The Political and the Sociological in the Arab Sphere: Shifts in Relationships

Abstract

It is widely accepted that the state employs the social sciences as an authority to expand its supervision and reinforce its legitimacy. In addition to allowing colonial powers to gain significant knowledge on Arab societies, it also provides newly-independent states with the possibility of shaping their political entities. The author notes how the emergence of sociology in most Arab countries was accompanied by a nationalist tide that aimed to build the national state and its political independence. Sociology, in these circumstances, could only be a “sociology of policies”. The state filled every domain; it was the customer, the funder, and the granter of legitimacy to a science in which the state saw the window to its “modernity”. The efforts exerted in order to challenge this hegemony through the creation of a critical sociology were aborted because they were conducted from within the very options and policies of the state. These policies were, willingly or not, adopted by many pioneering Arab sociologists.