Sociology of Failure in the Contemporary Arab Thought (Reading on Syauqi Jalal's Work on the Arab Left)

Abstract

The Arab world continues to show new social, cultural, and political dynamics. Post the Arab Spring era, Arab countries with a republican system and having a historical memory of pan-Arab nationalism, are still faced with crucial national issues such as political injustice, social welfare, religious conflict, and other critical matters. From the perspective of the Arab intellectuals, the following severe question arises: why the Arab thought since the modern to the contemporary period does not have any significant effects on the progress of the Arab world. Internal and external problems constantly plague the Arab world. One of the crucial causes is the lack of a clear direction for the future projection of the Arab world indicated by the ideological divisions. The non-success of Arab thought since the Nahda era, which culminated in a painful defeat in the six-day Arab-Israeli war in 1967, followed by another Arab crisis such as the Arab Spring, all shows the inflexibility of the Arab intellectual elite. It seems there is no relation between idea and reality. On that basis, Syauqī Jalāl, an Egyptian thinker, tried to reflect and to call into question why did the Arab thought face a dead end. What is the leading cause, and can the Arab thought provide a real solution to the Arab crisis? The paper seeks to answer these questions by exploring the perspectives of Syauqī Jalāl on the Arab thought by taking the leftist Arab wing movement as his analysis.