Ibn Rushd's Political Philosophy in Contemporary Arab Scholarship: A Transient Revival?

Abstract:What is it about Ibn Rushd that has made him such a lodestar for two different generations of Arab intellectuals–one which emerged in the early 1900s, the other in the late 1970s? Focusing on the second group, which arose in the milieu of young intellectuals who had been shaped by the secular pan-Arab nationalist and socialist ideologies of the 1950s and 1960s, but who now confronted the bankruptcy of those ideologies in the face of an insurgent populist Islamism, the following review identifies two currents in contemporary Arabic Rushdian scholarship: cultural nationalism and modernizing universalism. After analyzing how each sought inspiration in Ibn Rushd for its vision of Arab renewal, and then showing how deepening exposure to Ibn Rushd's texts revealed the incommensurability of his political philosophy with their nationalist, secularist or egalitarian agendas, I suggest that this "Second Wave" of Rushdian enthusiasm is already beginning to ebb. As pressure for democratization intensifies, the consolidation of democratic norms is narrowing the options for Arab intellectuals to a choice between a comprehensive liberalism and a religious populism neither of which seems to have any use for Ibn Rushd's political philosophy. While some individuals are opting for the latter choice, it appears that the majority of both currents are converging around a comprehensively liberal consensus. In such a context, can Ibn Rushd with his insistence on differentiating between high and low still provide, if not an alternative, at least a corrective to the prevailing spirit of the age?