa Adab al-Thawra,” al-Adab, January 1960, 10–11.

this ethos was partially indebted to Albert Camus. Borrowing Camus’s notion of
metaphysical revolt against reality, Abd al-Wahhab al-Bayati wrote: “Whether
for the individual or for society as a whole, the revolt against life is the first step in
the revolutionary process.”117 Camus’s idea of commitment to a life of revolu-
tion even after the revolution was officially over was compatible with the political

realities for Arabs, with neocolonialism, and with the message of Nasserism that the
revolutionary situation authentically emerged “from the self” (i.e., that it is exis-
tential).118
Taking Camus a step further, when Arab existentialists spoke of revolt, they had
in mind Ernesto “Che” Guevara, who was becoming a global symbol of revolt.119
Al-Bayati, who counted himself as an existentialist and a Camusian Third World
poet, quoted Guevara’s conviction that “what we must create is the man of the twen-
ty-first century.”120 Thus the remaking of the individual through Sartre’s committed
responsibility, Camus’s sacrifice and revolt, and Fanon’s purifying violence and pos-
sible martyrdom dovetailed nicely with Arab revolutionary culture and with Third-
Worldism as a whole.121
In the eyes of the Arabs, Sartre was an important symbol as well as an enabler
of Third-Worldism. Beyond Algeria, Arabs were impressed by his stand on Cuba and
Vietnam and his refusal to accept the 1964 Nobel Prize in Literature (in 1967 he told
Egyptian students that the prize was controlled by America).122 Through his actions,
Sartre led Arabs to believe that the “greatest thinker of freedom in the twentieth
century” was philosophically as well as politically invested in the Arab cause as no
Western intellectual had ever been before.123 This position further enhanced his
reception in the Arab world—especially in Iraq.
117 B. G. Garnham, “Albert Camus: Metaphysical Revolt and Historical Action,” Modern Language
Review 62, no. 2 (April 1967): 248–255; Bayati, Tajribati al-Shiriya, 23. See also Klemm, “Ideals and
Reality,” 143–152.
118 However, Arab revolutionary thinkers debated the question of the revolt’s causes when some
ascribed it to the individual, and others, mainly Marxists, to socioeconomic conditions. “Kamu wa Naz-
riyat al-Tamarrud,” al-Adab, August 1960, 22–27. One of the main aims of Arab socialism was to reform
the Arab subject. The state-endorsed socialist art of Abd al-Hadi al-Gazzar beautifully illustrates this
point. Liliane Karnouk, Modern Egyptian Art, 1910–2003 (Cairo, 2005). See also Abdel Hady El-Gazzar:
The Egyptian Painter’s Official Web Site, http://www.a-elgazzar.com/ar/.
119 Interestingly, however, although on various occasions Camus, a self-defined non-existentialist,
criticized Sartre’s excess of individualism and his “propensity toward monologue rather than dialogue,”
in the Arab world he was mostly indistinguishable from Sartre. Jeffrey C. Isaac, Arendt, Camus, and
Modern Rebellion (New Haven, Conn., 1992), 121.
120 Bayati, Tajribati al-shiriya, 31.
121 By the mid-1960s, Palestinian guerrilla fighters, and scores of other fighters around the world, had
adopted this revolutionary ethos. For instance, Ghlib Halsa, “al-Haribun min al-Huriyya,” al-Adab,
February 1960, 36– 43; Taha Riyad, Filastin: al-Yawm la Ghadan (Beirut, 1963). This intellectual ge-
nealogy helps to explain how people such as Nelson Mandela and Yasser Arafat found themselves
together in postcolonial Algeria struggling in different arenas for what they saw as the exact same cause.
According to Mandela, who visited the National Liberation Front (FLN), “The situation in Algeria was
the closest model to our own in that the rebels faced a large white settler community that ruled the
indigenous majority.” Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom (Boston, 1994), 259. For the military and dip-
lomatic support that the FLN rendered to Arafat’s Fatah movement, see Alan Hart, Arafat: A Political
Biography (Bloomington, Ind., 1984), 133–134.
122 “al-Huriya al-Wujudiya fi al-Sanawat al-Akhira kanat Nazwa,” al-Jumhuriya, March 5, 1967, 12.
123 Bertrand Russell was also appreciated, but his analytical philosophy offered little guidance in the
way of liberation. For Sartre as an Arab hero, see Idris, “Nahnu wa Sartir,” 1; Arthur, Unfinished Projects,
173.

1082 Yoav Di-Capua
IN HIS 2001 NOVEL Papa Sartre, Ali Badr revives the Iraqi existentialist scene of the
1960s and its veneration of Sartre. The story’s protagonist, Abd al-Rahman, is “the
Sartre of the Arabs,” the man whom “Sartre dispatched to save our nation.” “We
are going to make of Baghdad another Paris; we will turn it into the capital of ex-
istentialism,” he promises his followers.124 In the end, it did not quite work out that

way, but through literature and politics, existentialism did begin to conflict with the
Arab project of liberation.
Since July 1958, when the Iraqi monarchy was overthrown by a military coup
d’état, two opposing groups had emerged: the communists and the Bathists, each
with their own respective intellectual circles.125 Although both groups could be
branded as “anticolonial nationalists,” their nationalism had stark differences. Led
by Egypt’s Nasser, who had just completed the unification of Egypt and Syria (Feb-
ruary 1958), the Bathists sought to unite the Arab world politically under the banner
of Pan-Arab nationalism. The communists, in turn, rejected unification and focused
instead on Iraq’s internal socioeconomic problems and the traditional concerns of
international communism. Both domestically and internationally, these were diver-
gent approaches to the decolonization of Arab societies. Until his brutal assassi-
nation at the hands of the Bathists, Iraq’s president (1958–1963), Abd al-Karim
Qasim, and his communist allies rejected Nasser’s scheme of unification. The strug-
gle between Nasser’s Egypt, Qasim’s Iraq, and their respective Arab allies was nick-
named the Arab Cold War.126 Yet it was anything but cold. During this time, and
especially during the February 1963 coup, about five thousand Iraqi intellectuals,
ideologues, and rank-and-file activists met an untimely violent death. Massacres,
torture, and systematic persecution in the name of ideology became so painfully
common that the existential belief in “words as life” took on a particularly gruesome
meaning. Arab decolonization experienced an unprecedented level of internal vi-
olence.
The view from outside, among historians of decolonization and the Cold War,
was that the intellectual underpinnings of this bipolar reality were a mélange of
Marxism, communism, socialism, and anticolonial nationalism. These ideas made it
seem as though Arabs fit into the international ideological structure of the Cold
War.127 Although such a conclusion would not be entirely wrong, a closer look at
Baghdad’s intellectual circles during the 1960s reveals the dominant presence of
existentialism and its twin roles as an intellectual buffer zone between feuding com-
munists and Bathists and an important agent in the Arab effort to psychologically
decolonize the self. Both tasks were urgent, and neither was addressed by the ubiq-
uitous brands of anticolonial nationalism.
124 Ali Badr, Baba Sartir (Beirut, 2001), 34, 60.

125 The Bath Party is a Pan-Arab socialist party that was formed in 1940 by Michel Aflaq and Salah
al-Din al-Bitar. Although it was centered in Damascus, it spread to Iraq, where it gained power briefly
in 1963, and then again from 1968 until 2003. The party’s mission was to radically transform and resurrect
(bath) the Arab world. Calling for “One Arab world with an eternal mission,” and preaching “Unity,
Liberty, and Socialism,” the Bathists’ viewed their ultimate goal as the liberation of the individual from
all social, political, and psychological restraints. “Ba’th Party,” in Edmund A. Ghareeb, Historical Dic-
tionary of Iraq (Oxford, 2004), 44 – 45.
126 Malcolm Kerr, The Arab Cold War, 1958–1964: A Study of Ideology in Politics (London, 1965).
127 See, for instance, Elie Podeh, The Quest for Hegemony in the Arab World: The Struggle over the
Baghdad Pact (Leiden, 1995).

Because of the weakness of Iraqi cultural institutions, Baghdadi, and by extension

Iraqi, intellectual life took place in cafés. In the words of the poet Sami Mahdi,
“Cafés were the only alternative to a cultural life that was devoid of institutions.”128
Indeed, dozens of cafés with names such as Waq Waq (a mythical island), al-Bala-
diyya (“the village”), and al-Barlaman (“the Parliament”) served as the beating heart

of Iraq’s public sphere.129 Notably, each had its own set of intellectuals and political
commitments. Existentialism was predominantly a café phenomenon, represented by
poets such as Husayn Mardan, who was crowned the “number one existentialist in
Iraq.”130 The task of the existentialists was to focus on the individual and create an
alternative intellectual space, independent of political partisanship. Mardan’s line “I
do not love anything the way I love myself” captures the spirit of political disen-
gagement and the fear of being “lost in politics.”131
The poet Fadil Azzawi, a political prisoner at the time, also struggled with pol-
itics and argued that ideologues had turned iltizam into a tool that produced bad
politics as well as bad art. He called it a “Bathi iltizam.”132 Others in the Arab world
concurred.133 Referring to Sartre’s Critique de la raison dialectique, a text that sought
ideological accommodation, Azzawi wrote: “I liked Sartre for his attempt to unite
the social with the individual; he made a difficult union between Marxism and Ex-
istentialism possible.”134 Yet no political accommodation would take place in Iraq
until 1974.135 In the interim there was violence.
Indeed, the repression and violence of the 1960s pushed Iraqi, as well as Egyptian,
writers to question the fate of personal freedom. For writers such as Sarkun Bulus,
Yusuf al-Haydari, and Adil Kazim, to name only a few, it was a struggle over the
fundamentals of human dignity. This effort to salvage the individual used a type of
existentialism that was closer to Badawi’s radical individualism than to Idris’s com-
mitted collectivism.136 As Azzawi recalled, “When I left prison in 1965, my earlier
inhibitions were gone. I wanted to eliminate the holy justifications that were related
128 “It is not an exaggeration,” states Mahdi, “to say that Iraqi cultural life was the extension of the
cafés’ life.” Sami Mahdi, al-Mawjah al-Sakhibah: Shir al-Sittiniyat fi -l-Iraq (Baghdad, 1994), 37.
129 Other famous cafés were Hasan Ajami, al-Bayruti, Shatt al-Arab, al-Braziliyya, Yassin, al-Shah
Bandar, al-Rashid, Umm Kultum, and al-Jamahir. Faiz al-Haidar, “Ahya Baghdad wa Maqahiha al-
Shabiya Manba al-Adab wa-l-thaqafa,” http://www.yanabeealiraq.com/articles/faiz-alhider181108.htm.
130 Fadil al-Azzawi, al-Ruh al-Haya: Jil al-Sittinat fi -l-Iraq (Damascus, 1997), 103.
131 Husayn Mardan, “al-Ihda,” in Mardan, al-Amal al-Kamila, 2 vols. (Baghdad, 2009), 1: 11; and
Mardan, “al-Mafhum al-haqiqi li-l-falsafa al-wujudiya,” ibid., 2: 149–150.

132 Azzawi, al-Ruh al-haya, 168, 312, 356; Mahdi, al-Mawjah al-Sakhibah, 100.
133 In the early 1960s, criticism of iltizam as political partisanship and “slogan-shouting” became more
widespread. The Egyptian literary critic and poet Luwis Awad gently insinuated that iltizam was cul-
turally destructive, and the critic Muhammad Mandur and others agreed. Al-Adab, March 1962, 109;
Badawi, “Commitment in Contemporary Arabic Literature,” 870; Muhammad Adib al-Amari, “al-
Hayah wa-l-Iltizam,” al-Adib, April 1962, 2; Amari, “al-Ilham wa-l-Iltizam,” al-Adib, July 1962, 2; Muta
Safadi, “Multazimun am Mutasibun?,” al-Adab, February 1960, 61. Even as far away as Bahrain, un-
committed writers were attacked for their position. Qasim Hadad, “An al-Iltizam,” in Barada, Tahawwu-
lat mafhum al-Iltizam fi-l-Adab al-Arabi al-Hadith, 126–132. Idris rushed to defend his original cause
in its pure Sartrean interpretation, arguing that they preached for iltizam and not for ilzam (coercion).
Suhayl Idris, “Adabuna la Thawri,” al-Adab, January 1960, 1–2. Even Idris’s level-headed al-Adab took
a political stand and supported the brutal suppression of Iraqi communists: Faiz Saigh, “Marakatuna
ma al-Shuyuiyya,” al-Adab, June 1959, 1–3.
134 Azzawi, al-Ruh al-Haya, 78.
135 In 1974, the Bath Party and the communists established a National Front, which brought the
political conflict of the 1960s to an end.

136 Azzawi, al-Ruh al-Haya, 88.

1084 Yoav Di-Capua
to revolutions, morality, society, sex, regime, religion, poetry and writing . . . I wanted
to believe in a new revolution that would wash itself of the blood that had always
adhered to it.”137 This mission statement united the Iraqi sixties generation and their
quest to destroy “the old world and its various institutions such as the state, society,
family, gender, and even poetry.”138 In the search for a new Arab selfhood, these

Iraqi intellectuals branded themselves “existentialists.”139
Focusing on the failure of the Arab project of national liberation to address the
problem of individual freedom, the sixties generation drew their inspiration from
Sartre, Camus, Beauvoir, Guevara, and Arthur Kostler, as well as Allen Ginsberg
and the American Beatniks.140 It was an eclectic fusion whose main purpose was to
critique political bigotry, militarism, social violence, and sexual repression. Casting
themselves as social rebels, bohemians, misfits, and politically indifferent individuals
whose lives revolved around alcohol, tobacco, and sex, existentialists were publicly
visible as non-political advocates of lost individual freedom.141 Herein lies the value
of Iraqi existentialism, as the self-actualization of one’s circumstances and the con-
sequent refusal to distinguish between political and existential freedom.142
Although the Iraqi existentialist community had no counterpart elsewhere in the
Arab world, existentialist themes such as alienation, anticipation of death, absurdity,
angst, estrangement, and revolt became dominant in much of the poetry, prose,
and theater of the era.143 An important example of this new form of pre-1967 self-
137 Ibid., 90.
138 Mahdi, al-Mawjah al-Sakhibah, 264 –265.
139 They also distinguished themselves from the intellectuals of the 1950s, whose collectivist anti-
British nationalism appeared to them naı̈ve and simplistic. Azzawi, al-Ruh al-Hhaya, 122–123.
140 Ibid., 14. Merleau-Ponty and Neruda also figured strongly. Ibid., 51; Mahdi, al-Mawjah al-Sakhi-
bah, 22.
141 Many of them engaged in highly abstract conversations about why we live and die and why we
write. Lines such as “Existence exists not for my sake but for its own” were not uncommon. Mahdi,
al-Mawjah al-Sakhibah, 149, 170–171. Concomitantly, in the eyes of their critics, the existentialist scene
was nothing more than melodramatic role-playing tantamount to exhibitionistic “posing” and “acting
out.” Sami Mahdi, a Bathist, charged existentialists with eclecticism and philosophical superficiality. He
acknowledged that their aim was “to find humanistic truth and decipher the enigma of its existential
angst,” but he scorned their posing. Ibid., 221. Muhsin Musawi also found several inconsistencies in Iraqi
existentialism. Musawi, The Postcolonial Arabic Novel: Debating Ambivalence (Leiden, 2003), 183.
142 Iraqi existentialists thought of the “gap” between these two freedoms as “the absurdity of being.”
Mahdi, al-Mawjah al-Sakhibah, 149; Azzawi, al-Ruh al-Haya, 63.

143 Taking this message to the next level, the Syrian “theater of the absurd” dealt with similar themes
of revolt and estrangement and expressed strong longing for the emergence of an authentic unitary Arab
individual or subjectivity, in which everything has its demonstrable place and value. The absurd in these
dramas is based above all on two themes: detachment/alienation and violence. Sad Allah Wannus, who
was trained in France, was one of the most prolific existentialist playwrights of the mid-1960s. His 1965
play Glass Café (al-Maqha al-zujaji ) vividly depicts the tragedy of human existence with strong references
to Arab reality. After the 1967 defeat, he used absurdity as a sharp tool for sociopolitical criticism. Other
important playwrights were Walid Ihlasi, Farah Bulbul, and Ali Uqla Ursan. Ewa Machut-Mendecka,
Studies in Arabic Theatre and Literature (Warsaw, 2000), 86–96; Nadim Maalla Muhammad, al-Adab
al-Masrahi fi Suriyah: Nashatuhu, Tatawwuruh (Damascus, 1982), 62–165. In fiction, similar influences
existed in the writing of the Egyptians Naguib Mahfouz, Mustafa Mahmud, and, most interestingly,
Sonallah Ibrahim. Heavily influenced by Camus’s The Stranger, Ibrahim’s experimental novel The Smell
of It famously introduced into Arab literature the alienated ex-convict protagonist who has been reduced
by his aimless life to a set of mechanical daily actions, such as eating, getting dressed, smoking, and joyless
sex. Crushed by the authoritarian state for his politics, he is the exact opposite of the committed na-
tionalist hero of the 1950s and 1960s. His angst is the outcome of living in “bad faith” under the sway
of an alienated state and away from the authentic existence that decolonization promised. In addition
to Sonallah Ibrahim, a sense of metaphysical revolt underlies Awlad Haritna (1959; English trans. Chil-
dren of Gebelawi [London, 1981]), which is an allegory of mankind’s religious struggle to achieve har-

criticism was the existentialist feminist cry against patriarchy. In 1958, at the young
age of 22, the Lebanese writer Layla Baalbakki released her debut teen-angst novel,
Ana Ahya (I Live!). It tells the story of Lena, a nineteen-year-old girl-woman with
a thirst for freedom. She does not share the Arab nationalist fever of her times:
Frankly, I am not smart enough to find a solution to the problems of Palestine, Kashmir, or

Algeria . . . My concern . . . is how to walk the first time I wear my high-heeled shoes, which
raise me seven centimeters above the ground. Will they break as I hurry into the street?144
This is no simplistic teenage nihilism. Her radical individualism reflects her broad
horizons, and what follows constitutes an attack, an open revolt, against the Arab
sociopolitical order. She rebukes her greedy and sexist male colleagues. She rebels
against the prison-like institution of the Arab family, with its authoritarian father
figure and its double standards for the sexuality of men and women. She hates her
father’s authoritarianism and denounces her mother, who “knows nothing of life
except sharing a man’s bed, cooking his food, and raising his children.”145 In revolt
she finds her authenticity, her voice, and a hope for freedom. She talks only of her
own freedom, sexuality, thoughts, needs, and wishes. Known at the time as the “Fran-
çoise Sagan of the Arabs,” Baalbakki was accused of nihilism, radical individualism,
and egoism.146 Her tirade against patriarchy and her call for sexual liberation even-
tually became a public scandal, which landed her in jail for “offending public mo-
rality.”147 As she demonstrated, decolonization begins with the self, continues with
the family, and is then extended toward society.
Existentialism was also present in the work of the Palestinian writer-in-exile
Ghasan Kanafani. In 1963, Kanafani published his much-acclaimed novella Men in
the Sun, in which three Palestinian refugees decide to sneak across the Iraqi border,
drawn by the riches of Kuwait.148 They meet the elder Abu Khaizuran, a veteran
political leader in the lost land of Palestine who is now a truck driver. When he
promises to smuggle them in his truck’s empty water tank and guide them safely to
Kuwait, they agree. However, the three men never make it to Kuwait. They lose their
mony and justice. Absurdist themes characterize much of Mahfouz’s writing from the 1960s, when the
promise of rational national politics reached its dramatic limits. His 1961 novel al-Mustahil (The Im-
possibility) features an estranged protagonist whose father suppressed the emergence of his selfhood.
Striving to find meaning in life, he ultimately revolts against societal conventions, especially those related
to sex. Having an affair with his married neighbor, he comes to realize the absurdity and impossibility
of their relationship. Haim Gordon, Naguib Mahfouz’s Egypt: Existential Themes in His Writings (New
York, 1990). Another relevant novel of the time was Mahmud Diyab’s al-Zilal (The Shadow, 1964), in
which a selfish protagonist endorses existentialism as “meaning for everything,” which leads him to
embrace an unconventional and highly relativist personal morality that damages society. Ali B. Jad, Form
and Technique in the Egyptian Novel, 1912–1971 (Oxford, 1983), 295–307; Samia Mehrez, Egyptian Writers
between History and Fiction: Essays on Naguib Mahfouz, Sonallah Ibrahim, and Gamal Al-Ghitani (Cairo,
1994), 39–57; Stefan G. Meyer, The Experimental Arabic Novel: Postcolonial Literary Modernism in the
Levant (Albany, N.Y., 2001), 16.
144 Layla Baalbakki, Ana Ahya (Beirut, 1963), 45.
145 She calls her father an opportunist war profiteer and a “shadow of a human being.” Ibid., 15,
19–20, 112–113.
146 Anis Sayigh, al-Adab, May 1958, 59.
147 Samira Aghacy, “Lebanese Women’s Fiction: Urban Identity and the Tyranny of the Past,” In-
ternational Journal of Middle East Studies 33, no. 3 (November 2001): 503–523.
148 The three were Marwan, whose father abandoned the family for another woman; Asad, who was
escaping an arranged marriage and the Jordanian authorities; and Abu Qais, who, in dire need of support
for his family, lost his small fortune to traitorous Iraqi brokers of cheap Palestinian labor.

1086 Yoav Di-Capua
lives in that water tank, succumbing to thirst, heat exhaustion, and suffocation while
their guide spends time joking with the Kuwaiti border police. The novella closes
with the driver’s memorable cry when he realizes what has happened: “Why didn’t
you knock on the sides of the tank? Why didn’t you say anything? Why?”149
In this allegory of the Palestinian tragedy of 1948, with the failure of the Pal-

estinian leadership, the death of the omnipotent father figure, the collapse of the
family as an existential sanctuary, and the betrayal of Arab allies, Kanafani examines
the question of individual control “with respect to the issue of national will, purpose
and destiny.”150 Through the death in the desert, the true and authentic condition
of the Palestinian people is revealed in a Heideggerian fashion that individualizes
their situation in the world (Dasein): the Palestinian is alone.151 As exemplified in
Kanafani’s own revolutionary life, this understanding holds promise as a new be-
ginning for liberation on one’s own “Fanonian” terms.152
In sum, because anticolonial nationalism is “outward-looking” and thus is unable
to be self-critical, writers used existentialist themes in order to confront the ubiquity
of patriarchal norms, political impasse, state authoritarianism, violence, and an over-
all absence of freedom. In that sense, self-criticism of Arab liberation began and
peaked with existentialism years before the 1967 defeat. In their words and deeds,
these intellectuals issued the alarming reminder that internal decolonization re-
mained a critical cultural task, and that unless the Arab project of liberation was
completed, it might be compromised or even destroyed altogether. Sartre’s highly
anticipated visit to Egypt took place in this context.
IN LATE FEBRUARY 1967, Sartre and Beauvoir arrived in Cairo, where they were
greeted at the airport by Egypt’s progressive intellectuals.153 For Egyptians, their
two-week visit was an intellectual holiday (farah fikri ), and more than twenty new
publications on existentialism were released for the occasion.154 For improved mar-
ketability, some book covers even depicted nude women, which Sartre found shock-
ing.155 Although Lutfi al-Khuli and his wife Liliane (the same Liliane whose father
had deplored public kissing) hosted Sartre and Beauvoir during their stay, it was
149 Ghassan Kanafani, Men in the Sun and Other Palestinian Stories, trans. Hilary Kilpatrick (Cairo,
1991), 56.
150 Meyer, The Experimental Arabic Novel, 28.
151 Barbara Harlow, “Readings of National Identity in the Palestinian Novel,” in Issa J. Boullata and
Roger Allen, eds., The Arabic Novel since 1950: Critical Essays, Interviews, and Bibliography (Cambridge,
Mass., 1992), 89–108; Orit Bashkin, “Nationalism as a Cause: Arab Nationalism in the Writings of
Ghassan Kanafani,” in Christoph Schumann, ed., Nationalism and Liberal Thought in the Arab East:
Ideology and Practice (London, 2010), 92–112.
152 This new form of commitment to the Palestinian cause motivated Kanafani’s intellectual, political,
and guerrilla labor on behalf of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. He was killed in 1972
by Israeli agents.
153 The couple were invited to Egypt by al-Ahram’s editorial team when they learned that Les Temps
modernes intended to send an investigative delegation to both sides of the Arab-Israeli conflict and
publish a special issue on their findings. Given the mounting military tensions in the region and the
importance of European public opinion, both Arabs and Israelis wanted to influence the final outcome
of this visit. In his capacity as managing editor of the journal, Lanzmann joined the tour. Lanzmann,
Le lièvre de Patagonie, 396– 404.
154 Ruz al-Yusuf, February 27, 1967, 50; al-Akhbar, March 5, 1967, 16.
155 Al-Jumhuriya, March 3, 1967, 10.

FIGURE 1: This screen shot from Al-Ahram Weekly features a series of photographs taken during Sartre’s and
Beauvoir’s 1967 visit to Egypt. Al-Ahram Weekly On-line (Cairo), no. 47 (April 13–19, 2000), http://weekly
.ahram.org.eg/2000/477/bk6_477.htm. Most of the pictures were taken by Liliane al-Khuli, who, along with her
husband, hosted the French couple and traveled with them.
1088 Yoav Di-Capua
nonetheless a semi-official visit that included a meeting with President Nasser. Sartre
pleaded with him to release some communist prisoners. Nasser did. They traveled
across the country as if they were heads of state. They saw the Aswan Dam (where
locals mistook Sartre for Fidel Castro), visited the heavy industrial plants, and trav-
eled to remote villages that had recently purged themselves of feudalism.156 They met

workers, teachers, students, intellectuals, and peasants who clamored on command
“Long Live Sartre! Long Live Simone!”157 From Beirut, Idris encouraged Sartre to
visit a Palestinian refugee camp.158 The couple traveled to Gaza, where they guard-
edly expressed solidarity with the refugees.159
A fascinating aspect of the visit was Egyptians’ high level of intellectual pre-
paredness and their insistence on engaging Sartre intellectually at every turn, even
when their guest was pressed for time and visibly exhausted.160 During these en-
counters, Egyptians asked endless questions. They wanted to know, for example,
whether existentialism was dead, whether it had a future in the Third World, and
whether it was compatible with Marxism and Arab socialism.161 Sartre’s public ex-
change with the communist Mahmud Amin al-Alim, who a decade earlier had at-
tacked his radical individualism, answered many of these questions and ended with
mutual agreement.162 Having come from Beirut, Idris tried to get Sartre to speak
clearly about Palestine. He chased Sartre to his car, only to have the door slammed
on his bleeding hand as the vehicle drove away. Sartre was not interested in dis-
cussing Palestine.
Weeks later, and only a few days before the 1967 War, Sartre signed a pro-Israeli
manifesto denouncing Arab aggression. Arab intellectuals were stunned: Sartre, an
Arab hero, had unexpectedly betrayed them.163 In Cairo, an emergency meeting
condemned him in the strongest possible terms.164 A CIA field officer quickly cabled
a brief note to his superiors on Sartre’s fall, describing him as a “victim to the current
156 The couple visited Kamshish, where, as a result of popular resistance to landlords, a symbolic
victory against feudalism had been achieved the previous year. Ibid.
157 Beauvoir, All Said and Done, 375–376.
158 “Muqabala Adabiyya ma Sartir,” al-Adab, January 1966, 5.
159 However, Beauvoir’s recollection of the meeting with the Palestinians was highly negative. She
blamed them for their own condition. Beauvoir, All Said and Done, 38. Lanzmann, too, recorded a
disappointing meeting, during which “Each Palestinian phrase was a chant of war.” Lanzmann, Le lièvre
de Patagonie, 402. For Egyptian coverage of Sartre in Gaza, see “Sartir wa-l-ma’sa fi Ghaza,” Akhir Saa,
March 15, 1967, 70.
160 Sartre asked for a minimum of three hours to discuss philosophy. “Sartir Yatalaq ala Hadith li
Mahmud Amin al-Alim an al-Wujudiya wa-l-Ishtirakita,” Al-Jumhuriya, March 3, 1967, 10. Of great
interest, but unfortunately outside the scope of this article, was Beauvoir’s intellectual reception by
Egyptian feminists. See “Milaf Khas: Hiwar Sartir wa Simone,” al-Talia, April 1967, 117–137.
161 Sana Fath Allah, “al-Falsafa al-Markisiya,” Al-Akhbar, February 28, 1967, 9; Ismail al-Mahdi,
“Thaqafa wa Fann,” al-Jumhuriya, March 14, 1967, 2.

162 By this point, after the publication of Critique de la raison dialectique, Sartre was seen as an
existentialist-Marxist whose teachings were compatible with socialism and communism. For the summary
of their exchange, see Al-Jumhuriya, March 3, 1967, 10. Husayn was not invited to meet Sartre. Al-
Jumhuriya, March 14, 1967, 12.
163 In large part, the Arabs’ surprise was due to the absence of any serious attempt to understand
Sartre’s position that the Jewish condition was an element of the general human condition, with im-
portant positive consequences for Zionism as a legitimate project of Jewish authenticity. His 1948 Ré-
flexions sur la question juive was never translated into Arabic. At the time of his visit, only one critical
article appeared in the press, and it was not followed up. Al-Jumhuriya, March 4, 1967, 5.
164 The Jordanian and Syrian press were already critical of Sartre and charged him with doublespeak.
Amnon Kapeliuk, “Sartre in the Arab Press,” New Outlook 10, no. 4 (May 1967): 29–33.

Middle East crisis.”165 Then came the devastating war. Lutfi al-Khuli spent the first
weeks of June 1967 in Paris and thus missed the war.166 He was aware of the defeat
but did not know any of the details. According to an Arabic newspaper headline, the
Americans and British were fighting alongside the Israelis. That report was inac-
curate, but it sounded plausible to Lutfi.167 He also knew that Nasser had resigned,

and he took note of the French celebration of Israel’s victory. He found the anti-Arab
atmosphere in Paris frenzied and distasteful.168 Lost, confused, and angry, he con-
fronted Sartre. In an intimate yet volatile meeting, Lutfi and Liliane accused Sartre
and Beauvoir of intellectual inconsistency and hypocrisy.169 Beauvoir wrote in her
diary: “They blamed us angrily for not having loudly and publicly taken Egypt’s side
against Israel. It was a painful interview.”170 On his widow’s behalf, Fanon’s pub-
lishing house, Maspero, insisted that Sartre’s preface be removed from The Wretched
of the Earth.171
Although Sartre reiterated “his friendship to the Arabs” and insisted that he had
been “misunderstood,” the Arab view of him as a traitor gained currency.172 The
following months saw the birth of a new intellectual era, a time of increased ret-
rospection and self-criticism, but also of renewed interest in and greater respect for
religion and religiosity. The Arab Third World moment of decolonization was fading
away.
THE MULTILAYERED STORY OF Arab existentialism raises two primary questions that
substantiate the meaning of decolonization. First, what intellectual tasks did exis-
tentialism accomplish that anticolonial nationalism could not? Second, what hap-
pens “inside decolonization” when ideas such as existentialism that were created in
one historical context move to another and yet another context? In answering these
questions, we can see that decolonization was a transnational process rich in intel-
165 CIA, Intelligence Memorandum, June 2, 1967, NARA, CIA-RDP79T00826A002000010078-8.
166 Al-Khuli believed in Arab socialism and Third World power, but unlike many of his preaching
comrades, he was not given to slogans or flat thinking. He was also not an existentialist and, in his
writings, has largely avoided this trend. Yet along with the defeat itself, his critical engagement with
Sartre and Beauvoir was instrumental in the fall of Arab existentialism.
167 Al-Ahram, June 7, 1967, 1.
168 Lutfi al-Khuli, Hiwar maa Bertrand Russell wa Sartir (Cairo, 1968), 78.
169 Sartre denied the allegations and reiterated his support for “the struggle of Arab nations, in-
cluding the Palestinians, toward freedom and progress.” “The only thing to which I principally object,”
he added, “is war itself.” In a second meeting, Sartre remained equivocal and said that he had been
misunderstood. He condemned elements in Zionism, but not Zionism as a whole. He objected to some
Israeli policies, but not to the overall conduct of the state. He refused to condemn Hertzel’s Zionism
and to judge it by the moral standards that he himself articulated in the cases of Algeria and Vietnam.
He also could not see how his unconditional support of the state of Israel was in sharp contradiction
to his famous condemnation of neocolonialism. Ibid., 111–112.
170 A month earlier, she had said that Liliane “knew nothing whatsoever about the Jewish question
as it existed in the West.” Beauvoir, All Said and Done, 382, 402.
171 Eventually, Fanon’s widow, Josie, decided not to publish a new edition, and thus Sartre’s preface
was canonized with the text itself. Lanzmann, Le lièvre de Patagonie, 365.
172 Shortly thereafter, on a different occasion, Sartre said that he would never abandon Israel and
that “I know that my stance earns me the enmity of certain Arabs, who cannot understand that one is
unable to be at the same time for Israel and for them.” Jonathan Judaken, Jean-Paul Sartre and the Jewish
Question: Anti-Antisemitism and the Politics of the French Intellectual (Lincoln, Neb., 2006), 185; al-Khuli,
Hiwar maa Bertrand Russell wa Sartir, 80–81, 111–112. For Sartre as a traitor, see Edward Said, “My
Encounter with Sartre,” London Review of Books, June 1, 2000.

1090 Yoav Di-Capua
lectual cross-pollination, and not simply an atomized transfer of power from a sink-
ing empire to a newly formed nation-state.
Anticolonial nationalism was undoubtedly successful in creating a sense of com-
munity and opposition against colonial rule, but in all other respects it was intel-
lectually limited. The versatility of existentialism compensated for this lack. In its

philosophical version, it addressed the question of authenticity—a key aspect of the
effort to decolonize the self. In its version as iltizam, it functioned as a powerful
political tool, marginalizing the colonially complacent intelligentsia and drawing a
younger generation into concrete political struggles both at home and abroad. Ex-
istentialism thus tied the Middle East to the worldwide anti-imperialist movement
of the 1960s and to its prominent leader, Jean-Paul Sartre. Finally, in its literary
form, existentialism criticized the ongoing retreat of the Arab subject in the face of
an allegedly liberated society and tolerant state. This critique made the easy-to-miss
point that the state’s violence against its own citizens was intrinsic to the process of
decolonization. In fulfilling these functions, Arab existentialism acted not as a uni-
fied idea but as a multifocal and decentralized intellectual system. Regardless of its
contradictions, Arab existentialism has a central place as a variation on the post-
colonial theme of self-liberation as it was elaborated by people such as Gandhi,
Memmi, Senghor, Fanon, and, of course, Sartre.
A salient feature of the current literature on decolonization is that if it addresses
intellectual exchange at all, it does so within the framework of an incomplete and
unsatisfactory “borrowing” or “adaptation” of European ideas to Third World re-
alities.173 If evaluated against the original existentialism of Heidegger and Sartre,
Arab existentialism might indeed be condemned as a “poor application” that was
philosophically eclectic and politically incoherent.174 At times, even Sartre felt so.175
Yet it is futile to seek enduring intellectual integrity in the course of this process.
The reality was that even though the results were not always successful, Arab thinkers
creatively reinvented, reformulated, and domesticated European existentialism in a
way that enabled them to confront the formidable challenge of decolonization from
a collective, transnational perspective rather than from a solitary, autochthonous
standpoint.
Sartre fertilized decolonization everywhere and was even viewed by some as an
“African philosopher,” yet outside Europe, existentialism per se was mostly an Arab
phenomenon. This lost chapter in the history of decolonization, an account from
deep within Arab thought, demonstrates the inner workings of ideas in places and
by individuals who until now have remained obscure. The obvious lesson for his-
torians of this era is that they cannot artificially separate the political act of de-
colonization, nation-state-making, and Cold War struggles from their transnational
173 On this problem and on the limitation of “reception studies” in literature and science, see Marwa
S. Elshakry, “Knowledge in Motion: The Cultural Politics of Modern Science Translations in Arabic,”
Isis 99, no. 4 (December 2008): 701–730; Elshakry, “The Gospel of Science and American Evangelism
in Late Ottoman Beirut,” Past and Present 196, no. 1 (August 2007): 173–214.
174 For the many methodological challenges of “traveling ideas,” see Edward W. Said, “Traveling
Theory,” in Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge, Mass., 1983), 226–247; Said, “Traveling
Theory Reconsidered,” in Said, Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (Cambridge, Mass., 2000), 436– 452.
175 During his visit to Cairo, Sartre hinted that Arab existentialism borders on propaganda and pop-
ulism. “Al-Kuttab Yunaqishun Sartir,” al-Jumhuriya, March 8, 1967, 12; Rushdi Salih, “Sartir wa Rihlat
Umrihi,”al-Akhbar, March 5, 1967, 16; “Ma al-Muthaqqafin,” al-Talia, April 1967, 146.

intellectual context.176 A recent collection on the literary heritage of the Cold War
makes this point obvious and shows how, much as in the Middle East, the heritage
of Latin American intellectuals has also gone unnoticed.177 In failing to acknowledge
how this universal intellectual matrix shaped the global 1960s, and in focusing solely
on anticolonial nationalism and/or “ideology” (Marxist, socialist, or other), decolo-

nization studies and related fields overlook critical patterns of continuity, change,
and convergence that make episodes such as French Maoism and the international
collaboration of the radical left during the 1970s unintelligible.178 If widely practiced,
an intellectual history of decolonization can help to fill this gap.
176 Even though they do not focus so much on intellectual history, scholars of the Cold War and their
revisionist Journal of Cold War Studies acknowledge the intricate transnational nature of that era.
177 Jean Franco, “The Excluded Middle: Intellectuals and the ‘Cold War’ in Latin America,” in An-
drew Hammond, ed., Cold War Literature: Writing the Global Conflict (London, 2006), 226–241.
178 Left-wing international terrorism during the 1970s by groups such as the Japanese Red Army,
Baader-Meinhof, the IRA, and multiple Palestinian organizations was a direct outcome of the trans-
national intellectual affinities that were formed during decolonization. For more on such connections
in French history, see Wolin, The Wind from the East.
Yoav Di-Capua is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Texas

at Austin, where he teaches modern Arab intellectual history. He is the author
of Gatekeepers of the Arab Past: Historians and History Writing in Twentieth-Cen-
tury Egypt (University of California Press, 2009). He is currently at work on a
new book, tentatively titled Transnational Arab Thought and the Global Culture
of the 1960s. His research is supported by the National Endowment for the Hu-
manities and the University of Texas Humanities Research Award.

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Arab Existentialism: An Invisible Chapter in the

Intellectual History of Decolonization

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Arab intellectuals employed variants of existentialism in order to meet the multiple

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Césaire, and Wa Thiong’o Ngũgı̃.

Debate (Oxford, 1991).

AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW OCTOBER 2012

pioneering call for research on the “very underdeveloped” subject of decolonization

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This lacuna in the historiography notwithstanding, Arab intellectuals did in fact

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socialist, etc.), decolonization does indeed have a meaningful intellectual history

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no. 3 (March 1965): 453– 454, here 454.

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also a follower of Heidegger’s existentialism, believing strongly that “[Heidegger’s]

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(London, 1995), xii.

J. M. Harding (Cambridge, 1998), 9– 48; Roth, Knowing and History, 83–146.

nomenology World-Wide: Foundations, Expanding Dynamisms, Life-Engagements—A Guide for Research

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22 Although Badawi’s notion of time is reminiscent of Bergson’s notion of durée as an exploration

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Al-Insaniyya wa-l-Wujudiya, 103.

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philosophical synthesis resulted only in the discovery of Heideggerian and phenom-

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99–117, here, 102.

Eze, ed., African Philosophy: An Anthology (Oxford, 2000), 50–55.

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IF BADAWI PROMOTED THE deeply philosophical and politically disinterested brand of

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tre’s political existentialism.51 By the mid-1950s, it overshadowed Badawi’s enter-

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two copies. Badawi, who recorded this episode, took it as an example—actually,

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al-Adib,” al-Adab, January 1953, 74.

alatahu, 2 vols. (Cairo, 2007), 1: 266.

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The radical reduction of existentialism to iltizam would prompt Marxists to invest

February 1963, 49–50.

fi-l-Adab al-Arabi al-Hadith, 60–69, here 61.

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255, 264, 280.

Thaqafa fi-Misr by Husayn.

by an Egyptian publisher appeared only in 1989.